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Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1

An e-reader with a cup of coffee, a notebook, a pen, and a pair of reading glasses.
Photo by Aliis Sinisalu on Unsplash

For a long time I’ve used Tumblr primarily to share quotes from my favorite articles that I read online (and sometimes books, too). Since I’m no longer using Tumblr due to their atrocious, sex-negative decision about adult content, I haven’t been able to find a better way to do this. Most so-called Tumblr “replacements” are pretty barebones and/or nonfunctional.

So, clunky as it is, I’ll be doing it here! Every so often I’ll post some quotes and links to stuff you might like.

Starting off with a very topical one:

Tumblr made sex a community experience.

—Vex Ashley, “Porn on Tumblr — a eulogy / love letter

Now that the full scope of this administration*’s political vandalism and base criminality is largely being copped to in broad daylight in various federal courthouses, a good chunk of the elite political press is moving into the Hoocoodanode? stage of political journalism. This is best exemplified byThursday’s New York Times podcast, the headline of which—“The Rise of Right-Wing Extremism, and How We Missed It”—got dragged like Hector’s corpse all over the electric Twitter machine until someone at the Times sharpened up and changed the last half of it to “…and How Law Enforcement Ignored It,” which is a little better, but not much.

To take the simplest argument first, “we,” of course, did no such thing, unless “we” is a very limited—and very white—plural pronoun. The violence on the right certainly made itself obvious in Oklahoma City, and at the Atlanta Olympics, and at various gay bars and women’s health clinics, and in Barrett Slepian’s kitchen, and in the hills of North Carolina, where Eric Rudolph stayed on the lam for five years and in which he had stashed 250 pounds of explosives for future escapades.

—Charles P. Piece, “‘We’ Did Not Miss the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism. You Did.

Inspired by online recipe sites, he’d sit down to dinner and then let me know what rating I earned. “If I give you five out of five, you’ll quit,” he joked. And I laughed because when I was in my 20s, I believed that you were supposed to laugh when someone hurt your feelings. I thought you were constantly supposed to be trying harder.

—Lyz Lenz, “Now That I’m Divorced, I’m Never Cooking for a Man Again

“As you become more acclimated to the cold, your body becomes more effective at delivering warm blood to the extremities, your core temperature goes up, and all that contributes to being more resistant to the cold,” Leonard told me.

That means the only cure for hating winter, unfortunately, is just more winter.

—Olga Kazan, “Why So Many People Hate Winter” (ugh.)

Mattis saw it up close. He bore it as long as he could, in hopes of mitigating the damage. But when Trump broke America’s promise to the Syrian Kurds, he stained Mattis’s honor, too. That, apparently, Mattis could not accept. He leaves and takes his honor with him. And now the question for Congress is: The Klaxon is sounding. The system is failing. What will you do?

—David Frum, “No More Excuses

It’s called Star Wars. Not Star Trek, not Star Peace, not Star Friends, not even Star Tales. This gargantuan fictional universe is labeled with a title that guarantees the ability to travel space… and near-constant warfare.

We can debate the relative okay-ness of this focus from a moral standpoint, sure. But in reality, I think that Star Wars is accidentally teaching us the greatest lesson of all: It’s depicting what a universe looks like when you dedicate all of your research and technological advancements to war and destruction, and unwittingly showing us what an incredibly dark place that universe is. Because the Star Wars universe is a fun fictional playground for sure, a great place to build weird and wonderful stories… but it’s not a good place. Not by a longshot.

—Emily Asher-Perrin, “Star Wars is Really a Cautionary Tale About Devoting All Technological Advancements to Death

It’s no longer socially acceptable to believe that women are somehow less than especially not during a time when feminism is wielding so much cultural power. But arguing that women are just naturally better at caretaking or domestic work has become a clever way to shirk living up to progressive values while claiming you are simply complimenting women on their stellar ironing skills.

One way to combat this line of thinking is to highlight how fully capable men are in the private sphere. It is true that American culture relishes in portraying men as dolts when it comes to parenting and cleaning, and it’s an unfair stereotype.

But for women to make real progress in and out of their homes, men must give something up: the backwards dream of holding onto their feminist bona fides while seeking out female partners willing to limit their own aspirations to the home.

—Jessica Valenti, “The ‘Woke’ Men Who Still Want Housewives

So yes, forced birthers and [Status Quo Warriors], if you’re going to play it like that, I am OK with the idea of a world into which you, personally, were never born. I am equally as OK with the idea of a world where I don’t exist, either. Neither you nor I personally matters that much in a universe so vast and a sea of human experiences so rich. You and I both are accidents in our existence, possibly unhappy ones.

I would’ve rather your mother not have been forced to carry a pregnancy she didn’t want to term. I would’ve rather your father had approached your mother respectfully in an appropriate setting, or not at all. I dare to love your mother as a fellow human being more than you do and to dream of a better world for people like her. It’s rank misogyny and not very humanist at all to think otherwise.

—Heina Dadabhoy, “Why I Don’t Care If You Wouldn’t Have Existed

It is maddening to watch adult men respond to revelations of endemic sexual harassment in the workplace by instituting a series of ludicrous personal codes, rather than by learning the relatively straightforward lesson on offer: Don’t sexually assault or harass anyone.

At best, these “rules” are reflective of employers’ woefully incomplete approach to sexual harassment. Employers have long done the absolute minimum to comply with the law, relying on trite videos focused on what you can and cannot say or do in the workplace (“don’t give back rubs” or “don’t offer promotions in exchange for sex”) and sexual harassment policies designed primarily to protect them from lawsuits. The sweeping scale of the Me Too movement makes it clear that no mere set of rules is sufficient to prevent workplace harassment, especially when those rules fail to speak to all of the various power imbalances that make the critical distinctions between genuinely consensual workplace romances and harassment.

—Tahir Duckett, “Avoiding Women At Work Is A Childish, Cowardly Response To #MeToo

When you are terribly afraid of being held responsible for the emotional well-being of others, it feels very mature and responsible to decide that you should “work on yourself.” It becomes both a way of retroactively absolving yourself (wow, can you believe all of the ways my issues manifested before I decided to work on them) and a rather elegant little trick to exonerate ongoing bad behavior (dang, those pesky issues again! I guess I must keep working on them). This is especially true for those too-clever-by-half motherfuckers who think that nobly warning someone in advance they “are working on their issues” mitigates any way in which they might disappoint or harm. And even with the best of intentions, it obviates the fact that relationships themselves are a process of being made ready, not something you come to static and fully formed.

[…] We need each other desperately, in ways none of us can be ready for.

—Brandy Jensen, “Ask A Fuck-Up: I’m still in therapy. Should I be dating?


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Stuff I Read That You Might Like, Vol. 1
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Occasional Link Roundup

Oh finally, we’ve made it to February. Maybe one of these days I can start voluntarily going outside again!

Did you know I have a Google+ page? Now you do. If you’re one of those rare people who actually follow posts on there, now you can follow mine.

1. Stephanie and others are organizing a new conference: Secular Women Work. It’s being funded through Kickstarter. If you can, please help them out. I’m really excited about it and have already bought my ticket.

The Secular Women Work conference is a celebration of the work of female activists who create and run projects and communities in the secular movement. And there is no better way to honor their work than by using their expertise to help us all become better activists.

At Secular Women Work, you will find workshops: both hands-on exercises to develop your skills and facilitated group discussions where you can share challenges and solutions with other activists. You will find panels on specialist topics, with panelists who can help you broaden the horizons of your activism. And when you’re ready for a rest, you’ll find speakers who will entertain and inspire you with stories and lessons from their own work. In between it all, you’ll find a conference full of other activists who want to make a difference in the world.

2. An absolutely fucking brilliant post about “overdiagnosis,” as it applies to autism (and, in my opinion, to many mental illnesses):

Adopting labels to get help isn’t “overdiagnosis”; it’s an understandable and rational response to inflexible institutions and their refusal to deal in subtlety or individuality. The word “overdiagnosis” implies that there’s something more at stake than nonsensical hoop-jumping. It blames the wrong people for the wrong problem.

[…]Getting outraged about “misdiagnosis” misses the point; it blames clinicians and parents and autistics. But our current knowledge does not support the idea of drawing a bright line. It supports the idea of measuring individuals along many dimensions and providing them the individual supports they likely need based on what we know. The need for a bright line comes from politicians and bureaucrats, and those are the people who should catch flak. Why are we complaining about clinicians and parents for “drawing the line in the wrong place” when many people aren’t interested in this stupid line-drawing exercise in the first place?

3. Franklin explains why rules are not necessarily in polyamory:

If a person loves you and cherishes you, and wants to do right by you, then it’s not necessary to say “I forbid you to do thus-and-such” or “I require you to do thus-and-such.” All you really need to do is communicate what you need to feel taken care of, and your partner will choose to do things that take care of you, without being compelled to.

On the other hand, if your partner doesn’t love and cherish you, and doesn’t want to do right by you…well, no rule will save you. The rules might give you an illusion of safety, but they won’t really protect you.

4. Lis discusses talking about racism in therapy:

The course I hated most in grad school was taught by a professor who said, “If your clients talk about the outside circumstances that keep them down and make their lives horrible, about how they’re so hard done by, they can’t ever take responsibility for their own lives.” It was supposed to be a course on marriage and family therapy, which is a topic I love a lot on its own; but most of what I learned was about the use of institutional power, from a rich moderate liberal white guy who thought that talking about inequality of any kind was actively harmful to therapy.

I try to remember him even now because he was respected in his field and by his colleagues. He’d run programs in schools and military bases, taught therapists-to-be, received all the marks of approval from his profession, and thought that if a therapist let their client talk about experiencing racism or sexism, they were sabotaging the therapy. I try to remember him because I have to remember that when I meet a new client, that client has no outside indicators that I’m not exactly like him.

5. Why you don’t need to feel bad about yourself when you’ve acted immorally:

Feeling bad about oneself does not make one a better person. Sometimes we seem to think that it would be worse to do something wrong and not feel guilty, than to do something equally wrong but feel guilty about it, as if guilt makes us morally superior, as if it could purify us or redeem us in some way. It is unclear to me how guilt could have such effects. How bad one feels about oneself does not seem to be very relevant; what is important, instead, is repentance or regret: the desire to have acted differently, the intention to repair the damage done, and the determination that in the future one will not act similarly. While regret focuses on action (e.g., I did something wrong), guilt focuses on oneself (e.g., I am a bad person). Repentance is useful: it motivates one to remedy wrongs and not fall into the same mistake again. Guilt is impractical: by keeping the focus on oneself, it contributes to the reification of our negative qualities (e.g., I am selfish), and becomes an obstacle for imagining oneself differently, and for changing one’s behaviour, since we seem to adapt our behaviour to the idea that we have formed about ourselves.

6. Eve Rickert asks: Can you really negotiate your rights away?

There’s a reason domestic violence prevention websites have lists of your rights in relationships. It’s because the places you tend to see rights violations tend to be abusive relationships. It’s because rights violations tend to lead to abuse. Do abuse victims “consent” to be in their relationships? On the surface, perhaps it looks that way, but that is rooted in a victim-blaming, “why doesn’t she (he) just leave?” mentality and a serious oversimplification of the psychological dynamics of abuse. Abuse relies on tearing down your partner’s sense of self and personal agency to the point where consent is really no longer valid. And it doesn’t take physical violence to make a relationship abusive.*

I believe that if you’ve come to a place in your relationship where someone has negotiated any one of their rights away, that relationship includes coercion, and that invalidates consent. Staying doesn’t mean your partner’s not hurting you. The fact that your partner submits to you doesn’t mean you’re not being an abusive asshole.

7. Jonathan Chait has blown up the blogosphere; Anne Therault responds:

Rather than understand how trauma works, or recognize that trigger warnings are, in fact, about giving people the choice when and where to engage with potentially upsetting content, Chait prefers to patronizingly pooh-pooh the whole idea. Instead of recognizing that most people use trigger warnings as a way to facilitate the “controlled exposure” to trauma experts recommend – because, again, trigger warnings give readers the choice to make sure that they are in a safe space and a healthy mindset before engaging with potentially triggering content – he prefers to believe that anyone who asks for a content warning is a mewling infant who should just get over it already.

How nice that Chait has never found any content upsetting enough to require a trigger warning; one supposes that makes him an expert on the subject.

8. Kate critiques that research study about ‘foods containing DNA‘:

Tricking study participants is a time-honored tradition of psych methodology, but you have to trick them effectively, and I’m not convinced this is anything but a gotcha question. If you ask people to support or oppose a governmental policy and then bury one non-policy question in a bunch of actual policies they might have heard of, you are not actually doing excellent science. You are creating a popular Facebook graphic.

