Part deux

Dec 12th, 2012 4:16 pm | By

Where was I? There were some things I didn’t get to in the post this morning.

One of the things. Shermer is indignant about what I said about him. Here’s what I said about him.

You would think that nontheism and feminism should be a natural combination. Women have the most to gain from escaping religion, after all: monotheism gives men higher status, starting with their allegedly being made in the image of God.

But 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, well, forever…

The main stereotype in play, let’s face it, is that women are too stupid to do nontheism. 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 during a panel discussion on the online talk-show The Point. The host, Cara Santa Maria, presented a 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.”

I start with the stereotype – which is one that Susan Jacoby also talked about at the Women in Secularism conference – and then give an example of someone saying it. Well he did say it. I’m seeing a lot of weird explaining away, but that’s bullshit. I can easily believe he didn’t mean to say it, and that he would have put it differently if he’d been writing and thus had more time to think – but the fact remains that he did say it. And no, it doesn’t bear some other, less dismissive interpretation.

It reminds me of my brother-in-law, actually. Decades ago my brother and I were wrangling about a big desk that had belonged to my mother (a journalist) and that I said she had told me I could have, and my brother-in-law (older than both of us) suddenly cut in to say that a desk was a man thing. I don’t remember what I said or did; I remember only the rage.

No, a desk isn’t a man thing. No, wanting to stand up and talk about atheism isn’t a guy thing. No, wanting to go on shows about it isn’t a guy thing. Wanting to go to conferences and speak about it isn’t a guy thing. Being intellectually active about it isn’t a guy thing. They’re not more of a guy thing. I know this. I’ve done all the things Shermer lists, and I can think of a long long list of other women who also have. Saying it’s more of a guy thing is like saying the law is more of a guy thing, science is more of a guy thing, work is more of a guy thing, thinking is more of a guy thing. It is, in short, the same old shit. It would be pretty astonishing if Michael Shermer had never been made aware of an occasional whisper about this over the past 40-plus years.

So that’s one of the things. He said it. He could have just said it was a stupid thing to say, he was thinking on his feet and made a hash of it. But indignation at me for pointing it out? No. I don’t think he has a case.

The next thing. About the “why didn’t she email me?” again.

in journalism, as in science and all rational inquiry, there is an ethic of going to the primary source, and especially giving the person in question the benefit of the doubt. In this case, a simple email asking what I meant would have cleared up any misunderstanding.

I simply assumed he meant what he said. He could have emailed me asking what I meant, too, but he didn’t. Harriet Hall could have emailed me asking what I meant instead of emailing her thoughts to Shermer for publication. Everybody could email everybody about everything, but usually we address what’s on the page or in the podcast without emailing. That’s normal. Look at The Daily Show – it’s all about things people say.

That’s it. Back to stirring my witch’s brew.

 

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“It’s more of a guy thing”

Dec 12th, 2012 10:42 am | By

Michael Shermer is displeased with me. It’s about this thing from last August.

And speaking of videos…I didn’t watch all of that one on The Point the other day, and yesterday a Facebook friend, Mavaddat, pointed out a later segment when they talked about Y no women. Michael 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.

Screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeam.

 I quoted him in the column I wrote for Free Inquiry the same month. He’s replied to the column today.

I’ll just comment on a few things.

I would like to use this opportunity to address a larger issue at hand, starting with another important point that Benson also failed to mention, and that is Cara Santa Maria’s own comment that she made after reading the viewer question and before I answered: “In putting together this panel I had a hellova time finding a woman who would be willing to sit on the panel with me to discuss her atheism. Why is that?”

It’s because she didn’t ask enough women. Shermer emailed her later to ask her about it, and she told him

“In my search for panelists on the show, I did reach out to a couple of high-profile female atheists local to Los Angeles, but none were available to join.

Two. That’s not very many. That’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough to justify even the claim that she had a hellova time finding a woman who would be willing to sit on the panel, let alone any broader claim that women don’t do atheism so much.

Anyway. Shermer goes on -

We must remember that we are all subject to the same cognitive biases as those whom we criticize in religious and paranormal cohorts, and keep in mind that in journalism, as in science and all rational inquiry, there is an ethic of going to the primary source, and especially giving the person in question the benefit of the doubt. In this case, a simple email asking what I meant would have cleared up any misunderstanding. (Skeptical Inquirer columnist Kenneth Krause did just that after reading Benson’s article, and that removed any doubt for him as to my position.)

