Dawkins a Sexist Bigot – Lovely!
So I guess I missed some of the Hullabaloo around a certain peer of the atheist universe and a certain female peer of said universe. The Reader’s Digest version:
Women are annoyed that most atheist conventions, gatherings and organizations are sausage factories. When they do go to the sausage factory, they find that they are ruthlessly hit on and sometimes even threatened. Many of these women find this incredibly uncomfortable, and for good reason. Us girls have had a lifetime of reasons to find creepy-looking men saying creepy and often threatening things dangerous. All the while, the sausages themselves keep scratching their heads and boggling, “Why don’t hot chicks come to our meetings?”
Unfortunately, when Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson had the temerity to complain about some guy being creepy in an elevator at a conference, she got attacked … and by Richard Dawkins. I’m not sure why everyone is all surprised about this. Back in February, when something similarly stupid happened at an American Atheists meeting, he referred to the incident as “hysterical twaddle“, then went on to basically defend men who used biology as an excuse to act like shitheads (while at the same time saying he wasn’t).
I rolled my eyes then, as I am now. What it basically boils down to is this: Atheist men are whining about not having women at their retarded events while simultaneously doing the very things that make it so that women don’t want to go to said events and defending the act of doing it. It’s akin to saying, “Please come to my party so that I can hit on you all night long and treat you as nothing but a sexual creature. If you complain about this, I will mock you and make fun of you, belittle your political beliefs and belittle your opinions. But please, come to my party so that I can hit on you because I can’t figure out why women don’t like me.”
As much as I believe that women need to be a larger part of the greater atheist community, I don’t think that we should give these sausage factories any of our precious time. This isn’t to say that women don’t belong in the atheist community – we certainly do – but why waste time telling a bunch of over-privileged men things that they already know, yet refuse to face? Just don’t show up. After all, do you really need to go to a convention every few months to be re-convinced that you’re an atheist? I didn’t think so.
Here’s what I take the most offense to, though … outright stupid misogyny by a man who should know better:
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…
Via: Richard Dawkins: Skeptic of women? – Sex News, Sex Talk – Salon.com.
There are several easily evident problems with this statement. First, Dawkins uses a measure of developing world guilt on developed world women. Yes, Rebecca likely never ever faced the possibility that as a child she would have her clitoris cut off. She doesn’t live in a culture that would bury her alive, burn her to death or throw acid in her face, either. She’s also not likely to die of Cholera or any number of hideous ailments that the developing world faces. She’s not likely to be kidnapped and forced into a loveless marriage or raped and forced to bear the children of her captors, only to see them wandering off with machine guns as toddlers. No, because Rebecca lives in the developed world. Just because things are much worse one place does not make it appropriate for anyone to undervalue the very real threats that she (and most other women) face in this world.
Secondly, putting “chick” in quotes (like that) is one of those wonderful passive aggressive things that idiots do whenever they want to belittle the things that people have to say. My mother, when she was belittling my atheism, used quotes an awful lot. I would assume that an academic would get this and wouldn’t allow being petty, bitter and ultimately, well, a prude, get in the way of any sort of realistic argument he might have to make.
Fuck, I didn’t read the Pharyngula article or wade through the comments (I find I have better things to do than to read a bunch of atheists arguing with each other), so there might have been more to the message, but on it’s face … well, there’s nothing here but a big pile of stupid, and naturally I assumed that such an esteemed academic as Richard Dawkins wouldn’t be that fucking stupid … but here we are … in stupidville.
I think that Dick likely experienced a great deal of rejection by women (some young co-eds maybe?) in his life, and is thus very bitter about women complaining about being treated like pieces of meat. Yes, let’s put that fine a point on it… after all, that’s all Rebecca was doing was complaining. It’s not like she was trying to start a coupe of armed women hell-bent on murdering every man intent on asking them to their hotel room for a cup of coffee.