9. On Tumblr, The Unit of Caring has another good response to Jonathan Chait:

Basically every problem Chait identifies can be reframed in a competing-needs framework. Some people don’t want to be exposed to conversations about whether police officers can tell if a rape victim is lying, as came up in my Psych seminar last week. That conversation could cause them to relive one of the worst experiences of their lives. They want to not take part in it. On the other hand, intellectual inquiry really does demand we conduct studies on whether police can tell that sort of thing, and debate how to inform juries about the results of those studies, and debate which advice for improvement at detecting liars really works. Both these needs are valid. Both are legitimate. And both can be met.

Chait thinks he’s found people who want to shut the discussion down entirely, or at least people whose discursive tactics are causing the discussions not to happen because others don’t understand which comments will make them into targets and so they don’t talk at all. He’s calling this ‘political correctness’. What I’m seeing is a community that used to only meet one need – intellectual inquiry – now frightened that it has to choose between that need and the needs of its vulnerable members.

10. Homa Mojtabai at McSweeney’s lists ‘Reasons You Were Not Promoted That are Totally Unrelated to Gender‘:

I’m not sexist and this organization is not sexist and I have to say you’re developing a little bit of a reputation as a troublemaker. Five years ago we promoted a woman who happens to be black –- I mean, African-American… or maybe just African, I can’t remember –- and that proves that we are tolerant and committed to diversity.

11. Lindy West was amazing on This American Life:

Trolls still waste my time and tax my mental health on a daily basis, but honestly, I don’t wish them any pain. Their pain is what got us here in the first place. That’s what I learned from my troll.

If what he said is true, that he just needed to find some meaning in his life, then what a heartbreaking diagnosis for all of the people who are still at it. I can’t give purpose and fulfillment to millions of anonymous strangers, but I can remember not to lose sight of their humanity the way that they lost sight of mine.

12. It is okay and understandable not to want to hear a lot of details about someone’s sex life:

In summary, dear Letter Writer, I don’t think there is anything wrong with you for being leery when “Friend Who Was A Lot To Take At Times” becomes “Friend Who Brings Up Sex In Every Conversation” with you. That’s a volatile combination. It’s okay to create some distance – redirect him, change the subject, say “Hey did you see where I changed the subject back there?” and see how he reacts. Your comfort matters here, as does your consent. A good friend is not going to want to make you squirm about this.

13. Julian Sanchez makes the point Jonathan Chait should’ve made instead:

It doesn’t take any very fearsome campaign of intimidation for a group’s self-correcting mechanisms to break down. Imagine an argument where someone invokes a spurious or unfair accusation of (let’s say) racism or sexism as a cudgel to close down a conversation. Maybe many other members of the accuser’s ideological in-group (“allies”) themselves perceive it as unfair, but life is short and people are busy—what’s the incentive to chime in and say “hey, wait a minute”? Pretty weak even in the absence of negative feedback. And as anyone who’s watched these arguments play out is well aware, questioning whether such a claim is fair or reasonable in a particular instance is going to be read by some observers as denying that sexism or racism are problems at all.  (I recently, rather gently, questioned whether one specific document from the Snowden cache should have been published, then had to expend a whole lot more words insisting that I am not, in fact, a shill for the surveillance state.  Anyone who knows my privacy writing understands why this was slightly surreal.) You end up having to explain and justify yourself to all these folks whose good opinion you care about, and who needs the hassle?

Iterated over time, though, that means the people who do object in particular cases are increasingly from out-groups: People who really don’t care about racism or sexism or think they’re serious problems.  Now the incentives are even worse for in-group members. Because now being the one to say “hey, wait a minute” in a particular instance doesn’t just mean conflict with an ally, it means associating yourself with those assholes.  Increasingly the objections are coming from people who just don’t care about the good opinion of the in-group, many of whom are expressing those objections in actively racist or sexist terms.  So now anyone voicing reservations has to do all sorts of throat clearing (I did it instinctively at the start of this post) to avoid the ever more statistically reasonable heuristic inference that any pushback is coming from those repulsive quarters. If you’re the only ally pushing back, hey, maybe you’re not an ally at all, but secretly one of those assholes.

You end up with team “x is the problem” and team “x is not a problem,” and ever fewer people prepared to say “x is a problem, but maybe not the most useful lens through which to view this particular disagreement.” When teetotalers are the only ones willing to say “maybe you’ve had one too many,” because your friends are worried about sounding like abstemious scolds, the advice is a lot easier to dismiss. Which is fine until it’s time to drive home.

14. xkcd has a perspective on today’s events:

What have you read/written lately?

Occasional Link Roundup

MASSIVE Occasional Link Roundup

I have been so bad at link roundups. That’s why this one is MASSIVE.

First of all, thank you to Secular Woman for choosing me for their Blog of the Year award. It’s quite an honor! Check out all their other 2014 award recipients here. They’re all great people doing great work.

Second, I’ll be presenting my consent workshop at the American Atheists National Convention in Memphis, Tennessee on April 2-5. I’ve presented it twice already (at the previous two Skepticons) and am really excited to make it even better this year.

Finally, here is a reminder that FtBCon 3 is in just a few weeks, January 23-25.

Here’s the MASSIVE list of awesome articles spanning basically the entire second half of 2014.

1. s.e. smith explains that having depression doesn’t necessarily mean being sad all the time:

I feel like I need to engage in a sort of relentless performative sadness to be taken seriously, for people to understand that I really am depressed and that each day — each moment of each day — is a struggle for me, that even when I am happy, I am still fighting the monster. I feel like I need to darken everything around me, to stop communicating with the world, to stop publishing anything, to just stop. Because that way I will appear suitably, certifiably sad, and thus, depressed — and then maybe people will recognise that I’m depressed and perhaps they’ll even offer support and assistance. The jokes die in my throat, the smile never reaches my lips, I don’t share that moment of happiness on the beach by turning to my friend and expressing joy.

2. Libby Anne writes about atheists who take up women’s rights only when it’s convenient:

Frankly, I feel used. These atheist activists are the sort of people who want to use my story as proof that religion is horrible to women but aren’t willing to listen to what I have to say about sexism in our culture at large. They are the sort of people who are eager to use the shooting of young education activist Malala Yousafzai by the Taliban to prove how horrible religion is for women but somehow fail to mention that Malala is a Muslim who speaks of drawing her inspiration to fight for gender equality from the Koran. This is not standing up for women. This is exploiting women as merely a tool in a fight against religion.

3. Olivia Cole on the complicity of white women in anti-Black racism and slavery:

It’s true, white women lacked the agency of their husbands, fathers and brothers, so their hand in slavery did not extend to the buying and selling of human chattel, the laws being made that called black people only a fraction of a human being. But white women whipped black bodies. They burned them. They posed next to the murdered bodies of black people who were lynched. They called people niggers. They scratched faces. They separated families. While wearing their pretty dresses, they ruined lives.

4. Crommunist writes about the friend zone:

As someone who absolutely used to believe in and complain about the Friend Zone, it took a lot of listening and self-examination to accept that it was entirely possible that not only was there nothing wrong with me, but that there was nothing wrong with her either (whoever ‘she’ happened to be at the time). People do things for reasons. Sometimes those reasons are malicious and exploitative and cruel. But at least as often (and I’d say far more often), they’re entirely reasonable and defensible. Part of this problem, to be sure, is that we have adopted a completely bizarre model of relationships that denies both men and women full agency – men as mindless sexual automatons, women as miserly guardians of sexual activity. A more mature understanding of relationships as two people who find ways to enhance each other’s lives allows for the possibility that people could have meaningful interaction that may or may not include sexual intimacy.

5. Brit Bennett writes about racism and good intentions:

Darren Wilson has been unrepentant about taking Mike Brown’s life. He insists he could not have done anything differently. Daniel Pantaleo has offered condolences to the Garner family, admitting that he “feels very bad” about Garner’s death.

“It is never my intention to harm anyone,” he said.

I don’t know which is worse, the unrepentant killer or the man who insists to the end that he meant well.

6. Julian Sanchez writes about harassment and “harmless torturers”:

One reason public discourse about racism and sexism tends to be so acrimonious—though certainly not the only one—may be that we don’t explicitly enough distinguish “harmless torturers” cases from the “bad old days” variety.  Sophisticated critics, of course, routinely stress that misogyny and racism are fundamentally structural problems that can be perpetuated by actions that don’tnecessarily require the individuals perpetuating them to harbor any malicious intentions or vulgar attitudes.  But that’s still what we most automatically associate with the claim that something is “racist” or “sexist”—leading people to take umbrage (often in bad faith, but presumably at least sometimes sincerely) when a particular utterance or action is called out.

7. Eric Meyer writes about Facebook’s “Your Year in Review” feature:

To show me Rebecca’s face and say “Here’s what your year looked like!” is jarring.  It feels wrong, and coming from an actual person, it would be wrong.  Coming from code, it’s just unfortunate.  These are hard, hard problems.  It isn’t easy to programmatically figure out if a picture has a ton of Likes because it’s hilarious, astounding, or heartbreaking.

Algorithms are essentially thoughtless.  They model certain decision flows, but once you run them, no more thought occurs.  To call a person “thoughtless” is usually considered a slight, or an outright insult; and yet, we unleash so many literally thoughtless processes on our users, on our lives, on ourselves.

8. Dana Bolger writes about the harmful discourse surrounding “victims” versus “survivors”:

In elevating those who “move forward,” the victim/survivor dichotomy implicitly condemns those who do not, reaffirming myths about what constitutes a good versus bad survivor, and legitimizing certain forms of survivorship over others. To be a (strong) survivor is to carry that weight — figuratively, and literally. To be a (weak) victim is to crumble, “stay” silent, engage in self-harm.

9. Britni writes about men (hi Richard Dawkins) who try to “rank” forms of sexual assault:

The only reason forcible kissing would not be “life-changing” for me would be because I experience so many forms of sexual violence on a constant basis that my life is alreadychanged. My life looks inherently different than a man’s does. It also looks inherently different than it would if I were not subjected to sexual violence in the form of catcalling, groping, online harassment, and rape threats on the reg, or if I’d never experienced other forms of sexual assault and rape. My life is a reflection of the fact that I’m constantly on guard or on edge, constantly on the defense when I’m around men that I do not know and wary of men that I do know. My entire LIFE is a “life-changing” event, and most women that I know would tell you the same thing. It’s exhausting to have to worry about being assaulted every damn day, but we do it. And yeah, we have to look at the world through the lens of Schrodinger’s rapist because our experience tells us that we must. That is a result of cumulative, constant, pervasive incidents of sexual assault and violence over a lifetime.

10. Dean Roth wrote a beautiful piece about loving someone who is depressed:

Sometimes, your depressed friend wants to hang out with you so they can scream about how awful they feel. It’s not because we need attention, but because we know you value our wellbeing and want to help us affirm our struggles. But I am a depression vampire; to talk about myself, I need to be invited in. If you simply ask how I’ve been doing, I’ll just say “oh you know, fine.” Please be so explicitly clear that you want us to open up.Logically, those suffering from depression probably know that our loved ones won’t mind if we just start talking about our problems. Nonetheless, depression loves to tell us that our friends are not actually our friends. If you reassure us that we have a place in your life, we can begin to rebuild our trust in the world and our own self-esteem.

11. This article by Shea Emma Fett is about abuse in polyamorous relationships, but a lot of it is applicable to monogamous relationships as well:

If you are being abused, there is a very high chance that you will be accused of being abusive or of otherwise causing the abuse. That’s because this accusation is devastatingly effective at shutting you down and obtaining control in a dispute. However, I also believe this accusation is often sincere. People often engage in abusive behaviors because they feel deeply powerless and that powerlessness hurts. But not everything that hurts in a relationship is abuse, and not everything that hurts your partner is your responsibility. It’s important to be able to distinguish abuse from other things that may happen in relationships that are hurtful, or may even be toxic or unhealthy, but are not fundamentally about entitlement and control.

12. Paul Fidalgo writes about the brutalization of women in video games:

In modern civilization there is simply no excuse for manufacturing entertainment that holds up the brutalization of women as virtuous and worthy of reward. None. It’s not necessary even if the aim is to create the most suspensful, pulse-quickening adventure game. The only reason to do it is to titillate a certain demographic, and make them feel more powerful than the automata women placed in the games.

13. Lis Coburn has a fantastic take on the idea that children receive “too much” praise:

Validating someone means recognizing that a person’s own perceptions are worth listening to. It is recognizing them as real human things that real humans think. When they say, “I hate myself,” or “I’m worthless,” or “I wish my mother would die,” validation is saying, “Yeah. I can see you really do. You feel this way really strongly.”

