Christina Hoff Sommers is appalled at the way people are trying to make boys be more like girls and girls be more like boys.

Say what?

The Reklamombudsmannen (RO) has reprimanded Top-Toy, a licensee of Toys”R”Us and one of the largest toy companies in Northern Europe, for its “outdated” advertisements and has pressured it to mend its “narrow-minded” ways. After receiving “training and guidance” from RO equity experts, Top-Toy introduced gender neutrality in its 2012 Christmas catalogue. The catalog shows little boys playing with a Barbie Dream House and girls with guns and gory action figures. As its marketing director explains, “For several years, we have found that the gender debate has grown so strong in the Swedish market that we have had to adjust.”

Oh no oh no oh no! That’s terrible! It’s fabulous that all the other toy companies and retail outlets are doing the exact opposite with all their might, and it’s horrendous that anyone anywhere is trying to undo a little of the damage. Hell no toys can’t be just toys! Hell no children can’t just decide for themselves what they like. Certainly not. All the toys must be clearly marked as for one sex or the other sex, so that no child will be confused for one second about whether it’s an innie or an outie.

As one Swedish mother, Tanja Bergkvist, told the Associated Press, “Different gender roles aren’t problematic as long as they are equally valued.” Gender neutrality is not a necessary condition for equality. Men and women can be different—but equal. And for most human beings, the differences are a vital source for meaning and happiness. Since when is uniformity a democratic ideal?

Different gender roles aren’t problematic as long as they are equally valued. But they’re not. Has Sommers just not noticed?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I missed the part where Charlotte Allen replied to her critics. It’s a treat.

It’s no small thing, of course, to stop a gunman, whatever his size, but there might have been more of a chance with a few men on hand. I asserted that the “feminized setting” that prevails at elementary schools and the education schools that train their personnel creates a culture of “helpless passivity” that puts women and small children at risk when a psychopath like Lanza decides to blow out the doors.

And an admiring audience failed to materialize, so she is explaining it all again.

No, I was not blaming any of the 26 victims or the parents who enrolled their kids at Sandy Hook. I am, however, blaming our culture that denies, dismisses, and denigrates the masculine traits—including size, strength, male aggression and a male facility for strategic thinking–that until recently have been viewed as essential for building a society and protecting its weaker members. We now have Hanna Rosin at Slate urging parents to buy their little boys Easy Bake ovens so they’ll be more like little girls. Women are less aggressive by instinct, and they are typically trained to be nice. I praised and continue to praise the courage of the Sandy Hook principal, Dawn Hochsburg, and the teachers who gave up their lives along with her, but with some men on the scene who knew what to do, some of those lives might have been saved.

Might have been – well sure, but you could say that about anything. If Adam Lanza had tripped and fallen then lots of people could have jumped on top of him, too, and all the lives might have been saved. If things had been different they would have been different. Very true, but we already knew that. There have been other mass shootings where there were men present and many people were still killed, including men. It’s not even clear why Charlotte Allen assumes none of the women present “knew what to do” – and of course it’s completely unclear what she thinks there is “to do” in the face of automatic weapons.

I am also responding to David Weigel, who told me I gotten my facts wrong: that there are actually two men, a custodian and a fourth-grade teacher, on Sandy Hook’s 52-person staff. He’s right, and I stand corrected. This does help prove my point, though: just two adult men in a building containing 500 people — and it’s not clear that both of them were at work that day. Indeed, a visit to Sandy Hook’s staff website is a depressing experience, the sea of women’s names. Why aren’t there more men? Perhaps not enough want the job? But why? Because they are tacitly discouraged from careers in elementary education? It’s certainly not the money, because union rules typically require kindergarten teachers and high-school chemistry teachers to be paid on exactly the same salary scale. Another depressing page on the Sandy Hook website is the “Safe Schools Climate” page. It’s a page of links to “anti-bullying” resources. Yes, the Sandy Hook staff’s idea of a “safe school” was a school where kids didn’t say mean things about each other on Facebook! The Sandy Hook massacre was a tragedy, but it was at least in part a tragedy of the collision between feminist delusions and reality.