Dick, mind you, is an intellectual. As such, I would expect he would clearly understand (particularly with all of his advanced degrees) that he could never possibly understand what it’s like to be in Rebecca’s shoes because he isn’t in Rebecca’s shoes – or any other woman’s shoes for that matter. Just like I, as a woman, could never possibly understand what it’s like to be in HIS shoes. We all have an inherent fear of the creepy. It’s been drilled into us since we were kids. Don’t go home with strangers, they’ll do nasty things to you. Don’t dress slutty, don’t show a lot of skin, don’t go to your car in a dark parking lot unless you have security with you, don’t walk into dark alleys, and more. Even though a majority of rapes are done by men the woman KNOWS, everything from slasher films to the nightly news tell us again and again and again: BE AFRAID OF MEN.
There is not a male on the face of this planet who can possibly understand how that feels. I wouldn’t expect them to. What’s more, I wouldn’t wish it on them. It fucking sucks.
Not long ago, I took a solo vacation into the desert to do some hiking and some shooting. Before I went, I did a lot of thinking and ultimately preparation on the best ways to keep myself safe … not from the elements or wild animals, mind you … but from weirdos. There is no freedom in that. There’s no freedom to thinking that I need to carry pepper spray with me “just in case”. There’s no freedom to thinking that I need to avoid dark alleys or empty parking garages or avoid dressing a particular way. Further, every time I meet a man in one of those situations and give him the wary ‘I’m watching you’ look, I feel guilty. Guilty because, by and large, a majority of those men don’t have rape on their minds… but that is what society has made me. That is what this world has created … a whole lot of women who have to be careful about how they choose to exercise their freedoms.
Belittling that and making fun of that isn’t cool. In fact, men who do that look like severe douchebags. I’m sad to think that Dick has to be placed in that bin, but it sounds like that’s where he belongs. But here’s the thing that pisses me off the most about this … it damages the atheist community as a whole.
A lot of believers will tell you that atheists worship Dawkins the same way that Catholics worship the Pope. I know for a fact that this isn’t true, but it’s something that many people actually believe. Given that, when he shows signs of weakness – signs of being HUMAN – the teeming mass of stupidity-spewing, mouth-breathing sheeple jumps on it like a fat kid on the last piece of candy. We’re in a delicate enough position as it is, very slowly and carefully gaining ground. We don’t need Dicks muddying the water and making matters worse.
So do us all a favor, Dicks… if you don’t have something constructive to say, shut the fuck up … and you can take this to the bank: Any Dick who says that he has any idea what it was like to be Rebecca in that elevator has absolutely nothing worthwhile to add to the conversation (and that goes for the female Dicks, too).
This is What a Douchebag Looks Like
Courtesy of Boing Boing (though I went and got a bigger image because I rock).
Meet Greg Fultz, complete and utter loser douchebag of AMAZING proportions. I mean. Amazing. This billboard, which is utterly offensive, false and completely retarded, is just one facet of this man’s amazing douchebaginess.
From the Reuters article:
According to Holmes, when Fultz and his girlfriend, who was then 18, found out they were going to have a baby, she wanted to get married. Fultz refused, Holmes said, and during a church camping trip there was a “discussion about an ultimatum. Either you marry me or I’m not going to have this baby type of thing.”
The girlfriend later flew to Wisconsin for work and when she returned she was no longer pregnant, Holmes said. She did not explain what happened, but Fultz suspected she had an abortion, Holmes said.
“I know it’s her body,” Holmes said. “But his statement is more along the lines of ‘Hey, you know what? Dads have a decision in the process too.”
The girl says she had a miscarriage, but that’s completely beside the point. What she does with her body is completely and entirely up to her. She should not have to face the shame and derision brought on by other whackjob pro-lifers because her ex-boyfriend knows for damn sure that she was the first – and last – girl to ever let him put his penis inside of her. I mean … look at the guy.
Plus, really? Pulling out the lame ‘Father’s Rights’ card to try and force another human being to go through a pregnancy for your own retarded, selfish gain? Yes, you had a change to make a decision in the process. That chance was when you put your penis in her.