Most of what was cast in the 80s and 90s as failure to praise children was actually failure to validate them. When a child comes to an adult, dripping with defeat, and says, “I failed,” praise is, “No you didn’t! You did really well!” and validation is, “You’re really disappointed with how you did, hunh? That sucks.” And over time, if adults do nothing but praise, what children hear is: Your self-doubt and weaknesses are not wanted here. Failure is not acceptable, not even thinkable. I cannot accept you unless you do well.

14. Laurie Penny on why we’re winning the culture war:

Their rage is the rage of bewilderment.

They can’t understand why the new reaction to nude selfie leaks isn’t ‘you asked for it, you whore’, but ‘everyone does it, stop slut shaming.’ They can’t understand the logic of a world where ‘Social Justice Warrior’ just doesn’t work as an insult, because a great many people care quite a lot about social justice and are proud to fight for it.

They can’t understand why they look ridiculous.

15. Greta Christina explains why it’s nonsensical to use the word “radical” as an insult:

Insulting an idea (or a person) simply because they’re radical is an empty insult, devoid of any actual critical content. It’s like calling someone a poopyhead. (Unless, of course, the person’s head is actually made of poop.) And rejecting an idea (or a person) simply because you see them as radical is a sign of lazy thinking. In fact, it’s a sign of no thinking. It shows that you haven’t actually given the idea any consideration. It shows that the only consideration you gave the idea was to think, “I haven’t heard that before, it’s unfamiliar and it seems extreme, therefore it’s wrong.”

16. Ashe Dryden has some really good advice for coping with online harassment.

17. Kate Harding on misplaced concern for “free speech” online:

I’ll go to the mat for the First Amendment, but as far as comments on private websites are concerned, I say squelch ‘em all. The right to speak your mind does not include the right to parasitically attach yourself to a high-traffic website in order to reach an audience you could never earn on your own.

18. Heina discusses the “happy” Down syndrome stereotype:

“Positive” stereotypes are anything but. Those who more or less fit into them are pigeonholed, those who fit some but not all of the characteristics are identity-policed, and those who don’t fit them at all are thrown under the bus. Avoiding such splash damage is as simple as remembering that people with disabilities should not have to achieve heights of perceived “goodness” in order to be allowed to exist, heights that would never be asked of those without disabilities.

19. Katherine Lampe writes about shaming people for attempting/committing suicide (TW):

When you shame a person for mental illness, for attempting or completing suicide, what you’re doing is trying to make yourself comfortable at their expense. When you say, “Think of the people you will hurt,” you’re saying, “THINK OF MY COMFORT!” But most of the people I’ve known who’ve struggled with mental illness have already done that, and it didn’t work. We’ve already thought of you. We’ve already done the volunteer work. We’ve already found new hobbies. We’ve looked at the greeting cars we’ve saved from family and the letters from lovers. It’s not that we don’t know. It’s that none of it helps. And you think… You think, “Who’s the more selfish? Me, for wanting not to have to live in this pain? Or you, for insisting I do to spare you?”

20. Culturally Disoriented on what happens when disabled people try to “self-advocate.

21. Mia McKenzie discusses the ways in which (white) people get distracted from the issue at hand in the wake of a police shooting of a person of color:

But let’s get something straight: a community pushing back against a murderous police force that is terrorizing them is not a “riot”. It’s an uprising. It’s a rebellion. It’s a community saying We can’t take this anymore. We won’t take it. It’s people who have been dehumanized to the point of rightful rage. And it happens all over the world. Uprisings and rebellions are necessary and inevitable, locally and globally. This is not to say that actual riots don’t happen. White folks riot at sporting events, for example. Riots happen. But people rising up in righteous anger and rage in the face of oppression should not be dismissed as simply a “riot”.

Don’t be distracted by terms like “rioting”. Whether you’re for or against uprising and rebellion (side-eye if you’re against it, though), it’s a tool, not the issue itself. The issue is yet another Black teenager murdered by police. His name was Mike Brown.

22. Sarah Jones writes about the silencing of rape/abuse survivors:

Imagine telling a veteran that they’re too emotionally connected to the subject of war to discuss it properly. Anyone making that argument in public would be dismissed as a crank—and they should be, because it’s an absurd argument. We otherwise readily acknowledge that a person’s direct experience with a subject makes them more qualified to discuss it. It doesn’t grant them infallibility, of course. Nobody can lay claim to that. We’re talking about some level of expertise that the average person doesn’t necessarily possess.

But we hold women to a different standard when the subject is abuse. And then we dismiss them as conspiracy theorists when they start to talk about the existence of a rape culture.

23. Misha explains how people unintentionally enable bullies:

How do you effectively bully as an adult? The same way you effectively bully as a kid: you either figure out the places you can do it where no one else will see you, or you figure out the ways you can do it that people will either not notice or disregard.

24. s.e. smith suggests things to do instead of giving unsolicited advice:

Instead of unsolicited advice in response to a statement where someone is simply speaking to something that’s going on in her life, try just saying: ‘I hear you.’ If you have experience in that area, ‘I’ve been there.’ If you don’t, ‘I’m listening.’ ‘So sorry you’re struggling with this.’ ‘Thinking of you.’ Just stop there. You don’t need to say anything else. The original comment was simply a statement, an expression of frustration or anger or grief or fear or pain, and sometimes, people just need to know that people are paying attention, that people are thinking of them.

25. Leigh Alexander offers some tips for responding to online sexism and discussions thereof:

DON’T: Make stupid jokes. You might be one of tons of people Tweeting at her, tone is hard to read online, and you shouldn’t be putting anyone, especially someone who does not actually know you, in charge of figuring out your sense of humor when they are under stress. You might just be trying to lighten things up or cheer the situation, but let people be angry, let them have heated discussions if they want and need to. Imagine this: Your dog dies, and a stranger walking past thinks you should cheer up, or take it less seriously, and decides to joke about your dead dog. What would you think of them?

26. Jenn M. Jackson on the historic white fear of Black people:

The fear that black people would become too wealthy or accomplished was what caused early twentieth century southern whites to strategically lynch some of the most accomplished black families, the ones who owned a horse and buggy or a nice suit jacket. The fear that black women would steal white ‘massas’ from their whites wives resulted in the intentional objectification of black women’s bodies and hair, demoralizing them, beastializing them, making them into sexual beings rather than human beings. The fear that blacks were thinking too highly of themselves and threatening white business ownership was what caused them to burn it down on June 21st, 1921. White fear has systematically and by design demolished and suppressed black wealth, mobility, and familial progress for over three centuries. What we are witnessing today is no accident.

27. Some excellent advice from Captain Awkward about antidepressants and abusive families.

What have you read or written lately?

MASSIVE Occasional Link Roundup

#GamerGate Link Roundup

I haven’t written anything about gamergate because others have said it so much better than I could. Here are some links and excerpts from my favorite pieces about this whole sordid situation. Feel free to leave your own in the comments.

1. Kathy Sierra at her blog:

I now believe the most dangerous time for a woman with online visibility is the point at which others are seen to be listening, “following”, “liking”, “favoriting”, retweeting. In other words, the point at which her readers have (in the troll’s mind) “drunk the Koolaid”. Apparently, that just can’t be allowed.

From the hater’s POV, you (the Koolaid server) do not “deserve” that attention. You are “stealing” an audience. From their angry, frustrated point of view, the idea that others listen to you is insanity. From their emotion-fueled view you don’t have readers you have cult followers. That just can’t be allowed.

You must be stopped. And if they cannot stop you, they can at least ruin your quality of life. A standard goal, in troll culture, I soon learned, is to cause “personal ruin”. They aren’t alltrolls, though. Some of those who seek to stop and/or ruin you are misguided/misinformed but well-intended. They actually believe in a cause, and they believe you (or rather the Koolaid you’re serving) threatens that cause.

2. Arthur Chu at the Daily Beast:

I’m not scared of desperately uncool cultural reactionaries like Jack Thompson or anti-witchcraft Harry Potter burners. I’m scared of the people who do hold cultural power, who have the loud voice, who are, in fact, the cool kids, but think they’re embattled underdogs. I’m scared of the people who think that because disco was “taking over music” they had the right to “fight back” bullying and attacking disco performers and fans.

I’m scared of people who look at someone like Zoe Quinn, an individual who makes free indie games, or Anita Sarkeesian, an individual who makes free YouTube videos, and honestly think that these women are a powerful “corrupt” force taking away the freedom of the vast mob of angry young male gamers and the billion-dollar industry that endlessly caters to them, and that working to shut them up and drive them out somehow constitutes justice. The dominant demographic voice in some given fandom or scene feeling attacked by an influx of new, different fans and rallying the troops against “oppression” in reaction is not at all unique. It happens everywhere, all the time.

But let’s be honest: It’s usually guys doing it. Our various “culture wars” tend to boil down to one specific culture war, the one about men wanting to feel like Real Men and lashing out at the women who won’t let them. Whenever men feel like masculinity is under attack, men get dangerous. Because that’s exactly what masculinity teaches you to do, what masculinity is about. Defending yourself with disproportionate force against any loss of power? That’s what masculinity is.

3. Jennifer Allaway at Jezebel:

#Gamergate, as they have treated myself and peers in our industry, is a hate group. This word, again, should not lend them any mystique or credence. Rather it should illuminate the fact that even the most nebulous and inconsistent ideas can proliferate wildly if strung onto the organizational framework of the hate group, which additionally gains a startling amount of power online. #Gamergate is a hate group, and they are all the more dismissible for it. And the longer we treat them otherwise, the longer I fear for our industry’s growth.

4. Mike Diver at Vice:

GamerGate, to date, has taught us nothing. OK, maybe it’s taught us that certain men are horrible and have no shame in announcing their hatred of women to the world in the most hideous manner available to them. If GamerGate really was about ethics, Wu or Sarkeesian wouldn’t be going through what they are.

Until female developers, critics, columnists, and bloggers feel comfortable doing their jobs—which is to discuss gaming and expand the medium to wider and wider audiences—the ethics debate will be backgrounded by boisterous boys complaining that their toys aren’t how they used to be: i.e., made by dudes and played by dudes. That’s living in the past, though. Today, Peach can spank Bowser’s backside on Super Smash Bros., one of the highest-rated action games of 2014 features a kick-ass woman protagonist, and 52 percent of gamers are female.

Something, not someone, has to die—and that something goes deeper than GamerGate. I don’t have the answer to the question of how we prevent bias in the media, but I sure as hell know that we can’t sit idly by and just hope that the hatred goes away. Gaming hasn’t even reached the middle of its own excellent adventure, but it’s gonna suck if it doesn’t pick up more princesses along the way. So how about we all calm the fuck down before someone really gets hurt?

5. Melissa McEwan at Shakesville:

What women like Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu, Adria Richards, Kathy Sierra, and others have gone through, and continue to go through, all for having the unmitigated temerity to be women in gaming and tech, is incredible. And reprehensible. And shameful beyond description. And harmful.

Actively, ongoingly, profoundly harmful. Individually harmful, and reverberatingly harmful, as other women see what happens to women who do what they do and calculate whether it’s worth it to pursue their passion, in exchange for, potentially, their lives.

Women are being harassed, and abused, and threatened, and terrorized. Women have killed themselves. If the word “hurt” is to have any meaning at all, we need to stop saying that things need to change before someone gets hurt, and start saying plainly that things need to change because people are already being hurt.

6. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon:

1) The main target of #GamerGate is not a journalist. She’s a video game developer. Holding her accountable for “ethics in journalism” is like telling your accountant that it’s his job to negotiate peace treaties in the Middle East. While the attacks on Zoe Quinn aren’t, like the rest of this list, attacks on ethical journalism itself, the fact that this all started off with a non sequitur shows that, on the long list of shit #GamerGate cares about, integrity in journalism doesn’t even rate.

2) The second biggest target of #GamerGate is an exemplar of clean journalism. If what you don’t like about gaming journalism is that it’s too cozy with the industry and therefore the writers are afraid to be critical, then your fucking hero should be Anita Sarkeesian. She funded herself with Kickstarter and not industry money. She is harshly critical of video games, even as she is a fan. She is the ideal of what a critical gaming journalist should be: Knowledgeable, critical, fair, thorough and utterly non-corrupt.

7. Jenni Goodchild at the Flounce:

Throughout GG, I’ve undertaken a survey to find out what people want from reviews. Some of the answers highlight the above issue:

“Basically, a review that describes the game without involving the author’s personal opinion on it.”

“Focus on the gameplay and technical aspects, not the story and art style.”

“I mean that I want a game to be judged solely on its mechanics, story, immersiveness, strength of character and level of involvement, and judgement be based solely on that. Not whether a game is “problematic.”

These are all totally valid things to want from a review – it’s okay to not care about social critique – but the inclusion of these things isn’t corruption. It’s just a style of review people don’t like.

