I am, obviously, not going to treat this as a private correspondence. Jerry Conlon isn’t a friend of mine, I never asked him to contact me in any way, he tweeted at me yesterday (and the day before) just to stir the shit aka harass me, so I don’t consider his apology or my reply part of a private correspondence.

Jerry Conlon to me:

I would like to apologize Ophellia for that vile tweet I sent you yesterday. I did not mean it as threat on your person being but as a childish insult agaisnt your appearence.

I understand how you take it as personal threat and I hope in no way did I make you feel unsafe in your own home. That was not my intent and I apologize if I did.

I do not expect you to accept this apology or expect you to. I am not doing it to safe face with fan base either. I feel terrible for the tweet I sent and if it caused you any duress.

My apologies,

My reply:

Well, Mr Conlon, I don’t see why you think it’s ok to insult people for being old and ugly, either. It’s not “childish” – it’s vicious. I don’t suppose you do that to your mother (assuming she’s alive) or other ancient female relatives. I don’t suppose you would enjoy hearing other people doing that to your mother. I don’t even suppose you would do it to anyone face to face.

You did of course make me feel unsafe. I didn’t think you were going to hop on a plane and come here to throw acid on me – but of course it makes me feel unsafe when people are willing to say things like that to me. Hatred and rage escalate. That was what I was saying in the post about acid-throwing yesterday. Yes, I feel unsafe because of the non-stop hatred at the slyme pit and on Twitter. Yes, you made that worse.

Thank you for the partial apology, but I really urge you to stop doing things like telling women you hate how ugly they are.

I mean that. I hope he does. I would like to see everyone stop fostering the hatred and rage. However I don’t for a second think that will happen.

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

Gee I don’t know why you’re always making such a fuss about all this stalking and hate-mongering.

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

Wait, what? There’s such a thing as sexist sci-fi and fantasy book covers? Really? I thought only ugly feminists said that. Surely the BBC isn’t an ugly feminist.

Science fiction and fantasy novels routinely portray scantily clad woman on their covers – a device that draws the heterosexual male eye but may turn away women readers. Lynsea Garrison finds one fantasy author aiming to zap gender
stereotypes.

By doing the poses himself, to amusing effect.

Hines, a fantasy author, is posing like some of the female characters on science fiction and fantasy book covers he says objectify women.

He gets into character by twisting his body into the same contorted positions as the female characters on the books.

“The way women are portrayed is just so ridiculous, so often, you just stop seeing it,” Hines says.

“I think posing has made people see it again – you see how ridiculous it is when a 38-year-old fantasy writer is doing it.”

Well, a 38-year-old male balding glasses-wearing fantasy writer with stubble and armpit hair, at least.

Many science fiction and fantasy readers are disappointed to encounter everyday sexism in a medium that is supposed to offer an escape.

Covers frequently exhibit women’s bodies with revealing clothing unsuitable for combat, and fans argue that sexualising female characters sends a message to readers that women are sex objects.

And that the only women who are of interest are the pneumatic hottie type.

Gallo thinks part of the problem is that male artists greatly outnumber female artists in the industry.

“You go to art school, and it’s 50-50,” Gallo said. “But professionally, it’s overwhelmingly male.

“This is an unfortunate fact of the industry. These artists grew up with comics and gaming, so it’s easy to perpetuate these things without thinking them through.”

Ah no no no no no!! You can’t say that. No no no. That’s Nazi witch-hunting inquisition stuff. It never happens that anyone perpetuates these things without thinking them through. Never never never!

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

Some things are even worse than colonialism – at least the people of northern Mali feel that way after months of being oppressed and tormented by Islamists. They wave Frech flags, they smile, they want the French to stay.

Mali was one of the most successful democracies in Africa until insurgents began trying to take it over.

Besides taking many lives, the insurgents have destroyed historic shrines in Timbuktu that date to the 15th century. The attackers say the shrines offend Sharia law.

Such allegations have spurred the International Criminal Court to launch a war-crimes investigation, its chief prosecutor announced Wednesday. Fatou Bensouda said Mali’s government asked the U.N. tribunal to investigate in July, after Islamists had taken control of much of the country.

“The international crimes committed in Mali have deeply shocked the conscience of humanity,” Bensouda said Wednesday. “The legal requirements have been met. We will investigate.”