Jesus H Christ almighty – what is she talking about?? Is she claiming that feminism keeps men out of elementary schools? Wtf? Since when does feminism claim that elementary school teachers should all be women? The point of feminism is more that university professors should not all be men. And then, she finds a sea of women’s names depressing. I find that depressing. Same old shit – imagine her saying that if you replaced “the sea of women’s names” with “the sea of black faces.”

And then the sneer about anti-bullying – and I feel like throwing up.

Maybe it’s some kind of Sarah Palin “shake up those pesky liberals” shtick. Hooray for bullying.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Laura Bates of Everyday Sexism gives us some more everyday sexism.

Meanwhile, this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival made headlines for featuring a high number of jokes about rape and domestic violence. Such “jokes” are also endemic online.“We must wake up to the way that social media enables and magnifies abuse and harassment of women,” Ms Dustin says. The popular social news website Reddit has entire categories dedicated to “raping women”, “hot rape stories”, and “choke a bitch”. And an article on the student website UniLad in January said: “Eighty-five per cent of rape cases go unreported. That seems to be fairly good odds.”

Yes but those are just tropes and tropes don’t matter and besides “tropes” is a big stuck-up fancy intellectual showoffy conceited arrogant word that only a bitch would use because bitches are so arrogant and bitchy, plus they all stole it from Anita Sarkeesian because nobody ever used it before she did.

Jacqui Hunt, of Equality Now, says: “We absorb messages from all around us every day, so what some might dismiss as harmless banter takes on a completely different quality when it forms part of a general culture of demeaning, pejorative and prejudicial reporting on women.”

Noooooooo. That can’t be right. That implies that tropes matter and everybody knows that tropes don’t matter. Messages don’t matter, culture doesn’t matter, stereotypes don’t matter, nothing like that matters. That stuff is all non-physical, and nothing non-physical matters. What are you, some kind of crazy dualist or something? You think ideas matter? Ha! I laugh in your face. Ideas don’t matter. Only a punch in the face matters. Anything short of a punch in the face is totally inert* and harmless.

In fact, these jokes and media slurs could even be having an impact on rape conviction rates. Alison Saunders, head of the Crown Prosecution Service, told The Guardian this year that widespread “myths and stereotypes” about rape victims may give jurors “preconceived ideas” that could affect their decisions in court. When victims were “demonised in the media”, she said, “you can see how juries would bring their preconceptions to bear”.

Nope nope nope nope. Can’t be true. Can’t possibly happen. Juries never pay any attention, their whole lives, to intangible things like jokes and media slurs. That’s why there’s never any need to sequester them and make sure they don’t see any tv or newspapers. Myths and stereotypes make no difference to anything ever.

It will not be easy to tackle such deeply ingrained ideas. “We need nothing short of a revolution in our approach to sexual violence,” Ms Dustin says. But although the attitudes revealed have been worrying, the fact that such stories have been so prevalent in the media this year is a sign of progress, she believes. “The scale of revelations about abuse of women and girls in the Jimmy Savile case may have begun to turn the tide.”

As awareness grows, says Ms Diamandopoulos: “We have to get together as women … to grow the seeds of the fightback, which has already started, with organisations such as Rape Crisis, Object, Everyday Sexism, Mumsnet and others. Together, women have moved mountains before – we can do it again.”

Pfffffffff. Ideas – attitudes – stories – revelations – awareness. Come on – none of that makes any difference to anything! When has an idea ever made anything happen?

People are so silly.

*Oh I’m sorry, I used the word “inert.” That’s one of those words like “trope,” probably – too big and fancy for a good honest person to use, and just a way of trying to emasculate decent men.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Delhi rape victim. Dead.

First she suffered horribly, then she died. Because she went to a movie with a friend, and then got on a bus.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

The Delhi rape victim is much worse.

The 23-year-old arrived in Singapore on Thursday after undergoing three operations in a Delhi hospital.

“Her vital signs are deteriorating with signs of severe organ failure,” hospital official Kelvin Loh said.