8. Lesley at xoJane:

The irony of this situation is massive enough to develop its own gravitational field. These harassers want Sarkeesian to stop talking about misogyny in video games. So they unleash horrifying misogyny on Sarkeesian herself. To, I guess, make the point that video games are just fine? That misogyny in games is having no broader cultural effect? That there is no problem here? Because this kind of behavior is normal? If I wasn’t half convinced that the men harassing Sarkeesian weren’t in fact actual trolls — like, the kind that live under bridges with only rocks for friends — I would wonder how they’d feel if their mom or girlfriend or wife was receiving the same threats.

9. Brianna Wu at the Washington Post:

My friend Quinn told me about a folder on her computer called, “The Ones We’ve Lost.” They are the letters she’s gotten from young girls who dream of being game developers, but are terrified of the environment they see. I nearly broke into tears as I told her I had a folder filled with the same. The truth is, even if we stopped Gamergate tomorrow, it will have already come at too high a cost.

10. Poopsock Holmes at Medium:

So when Anita Sarkeesian tweeted that “gamergate is the new name for a group that has been harassing me for 2 years,” she was factually correct. Many of the most consistent users of #GamerGate are inextricably linked to harassment of Ms. Sarkeesian and other women. I’ve just shown you 20 of them, all of whom are happily welcomed into the GamerGate movement and not censured in any way for their actions. I’m sure this list will grow as more people share their experiences.

These people have spent the last two years harassing and demeaning women in and out of the games industry. You know what they haven’t spent the last two years doing? Talking about ethics in journalism.

There may be ethical, honest people involved in #GamerGate. But a few good apples won’t magically make a rotten barrel edible. And #GamerGate is rotten to the core.

11. Amanda Marcotte at the Daily Beast:

It’s being referred to by those engaging in the harassment as the “Zoe Quinn cheating scandal,” a phrasing that implies, ridiculously, that the private relationship snafus and infidelities of a video game developer rise to the level of public interest. But even the misogynist harassers of the Internet know it’s a stretch to justify abusing someone for garden variety infidelity. So, in a desperate attempt to justify this nonsense, Quinn’s ex and the harassers are accusing Quinn of an “ethics” violation, accusing her, no joke, of using sex to get a favorable review from Kotaku.

The fact that the review she was accused of “buying” doesn’t exist hasn’t slowed the self-righteous haranguing, of course. That’s because the “ethics” question is a paper-thin excuse for what’s really going on, which is that the video game world is thick with misogynists who are aching to swarm on any random woman held up for them to hate, no matter what the pretext.

12. Liz R at her blog:

one of the biggest sources of paranoia i took from reading through my first 4chan thread about this issue is that social justice activism will inevitably destroy communities like 4chan. these people feel so disempowered in their lives that they head to communities like 4chan or reddit to be able to feel some sort of empowerment, to act out on something, to feel part of something bigger. this is where the whole mythos of Anonymous comes from. that a lone person with a computer has a tremendous power to take down the shadowy elite. but in that act, there’s no accountability, and no moral code. anyone with the resources can mobilize people to target anyone they see fit. sometimes it attacks against the interests of power, but just as often it’s a conservative, reactionary anger that comes out of disillusionment and fear, and gets constantly externalized onto marginalized people, especially women and queer people.

13. Andrew Todd at Badass Digest:

“Social Justice Warriors” is a term used often by these sort of people, and it’s a term whose pejorative use perplexes me, because aside from the source of its invention, it sounds like a really badass thing to be. I’d much rather label myself a Social Justice Warrior than a warrior for…whatever it is that these people are warriors for. Social justice is such an inherently positive thing – literally everyone benefits from greater equality – that it’s impossible to see its enemies as anything but sociopathic. Hatred of Social Justice Warriors can be seen as a broader hatred of social justice itself.

Central to the self-centred psychology of these people is that they see themselves as the targets of a grand conspiracy of feminist, progressive journalists and game developers that seeks to destroy their ability to…something. They have no actual issue. It’s all perceived persecution at the hands of political correctness. These “theories” are so narcissistic, so devoid of substance, that the only way to explain them is through delusion. And I mean, I get it – justifying one’s shitty behaviour with a made-up conspiracy probably feels better than confronting the painful truth that one is an asshole. They think they’re part of a “silent majority”, but the real silent majority is the one that either isn’t aware of their ridiculous conspiracy theories, or understands that there’s simply no reasoning with people who are so obviously out of their minds. It’s the same kind of fictional oppression old white folks claim about foreign immigrants who are still generally less well-off than they are. The moment a woman – or even someone who empathises with women – muscles in on “their” territory (which hasn’t actually ever been “theirs”), they’re off, spouting slurs, giving the fingers at intersections, and publishing their banking details on hate sites.

14. Zennistrad at his blog:

Fun fact: Morgan Ramsay, founder of the Entertainment Media Counsel, did an objective study of how much of gaming journalism talks about sexism or social justice.

To do this, he downloaded 130,524 articles from 37 RSS feeds of 23 outlets, including The Escapist, Rock Paper Shotgun, CVG, Edge Online, Eurogamer, Gamasutra, Game Informer, GamePolitics, GamesBeat, GamesIndustry International, GameSpot, GamesRadar, IGN, IndieGames, Joystiq, Kotaku, Massively, MCV, NowGamer, PocketGamer.biz, Polygon, Shacknews and VG24/7, published over a period of twelve months. He then did a search on how often these games articles mentioned sexism, feminism, or misogyny.

The result? Over a period of one year, 0.41% of 130,524 articles referenced feminism, feminist, sexism, sexist, misogyny, and misogynist explicitly.

15. Garrett Martin at Paste:

That’s who is behind this entire situation: anti-woman trolls who intentionally distort the meaning of the word “ethics” to further their own agenda and mislead their followers. There are some beating the #GamerGate drum who sincerely believe that it’s not related to misogyny or the persistent attacks on Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn, that it’s simply about keeping the games press accountable. It’s impossible to extricate that hashtag from its roots, though, which grew out of unconscionable smears and threats against two prominent women in gaming merely because they are prominent women in gaming. All the conspiracies and trumped-up claims of “evidence” of collusion among developers, press agents and the press spread by the #GamerGate founders are lies and distortions aimed at driving Quinn, Sarkeesian and other women out of videogames. Whether it’s hate, fear or simply the grotesque joy horrible people find in maliciously denigrating others, this entire #GamerGate nonsense is built on silencing women and shutting them out of games.

That’s the scandal here. Not that some journalists are friendly with some game designers, or that review copies of games are often sent early to critics (an entrenched practice that occurs across the entire spectrum of tech and entertainment journalism, and which is crucial to informing readers in a timely fashion). It’s that a vocal minority of videogame fans who tend to congregate at sites like 4chan and Reddit, who blanket twitter and comment sections with hate and anger, and who adopt the exclusionary identity of “gamer” have united to intimidate and silence videogame fans, developers and writers who aren’t like them or don’t think like them. And the leaders of that movement, the ones who stir up the most resentment and convince their followers that it’s not about hate but ethics, the YouTube “personalities” and condescending Breitbart hacks and, uh, Firefly’s Adam Baldwin, are all well-established opponents of equality and social justice. Some are trolls, some are disingenuous, politically motivated bullies, and none of them are worth the attention.

16. Zack Kotzer at Motherboard:

Claiming not all gamers, Redditors, or Channers are responsible for despicable behavior is as deflective, tone deaf, and self-centered as the now lampooned ‘not all men’ response. It’s obviously ‘not all,’ but it’s still far too many. Gamers are being played, and not by journalists.

If people want to save these communities they’ll have to do better than throwing their hands up and saying “it wasn’t us!” when the world breaks into their speakeasies. Smoke them out and band up these silent majorities you speak of. As with anyone, you have to earn the respect you think you deserve.

17. Kyle Wagner at Deadspin:

The default assumption of the gaming industry has always been that its customer is a young, straight, middle-class white man, and so games have always tended to cater to the perceived interests of this narrow demographic. Gamergate is right about this much: When developers make games targeting or even acknowledging other sorts of people, and when video game fans say they want more such games, this actually does represent an assault on the prerogatives of the young, middle-class white men who mean something very specific when they call themselves gamers. Gamergate offers a way for this group, accustomed to thinking of themselves as the fixed point around which the gaming-industrial complex revolves, to stage a sweeping counteroffensive in defense of their control over the medium. The particulars may be different, and the stakes may be infinitely lower, but the dynamic is an old one, the same one that gave rise to the Know Nothing Party and the anti-busing movement and the Moral Majority. And this is the key to understanding Gamergate: There actually is a real conflict here, something like the one perceived by the Tea Partier waving her placard about the socialist Muslim Kenyan usurper in the White House.

There is a reason why, in all the Gamergate rhetoric, you hear the echoes of every other social war staged in the last 30 years: overly politically correct, social-justice warriors, the media elite, gamers are not a monolith. There is also a reason why so much of the rhetoric amounts to a vigorous argument that Being a gamer doesn’t mean you’re sexist, racist, and stupid—a claim no one is making. Co-opting the language and posture of grievance is how members of a privileged class express their belief that the way they live shouldn’t have to change, that their opponents are hypocrites and perhaps even the real oppressors. This is how you get St. Louisans sincerely explaining that Ferguson protestors are the real racists, and how you end up with an organized group of precisely the same video game enthusiasts to whom an entire industry is catering honestly believing that they’re an oppressed minority. From this kind of ideological fortification, you can stage absolutely whatever campaigns you deem necessary.

18. Brianna Wu at xoJane:

There’s no easy way to say this. I am a massive target for Gamergate/8chan.coright now and it is having horrible consequences for my life. They tried to hack my company financially on Saturday, taking out our company’s assets. They’ve tried to impersonate me on Twitter in an effort to discredit me. They are making burner accounts to send lies about my private life to prominent journalists. They’ve devastated the metacritic users’ score of my game, Revolution 60, lowering it to 0.3 out of 100.

With all of this, my only hope is that my colleagues in the industry will stand by me — and recognize the massive target I made myself standing up to these lunatics.

I woke up twice last night to noises in the room, gasping with fear that someone was there to murder me. I can barely function without fear or jumpiness or hesitation. I’ve been driven from my home. My husband says he feels like he’s been shot.

But I have to be honest: I don’t give a fuck.

I am mad as hell at these people, and I’m not going to let them keep destroying the women I love and respect.

#GamerGate Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

As you’ve probably noticed (unless you keep to the safety of your RSS reader), FtB has a redesign. It’s not perfect, and it’s still being worked on, but I think it’s quite an improvement from our previous layout.

Along with the redesign, we have three new bloggers, all of whom I’m really excited about and whose work I’ve been reading for a while now. Please welcome Heina Dadabhoy of Heinous Dealings, Hiba Krisht of A Veil and a Dark Place, and Aoife O’Riordan of Consider the Tea Cosy. OMG U GUYZ THEY’RE SO COOL.

Elsewhere in the progressive secular blogosphere, Secular Woman now has a Salon, where a number of writers from the community will be blogging about news and opinions. Their first post is about the paradox of women who oppose birth control.

Here’s some shit to read.

1. Kate of Disrupting Dinner Parties, on being cat-called by a five-year-old:

When those two little boys yelled body parts toward me that spring day, I was furious, but I wasn’t angry at them. I was angry at a world that teaches them to treat us this way, that teaches them from such a young age. So this is when it starts, I remember thinking to myself. This is the age they learn it. Five years old. Now we know.

I felt angry and helpless because it was a reminder that however much I plan to imbue my own (future, hypothetical) children with values of respect toward people regardless of gender, I don’t get to raise the rest of the world. Other people’s children are learning that sex is a weapon before they even really know what sex is. Other people’s children are learning to put tight little boxes around acceptable lives, around acceptable toys, and to react forcefully when others fail to fit in those boxes. Other people’s children are learning the men have power over women, that men don’t feel tenderness or sorrow, only lust and anger. My kids may be raised on feminism, but other people’s children are still learning toxic masculinity, and there’s very little I can do about it.

I and my children will still be the minority in a world full of other people’s children.

2. Aoife on body image and how we internalize the shit we fight:

I think there’s something impossibly messed-up about the idea that to be strong means being invulnerable. I despise the idea that because we’re feminists (or anti-racists, or LGBTQ+ activists, or..) that we must somehow not have internalised any of the crap we’re working against. Of course we internalise it. We live in a society that has made a science out of feeding it to us every damn day of our lives. It takes more than reading a few books and bonding with your femmo friends to dig through that. We still have to put the book down, put the phone down, and live our lives in the same spaces that screwed everything up in the first place.