The ICC has found “reasonable basis” to support allegations of murder, torture, mutilation, rape and pillaging, Bensouda said.

Well, “colonialism” is probably the wrong word. As the journalist in the video points out to the guy in the car who says the French should stay, France is the former colonial power in Mali – but all the same, there’s a difference between liberation and colonialism.

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

Oh yes I forgot one of my favorite things from earlier today.

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

So, that was interesting. I collected the big bag of held mail yesterday, and sorted it, and found the latest Freethinker with my column in it, and the latest Free Inquiry with my column in it. Late in the evening I flung myself down to read the Free Inquiry – and was brought up short on the contents page. “Oh? Eh? Wha? Really? Er…uh oh.” Because why? Because

53 Response

A Guy Thing? Secularism, Feminism, and a Response to Ophelia Benson

Michael Shermer

Huh, I thought. Huh. But he already did respond. At some length. With considerable heat. With, in fact, quite a large helping of righteous indignation. With an air of “who is this woman to criticize something I said?” He really needed to say more?

Who knows, but he did say more, along with recycling what he’d already said. He said a lot more. He took up three pages (or two and a half, since there’s an ad on the last page) responding to my one sentence in a paragraph on sexist stereotypes. He said a lot.

The issue isn’t online yet, and I don’t know if Shermer’s piece will be online when it is, so I can’t link to it. Update: now it is online. The gist is – we’re making great progress in including women in atheism and skepticism. But – there is “a McCarthy-like witch hunt” to get rid of all sexism and racism, real or imagined. This “unfortunate trend has produced a backlash against itself by purging from its ranks the likes of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris” -

Wait, what? Purging? Who has, what has? No it hasn’t. Many of us strongly disagree with Dawkins’s “Dear Muslima” but that isn’t purging him. Oddly enough, we don’t have the power to “purge” people. “This unfortunate trend” isn’t the KGB nor even the Stasi, and it can’t purge people.

There are lots of women at the top, he goes on, but even so “much ink and emotion are spilled over trivial slips of the tongue that allegedly reveal hidden biases and unconscious prejudices.”

Ok that’s for me – that was what that passage in my column was about.

…atheism hasn’t always been very welcoming to women. Maybe there’s an idea that men created God so men should do the uncreating.

Mostly, though, it’s just a matter of stereotypes, the boring stubborn wrong stereotypes and implicit associations that feminism has been battling since forever. The social psychologist Cordelia Fine sums them up in Delusions of Gender:

Measures of implicit associations reveal that men, more than women, are implicitly associated with science, math, career, hierarchy, and high authority. In contrast, women, more than men, are implicitly associated with the liberal arts, family and domesticity, egalitarianism, and low authority.

The main stereotype in play, let’s face it, is that women are too stupid to do non-theism. Unbelieving in God is thinky work, and women don’t do thinky, because “that’s a guy thing.”

Don’t laugh: Michael Shermer said exactly that a week ago on a video panel discussion on The Point. The host, Cara Santa Maria, presented the question: why isn’t the gender split in atheism closer to 50-50? Shermer explained, “It’s who wants to stand up and talk about it, go on shows about it, go to conferences and speak about it, who’s intellectually active about it, you know, it’s more of a guy thing.”

It’s all there – women don’t do thinky, they don’t speak up, they don’t talk at conferences, they don’t get involved – it’s “a guy thing,” like football and porn and washing the car.

It’s incredibly discouraging, that kind of thing. I thought (naïvely) that stereotypes of women as stupid and passive and bashful had been exposed as, precisely, sexist stereotypes decades ago, at least among intellectual and political and progressive types. I thought everybody knew they were not just wrong but also retrograde. Would Shermer have said that if the question had been about race instead of gender? Would he have said “it’s more of a white thing”? It seems very unlikely.

So, yes, I spilled some ink over something he said that, in my view, revealed a sexist stereotype, of a kind that does damage. I think I’m allowed to do that. I don’t think that’s a particularly monstrous thing to do.

But Shermer thinks it’s comparable to Nazism. Will Orac rebuke him? I don’t think anyone will bet on that.