…

On arrival at the hospital in Singapore, doctors said that as well as a “prior cardiac arrest, she also had infection of her lungs and abdomen, as well as significant brain injury”.

And all for why? For because she and a male friend tried to take a bus home after going to the movies. Slut! Obviously she deserved to be raped to death.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Now there’s another fake Twitter account using my name. I changed my profile picture two days ago to try to avoid the deception caused by the fake account (which had the pineapple as my picture). I used the amusing one that Hank Fox took of me squirming at a talk at Eschaton, which he gave me permission to publish. Nobody else has any right to use that photo. The harasser-bully who set up fake account using my name number 2 is using that photo. They’re bullies and thieves and thugs.

 Update: Ed says what he thinks of the thugs (he calls them assholes, which also fits), and what people should do about them.

Update 2: Latest “parody”

Bitter Benson‏@FakeOphiBenson

How can I exploit the Delhi rape death? It’s all about ME ME ME

Right, because tweeting about it and RTing other people’s angry sad tweets is exploiting it and making it all about me.

The thugs, meanwhile, of course are not exploiting anything, they’re just pursuing an honest…vendetta.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ed has a post on Al’s ragey video. He doesn’t find it completely persuasive. Usually he likes to be Switzerland when others are fighting, but this time, no.

It seems that, according to Al, I have unwittingly launched an “atheist cult” of “radical extremists” who are “giving a bad name” to “real feminists.” PZ, Jen, Ophelia, Stephanie, Rebecca and others, Al says, “appear to have an incredibly unhealthy vendetta against men in general, and as it appears, the entire Caucasian race as well.” This is not a straw man, it’s an entire straw universe, a bizarro world remarkably similar to the one inhabited by the religious right, where any challenge to their privilege is terrible persecution from “feminazis” and other unsavory types.

While listening to this, it seemed rather familiar. I’d heard such rhetoric many times and I’m sure you have to. But it probably came from Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson or some other religious righter that Al no doubt considers to be a neanderthal. When they say those things, we point and laugh with derision. When they claim that those evil liberal social justice activists really just hate white people, we know that they are completely, incontrovertibly, undeniably full of shit. What exactly is the difference between their positions and Al’s position here? None that I can see. It’s the same tired and, frankly, idiotic claim that those who fight against white male privilege must hate white males and seek to do them harm.

Then there’s the part where Al tried to patronize Ed:

I feel really bad for Ed Brayton. He’s actually a really decent guy and someone I’ve known for a while. He’s put an incredible amount of effort, time and personal expense into creating and developing Freethought Blogs. It’s gotta be incredibly frustrating to him to see his baby at the center of all this controversy.

Well yes, but not in the sense that he thinks it’s all the fault of the pesky women who keep drawing ragey harassers to the scene. Or as Ed put it -

I feel like I’m being used as a prop in his morality play and I have no desire whatsoever to be called one of the good guys if others that I care about and mostly agree with are being portrayed as the bad guys. So let me make a few things as clear as I can possibly make them here.

He does that. Go and read.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Has anybody here read The Brothers Karamazov lately? Or, many times and with great interest? Or anything along those lines? Read it in Russian perhaps? (Do I have any Russian readers? I’m not sure…but then I wouldn’t necessarily know, would I.)

Just wondering. I read it once, centuries ago, when I was in high school. It was my read all the long things phase, combined with a read all the Russian things phase. Clearly I didn’t like it much, or I would have read it more than once, as I have Anna Karenina. But I don’t remember it well.

I picked it up yesterday and took a stab – and found it immediately unreadable. It’s not just the translation: it’s clearly very wordy in a bad way; turgid, undisciplined, prolix, on and on ish.

And then there’s Father Stinking Zossima – oh take it away. Dostoevsky was a preachy Christian and a reactionary, so I probably shouldn’t expect to be able to like The Brothers K. I thought I would give it a shot in case there was good stuff I’d forgotten, but now I’m thinking no I won’t.