Based on one of his tweets, which reads “she would of been just under 8 months preg. and I would of been just under two months from fatherhood a dream denied”, it seems like Fultz’s goal all along was TO get her pregnant. Umm… creepy, anyone? Yes, Fultz, you made your part of the decision and she made her part of the decision. Stop trying to get teenagers pregnant so that you can force them to have your child.
He’s claiming first amendment rights. So, I’ve taken the liberty of using my own first amendment rights to put his own words, via his twitter account ‘prdpgn‘ (proud pagan) onto mini billboards of my own. Feel free to share them.
You can see all of his amazingly retarded tweets in this gallery.
According to his Facebook page, he is inspired by such greats as Bill Gates and Anton LaVey (just FYI for those of you who have never been a pagan – I unfortunately have – all pagans have to claim LaVey as a source of inspiration or they get kicked out of the cult). His book choices also include LaVey but also, oddly, the Bible. His music choices include, horrifyingly, a large amount of goth and industrial, but also a large amount of down-home southern country music. It is all quite horrifying.
In fact, it can be assumed, via this information, that the “church camping trip” where the two had their reported argument was likely an empty lot camped in by a variety of ugly, balding men and whatever women they could convince to stay with them dancing naked in the moonlight and imbibing cans of Miller Lite while they pissed on the camp fire and communed with nature by screwing whatever they could find.
Greg lists his employment as ‘GEFNET‘, which is actually ‘GEFTEK‘, which just means he will “Fix your computer”.
Lucky for us, all of the information about Fultz’s “business” is on Facebook, so we can practice our own ‘free speech’:
601 1st street PMB #411
Alamogordo, NM 88310
575-415-GREG
Oh, and if you’d like to make your own billboards with Fultz on them, here’s a blank:
Enjoy!
I’m a feminist, but …
I’ve been trying to find the right inspiration to reopen this blog in uproarious, Stacy-style, and a few have come here and there, but nothing that’s really stuck deeply enough for me to get involved (at least not right now, with the wedding just about 6 weeks away), but this really gets my craw.
A month or two back I was preaching to the choir of Rob that my Psychology of Women class was pissing me the fuck off. For someone as rabidly progressive as I am, that’s strange … but this class reminded me of all of the ancient, dusty, yellowed, and ultimately useless dogma of common feminism. It wasn’t even the book that did it, it was the instructor. I knew it was a bad idea to join this class when I entered the online classroom the first day and found everything in horrifying shades of pink. It was like there was a fatal accident involving Barbie in her Camaro and a retirement home for ladies who like cat figurines, doilies and flowery perfume.
I gave the class a try like I do every class, even defended it a little, but ultimately I had to leave. The book was fine … for the most part. For example, the most retarded bit of dogma I’ve been forced to gag on my entire life – that we’re supposed to somehow love and adore our periods. Sorry, but no amount of staring at my vagina in a hand mirror is going to make my period any less messy, annoying and painful than it is and I don’t give a rat’s ass if you have a thousand studies telling me otherwise. If science and technology wants to give me a way to avoid having to go through that – safely – than I’m willing to go for it. It’s unfortunate that most hormone-based birth control has too many side effects for me to call ‘safe’, but that’s not the point.
The same goes with pregnancies. The instructor actually graded me DOWN because I stated in a forum post that I’m rather fond of 21st century medicine and will be using all of the best painkillers come my first pregnancy rather than embracing the nature of having children the way our ancestors did. Fuck. We didn’t crawl this far up the evolutionary ladder and develop as much medicine as we have to just turn our back on it because some crotchety old feminist tells us that it’s more NATURAL. So’s getting a sunburn, but you sure as hell won’t see me out on the beech gleefully sunning until I get blisters just because it’s “natural”.