To date, I have stayed out of this witch hunt against our most prominent leaders, thinking that “this too shall pass.” Perhaps I should have said something earlier. As Martin Niemoller famously warned about the inactivity of German intellectuals during the rise of the Nazi party, “first they came for…” but “I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a…”

Yes, he wrote that.

He goes on to say that “self-proclaimed secular feminists attacked Richard Dawkins for a seemingly innocent response to an equally innocent admonishment to guys by Rebecca Watson…”

Self-proclaimed secular feminists? Attacked? Seemingly innocent? “Dear Muslima” was “seemingly innocent”? Not in my book. And if Rebecca’s admonishment was also seemingly innocent, why – oh never mind.

Then there’s Sam Harris and racial profiling, and a swipe at PZ. Then he says “the inquisition” (yes, he says that) has been turned on him, by me.

I have already responded to this charge against me elsewhere [with a footnote to the URL], so I will only briefly summarize it here.

Briefly?! Ya not so much. At great length. Most of this is the eSkeptic piece, a bit nastier in places (he accuses me of “redacting” what he said, when I simply quoted one thing he said, in its entirety).

He concludes with a warning about the way social movements devour their young, and then republishes what Harriet Hall said about me in her email to him, with lots of repetition of my name in case lazy readers had already forgotten it. Then he gropes for an explanation for why there aren’t more women atheists and skeptics doing tv shows right now -

…it is probably a legacy of the past socialization defining what women are expected to do.

No. That assumes women are deciding not to do tv shows. That’s not it. They are not being invited. It’s odd for a skeptic to overlook that. As I pointed out, Cara Santa Maria later told Shermer that she had asked only two women to do her show. That’s not a big enough sample to conclude that women are deciding not to do them.

But I’m a Nazi witch-hunting inquisitor, so what do I know.

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

Taking off yesterday from San Jose, we flew straight south at first. I know, it’s to do with the prevailing winds, but I kept wanting to shout “Hey! North! Seattle is north!”

But then we did the big turn to go the other way, and I had a window seat on the left side so I got a terrific view of Monterey Bay – the same view I’d had all morning from Cliff Drive in Santa Cruz, but from 30 miles away and higher up. I could see Point Pinos, where the Monterey peninsula turns the corner to Asilomar, right next to where I’d been staying. I could also see…the Santa Cruz wharf. That was a funny experience. It was the only human-made feature I could see on that whole crescent around the bay. Quite cool.

It’s been slightly grim weather to come back to – colder than usual and dull. There’s a beautiful lurid sunset now though, so that’s all right.

Pelicans. I love seeing Pelicans. There are no Pelicans around here at all whatsoever.

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

A tech writer writes about a sexist piece of advertising.

What does that advertise? A voice-control company. So it’s not what you think! That picture is all about her voice! That finger in her mouth is just a finger! And it’s pointing at her voice. And she does have eyes and a top to her head, but that would be completely irrelevant to the message of the ad, which is about voice-control.

Sex sells, right? And disembodied female body parts coupled with Beavis and  Butt-head-level puns are super-sexy, right?

Guys, this is why we don’t have more women in tech: It’s a cesspool. As long  as we’re passing offensive schlock like this off as marketing for a major  technology conference, we don’t deserve more women in tech.

Voco calls these ads “playful.” Maybe “playful” is in the eye of the  beholder. Maybe the beholder doesn’t think of women’s body parts as playthings.  Maybe that kind of play isn’t in any way related to voice-control technology or  consumer electronics — you know, the kind that aren’t sold at Babeland.

Or maybe they just pitched a journalist who isn’t in the mood to play those  pubescent, sniggering games anymore.

Oh come onnnnnnnnnnnn. Don’t be such a sex-negative bitch.

I think there should be stores that sell nothing but lips. Lips&Labia, they could call it.

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

Via the genius at Gnu Atheism on Facebook.

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

A cleric does the “god is complicated” dance, with a large helping of “I’m more sophisticated than they are” thrown in. A doorstep fella asked him if he’d found God yet. Oh how vulgar.

It was the formulation of his question that raised my hackles. It implied that God was a comprehensible being awaiting discovery. Scratch the surface of existence persistently enough and he will be revealed.

Well yes. That would be because people like you are always talking about god – talking about god is your profession! – so it’s really not all that strange that people think you mean something by it. You treat it as a name, so people hear it as a name.