Anybody want to argue the other side?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

It ought to be obvious why it matters that an imposter is sending out messages under my name, but the fans of the imposter are pretending it’s just a harmless joke and I’m a whiney idiot for objecting.

That’s just a sample of the pretending it’s just a harmless joke and I’m a whiney idiot for objecting, to give you an idea of it.

So I’ll demonstrate.

That’s why. One of the haters is telling the other haters that I started following him yesterday. I didn’t. That’s why the imposter account matters.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Making fake Twitter accounts that look like the real ones. Like mine for example.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Ahahahahahahahaha -

Jesus and Mo on norms.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Helen Epstein in the New York Review of Books says polio eradication campaigns aren’t such a good idea. Even if they weren’t mixed up with CIA spying, they wouldn’t be such a good idea, she says. They might might seem like a good idea, but…

The killings in Pakistan—which played out in a series of attacks in several different cities on December 18 and December 19—were heinous. But they also point to some serious problems with the heroic approach. For one thing, in conflict areas where the US is trying to route out insurgents with drone strikes, the UN is often not seen as neutral. But more fundamentally, the lavishly funded, multiple immunizations the polio program requires don’t always make sense—to local political leaders and warlords, or to ordinary poor people who are struggling just to keep their children alive. In order to avoid further tragedies, donors should work more closely with local people to improve the health of children in general, rather than strive for some romantic victory over a single virus alone.

Romantic?

She may have a point, but “romantic” is insulting. As she says, polio is horrible. Improve the health of children in general by all means, but also get rid of polio. Most countries in the world have done it; Pakistan and Afghanistan and Nigeria should do it too.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

I drew up a list of some of the anti-feminist tropes I’ve been seeing lately. (They’re not overtly anti-feminist – they’re more “this is how feminism is supposed to be done” – but they’re so crude and wrong and clueless that in fact they are anti-feminist. They’re anti everything that has been recognizable as feminism for a couple of generations now. The “feminism” they think they’re for isn’t really feminism.)

• Heroism is better than feminism. Don’t talk about systemic problems, don’t be a “victim,” don’t “whine,” don’t say there are obstacles, don’t resist harassment. Just suck it up and be tough and succeed anyway. Anything else is an insult to women, especially to women who did suck it up and succeed anyway.
• The struggle is over. We won. Feminism has fixed all the things already. There are no barriers, no obstacles, no issues, nothing to overcome, nothing to get rid of.
• Women and men are different, so feminism is stupid, because it acts as if they’re not. Women are weaker and stupider than men. They like different things. They think in different ways. They shop. They fuss with their hair. They gossip. They don’t like sports or computers or gaming or cartoons or computer science or engineering or philosophy or science or logic or atheism or speaking in public or activism.
• The way things are now is exactly how they are supposed to be. The jobs and interests and lives people have are all exactly the ones they want to have under any conditions whatsoever. People’s choices are not the least bit shaped by the surrounding culture or expectations or stereotypes or bullying or harassment or sexism or misogyny. There is no reason to ask why there are so few women in philosophy or physics or computer science. The numbers and proportions are what they are because everyone made a free choice, and that’s all there is to it.
• There is no reason to make an extra effort to recruit women to fields and activities where they are a minority, because any time women are a minority, it is because they want to be.
• Harassment and sexism and overt, vocal misogyny make no difference to anything. They’re all just jokes, just part of life, just haters being haters, just a tiny corner of something, just a little irritation which adults ignore.
• The real feminism, “equality” feminism, is about formal explicit written laws, and nothing else. The laws are now all perfectly fair and egalitarian, so feminism has no work left to do, so any residual feminism is obviously crazy. Critical reflection on culture and stereotypes is “radical” feminism and it’s totally crazy and wrong. Dislike of overt, vocal misogyny is radical and crazy and wrong. Real feminists get the joke and laugh along with it.

That’s the list.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kevin Smith (of CFI-Canada) contributes to an Ask the Experts piece on Should parents allow children to believe in Santa Claus?

It’s a short stretch of a child’s imagination to blur the legends of Santa and the Christian god. They have much in common.