3. Mary at the Ada Initiative blog discusses the worst anti-harassment advice ever: “Just hit him.”

It might make the victim more of a target. Maybe it was a weak slap and made a weak sound and the harasser smiled through the whole thing. Or the harasser caught the victim’s hand as it came up and is now holding her wrist tightly and grinning at her. Or the harasser pushed at the victim as her knee came up towards his groin, and she fell over.

Hitting does not necessarily make a situation end and it does not necessarily make the physical aggressor look strong and in control.

4. Erin Matson talks about the “gotcha game” of asking women whether or not they’re feminists (and denying them the right to say no):

Are the 476 men who serve as CEOS of the Fortune 500 routinely asked if they are feminist? What about the male actors and musicians who get magazine profiles? No, they are not. Instead this question is largely directed at those few women who hold power. This sucks so much. Do we really want to give all the men who hold the bulk of the power in our society a free pass to ignore the advancement of women? If a commitment to equality belongs solely to those who hold less privilege, we’re not going to move near fast enough.

5. Randi at Skeptability points out the harm done by constant demands that people with disabilities stay “positive”:

Positivity hasn’t done a damn thing to help my MS. It didn’t prevent me from getting MS, it won’t stop the progression of MS, and it won’t treat or cure my MS.

Memes about “positive mental attitude” and damage done by negativity are rampant, especially on Facebook. These do not inspire me to do anything except hit the “leave group” button. I don’t want constant reminders that MS doesn’t have me. I want people I can commiserate with, who understand what I’m going through. I don’t want to constantly be told that “it could be worse” – that shit does not help at all.

6. Tristan Bridges and CJ Pascoe at Girl w/ Pen discuss possible drawbacks of the fact that it can be socially beneficial for allies to support certain causes:

In her research, Hochschild found that husbands were often given more gratitude for their participation in work around the house than were women. That is, men were subtly—but systematically—“over-thanked” for their housework in ways that their wives were not. This simple fact, argued Hochschild, was much more consequential than it might at first appear. It was an indirect way of symbolically informing men that they were engaging in work not required of them. In fact, we have a whole language of discussing men’s participation in housework that supports Hochschild’s findings. When men participate, we say they’re “helping out,” “pitching in,” or “babysitting.” These terms acknowledge their work, but simultaneously frame their participation as “extra”—as more of a thoughtful gesture than an obligation.

We would suggest that something similar is happening with straight male allies. We all participate in defining the work of equality as not their work by over-thanking them, just like housework is defined as not men’s work. By lauding recognition on these “brave” men in positions of power (racial, sexual, gendered, and in some cases classed) we are saying to them and to each other:This is not your job, so thank you for “helping out” with equality.

7. Wesley defends ask culture:

When people say “Ask Culture is good; Guess culture is bad,” it’s like saying “kale is good for you; sugar is bad for you.” It’s a useful general rule, but taken to it’s extremes, it’s ridiculous and harmful. Very large quantities of kale can cause hypothyroidism. Your brain literally cannot function without sugar. However, this doesn’t change the fact that, for almost everyone, reducing sugar intake and increasing kale intake would be beneficial.

The same goes for Ask and Guess Culture. While extreme, inflexible Ask Culture sounds like a nightmare, and a complete lack of regard for people’s unstated needs isn’t healthy, the fact remains that almost every society would benefit from moving toward Ask Culture and away from Guess Culture.

8. At Queereka, Benny discusses the frustration of being asked to justify the “stability” of polyamorous relationships:

The goalpost will always be moved on us. For as long as people are uncomfortable with poly relationships they will demand that we prove our “stability” and “success” by having longer and longer relationships that fulfill an increasingly narrowly defined structure. When people see triads that have existed for 6 years they will demand 10, then 20, then 50. When they see that someone in that triad had a few relationships during that 50 years that started and ended the whole ordeal will be considered a failure. When families grow and shrink over time, we will be considered invalid families. When solo poly folks are happily dating for years without “settling down” or getting married they will be held up as examples of the failure of polyamory. This is unacceptable, and I wish we’d stop participating in the argument.

The definition of success in poly is not our ability to emulate the ideals of traditional relationships. It lies in our choice to structure our lives and relationships in the ways that work best for us as individuals, couples, groups, and families. Success in polyamory lies in having lives and relationships that make everyone stronger, happier, and better people.

9. Scott Alexander on trigger warnings:

I like trigger warnings. I like them because they’re not censorship, they’re the opposite of censorship. Censorship says “Read what we tell you”. The opposite of censorship is “Read whatever you want”. The philosophy of censorship is “We know what is best for you to read”. The philosophy opposite censorship is “You are an adult and can make your own decisions about what to read”.

And part of letting people make their own decisions is giving them relevant information and trusting them to know what to do with them. Uninformed choices are worse choices. Trigger warnings are an attempt to provide you with the information to make good free choices of reading material.

10. At Captain Awkward’s blog, Sweet Machine talks about a device that’s meant to literally torture you for not completing your fitness goals:

This unholy child of Pavlov and Milgram is the logical extension of a fat-shaming culture. Not only are you supposed to volunteer to torture yourself, but you’re also supposed to spend money for the privilege. Make no mistake, Awkwardeers: this is part and parcel of the massive beauty and weight loss industries that sell you the idea that there is something disgusting about your body and then sell you products to fix it, thus reifying the disgust by making it real for you even if it’s not for anyone else.

You are not disgusting. You do not deserve to be tortured. You would not torture someone else, because you are not a torturer. You are a human being with as much worth as every other human being on the planet. You are made out of atoms that were ejected by supernovae when the universe was young. You are a fucking miracle.

11. Kate has some excellent advice for helping people going through panic attacks.

12. Julia Serano explains her complicated feelings about activism:

I have complicated thoughts and feelings about many people and many things. So I resent how kerfuffles amongst activists (and there have been too many to count) always seems to result in polarization and over-simplified, cut-and-dried positions.

I believe that putting myself into other people’s shoes to trying to understand where they are coming from is a crucial part of my activism. So I resent how polarized activist positions attempt to coerce me into *not* identifying with, nor relating to, nor trying to better understand, certain people.

I resent how polarized activist positions try to compel me to see people as monsters and demons rather than as complex and fallible human beings.

13. Finally, if you read just one thing, read this amazing reflection on #NotAllMen, #YesAllWomen, and some of the reasons why conversations like these between men and women can be so difficult.

If you are a man who is becoming upset/depressed/overwhelmed/hopeless/defensive when you listen to the women in the world/your life talk about their experiences, you need to talk about it.  With another man.

I really, really mean this.  Not to complain about how crazy or uptight women are, please.  (I mean, personally, I don’t think that would help you or me very much at all).  But you absolutely need to talk to another guy.  A guy you are friends with and who you trust is ideal.  And if you don’t have that kind of guy in your life- and, seriously, you are not alone in that area- then you have the very hard, critical work of figuring out how to make that kind of friendship ahead of you.  If you are feeling a restless helplessness over all of this, that can be your challenge.  Because I think as women we really, really need you to form those relationships.  We really, really need you to have an emotional connection to each other.   And we need to know you guys can turn and talk each other through these hard things and support each other while you support us.

Have you read or written anything interesting lately? Leave it in the comments.

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

Greetings from the Amtrak! I’m on my way to Washington, DC for Women in Secularism 3. Both of my panels are tomorrow, so I’m getting there a day early and spending the evening running around the city by myself with my camera. I’m almost as excited for this as I am for the conference itself.

I haven’t done a link roundup in a while, so this will be torturously long. Sorry. 😛

1. Speaking of DC, Thomas has an in-depth analysis of the ways in which the police often stonewall rape investigations, using an example that took place here. Please do read this piece before you implore rape survivors to go to the police.

The simple way to think about a problem like this is to say, “figure out who they are and lock them up.” I’d love that outcome. But it won’t happen in a vacuum. In the real world, today, there are a number of reasons that we can’t count on the criminal justice system to rid us of rapists. Some of those reasons are the same cultural stuff that operates on everyone. The same things that make civillians leap to the defense of their local repeat rapist, that make school administrators see them as deserving of a second chance instead of punishment, cause some police to fail to get them behind bars.

Saying, “go to the police” won’t change that. Instead, if we want survivors to be able to uniformly go to the police, we need to work to make the police an institution that survivors can count on; to do their jobs and not to retraumatize the survivor.

2. Cate on the erasure of people of color from dystopian fiction:

When you get to create a world completely from scratch, where you could rewrite the laws of gravity or the science behind genetics should you so choose, but your vision of all the people is still lily white? I really do find that worrisome. It bugs me that people are more easily able to imagine the existence of non-human intelligent beings, or interactions with a completely alien race, than that a protagonist might be anything other than white. It tells me that in the real world, we have a problem imagining the humanity of people of color. It tells me that as a culture we still see people of color as nothing more than bit players in the lives of white characters, if we even see them at all. Why is it that so many people find nothing problematic about the willful erasure of people of color from their visions of the future? Because there’s a real and almost tangible problem with race if audiences can suspend their disbelief enough to accept that a fictional character can burst in to flames, repeatedly, at will, and not die, but not enough to accept that the same character could be black.

3. Mitchell has a great take on the idea that you can’t trust anything online:

I don’t automatically trust bloggers because a group of people I’ve never met decided to give them a badge that says “reporter” on it. I don’t turn off my critical thinking because they’ve gotten to be some sort of “professional”. I have to judge them on the merits of their writing and history of thoughtfulness or thoughtlessness alone. Because they could be a dog, and I wouldn’t know.

4. Suey Park and Eunsong Kim at Model View Culture write about the much-maligned “hashtag activism”:

There is a common belief that activist trends magically and spontaneously happen in cyberspace and remain stuck in that medium. Although lacking a geographic home, Twitter communities are intentionally constructed through the labor of specific groups. We use Twitter to defy the limitations of time and space. We use Twitter to remember we are not alone — or crazy — but instead part of a collective struggle. The idea of ongoing decolonizing campaigns is antithetical to corporate logics and branding campaigns. Yet our stories get replaced and sold as marketable commodities for corporate consumption. They are sold as 15 minutes of entertainment rather than connected and ongoing efforts.

5. Libby Anne discusses teaching consent to small children:

What I find really fascinating about these two anecdotes is that they both deal with the consent of children not yet old enough to communicate verbally. In both stories, the older child must read the consent of the younger child through nonverbal cues. And even then, consent is not this ambiguous thing that is difficult to understand.

6. John McCarroll at Sherights analyzes the language of feminist messages targeted at men:

Common to all these messages is that men CAN rape, hurt, buy women, catcall or what-have-you, but they SHOULDN’T. Men, we are told, shouldn’t hurt women, not because of any intrinsic rights women may have, but because other men might do it to THEIR women, and that would be awful.

Male privilege is re-defined, but not negated, in a way that leaves masculinity unchallenged and still dominant. The wonderful, complex, and multi-faceted language of generations of queer, trans, intersectionalist and sex-positive feminism and human-rights dialogues is thrown aside completely in favor of a request that straight, cis-gendered men join the rest of the world at the big-kids table.

7. Ferrett takes down the myth that “nobody can make you feel bad without your permission”:

But when you say, “Well, nobody can make you feel bad without your permission!”, that sets up a world where you have no responsibility for your speech. Were you digging for weak spots, mocking to make a point? Oh, hey, well, you were trying your damndest to make them feel bad, but if it worked it’s their fault for not having sufficient defenses. It’s not 100% correlation, but when I see “Nobody can make you feel bad!” I usually find a taunting dillweed nearby, taking potshots from the brush and then claiming no responsibility.

8. At the Everyday Sociology Blog, Karen discusses the dark side of “positive thinking”:

What’s missing from these and many other self-help books? Social structure. The fact that we live in a broader society that has specific economic policies working for or against our getting rich, or a labor market that might help or inhibit having an awesome career never seems to encroach on the dream-like state that many of these books create for readers. While some spiritually oriented books encourage readers to critically examine our material desires, others regard consumption as a reward—one that maybe should be delayed but shouldn’t be denied.

9. Britni writes about refusing to call rape what it is:

When we don’t name rape as rape, we take power away from the act by watering down the words we use to describe it. “Rape” is an uncomfortable word that we don’t like to use and we don’t like to hear. But avoiding it takes power away from the actions we’re describing and makes it easier to minimize the impact of those actions. When someone calls rape “a very bad night,” it makes it easier to tell the victim to shake it off or that it wasn’t such a big deal. It makes it easier to let the perpetrator off the hook as maybe being “too aggressive.” It makes it easier to refer to what happened as the result of “a miscommunication” instead of calling it that ugly word– rape.