Is that true? Is it true that in journalism, as in science and all rational inquiry, if X says something, there is an ethic of asking X what X meant?

I don’t believe it. (Get me, I’m a skeptic!) I think people get quoted all the time without further inquiry. That’s because very often that’s the issue – what was said, what people heard, what got out there into the discourse. Shermer said what he said. I wanted to address what he said. So I did that.

Farther down the page -

Perhaps unintentionally, Benson makes a strong case that something other than misogyny may be at work here, when she asks rhetorically if I would make the same argument about race. I would, yes, because I do not believe that the fact that the secular community does not contain the precise percentage of blacks, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans as in the general population, means that all of us in the secular community are racists, explicitly or implicitly.

Ah no that’s not what I said. I didn’t ask if he would make the same argument – I asked if he would say the same thing. Then I helpfully spelled it out.

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.

The difference is obvious, yes? I don’t believe he would say “It’s a white thing.” I think he would hear it before he said it, and stop. My point was that he didn’t hear “it’s a guy thing” in the same way.

There’s a lot of stuff about tribalism and witch hunts and purity, which is frankly mostly bullshit. Not totally bullshit, but mostly.

PZ has a post.

And so does John Loftus – totally non-tribal, of course. It begins with some friendly advice:

When will the witch hunt end? I’ll tell you. When atheists kick people like Ophelia to the curb just as people ended the real witch hunt in the 18th century.

Kick kick kickety kick.

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Zuckerberg’s business card

Dec 12th, 2012 10:00 am | By

Embedded image permalink

 

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PUBLISH THIS COMMENT IF YOU DARE!!1

Dec 12th, 2012 9:58 am | By

AJ Milne waxes poetical.

I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they won’t play this new bleep comment

It’s not that it’s buzz or beep beep dangerously insightful

Honestly, it’s more dingingly pointlessly banal ‘n abusive

You can’t say honk on this blog

Or shot or twang or blargh

You can’t even call the proprietress a silly sound effect

Even if you say doing so gives you a huge, stiff boing

So I bet they won’t publish this comment on their blog

I bet you they daren’t well scatching mark it approved

I bet you those ch’chinging old losers

Will just shrug and delete the load of horse raspberry

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Surgeries and modifications

Dec 11th, 2012 5:52 pm | By

There’s the Hastings Center report itself, which was the source of Lisa Wade’s article. Zinnia Jones has a great, detailed post on it. I’ll just mention some things that jump out at me.

Starting with the title.

Seven Things to Know about

Female Genital Surgeries

in Africa

They’re not surgeries. If you’re walking down the street and someone tears your arm off for the fun of it, that’s not surgery.

Calling FGM “surgeries” makes it sound health-related, beneficial, useful, good for the girl it happens to. It loads the deck. It’s a creepy, sly, underhanded way of trying to manipulate us into thinking oh well it’s not so bad then.

Then the first part of the first sentence.

Western media coverage of female genital modifications in Africa has been hyperbolic and onesided, presenting them uniformly as mutilation

Because they are. “Modifications” is again a way to pretty them up.

Then the next sentence.

Even if we ultimately decide that female genital modifications should be abandoned, the debate

around them should be grounded in a better account of the facts.

We? Who’s we? “We” already have decided that. Maybe the Hastings Center hasn’t, but I’m in a different “we.”

And what does “ultimately” mean? As if nobody had thought about this yet, and there were all sorts of reasons not to abandon FGM? As if it were a wide-open question? Many many many people, right there in Africa, have already decided that FGM should be abandoned.

The title and two sentences. Now to page 6.

Policy Implications 1. Better fact checking and better representation of the voices of scholars and the perspectives and experiences of African women who value female genital surgery are likely to change the character of the discussion. For nearly three decades, there has been an uncritical relationship between the media and antimutilation advocacy groups. In the face of horrifying and sensational claims about African parents “mutilating” their daughters and damaging their sexual pleasure and reproductive capacities, there has been surprisingly little journalistic exploration of alternative views or consultation with experts who can assess current evidence.