That’s why allowing for a belief in the magic of Santa Claus is one of the greatest gifts a parent can give their little ones at Christmas. While it may seem irrational to perpetuate a myth about a jolly old man who slides down chimneys delivering gifts, it encourages a child’s development in critical thinking.

Unless the adults block it!

Well I suppose I didn’t go on believing in Santa Claus until I was 17 or anything. But the blocking still annoyed me. It seemed like breaking an implied agreement – you don’t lie to the child when the child asks a serious question.

It’s funny in a way though, because I can’t for the life of me remember ever really believing in god. I remember tv shows from early childhood, but not early childhood mental pictures of god. Maybe tv got in the way of god – which is why idolatry is supposed to be a bad thing, isn’t it: the image or statue gets between you and the…fantasy.

Santa Claus awakened my skeptical mind. After the age of eight, I began to question how it was possible for a sleigh to carry so many presents, and why did he use the same wrapping paper as my parents?

The gift of Santa comes with a due-date. It promotes a critical assessment of the world; teaching us to seek evidence rather than accepting something on faith. Why this doesn’t extend to other supernatural super-heroes is beyond my belief.

Exactly. I argued in the other direction – I was in the back seat of the car on summer vacation, age about 5 or 6. Santa Claus is real, I told myself sagely, so maybe god could be real. You see where that would have led in a few years.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

Kate Donovan reminded us of a certain transcript she did way back last June. It was that first Google+ hangout, run by PZ, with Ian and Stephanie and Dan and Rebecca and Jason and Greg and me and…Al Stefanelli. It’s why I’m always so surprised by the height and depth of his rage now – given how well concealed it was then.

Ian Cromwell: If you look at DJ’s record before this latest thing, there’s nothing to suggest he was looking for, or trying to encourage sexual harassment. In fact, my understanding is that it was quite the opposite. That he was trying his damndest to make TAM a more inclusive, diverse environment. His reaction is bad. But it is not uniquely bad. It is not atypically bad. This is what happens when you think there isn’t a problem, and people point out to you, hey look, you’ve got a bunch of problems. The first thing that anyone does is say you’re making it up, you’re exaggerating, it’s not a problem, you’re crazy. That’s a completely normal human stupidity thing to do.

Al Stefanelli: Ian, that might be normal, and I completely and totally agree with you. But we’re supposed to be men and women—people—of reason. And it doesn’t do well when one of us makes a statement, and we’ve all, at one time or another in our careers, made statements, printed things, said things, that turned out to be inaccurate, and when we were called on it, we retracted it. We came, on our blogs and our videos and our [couldn’t make it out], and said, you know, I said this, I wrote this, I was wrong, let’s move on.

Jason Thibeault: I’ve had to walk back things I’ve said that I didn’t intend the way they were said. And I’ve had to walk them back and correct them.

Al Stefanelli: Now, when you’ve got an individual who has as much influence as DJ does, when you get an individual like that, who was presented with evidence, it reminds me a lot of another demographic of our species who does the same thing, pretty much burying your head in the sand and saying ‘if I don’t say anything about it or if I ignore it, it will go away”. Problem is, we’re all skeptics. And it does not go away.

Gosh. He doesn’t sound like that now. I wonder what happened.

Al Stefanelli: Correct me if I’m wrong, Rebecca, but after DJ had said that there was no issue, or no problem, or however he stated it, didn’t he receive ample evidence or proof or accounts afterwards? That’s the point I’m was making, is that to deny that there was ever anything going on, after receiving reports… I don’t believe that there was any malice. I just think it’s poorly executed attempt to put a positive spin on something.

Rebecca Watson: Yeah, DJ reported that there were—

Al Stefanelli: –acknowledge and apologize—

Stephanie Zvan: Well, he received the second report at TAM last year.

Al Stefanelli: So he knew about it prior to the fact, then, right, Stephanie?

Stephanie Zvan: Before he made these statements. He received the report last year at TAM.

Rebecca Watson: Yeah.