10. Melissa at Shakesville writes about the bootstraps myth and how it plays out in the lives of people who actually have to get through life without any help:

The people who claim to never have had any help from anyone are the same people who tend to criticize “government hand-outs” and talk about the social safety net like it’s a giant waste of taxpayer money—a “wealth redistribution program” to steal rich folks’ money and give it to the poor.

[…]But people need help. Everyone needs help. And not everyone is fortunate enough to have the kind of help that is so reliable it’s possible to dismiss it out of hand as not even having been help at all.

This is what really having no help looks like. We don’t actually reward not having help in this country; we criminalize it.

11. Maddie at Autostraddle criticizes the suggestions RAINN (Rape, Assault, and Incest National Network) made for ending sexual assault on college campuses:

By dismissing rape culture and then, as RAINN’s recommendations do, evoking the criminal justice system as the only and most important solution to ending rape, RAINN both obscures the fact that sexual violence is pervasive throughout the criminal justice system, and cuts off the potential for alternatives, like transformative justice solutions. Devoting resources to developing transformative justice solutions is important, because they don’t require the engagement with the criminal justice system, which at the moment, is often the only option survivors have to make the immediate violence stop. The criminal justice system is unsafe for everybody within it, and is also much less likely to be useful or safe for people who are members of communities of color, queer and trans* communities, or any survivor who does not want to see their assailant behind bars, which is a reality for many people for a variety of reasons. Immediately deferring issues of sexual violence to law enforcement solutions does not end sexual violence; it limits options for survivors and can deter survivors from seeking support, in which cases the violence is more likely to continue.

12. Kat Hache´ talks about names and her experience as a trans woman:

There will always be the negators of the world out there to remind us that our past indeed happened, as if we could ever forget. Their reminders should not be given the weight of invalidation, however. If our society accepted the multitudes within us as trans individuals (to paraphrase Walt Whitman) in the same way that the complexity of cisgender individuals’ identities were accepted, it would cease to be an issue. For this reason I have come to accept my dead name as one of my multitudes. My past is one chapter of my beautiful story, but it is not the entirety of it.

I am a woman named Katharine who was once called a boy named Kevin. If you find that contradictory, very well.

I contain multitudes, and there are multitudes within my name.

13. s.e. smith writes about the practice of wearing fat suits to “simulate” being fat and find out what it’s like:

Nor does wearing a fat suit offer insight into what it’s like to live in a society where you are loathed and hated because of your body. People seeing someone in a fat suit can tell it’s a fat suit, it’s not like these garments are subtle. You might attract comments or laughs, but it’s nothing compared to actually living in a fat body. If you walk down the street in a fat suit eating a doughnut, what people see is a person walking down the street in a fat suit eating a doughnut. Nothing more, nothing less.

14. Cate takes down the tiresome “yeah well Twitter is public deal with it” canard:

By defaulting to “twitter is public I don’t need permission” when dealing with sensitive topics like this, you’re effectively saying “Don’t speak out! Don’t share your stories! Don’t share your pain! Because if you do I will be within my rights to exploit you, make money for myself and leave you to deal with the backlash.” It puts us in a situation where we are pressured into speaking out against rape culture and punished by threats and abuse if we do. There is no way to win.

The “twitter is public” excuse is reductive and lazy. As I said, “in the commons” is not the same as “public.” You wouldn’t eavesdrop on a “private” conversation on the train, and then use the information for your next scoop, while identifying the person involved. Sure you “heard” it, but that person wasn’t talking to you. And the women involved here were not talking to Buzzfeed. The lines between public and private online may be blurred but they’re not invisible. Private conversations can and do happen in public spaces. Twitter is one such space.

15. This is old news now, but Chris Hallquist wrote a great piece about people flipping out that Brendan Eich resigned from Mozilla due to his homophobia:

I also wonder why the people urging tolerance for Eich can’t be more tolerant of the decisions made by other people at Mozilla and OKCupid. Where’s the tolerance for people who don’t want to work for, or use the products of, a company with a homophobic CEO? Can it really be our solemn duty as members of a democratic society to never complain, or decide to take our business elsewhere, when we find out that someone supported an effort to take away important rights from ourselves or our friends?

16. Mitchell has a set of responses when people ask him (in relation to polyamory), “But don’t you get jealous?”

Yes, but it also means I get to unlearn one of the worst root causes of jealousy for me. For me, poly provides an opportunity to unlearn this culturally ingrained habit of thinking oppositionally. When I was monogamous, and someone I was interested in decided they wanted to go out with someone else, it was easy to feel like that was because I wasn’t good enough — that I wasn’t as attractive or interesting as that other person. Being poly, though, means that when someone decides they don’t want to date me, it isn’t because some other person is “better”. If they’re poly, it means that they could date me anyway, which means that I don’t have to think about my rejections in the frame of “I’m just not as good as that other person is.”. I get to practice thinking about them in the frame of “Something just didn’t work between this person and me.”.

17. Benjamin wrote this post that I can’t really encapsulate in a few words except that it’s about effective communication when you want to talk but don’t know how or what about. Anyway, I found it useful for dealing with my spirals of “I’m depressed and I have nothing of value to say to anyone so I will never talk to anyone ever again.”

18. Sparrow Rose Jones writes about identity labels, why they’re useful, and why remarks like “you don’t need labels!” are dismissive:

Labels help us to understand ourselves better. Yes, they are a sort of heuristic — a short-hand and reductionist way to identify things that doesn’t encapsulate the entirety of who and what a person is — but they are so useful. A woman who notices her stomach getting bigger and bigger is comforted by remembering that she is pregnant. Pregnant is a label. When I get frustrated that I have to slowly reason out people’s words and actions and cannot interpret them immediately and on-the-fly, it comforts me to remember that I am Autistic. Autistic is a label.

19. This Medium piece by Rachel Edidin is about Asperger’s Syndrome. So I’m not sure why I related to it so immensely. But I did.

People interest me. I care about some ferociously and passionately. I care about most in at least an abstract humanitarian sense.

But people also baffle and exhaust me, and I don’t trust most of them. They generalize and assume based on very limited data sets. They touch me. From behind. In crowds. They ignore the words I have so carefully arranged to say exactly what I want them to say and project their own insecurities and needs and prejudices. They treat me like an extension of them; they subsume who I am and what I say into whatever role they want or need me to fill and then punish me when I fail to follow a script I can’t see.

I wish I were better at being what people want me to be. I wish they’d tell me what that was.

I wish I knew what the rules were.

I wish there were rules.

Have you read or written anything interesting lately?

(If you’re attending WiS3, see ya at the con!)

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

First of all, the most important thing this week: donate to Karen Stollznow’s legal defense fund. Jason has a timeline of the whole story as it unfolds at his blog, and reading it has really given me an education in how exactly rich powerful dudes shut up the people they abuse. If you want to see Stollznow defeat this ridiculous defamation suit, help contribute to her fund. And by the way, if you don’t want people to write about your abuse of them, try not to abuse them. Eh, Radford?

Moving on, I’m going to briefly mention the various talky things I’m doing this spring and summer. Next weekend, I’ll be at the Skeptech conference in Minneapolis, giving a talk about how technology has influenced the social justice movement (how’s that for a broad topic? Guess who came up with that bullshit?) and also speaking on a panel about moderating online spaces.

Then on May 16 at Women in Secularism 3 in Alexandria, VA, I’ll be on two panels: “Online Activism” and “Intersectionality and Humanism.” If you need any motivation to get to the con before Friday night, there it is.

At some point from July 3-7 in Bloomington, MN, I’ll be on a few panels for CONvergence, but I’m not sure what they’ll be yet. From July 11-13 I’ll be at SSA East in Columbus, OH, talking about microaggressions and making secular groups more inclusive. And if North Texas Secular Con gets rescheduled for late July, I’ll be speaking at that somewhere in Texas. And there’s FtBCon on August 22-24.

I’ll be doing a fundraising campaign sometime within the next month so that I can actually pay for all this (those costs are rarely covered and when they are, they don’t include stuff like food). So look out for that.

Links:

1. Cate explains “white feminism”:

When I talk about “white feminism,” I’m talking about the feminism that misappropriates womanist thinkers like Audre Lorde to declare that keeping white women’s racism in check is “bashing.” I’m talking about the feminism that cheekily denounces “twitter feminism” as useless, without considering that twitter is the main medium through which less economically privileged women (usually women of colour) can put their feminism into practice and gain access to and engage with like-minded women. I’m talking about the feminism that publishes an article advocating for forced sterilization, completely disregarding the way in which forced sterilization was used as a tool of genocide against black and native women. I’m talking about the feminism that thought holding a writer’s retreat at a former slave plantation was a swell idea. I’m talking about the feminism that throws women of colour under the bus in the quest for body diversity and acceptance. I’m talking about the feminism that thinks barging into a Maasai community and “breaking barriers” is feminist, disregarding the work that actual Maasai women are doing to help achieve equality on their own terms, and obliviously parading its class privilege along the way. I’m talking about the feminism that insists that “Muslim women need saving” and refuses to acknowledge that cultural differences mean different, culturally specific approaches to feminism and equality. I’m talking about the feminism that thinks not “leaning in” is the only thing standing between women and economic success. I’m talking about the feminism that defends The Onion when it calls a little black girl a “cunt”. I’m talking about the feminism that celebrates Tina Fey, Lily Allen and Lena Dunham, but tears down Nicki Minaj, Beyoncé and Rihanna. I’m talking about the feminism that pats itself on the back, but doesn’t apologize after supporting a known abuser of WoC feminists who confesses to his transgressions. I’m talking about the feminism that did all these things in the space of one year.

2. Scarleteen has this amazing sexual inventory to help you figure out what your boundaries are and share them with someone else. I’ve seen many of these types of lists, but this is my favorite because of the sheer scope of things it includes as part of a conversation about sex and intimacy that others might not: preferred pronouns and identifiers, comments about one’s body, triggers related to bodies and sex, various types of relationship arrangements, and sexual stuff involving phones and the internet.

3. Jay writes about the lie of the word “normal”:

Normal is a lie. It is a toxic lie, one that seeps beneath our skin and turns us against ourselves. Normal is why I grew up hating the colour of my skin and the way it marked me out as different from my classmates. Normal is why I wanted to be a boy growing up, because boys got to do all the things I wished I was allowed to do. Normal is why my ex used to silence me every time the topic of my queerness arose in conversation with friends – he was ashamed to be dating someone non-heterosexual, someone perverted. Normal is why many Muslims think I’m too “western” and westerners think it’s weird that I don’t drink alcohol or eat bacon. Normal is the little voice whispering in your ear that whatever you are, whoever you are, you are an outsider and a freak and you will never be good enough.

Normal drives people to hate themselves.

4. Chally talks about how patriarchy encourages women to be uncertain of their feelings and opinions, and even of whether or not they “really” experienced boundary violations:

One of the things that gets me the most about patriarchal society is that women are made to be constantly watching out for our own protection, even while we are simultaneously taught to dismiss our opinions, insights, and instincts as wrong or insufficient.

5. Dr. Nerdlove discusses social awkwardness and how it’s used as an excuse by some men as a way to violate boundaries:

The pressure to give someone a second chance – that they were just being awkward and the woman should just relax her boundaries a little – is telling a woman that she doesn’t have a right to establish her limits or to control who she does or doesn’t talk to. It carries the message that the right of a maybe-awkward-maybe-creepy guy to talk to her is more important than her right to feel safe and secure. It means she’s not allowed to trust her instincts and instead should either magically intuit somebody’s intentions or just let the crowd override her decisions.

6. Mitchell explains the usefulness of being selective about who you engage with online:

By the same token, if I had a blog that was all about studying climate change, I would probably block climate change deniers. Blocking a particular climate change denier does, obviously, prevent me from being exposed to their input. However, I wouldn’t consider this a loss for two reasons: first, because their input isn’t new or novel — it isn’t just wrong, it’s redundant — and second, because it is trivially easy to look up the arguments and opinions of client change deniers anyway. If they ever were to come up with a new, interesting idea, it wouldn’t be hard to find.

Blocking those people would mean I had more time and energy to engage with people who have thoughtful, nuanced opinions about the topics under discussion. It absolutely does deprive me of access to those people’s opinions in the same way that not going on a date with that person who pleads “Just give me a chance!” would deprive me of the miniscule chance that they would turn out to be a good match, but ultimately it leaves me with more time to engage with ideas of value.

7. Lucy has a lot of useful advice for screening a therapist.

8. The Belle Jar Blog has a post about those shirts dads wear that have slogans threatening their daughters’ boyfriends:

Rape culture is the normalization and trivialization of rape and sexual assault. It’s a culture in which sexual violence is made to be both invisible and inevitable. It’s a culture that teaches us that male sexual violence is both normal and desirable. It also teaches us that men are not able to control their actions when they are aroused.