If god is not a comprehensible being, then why don’t you just stop talking about it altogether? Why are you a cleric if you don’t think god is a comprehensible being?

If we envisage God as a person clothed with epithets such as powerful, loving, just, fear-inspiring and omnipotent we are creating a manmade image. Sigmund Freud points this out in his book, The Future of an Illusion. “Religion comprises a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality.” In other words we have an innate tendency to invent the particular God that suits our needs. Ironically this is precisely what the second commandment fulminates against. A paradox lies at the heart of the doorstep caller’s question. The more you claim to know God and attempt to delineate his nature the less likely you are to have hit the bull’s eye.

Well then shut up about it! You can’t have it both ways. If we don’t know what god is, then we should stop endlessly going on and on about it.

It is only possible to escape from this impasse by re-orienteering our thought forms. Faith is not the progressive unearthing of God’s nature but a recognition that he/she is fundamentally unknowable. The signpost points not to growing certainty but towards increasing non-knowing. This is not as outrageous as it seems. An apophatic thread, a belief that the only way to conceive of God is through conceding that he is ineffable, runs throughout Christian history.

Yes but that’s just an elegant way of saying the whole thing was an invention from the beginning and it’s time to recognize that and move on. If god is fundamentally unknowable, then there is no earthly point in using the word. If god is unknowable then maybe it’s a gas, or empty space, or a virus, or a cruel savage demon. If you don’t know, then how can there be such a profession as being a vicar? You’re not a vicar for all the other things you don’t know are you? Why are you a vicar for this one? The [unknown] that has the label “god” – why are you a vicar for it? If you don’t know what it is, why do you call it god?

Is anything left or does this destroy the very fabric of spirituality? What remains is a Quakerlike silence during which we can respond to the numinous, develop our perceptions, hone our morality and enhance our wonder at the staggering complexity of the universe. Instead of ranting at the arbitrariness and high-handed conduct of the God we have invented, it is now possible to rest in a cloud of unknowing which gives us time and space in which to reflect on the fundamental questions of life. Why am I here? How can I best deport myself in this bewildering world?

But you can do that anyway. You don’t need god for it.

Persist and the rewards are immense. There is an exhilarating sense of newfound freedom. It releases us from the burden of kowtowing to the dictates of a holy book and it relieves us of the intellectual difficulties of accepting the dogmatic assertions of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. We are liberated and can follow our own spiritual path. Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk, spent a lifetime doing just this and found it uncovered an oasis of calmness and peace. “Follow my ways and I will lead you to golden-haired suns, Logos and music, blameless joys, Innocent of questions and beyond answers: For I, Solitude, am thine own self: I, Nothingness, am thy All. I Silence, am thy Amen!” Give it a whirl. I might just free you from the shackles of orthodoxy and kickstart your spiritual life.

I’ve already given it a whirl. I already don’t have the burden of kowtowing to the dictates of a holy book. I already don’t accept the dogmatic assertions of an ecclesiastical hierarchy. I don’t need apophatic theology for that; no one does.

He doesn’t care though, of course. He wants to have it both ways.

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

I don’t think I was aware of Alisa Valdes before. She wrote a memoir, The Feminist and the Cowboy: an Unlikely Romance. Sounds potentially good, in a way – she teaches him to understand that women aren’t lesser beings, he teaches her to appreciate horses and bad coffee. Culture clash made fun; meeting cute; oddly-matched couple models the potential for mutual broadening of horizons.

Yes but that’s not the plot. The plot is that she

falls in love with a cowboy who teaches her to reconnect with her “femininity” — and to never talk back, open her own car door or walk on the street side of the sidewalk.

Erm. That’s not a good plot. I dislike that plot. Throw that plot away and start over.

Well she has, kind of, but that’s because it turned out – surprise, surprise! – that the kind of guy who teaches a woman never to talk back ends up abusing her.

The book, which features a cover image of a woman’s bare legs tossed high with a cowboy hat perched atop one foot, has been heavily marketed to the anti-feminist crowd, even earning a plug from Christina Hoff Sommers, who called it a “riveting tale about how a brilliant, strong-minded woman liberated herself from a dreary, male-bashing, reality-denying feminism.”