I could tell almost immediately that I didn’t belong in that class. I could tell that the instructor was trying hard to accept more modern views of feminism as acceptable, but it seemed it was easier for her to accept the horrifying reality that a vast majority of the women there stated that they’d rather keep their daughters in the dark about their sexuality than risk angering their “god” by letting them in on the big fat secret that people fuck. I mean, forget the fact that these women were being given study after study and statistic after statistic telling them that kids who don’t get let in on that secret are the ones getting pregnant and dying early from STDs and botched back-alley abortions. It was easier for the teacher to accept that as “social and religious differences” than it was for her to accept the fact that there are real feminists who don’t believe there’s anything wrong with dressing sexy, having painkillers during childbirth and hating the fact that you have to have a period once a month.
The entire time, I really wished she’d bitchslap these women the same way my oceanography teacher bitchslapped the intelligent design freaks who kept insisting that they didn’t “believe” in evolution. That’s not how it works. You can’t CHOOSE bits and parts of reality to believe in or not believe in. Seriously, try that little trick with gravity. Go ahead. Disbelieve in gravity and walk off a skyscraper. That shit’s evolution in motion (at least until you hit the pavement).
At about the time that I was realizing this class isn’t for me because I’m MUCH more of a feminist than the old guard, I met someone new. It was one of those odd sort of ‘synchronicity’ meetings. She posted a blog entry about how she hates feminism because it rags on all of the fun things about being a sci-fi fangirl (specifically the movie ‘Sucker Punch’), her husband (a guy I used to work with close to a decade ago ) posted a link to the blog post. We got into a discussion on what ‘feminism’ really means and at the end we ‘friended’ each other. I have to say, Rebecca is the bone-fide FIRST Facebook friend I’ve made over Facebook alone.
After our first meeting, I urged Rebecca (and others like her) to take the word ‘feminist’ and redefine it. Society currently has a fucked-up view of feminism, and feminism has done very little to actually modify that fucked-up view. I’ve talked to quite a few young women who have said time and again that they aren’t feminists, yet they’ll go on to tell me, in action and through the very nature of their beings, that they ARE feminists … they’re just not feminist stereotypes. They think a lot deeper than the old guard feminists, they hope for a lot more idealism, and they truly understand that the only way that we’re going to find any sort of measure of equality is by allowing women to freely do WHATEVER they want, not shaming them into being women who quietly behave.
Opening the door to equality is a lot like opening the door to a hoarder’s apartment. It’s going to take more than one shove, more than one movement and more than one generation to push through the huge pile of crap that’s keeping the door from opening. Our mother’s generation did a great job of getting us into the workforce, giving us better control over our bodies and ultimately teaching us all that we deserve to haverespect and understanding from the other half of the human race, but the job isn’t done. That was just one of the many shoves that the door has to be given. It’s time that we rally to a new banner, re-define feminist so that it isn’t just a gross stereotype. It’s time to say, unabashedly, that we’re not willing to accept that reaching for idealism is too hard for us to do, just like our mothers insisted on us not believing that math was too hard to do.
We may have to rip the banner out of the hands of our mothers, but so be it. If they’re not willing to make the necessary changes to keep feminism moving forward, then we have to. One might even say it’s our generation’s birthright TO rip that banner out of the hands of our mothers. That, too, is evolution in action – the evolution of activism.
Rebecca and I are on nearly the exact same wavelength. I, however, have the added burden of having been involved in the feminist movement about a decade ago and ending up being ostracized from it for my radical thinking. Frankly, I’m fucking tired of dealing with catty feminists who have gone from being the girls who were picked on in High School to doing the picking from their lofty ‘A-List Blogger’ platforms. They’ve turned the use of ‘relational aggression‘ into an art form. So, when Rebecca got involved in activism with SlutWalk San Diego, I watched with glee as it seemed that feminism was changing right before my very eyes.
I knew all the SlutWalk organizers would endure some pretty ignorant and ridiculous comments when I first heard about it, but I didn’t realize the extent of that torment until the first Facebook pages were launched.
It’s worth noting at this point that in order to comment on a Facebook page, you have to actually ‘like’ that page. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. In order for a douchebag, regardless of the type of douchebag he is, to comment on the SlutWalk San Diego page, he first has to ‘like’ that page. WHY IN THE FUCK WOULD YOU ‘LIKE’ SOMETHING YOU CLEARLY DIDN’T ‘LIKE’?! If you do this, JUST so that you can get your $.02 cents in, you deserve to be one of the aforementioned idiots that should try disbelieving in gravity. Jesus fucking mary and joseph christ almighty. Yes, it aggravates me THAT much.