We recommend that journalists, activists, and policy-makers cease using violent and preemptive rhetoric. We recommend a more balanced discussion of the topic in the press and in public policy forums. Female genital surgeries worldwide should be addressed in a larger context of discussions of health promotion, parental and children’s rights, religious
and cultural freedom, gender parity, debates on permissible cosmetic alterations of the body, and female empowerment
issues.

No. No I’m not going to seek out ”better representation” of the perspectives and experiences of African women who value female genital surgery mutilation. I’m not going to do that any more than I would in the case of foot-binding. No I’m not going to combine “parental and children’s rights” in that way when it’s a question of cutting up children’s genitals. Parents don’t have a “right” to do that in the absence of medical necessity. No, no, no.

Richard Shweder is one of the people who signed that report. We’ve seen him before. It was five years ago…

I trust you read that piece by John Tierney on the need to be more respectful of female genital mutilation – or rather, of what he carefully decides to call ‘female circumcision’ because it’s critics who call it female genital mutilation. Well we call it that because chopping off the clitoris and most of the labia and sewing up the whole hatchet-job does seem like mutilation – we critics are funny that way.

Tierney’s piece on Leon Kass’s speech last week was terrific, but this one is…not so good. I do not like it. It makes me cross.

But the one by Richard Shweder puts Tierney’s in the shade. It’s jaw-dropping.

He’s very angry with feminists who don’t like FGM.

The article is one of a series of sensational, lurid and horrifying pieces that the Times has printed over the past decade or so covering the topic, all giving one-sided and uncritical expression to a representation of the practice that has been constructed and widely circulated by feminist and First World human rights activist groups.

Horrors. Feminists and human rights activist groups have ‘constructed’ a representation of FGM that portrays it as a drastic mutilation imposed on female children as a way to control women by chopping off most of their genitalia. How imperialist, how colonialist, how elitist, how cosmopolitan, how wicked. Of course mutilation of girl children is a fine thing as long as it’s done six thousand miles away.

There’s a lot more, and a lot of comments. Oh yes we’ve been here before.

See also Will Bordell’s article from a couple of months ago.

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Adult conversation

Dec 11th, 2012 4:05 pm | By

Renee Hendricks has been commenting here. She’s also been discussing her commenting with her pals on Twitter.

Welcome to the cool kids’ table in junior high school.

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Women who

Dec 11th, 2012 12:42 pm | By

Now that the first steam has dissipated a little, a closer look at one part of Lisa Wade’s “Balanced Look” at cutting off parts of the genitalia of very young girls.

The third item in her list of useful things for people to know so that they can take a more “balanced” approach to Female Genital Mutilation.

Research has shown that women with cutting are sexually responsive.

Women who have undergone genital surgeries report “rich sexual lives, including desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction…”  This is true among women who have experienced clitoral reductions and undergone infibulation, as well as women who’ve undergone lesser forms of cutting.

Look at the way she puts that. There are no qualifications – no “many” or “some” or “there are a few who” – just an unadorned “women.” Fortunately, most people who read that far will already be furious enough to spot the manipulative wording, but that doesn’t make her wording any less infuriating. It’s all the more so because she says “genital surgeries” – as if FGM were medical. It’s not medical. There is no medical reason to cut away parts of the healthy genitalia.

What she implies in that disgusting passage is a brazen falsehood. Many women who have undergone FGM report shitty sexual lives, and even shittier childbearing.

How horrible to try to obfuscate that.

 

 

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Come back a different person

Dec 11th, 2012 12:19 pm | By

So clearly the guilty verdict on Nechemya Weberman, unlicensed “therapist” to rebellious young girls, presents a problem for people who need to control rebellious young girls. What to do, what to do. Export them!

Embarrassed by the sex abuse trial of a Hasidic counselor, leaders of Williamsburg’s pious Satmar sect are considering a different way to deal with rebellious teens: shipping them out of the country for treatment.

For “treatment”? Rebellion isn’t an illness.

Without addressing the allegations against Weberman, a Satmar official told the Daily News that leaders are considering ways to avoid similar accusations by victims.

“This was a wakeup call; nobody denies that,” said Gary Schlesinger, who heads a nonprofit tied to Satmar leader Rabbi Aaron Teitelbaum.

“Maybe we will send them to an Israeli program or a European program, and the kid will come back a different person.”