But now the author, Alisa Valdes, a prolific romance novelist, alleges that the man who taught her to “submit,” and to enjoy it, turned out — after she wrote this love letter of a book about him — to be an abuser.

Has anyone called Christina Hoff Sommers for a comment?

It’s not that she’s entirely changed her mind, though. She considers herself a “Difference Feminist” (i.e., she sees men and women as having equal worth but as “not being necessarily the same or having the same abilities in all things”), and maintains that the cowboy helped her “to embrace my own female-ness in a way I had been trained to subsume.” She ended the email with a nod to her alleged abuser, “As the cowboy often said, there is the way things are, and there is the way we would like for things to be,” she tells me. “The only one that matters, ultimately, is how things are. We might not like it, and it might not be fair, but that doesn’t make any of it less true.”

That doesn’t make any of what less true? Feminism isn’t a truth-claim. Feminism isn’t an assertion that women and men are the same. Feminism is a moral commitment. Moral commitments depend on the idea – they are the idea – that “how things are” in the social world is not necessarily how things should be or how they have to be. The idea of equal rights, of equality, of human rights, does not depend on any claims of exact sameness. It does depend on a core of sameness, of an entity that has some sort of need for rights and equality; it rules out stones and daffodils and steam as rights-bearing entities; but it does not depend on sameness all the way down. The cowboy’s wisdom is bullshit. In the social realm, the difference between the way things are and the way we would like things to be is one way of describing the whole idea of reform, aka progress. That can lead to wishful thinking, yes, but that doesn’t mean it just is wishful thinking.

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

Greetings from San Jose airport. Flight delayed half an hour.

I just had a brilliant time in Santa Cruz, which I’d visited or crossed a few times before but never properly explored. This time I managed to stumble on some of the good things to see. What a town! First I stumbled on the municipal wharf, and walked out on it a little distance and admired the gaudy Seaside Attraction stuff off to one side, and also admired the gaudy Victorian house at the top of a hill off to the other side. I went to check out the Victorian house first – it’s an inn – and that took me to the road that goes along the cliff above the shore for some miles.

I parked immediately and started walking, and in a couple of minutes was rewarded with one of the best Victorian houses I’ve ever seen. It has a name, which is Epworth-by-the-sea. There are other good houses and the view from the cliff. I walked on a bit and found a statue to The Unknown Surfer, which made me nearly fall down laughing. That’s not really its name, but it is a statue to the surfer, and it is of a very stalwart, Steve Canyon type guy standing in front of a surfboard, wearing trunks. It is extremely funny and simply added to the delight of my morning. Then came the lighthouse – an extra lighthouse! thrown in for nothing! – and Lighthouse Field State Park, and the surfing museum inside the lighthouse and a plaque outside (it was long before opening time) that explained about three Hawai’ian princes who brought surfing to the US when they were at school here in the late 19th century. I didn’t know that, and it’s interesting.

Then lots more Cliff Drive until it ended at Natural Bridges State Park – which is rocks with holes carved in them by the surf. Then I went back in the same direction and visited the gaudy amusement park/boardwalk thing, which is fabulously kitschy and colorful and gorgeous. I loved it to bits. Plus there were more gaudy Victorian houses just up the hill from there. Who knew?! Not I. I think of Santa Cruz as modern and hip. I know nothing, nothing.

I started wondering why Santa Cruz is pronounced Santa Cruz, when all the other California Santas I can think of are not pronounced that way. Because Cruz is a monosyllable? That’s my guess, but I don’t know. Funny how Santa Cruz sounds quite nice while Holy Cross sounds horrible.

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

The Ottawa Citizen asks its religious experts about the Newtown shootings. Kevin Smith says something I really like. [scroll down]

They say He’s been banished from schools — He being the creator of the  universe, the loving, omnipotent father possessed with a tendency toward  occasional vengeance if he’s not worshipped every day. That is the sole reason  for the murders, they repeat, as much to convince themselves as for others who  must rationalize the irrational.

How cruel to the grieving families that these self-serving defenders of their faith dare make excuses for a God who doesn’t care, or who is not there. He is  never anywhere.

Really. God is never anywhere. Why isn’t that a demerit? Why don’t god’s fans see it for what it is – if god is real, it’s a hateful abandonment, a refusal to help, a cold folding of the arms, a locking of the door from the other side.

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