So I just want to take a moment to address some of these douchebags in my own fashion, but outside of Facebook itself, so as not to continually perpetuate this bullshit (the first rule of dealing with trolls is, after all, is not to feed them).
Ready?
Go!
…because pretentious-modest-idiot walk was already taken. This girl is why so many people think women are dumb.
Then she made a comment that made me want to strangle her:
…an event for people to excusably dress inappropriately. Wow, way to be a judgmental little stick in the mud. You know, you might want to get a stick-in-your-ass-ectomy as soon as possible. Does it petrify you when the hemlines around you go above the knee? Or is it boobies that scare the living crap out of you? Either way, it’s not your place to tell people what’s appropriate. Or your church’s or anyone’s. Fuck. We come into the world downright NAKED, and that’s perfectly natural.
Inappropriate? Jesus fucking christ on a pogo stick.
I’ve seen numerous types of wide-eyed sweet girls come in there declaring that they are oh-so concerned about the name and what it might look like if they were to participate. Oh, please. If you ever use the term ‘dress inappropriately’, you’re not a feminist, so stop saying you are.
Again. Jesus fucking christ on a pogo stick.
The next one agrees with everything, BUT… there’s a TON of these douches.
Oh my god, we should be teaching women to cower at home in burlap sacks or else the MEN will rape the fuck out of them! The only problem that people like YOU have with the title is that it reminds you of how loathsome a person you are for using ‘slut’ to describe women who dress in ways that YOU wouldn’t. Using descriptive phrases like ‘dress up like hookers’ is the same fucking thing as calling women ‘sluts’, just using another set of unsavory words. Of COURSE you have a problem with the title. You need to reserve THAT phrase for telling your girlfriends what a slut the neighbor is for wearing a tube top while gardening.
You do realize, Ms. How-Will-It-Look? that all of your friends saw you ‘like’ SlutWalk just so that you could post your little moral rampage. However did that look? WHAT WILL THE NEIGHBORS THINK?!
This last one has read so many cheesy fantasy novels that he’s mistaken the fantasy worlds for reality:
Dude, I’ve got news for you. This isn’t the world of Dragonlance. There doesn’t need to be an evil dragon for every good dragon that lives in the world. Do you know why? Because like dragons, stupid notions of what ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are were constructed by humanity. Making the argument that sexual violence has to always exist in this world in order for … I don’t know what the opposite is, making love? … to exist is childish, stupid and downright pathetic. Do you also believe that if you clap loud enough fairies will get their wings?
And that last one is the rub of all of it and the big reason why the SlutWalk organizers – all of them, all over the world – should be applauded. There is no reason on earth that we should abandon reaching for the ideal goal … a world where ‘evil’ doesn’t exist. A world where irrational actions don’t happen. A world where it’s never ‘okay’ for men to sink down to their baser selves to satiate a dark urging, then blame the woman for tempting him. The organizers of this very grass-roots movement are saying what everyone else SHOULD have been saying all along – that there’s no good reason not to reach for idealism.
The messages these women are getting from the older feminists are that it’s too hard to reach for an ideal world, so we have to settle with the world that we have and teach women how to avoid getting raped rather than teach men not to rape. Yeah, it’s fucking hard, but it’s something worth doing, no matter how difficult it is. The world doesn’t change when people stop being idealists, it changes when they START being idealists. Give them a hand – all of them – it takes a lot of guts to do what they’re doing, but it’s exactly what we need.
For me, being down and beaten and tired of feminism’s bad rap, SlutWalk has reinvigorated me. I won’t be able to attend because there’s just so much going on with the wedding, but I’ll be sure to dance around in my underwear to ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ in honor of girls getting to do whatever the fuck they want without getting raped.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIb6AZdTr-A&feature=player_detailpage
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