History according to the MRAs

Db03 Comments

Women have always been privileged in human history, dontchaknow?

Once again, I have to point out the absurd perspective of MRAs, just because of how unbelievable it is

Read the posts, women are not the victims of sexism and never were. It’s all a propaganda lie. Women are and always have been the most pampered members of this and nearly every society on earth.

oh, that’s not all

Name any society in any period of history where the average man had a better life than the average woman. Quit looking at just the top tier.

All societies serve women above men. Blessed be the womb of reproduction. Might makes right, numbers make might, and women make numbers.

And the funny thing is, that this is not an uncommon sentiment among MRAs. I’ve seen the same thing repeated multiple times.

Obviously these people are pointing out to the ideas of chivalry and how the women were treated as the “protected gender” in history, without really looking one inch deeper than that. They don’t care to understand that women were protected because they were considered far weaker than men, which was also the reason why they were not allowed independence. In most of history, women were literally either slaves (to their family or husband) or outcasts if they didn’t choose this path of life.

And because  women were treated as objects, as slaves, as inferior, as commodities and so on, they were protected as an object, a slave or a commodity. Protected because they weren’t considered to have enough agency or strength to protect themselves. And that protection only came as long as they accepted this marginalization, for a woman that wasn’t in her place, became the target of violence; from her father, her brothers, her husband or just strangers. And if violence wasn’t enough, she was ostracised at best, or raped/killed at worst.

Remember, slaves were protected as well, because they were a valuable commodity. But this protection only existed inasmuch as it didn’t harm the slaveholder. Were the slaves to think and act for themselves, they would be put in their place quickly and decisively by their owner or society at large. Their protection existed only as long as they were not allowed to protect themselves.

This idea that oppressed people can somehow have a “better life” than their oppressors, is a very common sentiment within reactionary ideologies, especially those who have a purely materialistic or crassly individualistic basis. So for some MRAs, women had “better life” because they were protected from external harm and didn’t have to work for their wealth. Discounting the in-family violence, the fact that they didn’t own the wealth (i.e. if they lost their husband, they were kicked to the curb) and the almost complete absence of freedom. This is similar to the argument that slaves were better than their non-slave brethren (that some slave owners actually used), because they were protected and fed, discounting again the complete loss of freedom. This is in turn very similar to capitalist rhetoric, that workers of today are better off than free farmers and artisans of the past, just because they have more luxuries available, completely discounting the freedom they miss comparatively.

There’s a reason why so many “men’s rights” are also right-libertarians and have quite a bit of intersection with “white rights” people.

In the end, almost everyone in the world can intuitively understand now at what price such protection and “better life” was provided for women and slaves. Everyone but MRAs, for whom personal freedom was apparently not important at all, compared to ephemeral wealth and shallow protection.

Name any society in any period of history where the average man had a better life than the average woman. Quit looking at just the top tier.

All societies serve women above men. Blessed be the womb of reproduction. Might makes right, numbers make might, and women make numbers.

APOC VS Food Not Bombs

Db04 Comments

Is Food not Bombs unwittingly harming the POC communities it helps? Some seem to take it a step further than that.

A meal being served by Food Not Bombs

This article just came to my attention, and it’s just…wow ((Note: I realize that this is just one APOC who does not necessarily repressent the feelings of the whole movement. I just needed a title)).

I am not very familiar with the “race” tension in the US (I use “scare quotes” because I can’t really consider skin colour a race) but some of the things the author says don’t make sense to me. White privilege does not equal white supremacy. Someone may be ignorant on how their privilege display and use is harming poc, but that’s a far cry from claiming that they are part of a movement aiming to dominate people of colour. This is without pointing out that FNB does not operate just in black neighborhoods as far as I understand.

The next thing that perplexes me is that the author asks FNB people to give away the food to the communities that need it and go away. But this presumes that there are people in those communities who are up for running a kitchen, or distributing it, or whatever. But if those existed, wouldn’t they have set up their own FNB (or something similar) in the first place, therefore making the existence of a second FNB org moot? And if nobody is there to actually do this, then what? Not do it at all? Not try and help people in your communities with your own time and effort?