A different, non-rebellious, submissive, compliant, obedient, conformist person. Not an autonomous, thinking, choosing, deciding person who gets to shape her own life according to her own hopes and plans. That’s what “kids” are for: to be robotic clones of their elders.

 

 

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A “balanced” look at Female Genital “”"Mutilation”"”

Dec 11th, 2012 11:02 am | By

Sunil D’Monte alerted me to this blood-curdlingly horrible article on FGM by a sociologist, Lisa Wade, who wants more “balance” in the discussion of the grand old tradition of carving up the genitalia of very young girls.

While I’m most well-known for my work on hook up culture, I’ve written extensively on a different topic altogether: how Americans talk about female genital cutting practices (FGCs), better known as female genital “mutilation.”  While FGCs are passionately opposed by essentially all Americans who learn about them, our understanding of the practices is, in fact, skewed by misinformation, ethnocentrism, and a history of portraying Africa as naively “backwards” or cruelly “barbaric.”

Good start. Put ”mutilation” in scare quotes because hey, it’s not really mutilation, it’s just “cutting,” which is another thing altogether. Then present a stupid parody version of opposition to FGM because hey, nobody could oppose FGM for reasons that aren’t ethnocentric or racist.

Using the word “mutilation” is counterproductive.

People who support genital cutting typically believe that a cut body is a more aesthetically pleasing one.  The term “mutilation” may appeal to certain Westerners, but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive.

Well of course they do, and that’s the problem! People in China used to think a deliberately deformed foot was a more aesthetically pleasing one, too, and that’s why little girls had their feet systematically broken and crushed, and had to be put at a distance from the rest of the household at night so that their screams of pain wouldn’t keep everyone else awake.

But I’ll let Urooj Zia reply.

Hello from Pakistan. This article has offended me and made me furious enough to leave a rant in response. Here goes:

//but people in communities where cutting occurs largely find the term confusing or offensive//

What the WHAT?! So in one clean sweep, feminist voices from these communities get discounted, while barbarism gets amplified by a feminist? How does that make sense? And this ‘them non-Western women don’t deserve any better’ is racist!

Moreover, how does women controlling these procedures not make them patriarchal and oppressive?! I don’t even know how to respond to this hypocrisy!

//It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children//

No shit, Sherlock. Child abusers in ‘western’ societies don’t like being told that either, nor do rapists. Does that stop feminists in those societies from denouncing this crap? I don’t get it, why did you write this article? Why would anyone do this, why?! What makes you think that you sitting in your ivory tower deserve better than us? What are we, lesser beings? What makes you think we deserve to have our bodies mutilated? What is WRONG with you?! Feminists here have a hard enough time anyway; stop making our lives more difficult. If you can’t support our voices, don’t cut us down and don’t you dare tell us that we don’t deserve better. We bloody well do.

I’ve been following Urooj on Twitter for a long time. Urooj rocks.

Lisa Wade continues -

“Only” 10% of FGM includes infibulation. Mostly it’s not so bad really.

Women still have fabulous sex lives after FGM.

Health problems from FGM are the exception, not the rule.

It’s not cruel patriarchs.

It’s not African.

Women in the US get cosmetic surgeries on their genitals.

The obvious is obvious.

It turns out that people don’t appreciate being told that they are barbaric, ignorant of their own bodies, or cruel to their children.

It also turns out that girls of 5 don’t like being held down while someone slices off bits of their genitals with a razor. Next platitude?

I would be more livid, if it weren’t for the fact that almost all of the comments are disgusted. I’ll just repeat Urooj’s observation -

And this ‘them non-Western women don’t deserve any better’ is racist!

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Nechemya Weberman found guilty of sexually abusing girl

Dec 10th, 2012 4:06 pm | By

Guilty!

The verdict, against Nechemya Weberman, was a significant victory for Charles J. Hynes, the Brooklyn district attorney, whose office has been criticized for not acting aggressively enough against sexual abusers in the borough’s large and politically connected Hasidic community. And the case offered a rare window into how the Satmar community enforces its sexual values, particularly for young girls, with so-called modesty committees chastising girls for wearing revealing clothing or using cellphones, and parents pressured to pay high fees to religious counselors to treat those girls.