And that’s what this shirt is really saying, isn’t it? That a teenage boy will, given the chance, commit some kind of sexual violence against his girlfriend, and that the only solution to that violence is more violence, this time on the part of the father. This shirt assumes that the rape (or attempted rape) of the daughter is inevitable, and the only solution is to remove the boyfriend from the scene. This shirt says that the blame (sidebar – why the need for blame?) for any sex had by the teenage couple will be put squarely on the shoulders of the male partner. Why? Because our culture teaches us that men want sex more than women, that they can’t help being physically aggressive when it comes to sex, and finally that all of these toxic messages are just sexual norms and there’s nothing that we can do to combat them beyond matching violence with violence.

9. Lucia wrote this amazing post about being single:

I have learned, over the years, that my description of my rather persistent singleness is not neutral. The reception and interpretation of my lack of a romantic partner has called up some of the most interesting, misguided, or presumptive statements and unsolicited analyses of my psyche and my behaviour. It has suggested to many that I may be too nervous to date, too preoccupied with my career, too picky about prospective partners, too conservative, too liable to pick “bad” matches, too this, too that. Funny how one’s personal life so quickly becomes open season fo armchair psychologists! And while these commentaries and assumptions can be only rather irritating at times, the banter of a nosy relative or well-meaning friend, I have recently noticed how awfully sinister, how awfully narrow-minded and rife with victim-blaming they can be.

What good things have you read/written lately?

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

First of all, I have an announcement! After a lot of planning, some friends and I have launched a Facebook support group for atheists struggling with mental health issues. It’s called Help Without Heaven. In just a few days, it’s grown to over 100 members and is really active, supportive, and helpful. It looks like this was really a need that hadn’t been filled, and we’re really excited about how it’s going.

Soooo unfortunately, our community being what it is, we (the admins) can only accept members we know personally, or who can get another group member or a mutual friend to vouch for them. This is to ensure as much safety for the group members as possible, and it’s unfortunate that this means that much fewer people can benefit from this group than if we let in anyone who wanted to join.

However, if you’ve had a good record of commenting here and you’d like to join, you can email helpwithoutheaven[at]gmail.com from the email address you use to comment, and I can send you an invite to the group. You can also take a look at the group and see if you have friends in it, or if you have mutual friends with one of the listed admins, who could maybe vouch for you.

And like, I just gotta say for the record, if you try to sabotage this in any way or use this as further ammunition in some dumb vendetta against “FtBullies,” you are really, really sad and pathetic. This has nothing to do with FtB and everything to do with atheists getting the help they need to be happy and healthy.

Anyways! On to the links.

1. Angele on Thought Catalog writes about depression:

But see, that’s the thing — depression doesn’t care what life looks like on paper. It doesn’t give a damn about what you tell yourself about how great life is and could be. What it does is slams the sheer gravity of being down upon you when you least expect it, ties weights to your ankles and drowns you in a sea of anxiety, of “what if”s and “not good enough”s. And that is something that took me a long time to understand and an even longer time to talk about.

2. Janani on Black Girl Dangerous talks about the intersections between eating disorders and race (TW):

I remember being hugely troubled by the language many of the speakers and health educators would use about their experiences: that ‘eating disorders were about power and control, not beauty’.  As if this were a dichotomy. As if beauty were something other than a system of control and domination.  There is nothing shallow about beauty; I have drowned in it. My anorexia had everything to do with affluent white womanhood, something not available to me, but that I was systemically surrounded by.  It had everything to do with heterosexuality: an aspiration for ‘proper and dignified’ white womanhood – that is ultimately desirable to white masculinity.

3. People love to claim that nonbinary gender is some dumb #firstworldproblems thing, but Foz put together this amazing list of nonbinary gender identities from cultures around the world. There’s even one from Jewish religious texts. (By the way, even if nonbinary genders only occurred in the Western world, that wouldn’t mean they’re not legitimate and worthy of respect.)

4. Captain Awkward has some wonderful advice on first taking care of yourself in order to be a better friend when things aren’t going well:

You are the only person who understands me!” “You’re my only friend!” sound like compliments, but they come with too much pressure and too much…self… to actually be compliments. Your friend, even if she promises to be your best friend forever, can’t actually fix your bad feelings about yourself or fill up all your lonely places. I get why you feel abandoned, I get why you are panicking, I get that you would do anything to make this right, and I have oh so much love and empathy for you right now. But my honest advice is, take massive, radical care of yourself and do what you can to comfort and distract yourself  until you can meet her on more solid emotional ground.

5. s.e. smith discusses all the snark about women saying “I’m fine” and not really meaning it:

There’s an almost hostile attitude behind the frequent demands for “women” (as though women are an amorphous, interchangeable mass) to explain why they say, “I’m fine.” It’s a sharp reminder of the demanding tone that tends to prevail in situations where women are pressured to talk when they’re not ready or need time to deal with something before they can approach a conversation. There’s an expectation here that women should be ready on everyone else’s schedule to deal with everything, including their own emotions.

6. Heina writes about being labeled “angry” when she isn’t:

He was hardly the first or only person to dub a carefully-worded, cautiously-approached conversation an expression of anger, despite my avoiding of words like “sexist.” Being read as angry when you are not does not require bad faith on the part of the person interpreting your words. All it requires is the skewed perspective bequeathed to us by the world: that anyone not upholding the status quo is disrupting it, and that such disruption is, by nature, angry.

7. This article from the Belle Jar about men who ask women to debate feminism with them is simultaneously a steelman and a snarky rebuttal, and I love it:

After all, if you’re going to call yourself a feminist, you should be willing to back that belief up with facts, right?

And if you’ve got all the facts, it should be easy enough to convince him, shouldn’t it?

And after all, how is he supposed to understand anything if you won’t educate him?

He just wants so badly to understand.

If you don’t mind, could you start by providing him with some kind empirical data that women continue to suffer from systematic oppression? He doesn’t care about the past, and doesn’t want a history lesson. He wants to talk about the here and now. And from what he can see in the here and now, women are doing pretty well. Just look at you! Smart, well-educated, pretty. What about your gender could you possibly imagine has ever held you back? If anything, it’s probably done you a few favours!

8. Another one from the Belle Jar, that I can also relate closely to:

If you live with a volatile person for long enough, it’s hard to maintain a consistent personal narrative. Every event is re-framed by how they saw it, and no matter how hard you try to hold on to your version of events, the force of their overreactions starts to erode your confidence in your own perspective. Trying to fight against them begins to exhaust you – they’re too good at pushing your buttons, know too well exactly what to say to hurt you most deeply, and you can’t keep up, can’t maintain that level of mean-spiritedness. You start to accept what they tell you, because it’s just easier. It’s easier to be wrong all the time. It’s easier to apologize. It’s easier to lie down and let them walk all over you. Of course, you lose yourself in the process, but what does that matter? By that point you believe that that self was worthless anyway.

9. This sexual boundaries checklist from Scarleteen is one of the best I’ve ever found. I love how many things the author considers a necessary part of a conversation about boundaries.

10. This piece by Gaby Dunn is amazing:

I used to think I was getting away with something.

“Girls don’t count,” I’d say, running my fingers up her arm at the bar. “Don’t you know that?”

We both had boyfriends. Long-term boyfriends. Mine had introduced me to the concept.

“I wouldn’t feel threatened,” he’d say. “I know they could never compete.”

He meant that a woman, no matter how attached I got, could never “steal” me away from him. He meant that he’d only care about male penetration, about “sex” in the most typical terms. I was young and I didn’t value myself and I hadn’t been taught a lot about feminism or how relationships should work. I said nothing, because I wanted it to be true.

What have you read/written lately?

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

I know we’ve been slacking on the advertising front, but the second FtBCon is coming up in…less than a week. Literally. (It’s January 31 – February 2.) The schedule is up (but subject to last-minute additions) and I’ll do a post of blurbs about my panels soon. If you want updates, keep checking our Twitter, Facebook page, and website for updates. I hope to see you there!

Links:

1. First of all, a brilliant post about the myth of “self-care” in social work. This post puts words to something I’ve felt for the last few months, that cringing annoyance whenever professors and supervisors preach on about “self-care,” as though chocolate and bubble baths are supposed to dull the fear of having to pay off a six-figure student loan debt with a $35k salary, or the stress of trying to help clients who can’t really be helped because there are no resources available to help them and nobody gives the slightest fuck. It also applies to many other fields.

Within the social work world, many members of the profession (especially supervisors) explicitly promote “self care.” That’s great, and appropriate. We should encourage professionals to put on their own oxygen masks before they help others with theirs.

In fact, some people conclude that the high rates of turnover within the profession are specifically connected to insufficient self-care. However, this conclusion is incorrect. The drop-out rates within the field of social work have less to do with individual social workers’ abilities to self-care, and more to do with agencies’ abilities to promote self-care as a culture.

2. On Shakesville, Melissa has a great post about the internet and “real life” that is definitely true to my own experience, as well:

The internet has made disappearing easier, in the sense that I don’t totally disappear. I can maintain the necessary indulgence of my introvert nature and still be the one doing the reaching out. Sometimes, it is during a disappearance that I write the most meaningful emails, have the most wonderful tumbling conversations via text, give my friends the biggest laugh by posting some elaborate Photoshopped monstrosity of their favorite things on their Facebook walls. Dispatches from the shell.

3. Apophemi wrote a post about how they feel excluded from the rationality/Less Wrong community due to its frequent dispassionate discussions of really triggering material, and the elevation of that dispassion as the ideal state. Scott wrote a dissenting but extremely compassionate response. Ben responded to Scott, attempting to bring these two viewpoints together cohesively. Any quote I give from any of these three posts will not do any of them justice, so if you have time and care about inclusivity within rationalist circles, I recommend them. I feel like a smarter and more empathic person for having read all three of these perspectives.

4. A person with a serious illness wrote in to Captain Awkward and asked if there’s any way to ask people to support them in tangible ways rather than posting vague memes on Facebook about supporting people with illnesses. As usual, CA has lots of great advice, and says:

Chronic illness/disability sucks in SO MANY WAYS and one of the worst is having to go through this sorting process. It is totally ok if you decide your time and energy are too limited for this crap and just cut those people free. You don’t have to be their way of demonstrating to the world how cool and awesome and caring they are with these meaningless public displays of glurge. There are other awesome people out there, and yes it is possible for us to find them.

5. [older, but so necessary] Trudy explains why she’s tired of people responding to her personal tweets or posts with meta-humor of the “I hate photos of spiders”/”HERE HAVE A PHOTO OF A SPIDER LOLOL” type. I’ve often tried and failed to draw boundaries around this sort of thing, which I also can’t stand.

These are the responses from people who simply cannot handle the idea that I am human and I am not going to perform happiness for them 24/7. I don’t believe in positivity culture where I am not allowed to fully experience sad or angry emotions (or when I do, I am told that “angry” is my “personality” type) and have to perform superficial joy. Thus, they think being abusive and engaging in the exact behavior that I mentioned causes me stress is somehow supposed to “cheer me up” since they are being “funny” by being “ironic.” Why can’t I stay upset if I choose to? Further, why would more of what upsets me magically please me just because they say so?

6. At Feministing, Veronica writes about calling out in the feminist movement:

I am so ready to let go of the America’s Next Top Radical model of social justice; it’s unsustainable, unproductive, and frankly a pretty bad strategy. It seems as though some of us – us being folks invested in the advancement of social justice in some way or another – are calling folks out sometimes not to educate a person who’s wrong, but to position themselves a rung above on the radical ladder. What’s worse, both in real-world organizing and online, this behavior is often rewarded: with pats on the back, social status, followers. We’re waiting and ready to cut folks out when they say the wrong thing. We’ve created an activist culture in which the worst thing we can do is to make a mistake.

7. People often object to the term “privilege” because they think we’re trying to suggest that it means they’ve had an easy life. Not so.

Privilege means that, because of your membership in a non-marginalized group, there are things you don’t have to deal with. And because you don’t have to deal with them, you don’t have to think about them, and may not be aware of them.

[…]I can’t imagine that if you’re a man, reading this evokes something you’ve long felt as an extra advantage you have. It’s an absence that is likely invisible to you until someone points it out — just something that you don’t have to worry about. It doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get hired, it doesn’t mean you didn’t have to compete for your job, it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person for not thinking about it.

It just means it’s a challenge or obstacle that you didn’t have to overcome, or even think about.