The author seems to be unwittingly supporting a kind of class division, in the way that they say: “I flip a finger to all you white college kids and middle-class punks hiding in drop-out culture, get your fucking privilege out of my face.” But aren’t people of all classes supposed to co-operate? Shouldn’t it be expected by better-off anarchists to use their privilege for good rather than evil? Of course it is privilege that these people have the time, money and energy, to setup FNB chapters, but I don’t see how it’s a privilege that reinforces oppression. Rather, I would think that it’s the kind of privilege use, that battles itself, by letting people know that they can  do the same thing, regardless of their skin colour or wealth.

I could be simply ignorant here. There could be specific circumstances in POC neighborhoods that primarily white FNB chapters inflame somehow, but the author does not deem it necessary to go into detail. The best I understand is that FNB dumpster diving might be affecting those who dumpster dive themselves outside of FNB. But that would be a class privilege rather than white privilege and something that I would expect the people actually affected to oppose. Is there any such opposition from people that cannot dumpster dive anymore when FNB comes around?

Unfortunately, the author does something I’ve seen many other times within radical circles, which is, use privilege as an excuse and a cudgel in order to promote something which has nothing to do with it. In this case, the author seems to just want white people out of black neighborhoods, regardless. The argument seems to be basically: FNB is white supremacist because privilege.

But I would expect a bit more explanation than that. I can imagine a few scenarios, such as FNB disturbing the dynamics of poc dumpster divers, or trying to take some kind of white charity role, or being a gentrification front. But without at least some clarification, it’s impossible to know what exactly, and how to avoid doing it in the future, while continuing to be of help to the rest of your community. But simply wishing that white people stop trying to provide mutual aid because they’re white, with no further explanation or nuance whatsoever, seems simply wrong.

Anyway, as I said, this is coming from my own, non US-centric perspective. If any POC are willing to perhaps educate a clueless European like me, or at least provide me with some places I can educate myself, I’d appreciate it.

EDIT: I just noticed that this is an old post, there’s been follow-ups here and here

Scumfuck gamers

Db0

Ha ha. Rape is funney!

In this video, at 14:24, the player passes a random peasant woman in a village. Some guy in the audience shouts “Rape her!” The Audience laughs…

It’s shit like this why the gaming community deserves the reputation it has much of the time. It’s shit like this which drives women away from gaming.

This is what rape culture looks like. Fuck this shit.

Criticizing authors based on the characters

Db06 Comments

I just read this post and while it makes some compelling points I’m not sure I agree with the author completely. Is it accurate to do a reverse psychology on an storyteller based on the flaws of the protagonists they’re making?

While I can understand the various story fails that Buffy and Firefly has, I can also understand that a story cannot have perfect characters. If Whendon was just designing flawless women all the time, it would just not make very compelling stories and people would rightly call him out for it. And if you’re going to have a flawed but empowered female character, she’s allowed to be flawed in her empowerment.

In the Firefly case for example, the author criticizes Inara for failing at her own empowerment at times, but doesn’t this make for a compelling story? Sure, Mal “saves” her (and it’s arguable that Inara didn’t need his help), but in the end she has to save him in turn from his own stupidity.

So yeah, Mal is very flawed, and Inara as well (albeit less so imho), but I’m not sure I’d characterize Whendon from the personality of such characters and particularly Inara’s story, especially when there’s others like Zoe who are nothing like Inara and don’t need any such help (and in fact end up saving Mal and her own husband more than once).

I’m also concerned about the “key points” for “Nice Guys” that the author is making. I used to be a Nice Guy and I never thought, for example, that “Men Are Evil, Male Sexuality is Evil“. Not even close. In face, I do not believe I held any of those Key Points as true in my Nice Guy phase. Rather, I was just very shy, inexperienced and awkward with females and my shyness was preventing me from making clear that I wanted a sexual relation, thus ending up bypassing it.

Perhaps I wasn’t the kind of Nice Guy the author is talking about as my phase only lasted until my early twenties, but given how little the Nice Guy Key Points describe my former self, I’m not keen on accepting them at face value.

Introducing the Confederation of Anarchist Reddits

Db03 Comments

/r/Anarchism attempts to confederate all the Anarchist communities of reddit. Lets see how this experiment works.