He was convicted on 59 counts.

There’s been a considerable culture of impunity until now, with the police looking the other way for years.

Prosecution of sexual abuse allegations in the ultra-Orthodox community has been hampered in the past by the intimidation of witnesses. In this case, Mr. Hynes’s office brought charges against several men for allegedly trying to interfere with the case, through bribery and threats. Then, during the trial, three other men were charged for taking cellphone pictures of the victim, in violation of court rules. And, although supporters of accused abusers have dominated the gallery at previous trials involving prominent ultra-Orthodox Jewish men, on many days at this trial, supporters of the accuser and advocates for abuse victims were in the majority.

H/t No Light.

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Men against assholes & misogyny

Dec 10th, 2012 3:53 pm | By

Manboobz offers a good thing by way of a break from bad things. We all get sick of bad things. The good thing is

comedian Jen Kirkman’s new tumblr blog: “MA’AM” – MEN AGAINST ASSHOLES & MISOGYNY, which she describes as “a place for men – not afraid to call themselves feminists – to write from their heart to help educate men who may still hold some sexist attitudes towards women.”

Kirkman started it a bit over a week ago after going on a sort of Twitter strike, frustrated by all the misogynistic assholes that kept popping up on her timeline.

Here’s how she explains it:

Sometimes I would get sad when I was batting away dozens of hate-filled things while in my timeline my male comedian friends were just joking along having fun – as we all should be.  And I felt like I was alone on the playground and I wanted them to speak up for me.  Not “beat up” the specific people attacking me … but I wanted my male comedian friends to write, in public, about things they have expressed to me in private about how much they feel for the women in their life who are still spoken to this way.

Yeh. I remember when I used to be able to post non-misogyny-related things and just chat away about them. It seems like another world.

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Almost all the missing students are female

Dec 10th, 2012 12:15 pm | By

A Turkish lawyer and women’s rights activist, Canan Arin, was arrested for mentioning the fact that girls get married off very young in Turkey.

I was the co-founder of the Istanbul Bar Association, Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and worked as a trainer there.  The Antalya Bar Association was opening a Women’s Rights Enforcement Centre and the lawyers needed training. I gave a talk on violence against women in the form of early and forced marriages in the context of training.

I used two examples to illustrate my point. One was the Prophet who married a girl of seven. The second was the head of the Turkish Republic who was engaged to his wife, the first lady, when she was 14 and married her when she was 15. These are facts.  As I spoke, a group of young men got up and started shouting at me. They said I was insulting and going off the subject. I denied this and said they were free to leave the conference room, which they did.

The next day another group of young men, (I am not sure whether they were lawyers), held a press conference and reported me to the court on charges that I was insulting the Prophet and President of the Republic of Turkey. This group of around 10 men who filed a complaint against me were not present at my talk.

So the cops arrested her.

The interviewer, Bingul Durbas, asks searching questions.

BD: The new education reform known as “4+4+4” seems very problematic. Under the new education law, it is not compulsory to continue education after the first four years. The Child Bride project of the Flying Broom, a women’s organisation in Turkey, has recently found that, almost all of the students who are absent from school due to early marriage and engagement are female. According to the TurkStat the prevalence of lifetime physical or sexual violence against females decreases with the increase in their education. This indicates that the new education reform is likely to increase the vulnerability of girls to early marriages and violence.

CA: Exactly. And, no one reports these crimes despite the fact that child marriages constitute sexual abuse of children and sexual intercourse with those who have not achieved adulthood is a crime, according to the articles 103 and 104 of the Turkish Penal Code. However the law is not implemented.

It’s a multi-pronged approach – minimal schooling, marriage at 15 or 12 or 9, no right to leave, “honor” killing if you do leave, a terrible life if you stay.

BD: In another recent case, Nevin Yildirim, who killed her rapist to save her honour, was not allowed to have an abortion and she had to give birth to her rapist’s child. There is also a link between the abortion issue and ‘honour killings’. My research shows that in cases where the victims got pregnant out of wedlock, the defendants (the girls’ families) take the victims from one hospital to another, in a desperate bid for an abortion to avoid any social stigma. They try to avoid murdering the victims in every way they can. If they fail to resolve the situation then they kill the victims to cleanse their’ honour’.

