I’ll post a more complete write-up of the event as soon as I’ve had time to recover. But in the meantime, Jen has posted a video of the Purdue talk. (Give it a minute or two to load.) Including the Q&A, which was one of the best and most fun parts. I’ve embedded it below the jump, since for some reason putting videos below the jump screws up my archives. If you want to see it full size, you can do that on Vimeo. (Again, give it a minute or two to load.) For those of you who wished you could come… seeing it on video is the next best thing!
Enormous thanks to Jen… and to the Purdue Queer Student Union, who co-sponsored the Purdue event… and to Joe Hughto of the Secular Alliance of Indiana University… and to Lyz Liddell of the Secular Student Alliance… and to everyone in all these organizations who helped make this trip run so smoothly. I’m totally hooked now. I want to do this all the time. If you want me to come speak about atheism and sexuality — or an assortment of other atheism- related topics — I’m yours, for the cost of a plane ticket and a hotel room. (Which the SSA will help you out with, if you’re part of their organization.) Wa-hoo!
Greta Christina on Atheism & Sexuality from Jennifer McCreight on Vimeo.
Very cool! Judging by the rave reviews this talk has gotten in the comments at Jen’s site, I’m eagerly looking forward to sitting down and watching the whole thing. Congrats, Greta!
I’ve starting to suspect that you, like Daniel Dennett, are constitutionally incapable of being boring.
I do have a slightly different perspective on pornography in the last question, perhaps because most mainstream porn is aimed at people like me.
Yes, there’s a lot of sexism in hetero male video porn. But there’s a lot of other bad or unrealistic stuff in there as well (starting with unprotected sex with random strangers and going from there).
But IMHO this can be compared to the way just about every action movie violates the laws of physics. And yet we know that you can’t jump out of a fourth-floor window on fire and land on a mattress; you can’t solve all of life’s problems by kneecapping The Bad Guy, and you can’t go traipsing in search of the Ark of the covenant an hour after drinking Tibetan yak herders under the table.
So it seems that we need to figure out as a society that porn is entertainment, and as such is vastly different from the way things are in real life, and also the way things ought to be.
“…and you can’t go traipsing in search of the Ark of the covenant an hour after drinking Tibetan yak herders under the table.”
Who says?
If anyone wants to download the vimeo file, instructions are here. They prevent direct linking by having the URL of the media file change frequently, but you can download this control file and extract the necessary request_signature fields from it.
arensb: My complaint about porn is the same as the tail end of Greta’s response to the question at 1:13:30: it’s often the only explicit sexual information people get growing up, and a few years of masturbating to that, in the absence of other information, can lead to some frighteningly unrealistic expectations and fetishes.
Unrealistic can be fun, but it’s important in all things, specifically including the explosions and murders in action movies, that the audience not get confused and think reality works like that.
Well, since most of the things I wanted to say about the talk have been said by other commenters, I’ll just say this: your weight loss program is working! Congratulations!
I agree with Eclectic: porn is often the main source of information about sex for young guys (less so for girls, but my experience there is limited), and it does create a lot of silly expectations that do, nonetheless, take quite a while to unlearn.
The way to deal with this is the same way we deal with the lack of realism in action movies that Arensb mentions: be willing to talk about it and acknowledge how silly it is, even when we still find it enjoyable.
Would you be interested in speaking at a Unitarian Universalist church? If so, I’d recommend you to our summer speakers committee.
“Would you be interested in speaking at a Unitarian Universalist church?”
Sure. I’d be happy to. If it’s in the Bay Area, it’s easy; if it’s not in the Bay Area, you’d need to pay for my travel and hotel — but if you do that, I’m willing to travel just about anywhere.
I’m so sad I missed this! You picked the one semester I’m studying abroad to come to Purdue!
Look on the bright side, marie7. Thanks to Jen McCreight, about all you missed was a chance to participate in the Q&A.
Presumably you’ve noticed that the video has been Pharyngulated. Prepare for the ravening hordes!
Hello! I got here from Pharyngula. It was the first time I heard about you, and I loved the video of your talk. I agree with you on pretty much every syllable, but had never been able to phrase my opinions before. Thank you so much for helping. I’ll stop by regularly from now on 🙂