Exciting A Black flag and the 8 tendencies of anarchism in the form of bi-coloured stars, surrounding the all-black "Anarchism without Adjectives" star. Below it "reddit" is written.news everyone!

We implemented a new initiative yesterday at /r/Anarchism, meant to promote solidarity between the various disconnected anarchism subreddits: The Confederation of Anarchist Reddits.

The idea is very simple: Using Reddit’s built-in functionality to combine multiple subreddits on the same page, we create an aggregated page including all the known Anarchist subreddits. This means that someone can simply visit that page and get an overview of news from all subreddits, even if not subscribed to each individual one. Then we put a nice link on the header of each reddit (although that’s optional) which is meant to grab people’s attention and get them to visit the aggregated page.

In the end, we’ve settled to the following look:

And clicking on the link, takes you to this page.

As you can see if you visit it, you see the latest posts coming up in all the subreddits as well as a list of the subreddits in the confederation on the sidebar. Now people can simply open new browser tabs for each article of interest and vote on everything discussed in all the anarchist reddits.

Now you might ask, what’s the point? Doesn’t every individual user have the capacity to fine tune their subscriptions to any subreddits they want? Well, yes they do, but the confederation is there to serve a slightly different purpose. The benefits I see coming from it are the following

  • It allows new people to discover the anarchist community of reddit at one-stop and also provides them with a launching pad into reddit they can bookmark and visit. It also saves someone from subscribing to a dozen low-traffic reddits they’re only marginally interested in, and cluttering up their subscription list.
  • Because of the above benefit, people who wouldn’t otherwise subscribe to a dozen different anarchist subreddits, can now still be exposed to them via the aggregated page and ideas/news which they might otherwise miss, might grab their attention. Hopefully, this will lead to a sort of “cross-pollination” of ideas between the various subreddits.
  • Because of the common link and the implicit sending of traffic towards the smaller subreddits, I hope that solidarity will be improved in between the various fragmented communities. In the end, we’re all part of the same movement and significantly outnumbered so it pays to remind and reinforce our common ideological bonds.
  • It allows each subreddit to tailor its moderation policies to suits its own style. You see we have various perspectives on how a reddit needs to deal with anything from Trolls to Fascist Agitators to MRAs. In fact, the difference of opinion on the moderation policies were the primary reason for /r/Anarchism’s Great ShitStorm of 2010. So /r/anarchism has now settled in a somewhat active moderation against oppressive speech. However, many other people don’t feel the same way and a few have gone ahead an opened reddits which follow their own perspective. From janitorial moderation of /r/anarchist, to no moderation of /r/blackflag.
    Unfortunately, because /r/anarchism is the largest and most visible subreddit of them all ((To the point that we’re the 9th link in google for the search term “anarchism”)) many people argue for their own preferred style of (non-)moderation in /r/anarchism still and refuse to simply move to another anarchist reddit because /r/anarchism is the most big and active one. And that makes sense, as it’s almost as a voluntary ostracism to remove yourself like so.
    The confederation aims to bring the best of both worlds. Now each subreddit can choose the moderation style they prefer best and at the same time get the benefit of the larger community which uses the confederation aggregation as their starting point in reddit’s anarchist community. This means that even if what someone thinks is a perfectly legitimate post about “National Anarchism” was removed from /r/anarchism outright, they can still visit /r/blackflag and post it there. They will probably still get downvoted into oblivion now that the larger anarchist community can see such the post of course, but at least they will have less a reason to troll and complain that those nasty “authoritarians” of /r/anarchism censor them.
  • In the same vein, people who are not interested in reddits which do not moderate, retain the capacity to personally customize the aggregation so as to remove loosely moderated reddits altogether. So if /r/anarchist starts getting flooded by Men’s Rights, eventually many anarchists will simply remove the reddit from view and in a way, “organically” ostracize it from their collective attention.
  • It will allow smaller subreddits to gain some instant traction since their new posts will appear automatically at the view people who are using the confederation. So if Bob creates a niche subreddit about guerrilla gardening for example,  they can still take advantage of the larger anarchist community, even if their post introducing people to it is downvoted into oblivion. Even if they don’t advertise at all and merely start posting interesting articles.
  • It naturally presents a core point in action, to outsiders to anarchism: that is the principle of federation between anarchist communities, thus showing how we value both communities of a common mind, and expression of individuality between communities.