CA: Very true. The Prime Minister is involving himself in women’s private lives more and more – from how many children she should have to whether she can have an abortion or a caesarean. So that is why it is especially difficult for young women in Turkey.  A woman has no value unless she is married and it is the family that must be protected – not the women, whatever the cost.

Every door is closed and locked.

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Eschaton omnium gatherum

Dec 10th, 2012 11:15 am | By

Via Veronica (via AtheismTV) – a montage from Eschaton 2012.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEsWN92ubH4

Blog posts on Eschaton are collected at Eschaton.

And a video of the protest outside the Uganda High Commission last Monday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et30EsRyzIM

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That face is familiar

Dec 9th, 2012 5:16 pm | By

Don’t miss Katha Pollitt on Ross Douthat.

Ross Douthat, TheNew York Times’s Catholic-conservative columnist, is so obsessed with women’s fertility it’s really too bad he can’t get pregnant himself and see firsthand what it’s all about.

Yes but that would take all the fun out of it. The whole point of being a Catholic-conservative columnist dude is so that you can try to browbeat women into getting pregnant moar.

I’m not so sure why we want more people on our crowded, overheated planet, where world population is projected to increase by 2 billion before finally beginning to fall. But if Douthat really thought through what it means to have and raise a child these days, I’m sure he could come up with a lot of great ways to help women and families. The trouble is, he couldn’t be a Republican anymore. He’d be a socialist.

But it’s not about helping, it’s about telling.

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“One individual has already been identified”

Dec 9th, 2012 3:50 pm | By

David Futrelle points out A Voice for Men campaigning to terrorize a young woman they dislike. These guys are scary. Seriously scary:

AVfM is conducting outreach and investigation into the identities of the persons involved in the violent protest against the rights of men and boys orchestrated and conducted by the University of Toronto Student Union and other antisocial elements within that institution.

To that end, one individual has already been identified, and you will be seeing a story on her here in the near future. Our search for the woman highlighted in the video of the protest continues, with some leads. …

Gender ideologues absolutely hate the light of day. They hate it shining on their ideas and on their lies. Many of them also don’t want it shining on their identities. They seek anonymity for the same reason Klansmen wear hoods.

Futrelle points out a discrepancy:

Even beyond the vicious nature of AVFM’s language and tactics, the hypocrisy here is off the charts: most of AVFM’s writers – gender ideologues all – hide their identities behind pseudonyms, including of course JohnTheOther, who launched AVFM’s campaign against the still-unknown protester.

It’s all so very familiar.

Futrelle includes some of the threats left at YouTube:

ytwf2

ytwf5

ytwf6

Futrelle’s post was yesterday. Today they’ve posted a different woman’s name, along with a picture.

They’re scary.

 

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How will billionaires be able to afford to buy politicians?

Dec 9th, 2012 12:05 pm | By

Andy Borowitz asks.

a consortium of billionaires today warned that if their taxes are raised they will no longer have enough money to buy politicians.

The group, led by casino billionaire Sheldon Adelson, commissioned a new study showing that the cost of an average politician has soared exponentially over the past decade.

While the American family has seen increases in the cost of food, health care and education, Mr. Adelson says, “those costs don’t compare with the cost of  buying a politician, which has gone through the roof.”

That is very worrying. Food, health care, education and housing are all luxuries, of course, but the ability for billionaires to afford to buy politicians is non-optional.

Plus think of all the jobs!

The Vegas magnate complains that the media has ignored billionaires’ essential role in giving jobs to politicians who would otherwise have difficulty finding “honest work of any kind.”

“Billionaires are providing employment for a group of seriously incompetent and marginal people,” Mr. Adelson says. “You raise taxes on us, and who’s going to create those jobs? I really don’t think people have thought this through.”

He’s forgetting the Catholic church…

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The gross crime against humanity of being born a woman

Dec 9th, 2012 10:57 am | By

Via Mona Eltahawy on Twitter - Pakistan has its “Twitterati” – “the artists, the journalists, the designers, the political analysts, the bloggers, the activists.” I follow quite a few of them myself.

But guess what – there’s a penalty. Of course there is.