8. The Belle Jar Blog, on virginity as a social construct:

One problem with the idea of virginity is that there’s no hard and fast way of deciding who’s a virgin and who isn’t. Many people would define loss of virginity in a very heteronormative sense – a sexual act where the penis penetrates the vagina. But does that mean, then, that a queer woman who has only ever been with other women is a virgin? Is a gay man, who has only ever had anal sex, a virgin? Most people, when pressed, would agree that no, those folks aren’t reallyvirgins, even if they’ve never had penis-in-vagina-style intercourse. The flip side of this is that many rape victims don’t feel as if they have lost their virginity even if they’ve had penetrative intercourse forced on them. They consider themselves to be virgins because they don’t consider what happened to them to be sex. So taking all of that into consideration, how do we then define virginity?

9. At Youngist, Suey Park interviews Dr. David Leonard on white “allies”:

First and foremost, [terms like “white ally”] presume that struggles against injustice are the responsibility of someone else – those who are subjected to the violence of racism, sexism, homophobia – and that the “allies” are helping or joining forces with those who are naturally on the frontlines. The idea of white allies also reinscribes the idea that whites have a choice as to whether to fight racism, to fight white supremacy. And while this may be true, it turns any agitation into a choice worthy of celebration. At the same time, it turns struggles against racial violence and injustice to a discussion of “what people are” rather than one focused on what people are doing in opposition to white supremacy.

10. Aoife writes about why potential fathers should not have a say in abortion decisions, and why it’s wrong to demand that pregnant women consult their partners about such decisions:

When it comes to abortion, our right to choose to carry a pregnancy to term or to terminate does not exist because of our genetic relationship to the fetus inside us- forcing a surrogate mother, say, to carry to term is abhorrent. Our right to choose exists solely because the pregnancy is in our body, is part of our body, sharing our blood, our food, water and oxygen. The right to choose is, at the end of the day, nothing to do with pregnancy. Pregnancy is simply a time when that right is contested. The right to choose is about our right to self-determination, nothing more.

11. Laura Lippman writes about being a woman in public:

Of course, the ultimate moment of being Female in Public comes when a woman, deep in thought, is told by a strange man to SMILE. (And this happens only to women.) Gentlemen, let’s get this straight. There is no part of my body that belongs to you, not even my facial expression. Stop trying to stake out territory there, whether by legislation or verbal imperative.

12. Leopard writes about low-paid doctors in Russia, who are mostly women, and the argument that women “just happen” to do the jobs that are devalued in society:

What this illustrates perfectly is this — women are not devalued in the job market because women’s work is seen to have little value. It is the other way round. Women’s work is devalued in the job market because women are seen to have little value. This means that anything a woman does, be it childcare, teaching, or doctoring, or rocket science, will be seen to be of less value simply because it is done mainly by women. It isn’t that women choose jobs that are in lower-paid industries, it is that any industry that women dominate automatically becomes less respected and less well-paid.

13. s.e. smith writes about people with mental illnesses and how we have to put up a facade for our friends a lot of the time:

We spend a lot of time being told that bottling up emotions is unhealthy and we should express ourselves and I cannot even begin to tell you how many of my friends have said they’ll ‘always be there for me’ and ‘are happy to talk any time.’ Those things are said with love, with a genuine desire to help, but with all due respect, they’re also said with a total lack of understanding about mental illness and how it works. Those friends don’t really want me to drop the facade and be real with them, even though they think they do, and they definitely don’t want to be providing amateur counseling services.

What have you read/written lately?

Occasional Link Roundup

Occasional Link Roundup

Guys, living here is like living in a social justice paradise. I saw Julia Serano give a reading last week, and next week I’m going to a poetry slam about social change and then seeing bell hooks and Melissa Harris-Perry speak and then going to a workshop on gendering racial microaggressions.

And that’s just the stuff I find time for. 😛

Also, I had never been in New York during the fall before, and it’s so beautiful it makes me cry. Not even kidding. Check it out.

Since I probably won’t do another one of these updates within the next two weeks: Skepticon is coming up I am so excited ahhh. If you’re going and getting there early enough, check out my workshop on consent at 4 PM on Friday, or just feel free to come say hi to me at some point during the weekend. (Seriously, every time I get back from a conference someone tells me online that they really wanted to talk to me but felt too shy and didn’t. First of all, I would totally do the same thing. But second, I’m super friendly so just come up and ask me to tell you about what I’m reading or writing. Or politely argue with something I wrote. Whatever!)

1. Speaking of conferences, the Skeptech team is running a fundraiser to help organize their second annual conference! I went last spring, spoke on two panels, and had an amazing time and plan on coming back in 2014. The organizers are auctioning off a personal portrait of one lucky winner by SMBC cartoonist Zach Weinersmith. The fundraiser ends at 1:30 Central tomorrow, so go bid if you’d like. Even if you can’t do that, consider spreading the word about the conference and/or attending in April 2014 if you can. It’s a really great con and has a strong commitment to bringing diverse speakers and creating a safe, welcoming space for everyone.

2. If you only read one article on this whole list, you must read this. It’s called “Dating Tips for the Feminist Man,” but it goes so much deeper than that. And while it’s applicable to people of all genders, it addresses the problems that straight, cis feminist men are particularly likely to face:

If you find yourself disregarding something she is saying because she is upset as she is saying it, notice that this is sexism. You may have been raised to believe emotion is not rational and is therefore not legitimate. That is for you to unlearn, not for you to impose on others. Emotion and intuition, when finely honed, serve clear thinking. Don’t retreat into your head or use logic to disconnect from empathy when you find emotions coming your way; clear thinking is informed by ethics and compassion. Build up your capacity to feel and to respond to feelings in a rational, intuitive, self-aware way. You’ll be more human for it, and a better feminist, too.

3. A post about the idea that not saying “no” is equivalent to saying “yes” when it comes to consent:

If you asked your girlfriend, “Do you want a Hawaiian vacation for your birthday?” and she didn’t say anything, would you buy plane tickets? If you asked someone at the grocery store, “I only have one item, do you mind if I check out ahead of you?” and they stared determinedly into space, would you cut in front of them? Why is it that “you didn’t say no” applies only to sex?

[…]So tell me, do you want to have sex with someone who lets you fuck them, or with someone who wants you to fuck them?

4. On sexual harassment in science:

We should be able to give a lecture without a colleague eyeing-up our legs. We should be able to bend down and tie our bloody shoelace on campus without someone making a comment about our bum. The gateways to particular people, jobs, ideas and spaces should not be guarded by questions of whether or not we are willing to entertain the idea of screwing someone in a position of power. We should be able to talk about stuff like this and call it out without being made to feel like some sort of sour killjoy.

5. And another great one about sexual harassment in science, and how easy it actually is to not do it (contrary to some men’s claims):

But what about cases where you didn’t mean anything sexual, like when you complimented your coworker on her outfit, and she accused you of harassing her?

This scenario is, largely, a fraud.

Lots of people legitimately worry about it, because they’ve heard so much about this in the media, in politics, in news. The thing is, the reason that you hear all of this is because of people who are deliberately promoting it as part of a socio-political agenda. People who want to excuse or normalize this kind of behavior want to create the illusion of blurred lines.

6. Thomas has a great post at Yes Means Yes about how to stop rape by noticing predatory behavior, calling it out, and excluding those people from your social groups. Read all of it. (TW)

The thing is, rapists absolutely need one thing to operate.  They need people to believe they are not rapists.  Stranger rapists do that by trying to hide that they are the person who committed the rape.  Acquaintance rapists do that by picking targets who won’t say anything about what happened, or by using tactics that, if the survivor does speak up, people will decide don’t really count as rape.  If you want to do something about rapists, make sure people know they are rapists.

7. Ed (formerly of the Heresy Club) criticizes a common way atheists talk about faith:

Belief is a complex assortment of cultural, societal, and personal motivations. A clusterfuck if you will. And by unpacking all that complexity into “Herp derp, God’s for stupid people and crazies!”, you do absolutely nothing to lessen people’s reliance on religion in the first place. Which again, considering blind faith’s many potholes, is a perfectly valid goal to shoot for. The idea that we can shoo people away from religion by being insulting enough though? That’s dumb. And while I’m not saying that most organized atheists actively engage in that sort of behavior, it’s an attitude I see plenty of, even within my closer communities.

8. Olivia A. Cole writes about the sexual assault of boys, relating it to Chris Brown’s recent revelation that he “lost his virginity” via rape (except, it’s important to note, he did not refer to it as such; TW):

What if we have been normalizing male rape victims’ symptoms for centuries? This is not to say that every man has been the victim of sexual abuse, but I know more than a few who have been, and their cries for help—the ones that get such attention when our “ladylike” daughters act out sexually and/or aggressively—went unnoticed, chalked up to a male standard of behavior that not only turns a blind eye to promiscuity but rewards it. Can you imagine? Can you imagine being sexually abused and then growing up being told that this is a good thing? That your sexual potency has been enhanced? That rape was a “head-start” into the wonderful world of sex? The damaging system that tells girls they are worthless after rape has a disgusting flip side for boys: you have worth now. This violence has made you a god.

9. A great response to people who claim that they’re “just not attracted” to trans women:

But when some say for example “I am not attracted to trans women”, they make a blanket statement based on the assumption that they can tell them apart before attraction occurs, guess what: you can’t. Then usually the “I don’t like penis” argument comes along, but guess what: not all trans women have one. Then follows the argument about how magical cis vaginas are and what an abomination trans women’s vaginas are, nearly always from a person who doesn’t have proper knowledge or experience with them. Then a last-ditch attempt of “but I wanna have my own children” is thrown into the mix, but that is hardly trans specific as there’s plenty of infertile cis women, and some trans women get their genetic material frozen before they transition. All of this is just an ego trying to wriggle itself out of admitting that just maybe, it’s culture has taught it to be repulsed by trans women.

10. Trudy writes about sex positivity:

My vagina is not the place where I “prove” my politics to other people. That’s MY BODY. Why does sex positivity, just like sexual orientation itself involve “papers please” moments, especially for Black women? Well…this idea that I can only be a “whore” or “prude” is a racist, patriarchal, misogynoirist binary that directly connects to controlling images (i.e. Jezebel, mammy) used to oppress Black women. And unfortunately, it’s not only Whites who view Black women through this binary; internalized White supremacist thinking amidst Black people means the same views are replicated intraracially. Black women exist in every sexual orientation with a plethora of sexual practices, desires and emotions; disinterest or interest in heterosexual relationships does not make Black women “prudes” or “whores.”

11. Ania shared her heartbreaking story of being assaulted by a doctor (TW):

Sexual assault is about power. It is about the perpetrator feeling like they have power over the victim. It is not about sex. The inclusion of my genitals in this assault was incidental. The doctor in question wasn’t trying to get any kind of sexual thrill or fulfill a sexual desire. Who I was didn’t matter. She just needed to assert her own power over someone else, and I was the lucky victim.

12. Tauriq makes a case for criticizing media that you’re a fan of:

We need to start recognising that loving is not incompatible with criticism – who we are and what we create is not perfect and criticism acknowledges this. Progress is made by filling the cracks of things we’ve previously examined and thought could be improved upon. We hinder this process by insisting our loves are perfect, that none may touch or alter or view it differently.

13. At the Feminist Current, Cecilia explains why men who demand to be educated about sexist oppression are perpetuating that same oppression:

The most common argument is: If You Won’t Educate Me How Can I Learn. This is how it usually plays out. Self-described Nice Guy interjects discussion with earnest appeals for feminists to engage with his personal opinions. Having pushed past his bristling discomfort at feminists being bitter, resentful and combative (but not before pointing out this sacrifice), Nice Guy is bewildered not to have his theories discussed immediately and in a reasonable, non-angry way. Despite the hundreds of resources on the subject which he could, like the rest of us, go off and read, Nice Guy expects women to stop what they are doing, and instead share their experiences of oppression and answer his questions. In an ironic twist, Nice Guy is unaware that by demanding women divert their energies to immediately gratifying his whims, he reinforces the power dynamics he is supposedly seeking to understand.

14. This article about women in the tech sector who defend or ignore sexism is absolutely brilliant.

Unfortunately, women play a particular dangerous and critical role in discrediting and gaslighting other women and their experiences and speech acts, allowing the industry to persist in a state of denial and providing a highly credible means of deflection from the issues at hand. Women in the community can often be seen berating other women for their “anger”, “negativity,” or “vitriol”, criticizing feminist discourse for alienating men, discouraging or minimizing open discussion of the ugliest issues in the community (such as rape and assault), or painting civil debate as feminist bullying. In tone policing other women, many women are co-signed and supported by influential white men (just check out Dave Winer’s championing of white women defending and indulging his egregious ignorance and obvious, unrepentant sexism) — perhaps hinting at the hidden system of reward offered up to women willing to carry out patriarchy’s bread and butter regulation. In these roles, women themselves act as the first line of defense against feminist dialogue in the industry.

That’s it for now. Have a great weekend and a happy Halloween! Don’t be racist! 🙂

Occasional Link Roundup