These are just the initial benefits I can see coming from it. I’m excited to see how it will morph and develop in the future. I’ve already informed the community and most other subreddits I initially added and reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, even from critics of /r/anarchism’s moderation.

What do you think of it?

MRA lulz of the day

Db011 Comments

In this discussion, I am talking to a completely culturally illiterate MRA who insists, INSISTS, that asking a lone woman you do not know to come to your room for coffee, at 4 in the morning is definitelly not an euphemism for casual sex.  Oh no. That’s just a particular feminist interpretation to make guys look creepy.

It doesn’t matter how clearly and patiently basic social nuances are explained to them, they don’t get it. So in the end, I suggested to actually go out and ask 10 different females what they would think about such a coffee request. The answer I received was just too good not to share it with the rest of you.

Some would certainly think it was strange and indeed it is, but it’s unlikely they would assume it was propositioning them for sex. Indeed I would think it was strange if a woman would do the same to me, but I would not assume it was propositioning me for sex.

Queue jawdrop.

The fact that they just assume what females would reply (which naturally is what they expect) is just…golden. By itself, this reply showcases just how male privilege works. Not only is the actual female perspective dismissed, but it’s just assumed based on the male perspective.

I may be ageist by thinking this, but does anyone else think it’s even slightly possible that this poster is not a socially awkward teenager? I just can’t accept that a full grown adult with actual social experience with females can be that deliberately obtuse. MRAs might overwhelmingly be scum, but at least they do understand social nuances.

In fact, if a woman accepted such a proposition in good faith and got raped in that stranger’s room, MRAs would be the first to call it a false rape accusation because of course she must have known it was about sex in the first place.

In which I am told that women in the Dark Ages were not oppressed.

Db01 Comment

Population advantage clearly proves who holds the power. Which is why the poor have it best of all in life.

Ah MRAs, the group that must be in some of the most startling degrees of denial ever experienced in the human race. I did the mistake of getting into a discussion with such a fine young man, who gladly informed me that women can’t be oppressed because they compose 52% of the population and as such, the numerical superiority proves that it’s impossible for them to have truly been oppressed. When I inquired deeper into the subject of whether women of 500 years ago were not oppressed either (since, after all, they still had similar numbers), I was informed…

Depends on how we want to define “oppression”. Were there gender roles? Oh hell yes. Did both genders have roles? Yes. But if we want to define “oppression” as a relative or comparative term, then no. The average woman had a better life than the average man since… well since recorded history at least.

Right. I have been enlightened.

You hear that females? Ignore such things as not having the right to talk or even participate in discussions or the fact that female abuse (AKA “moderate correction”) was accepted and even enshrined by law. Since you held the majority of the population, clearly that was what women intended to have to improve their life. Not only had we had true equality as far back as the Roman Empire, but things were clearly skewed in your favour.

And now, all this 3rd wave feminist crap has made things even more skewed and the poor ole men need all the help they can get.

WTF Dawkins? What the flying fuck?!

Db029 Comments

Dawkins says some stupifyingly derailing shit.

Sean Prophet mentioned at a post in Facebook the following comment that Richard Dawkins supposedly left at PZ Myers’ excellent defence of Rebecca Watson.

Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

He was then called on it

Did you just make the argument that, since worse things are happening somewhere else, we have no right to try to fix things closer to home?

And replied with more derailment.

No I wasn’t making that argument. Here’s the argument I was making. The man in the elevator didn’t physically touch her, didn’t attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn’t even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.

If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics’ privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn’t physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Muslim women suffer physically from misogyny, their lives are substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny. Not just words, real deeds, painful, physical deeds, physical privations, legally sanctioned demeanings. The equivalent would be if PZ had nailed not a cracker but a Catholic. Then they’d have had good reason to complain.

Richard

What is this I don’t even

I won’t go into details, as this and this posts say pretty much all I had to say on the matter ((Dawkings absolutely misses the point, continues derailing and generally dismisses the concerns of a female due to his extreme privilege blindness)). I just was completely stunned by the WTF-ness of the post by someone who should know better.