But with fame comes the inevitable trolling. And unfortunately, if you’re in Pakistan, and you committed the gross crime against humanity of being born a woman, you’re a prime target. Any female professional in Pakistan who is active on Twitter will find herself vilified and harassed online simply because she is a woman who works, and (as is the case with many professionals) supports women’s rights and is a feminist. What’s alarming is that this trolling is not at all harmless tomfoolery. It is dangerous, violent, and misogynist to boot.

I first saw this form of violence against women when popular blogger, Mehreen Kasana, was the victim of a disgusting practical joke. Her head was photoshopped on an image of a woman dressed  in a “sexy” French maid outfit. Imagine the horror of waking up to find such an image all over the internet, hoping your siblings, cousins, relatives, etc. don’t come across that picture. I don’t know who was behind all of this, but it’s a disgusting thing, picking on women who happen to have a loud voice and state their opinions clearly and firmly.

I don’t have to imagine; I’ve had that: my head photoshopped onto a sexy body in a bikini, as punishment for constantly lying about how gorgeous and sexy I am.

Similar antics involved the activist Sana Saleem, where fake accounts with obscene names masqueraded as her, tweeting vile things about her, and even worst, these accounts would keep cropping  up as soon as one was shut down. It is a testament to Sana’s courage and resilience, because there is only so many times you can tell yourself that this is meaningless.

We’ve all had that – all of us who are objects of the misogynist campaign.

What is disappointing is that no one will view this as violence against women. No one will say that this is cyber harassment. No, if these women even dare to call this cyber harassment, they will be called attention-seekers, whiners, immature. Every time a woman is attacked, and she fights back, she is the one who is vilified.

Check, check, check. Not, to be sure, the “no one” part; no, in our case it’s far from no one. But it is a lot fewer people than we would have thought.

Well – solidarity forever, and all that.

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

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An environment that is just too toxic and hostile to endure

Dec 8th, 2012 5:07 pm | By

So there’s Anita Sarkeesian’s TEDxWomen talk on online harassment and cybermobs.

Gee I don’t know why I would be interested in that…

Now, I’m a pop culture critic, I’m a feminist and I’m a woman. And I’m all of these things, openly, on the internet so I’m no stranger to some level of sexist backlash. I’ve sadly gotten used to sexist slurs, and sexist insults, usually involving kitchens and sandwiches…

But what happened this time was a little bit different. I found myself the target of a massive online hate campaign.

Gee I wonder what that’s like…

What’s even more disturbing, if that’s even possible, than this overt display of misogyny on a grand scale, is that the perpetrators openly referred to this harassment campaign and their abuse as a “Game”. They referred to their abuse as a game.

So, in their minds they concocted this grand fiction in which they’re the heroic players of a massively multiplayer online game working together to take down an enemy. And apparently, they cast me in the role of the villain. And what was my big diabolical master plan? To make a series of videos on YouTube about women’s representations in games. Yeah.

That’s interesting. The perps I’m familiar with don’t call it a “Game” as far as I’ve seen, but they do treat it as a game, as well as thinking of themselves as heroic players.

Where is this game played? Well, the perpetrators turn the entire internet into a battlefield. So, in my case they came after everything and anything that I possibly ever had online. They also have a home base where they coordinate their raids and work together and communicate and this usually takes place on largely unmoderated, largely anonymous message boards and forums. And these are places with no real mechanisms for accountability.

Check, and check.

So what is the goal? Well, the immediate explicit goal is to stop the villain and save video games from…me and my crazy feminist schemes. And they tried to do this by silencing and discrediting me and my project.

But the larger implicit goal here is that they’re actually trying to maintain the status quo of video games as a male dominated space and all of the privileges and entitlements that come with an unquestioned boys club.

The chief of which is being surrounded by mostly males, which is a privilege and entitlement because females are…you know, such a drag, talking so much and everything.

Now we don’t usually think of online harassment as a social activity but we know from the strategies and tactics that they used, that they were not working alone, that they were actually loosely coordinating with one another.

This social component is a powerful motivating factor that works to provide incentives for players to participate, or perpetrators rather, to participate and to actually escalate the attacks by earning the praise and approval of their peers. We can kind of think of this as an informal reward system where players earn “internet points” for increasingly brazen and abusive attacks. Then they would document these attacks and they would bring them back to the message boards as evidence, to show off to each other – kind of like trophies or achievements.