PZ Myers: It’s always the cover-up that gets you, isn’t it? That’s what’s happening here. You know, I don’t think any of us think that TAM is particularly awful, as far as sexual harassment. And as Rebecca mentioned, it’s always been the model convention for a lot of us as for how to handle diversity. And the problem is that here we’ve got a few incidents. They’re reported, and they’re swept under the rug and ignored, and that’s what’s bother people. Why can’t you just face up to the fact that yes, there has been a small amount of sexual harassment going on at TAM, you haven’t been very effective at treating it; we’d like to see you be better about it. That’s what we’re saying. That’s what we want. And DJ seems to be running away from this. That’s the annoying thing about it.

Rebecca Watson: Every, every conference has problems. Not just in the skeptic or atheist communities—every conference everywhere has problems. So when you tell us that there’s never any problem at this conference, first of all, that’s highly dubious. And then all these reports come in and show that it’s flat out wrong. However, there are other conferences that say yeah, things happen. Here is what we do to take care of them. Here is what’s happened in the past. Here’s how we do our best to keep you safe. That is what’s going to make people feel safe, and come out to your conferences.

Al Stefanelli: And it won’t throw up any red flags. Whenever someone says “never”, it always throws up a red flags, particularly in the skeptical community. Don’t tell us something never happens. Because somebody is going to find a report of something that happens, and they’re going to call you on it. It’s like when they find that misused comma in your blog.

But but but but I thought we were the bad guys here.

Jason Thibeault: And I think there’s a lot of misinformation going on in this entire fight, from the very get-go. Look at—first of all, DJ has been conflating TAM with the entirety, the totality, of the skeptic/atheist communities. It’s kind of ridiculous. And then come the trolls, who say that Rebecca and Stephanie are trying to ruin TAM. And there comes the troll who says Ophelia thinks TAM is like Nazi Germany. And there are so many instances where—

Ian Cromwell: Wait. Those aren’t true? [deadpan]

[everyone chuckles]

Ian Cromwell: I don’t know… I heard from a preeeeetty reliable source.

[more chuckling]

Rebecca Watson: Surely those trolls can’t think I’m trying to ruin TAM. I backed out of TAM, so I’m sure they think TAM is way better now, sooo

Jason Thibeault: Oh, but you’re trying to send women to TAM so that you can have them harassed, and then you can talk about it, and then take over the movement. That’s what I heard.

Rebecca Watson: Really? Like it’s entrapment? Oh, God.

Al Stefanelli: If you’re going to do that, you have to rub your hands together like a nefarious villain.

[more laughs. Ian and Jason recommend buying a fake mustache at the same time. Jason illustrates with his mustache. More laughing happens]

PZ Myers: So that’s it. When DJ said only 18% of the attendees were women, he wasn’t saying we need more women, he was saying we need to get rid of these women somehow.

[more laughs]

Rebecca Watson: Now it’s going to look really bad when it comes out that the uniform all of our grant attendees have to wear is just like a string bikini, and you know…

[more laughing]

Ian Cromwell: Can I get one of those?

Jason Thibeault: …uniform of the Galiban?

Al Stefanelli: I find it quite ironic that the people who are accusing The Powers That Be of trying to ruin TAM, are actually trying to make it better. Theyre trying to make it a better event. That’s disheartening to me. When people are trying to make a venue, you know, more attractive to everybody, to be accused of trying to make it worse. It’s mind-boggling.

That was then. This is now.

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)

So what about Santa Claus, huh? Alex Gabriel has been saying on Twitter that adults shouldn’t tell children lies and Santa Claus is a lie so what about it eh? And people are unagreeing with him.

I agree with him though. I agree with him because I resented being lied to about it when I was a kid. I thought it was a dirty trick, since adults have that advantage that children tend to believe them, because they’re supposed to know better and tell the truth and all like that. You know what? I still think that.

I don’t see the point of it, in the case of people who value the truth. It seems strange not to want to begin as you mean to go on. Why not just treat Santa Claus as a fun story and ritual?

What do you think, Linda?

(This is a syndicated post. Read the original at FreeThoughtBlogs.)