EDIT: Dawkins has provided yet another reply, showing that he still doesn’t get it

Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.

I sarcastically compared Rebecca’s plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.

But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let’s ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.

No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.

No, I obviously don’t get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.

Richard

Dear Richard, even if Elevator Rape wasn’t an actual thing, it would still be wrong to proposition women in inappropriate locations, such as female you do not know at 4 am in an Elevator. And there is a reason why they are called “inappropriate”. Because by normalizing them, you treat women as sexual objects. As if people who can’t possibly have times where there’s no chance in FSM’s blue earth that they would accept. As if your own desires make their own desires – which common sense has made blatantly clear – irrelevant.

Inappropriate behaviour can be called out and enforced, so that people stop doing it. Because it’s bad, m’kay? Because normalizing the idea that a woman can be propositioned for sex without even taking the time to figure out if there is a chance for it, is degrading to women as it reduces them to sex dispensers. Because using rape culture and patriarchical conditioning to corner a female and implictly pressure her (even if you do not realize the pressure you exert) into sex is reinforcing those bad cultures.

Note that I would love to live in a free world where males and females are sexually liberated and they feel confident proposing no-strings-attached sex without taboo and faux shame. But that world would arrive within true equality, where rape and abuse of females is not the norm at the hands of controlling and horny males.  I get the feeling that some are outraged that what they perceive is a small step towards that world of sexual liberation, is being trounced by “those prude feminazis who get their panties up in a bunch about a harmless request for sex”. They fail to see the institutionalized oppression who cannot make this step valid, without further marginalizing females in every other context.

If you want sexual liberation, you need to fight first for female liberation and true equality. Then, and only then, will a sex positive culture occur.

And finally, PZ nails it once more

I’m taking one last stab at explaining this. Imagine that Richard Dawkins meets a particularly persistent fan who insists on standing uncomfortably close to him, and Richard asks him to stand back a little bit; when he continues, he says to the rest of the crowd that that is rather rude behavior, and could everyone give him a little breathing space? Which then leads to many members of the crowd loudly defending the rudeness by declaring that since the guy wasn’t assaulting him, he should be allowed to keep doing that, and hey, how dare Richard Dawkins accuse everyone present of trying to mug him!

I’ve also had enough of a discussion with Sean Prophet trying to explain to him in Facebook why Dawkins is not saying anything relevant and why feminists are not in the wrong to call out inappropriate behaviour. I’ll post it below for your perusal.