So, we have a general structure of a social game. We have players, we have the villain. We have a battlefield. We have this informal rewards system.

But the thing is…Its not a game. It’s an overt display of angry misogyny on massive scale.

Its not “just boys being boys”. Its not “just how the internet works”. And it’s not just going to go away if we ignore it.

Emphasis added.

…the usual terms that we use to describe online harassment such as “cyber bullying”, “cyber stalking”, even trolling, don’t adequately describe a hate campaign of this scale.

What happened to me, and sadly other women as well, can best be described as a cyber mob.

And whether it’s a cyber mob or just a handful of hateful comments, the end result is maintaining and reinforcing and normalizing a culture of sexism — where men who harass are supported by their peers and rewarded for their sexist attitudes and behaviors and where women are silenced, marginalized and excluded from full participation.

A ‘boys club’ means no girls allowed. And how do they keep women and girls out? Just like this. By creating an environment that is just too toxic and hostile to endure.

Emphasis added, again.

On the other hand – she’s still here.

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

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Get consent

Dec 8th, 2012 3:08 pm | By

Martin Robbins has some blunt things to say about genital mutilation.

Infant circumcision involves performing surgery without consent to permanently alter an individual’s genitals. In many cases this is done without good medical justification, for example to force the infant to conform to the expectations of a particular religion. Just as we call sex without consent ‘rape’, circumcision without consent or reasonable justification should be called ‘mutilation’.

Yes but religion. Respect. Tradition.

Physical merits and demerits aside, infant circumcision has had a profound psychological impact on many men.  “I can’t get it out of my mind how I have been mutilated against my will,” reads one testimony on the website of the charity Norm UK

I spoke to several circumcised men in the course of writing this article, who were kind enough to allow me to share their experiences with you. I’ll be posting more of their testimony (and that of others) in a follow up to this post, but for now a couple of quotes are worth highlighting.

Philip, from London, told me how he felt when he first became aware of his status as a small child:

“I wanted it covered up.  I felt mutilated.  I also felt that my parents had abandoned me; why had they let someone do that to me? I had such a feeling of helplessness and abuse due to my circumcision.”

His advice to parents considering it now?

“DON’T.  Even if you think it may be necessary later, wait until later to see if it really does become necessary.”

Which, surely, is only fair. Just wait. Let your kid decide.

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

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With one stroke of the sword

Dec 8th, 2012 11:55 am | By

A news item from India.

In the first honour killing in Kolkata in decades, a 29-year-old youth dragged his sister out on the street and cut off her head with one stroke of the sword in Ayubnagar locality of Nadial, barely 13km from the city centre, on Friday.

Scores of residents looked on in horror as Mehtab Alam walked to a police station with the head in his left hand and the sword in his right, dripping blood all along the way.

We know the rest without looking. She had sex with someone, or her brother thought she had sex with someone, or the brother thought the neighbors might think she had sex with someone, or the brother thought the neighbors might think the brother might think the neighbors might think she had sex with someone. Whatever. It doesn’t matter. Somebody somewhere might suspect that Mehtab Alam’s sister had The Wrong Penis up her, so her head had to be cut off – in the street where everyone could see.

Even as deputy commissioner-port division Mehboob Rehman rushed to the scene of crime, where Nilofar’s headless body lay in a pool of blood, Mehtab told the numbed police officers that he had killed his sister for “running off with a lover and dishonouring the family”, say sources. Nilofar was married for eight years and had two children. It was “immoral” for her to live with her former paramour, Firoz Hossain, Mehtab apparently told police.

And if it’s immoral, then her brother has every right to cut her head off. The wages of sluttery is decapitation.

 Nilofar married Akbar of Pachura, Rabindranagar, when she was 14. They have a son aged six and a daughter, four. On November 28, she ran away from her in-laws’ home, alleging that she was being harassed and tortured by Akbar’s brother. On November 30, she disappeared from herpaternal home, too.

Nilofar’s father lodged a missing person’s diary at Nadial police station. In a few days, Mehtab came to know that she was with Firoz, with whom she had an affair before marriage, say police.

That “married” is interesting – as if she’d done it of her own volition. How likely is that at age 14? And if it is likely, is it legal? No; the legal age in India is 18 for girls.

Whatever. She won’t be marrying or shacking up with anyone now.

 

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

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