  • Sean Prophet
    Absolutely!!!! If agreeing with Dawkins makes me misogynist, then hate me and bring it on. The feminists have a right to their opinion, but this is totally subjective, and in fact goes pretty far toward the demonization of men by calling them “creepy.” All the feminist definition of “creepy” means in this case is “made an unwanted advance.”
    Men are at a distinct disadvantage in this game since they *always* have to deal with the high likelihood of rejection, something women have far less experience with. This is not a “moral” or “progressive” issue. This is an issue of *equality.* And that means women get to say “no” and as long as the guy is polite and leaves, he has done nothing wrong or anti-feminist. He may have been clumsy, or simply not attractive, but that should not be a crime. Nor even an offense.
    And this does call for the phrase “grow up.” If women want to be considered equals, then *act like it!*
    I think Skepchick just made a colossal fool of herself. And shame on the others like Blag Hag and PZ Myers who doubled down on the foolishness.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    I consider myself a feminist and I agree with you 100%. Well said!
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    However, there’s a lot of degrading crap that goes on on a daily basis that isn’t polite, as you’re probably aware…or maybe not, since you don’t have to deal with it.
  • Sean Prophet
    I agree many men are creeps. Which is why when a guy just screws up and politely leaves, he should be applauded for *not* being a creep.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    I liked what you said about men having to regularly face rejection and how difficult that is. Women need to understand that and cut men some slack, as long as men are being polite. Women also need to stop participating in their own exploitation and then playing the victim. I’d love to see more respect and healing between the sexes. This is a good discussion to be having. Thanks for bringing it up.
  • Sean Prophet
    Hey no problem. I’ve got a blog post coming, where I provide more links and details. 😉
  • Divided By Zero
    What a bunch of nonsense from Dawkins. First of all, yes, he is making the argument that people should raise an issue with things happening to them because “children are starving in Africa” kind of thing and it’s obvious how ridiculously wrong that is. His reply to that is completely irrelevant. So it’s just words. Sure, and Rebecca replied with “just words”. What’s the problem again? Oh, is it because those words make you uncomfortable in propositioning unknown females you find in elevators? Are you for serious?
    Recebba has a right to point out bad behaviour, and privileged males like you don’t lose time in putting her in her place. It’s disgusting.
  • Gretchen Chadwick
    No, Dawkins has a good point. Feminism needs to set priorities. A guy asking a woman to have coffee with him is no big deal. I had a guy run down the street after me to invite me to dinner and I thought it was funny/sweet. I didn’t go because I didn’t know him, but, even if it had made me uncomfortable, he did nothing wrong. There are such bigger problems that feminism needs to tackle, not the least of which is how young women are being systematically trained through a variety of media to become perpetually youthful sex objects. Picking on men for asking to spend time with a woman just creates tension between the sexes and makes feminism seem stupid and frivolous. There are bigger fish to fry.
  • Divided By Zero
    You’re dismissing the very real concerns of why these women do not like this objectifying behaviour – and this has very little similarities to someone asking you out for coffee. The idea that there are other things to do is simply a derailing tactic used to silence and has no benefit to the discussion. People talk about their own experiences and the things that affect them on a daily basis. Just because some other people have other, more difficult situations to face, does not make those issues invalid.
  • Sean Prophet Db0 I addressed this in my blog post. As did Dawkins in his comment. This was a simple overreaction on the part of Skepchick, and now people are just doubling down to avoid offending feminatheists. Is there anywhere you would draw the line? Or do women just get to completely dictate every detail of men’s acceptable behavior?
  • Sean Prophet
    And I’m actually glad Dawkins has burst this little pustule of pompous powermongering entitlement. And it also smokes out the men who have absolutely surrendered and ceded all pretense of balance between the sexes. Certainly everyone has a right to their opinion, but I want nothing to do with women who act this way nor the obsequious men who follow them around. If I’m going to be that submissive, it’s going to be for a hot scene with a self-aware domme who has her shit together.
  • Sean Prophet
    Gretchen, I do think the media makes things worse, as you said. But youth and beauty are tied to fertility, so will always be desirable. Where I think there’s room for growth is broadening the range of what is considered beautiful. (As well as prolonging and preserving health.) Increasing the beauty in the world is really something we call all do with a simple shift in consciousness.
  • Divided By Zero
    They get to dictate behaviour when it affects them. This is not a contentious issue or something difficult to grasp. One is not “sumbissive” for recognising that women are not sexual objects you can proposition at any and all time.
    This ridiculous pompousy of yours is just absurd. Just bang your chest a bit more and declare you don’t care what those damn bitches want. Maybe you’ll feel manlier.
  • Sean Prophet
    Women *are* and always will be sexual objects. They are also a lot more than that. And there’s a whole other dimension to both sexes. But nothing can remove the fact that life is pretty much an endless stream of penises searching for vaginas.
  • Divided By Zero
    The problem is that such behavious treats them as *just* a vagina. Because you apparently do not see anything wrong when people treat women as if they’re there just for their enjoyment and they couldn’t possibly be some contexts were propositioning them is inappropriate.
  • Sean Prophet
    I don’t need to beat my chest (which is not all that large). I simply demand a balance of power between the sexes. My relationships with women have been the most important relationships in my life. I love and respect them, and they do the s…See more
  • Sean Prophet
    BTW I dislike overly submissive women (or men) just as much as the petty dominants. Self-aware people do not act out either extreme. They know unctuousness quickly turns to contempt. This kind of crap on either side is essentially two sides of the same developmentally-challenged coin.
  • Sean Prophet
    I agree elevator guy was inappropriate. Wrong time and place. But once he realized that, he quickly went home and left her alone. We can’t legislate (or even socially regulate) all the nuances of what goes on between people who are drinking late at night in hotels at conferences. There should be plenty of leeway so long as basic social norms e.g. consensuality, are being observed.
  • James Scott ‘Doc’ Mason
    My issue was with Skepchick’s characterization of the encounter as misogynistic. I agree with Sean that it was inappropriate, but only because she is a young, attractive woman. If he had said the same exact thing to a man, we wouldn’t have this conversation. Maybe I need a better understanding of misogyny, but from what she described it didn’t feel like he was hateful or sexualizing her. We simply do not have enough information to be objective about his intentions. Isn’t it possible that he found her interesting and simply wanted to continue the conversation in a quite setting? We’ll never know, because she did the right thing by politely saying no, and he did the right thing by accepting her refusal.
  • Divided By Zero
    Cheezus, you people are acting as if he asked her out for a coffee during work. Are you completely incapable of recognising the fact that propositioning is completely inappropriate at times and with particular styles? Do men get excused at all times as long as they accept the “No”? This is completely obtuse. Think about it for a second for crying out loud.
  • Sean Prophet
    Db0 did you not read where I said “elevator guy was inappropriate”
  • Divided By Zero
    And then you said “But once he realized that, he quickly went home and left her alone.”, which implies that all was OK. But all was NOT OK. You can’t proposition a woman at any time and method and act as if nothing was wrong as long as you accepted rejection. Some things need to be called out, and this is what Rebecca did in the first place.
  • Sean Prophet
    Rejection *is* the penalty. Nothing else is called for. Negotiation 101.
  • Divided By Zero
    Yes. There is. To give an example even you might understand: if someone comes to a woman an propositions her for money, simple rejection is not enough.
    Rejection, by itself, is not a penalty, except in the mind of midguided PUAs
  • Sean Prophet
    The guy was *not* a pua. He was simply inept. That is not a crime, or even an offense.
  • Divided By Zero
    Oh gawds…I didn’t say he was a PUA. I said “Rejection, by itself, is not a penalty, except in the mind of midguided PUAs”. And you haven’t countered my point that simple rejection is not enough.
  • Sean Prophet
    You haven’t supported the point. Shall there be a law passed to prosecute inappropriate speech? Public shaming? Ban from elevators? You’re going really overboard, just like Skepchick. And especially for an anarchist.
  • Divided By Zero
    I’m “going overboard” for the srawman suggestions you made? Are you for real?
  • Sean Prophet
    I still don’t understand the issue. He was shut down and went home. What more does anyone want??
  • Divided By Zero
    Have you see the video Rebecca posted about it?
  • Sean Prophet
    Yes, that was not a big deal. What was a big deal is that when Stef disagreed with her she called her out publicly and tried to turn the non-incident into some kind of feminist rallying cry. That was *way* out of line, and that’s what all the controversy is about.
  • Divided By Zero
    You’re not criticizing THAT though. You (and Dawkins) are criticizing her reaction to guy in the elevator. Whether she should have publicly made an example of her disagreement with Stef is up for debate. I’m with PZ Myers on that front http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/07/always_name_names.php
  • Sean Prophet
    It was still an overreaction no matter how anyone slices it.
  • Divided By Zero
    It’s an overreaction to point out that there are inappropriate times to proposition women and that women are not sexual objects?
  • Grace Feldmann
    NOT an overreaction and Thank you Divided By Zero!
    Grace Feldmann
    please see my note on this. And BTW I take the dare Sean. This IS in part about a blind spot around not just White, but male privilege and power. Absofuckinglutely.

 

And this is where the discussion stands at the moment.Hopefully, he starts to get it but I won’t get my hopes up.

However this whole Brouhaha does show how little connection there is between Atheists and their lack of common positive goal. Atheism is a negative cohesive point. It’s as unifying as the lack of hair and the more people that identify as atheists there are, the less cohesion the movement as a whole has, as it stops becoming novel (within a religious community) thus requiring support for others, and rather becomes the norm. But I digress. As I was saying, this just another example of how little one Atheist has with another.

You can’t demand that other Atheists are feminism or anti-racists because this is not a defining aspect of the irreligion. It’s precisely because you can have racist and sexist atheists that there is so much friction in the movement, and the secondary reason why I stopped wasting my time with it. The primary being the same for most others I presume: I live in a country where religious oppression does not exist anymore and therefore my irreligion is not used as a point of oppression.