As I write this, the Seventh Annual Orange Country Freethought Alliance Conference—so good they named it lots—is underway. I know this because over the last hour, friends have been sharing an image showcasing (if not advertising) the conference’s lineup of speakers. According to the ad, there are twelve people speaking at this year’s OCFAC. In stark contrast with the county itself, all of them appear to be white, while in contrast with planet Earth, eleven appear to be men. I’m not here to crucify OCFAC’s organisers—there is, however, a point I’d like to make.

Here is the Keswick Convention’s lineup of speakers this year.

Here is OCFAC’s.

Why do I bring this up? In the churches I belonged to, women did everything. I’ve forgotten most of their names, but remember Margaret who served tea and coffee, Hillary who ran Sunday school and Lynn who ran the crèche, Doreen who sent shoeboxes to orphanages abroad, Gill the receptionist, Donna the keyboard player, Lizzie who made soup for the church café, Lynda who sold visitors sandwiches from the church bus. Sara, who was my headteacher. My sister, a missionary. My mum, who sold conventioners traybakes to make ends meet.

In those churches, women did everything—except speak publicly.

This year, the Keswick Convention has thirty-one speakers, of whom four are women. In parts of the local Christian landscape, even their inclusion provokes outrage, and one church my mum belonged to was part of a worldwide network with a firm line against women preaching. Churches today are divided on female leadership—books on family members’ shelves call it an act of Satanic violence—but even those which now employ female clergy obeyed Saint Paul for centuries, with women omnipresent but unacknowledged, voices unheard and work ignored.

I got out of the church, and while the women in my family stayed, millions of others have got out too. They’re getting out, and they’ll continue to—in greater and greater numbers if current trends continue. I know dozens of women who’ve escaped the church, and work with some; others are writing books about the ‘exodus’ of women from churches in the US. Still others will just be finding their feet, looking for a place to land after letting to go of God—looking for friends, for books about people like them, for new communities and secular conferences to attend.

My town’s evangelical convention has thirty-one speakers, four of whom appear to be women. That’s just under thirteen percent. The Orange County Freethought Alliance Conference has twelve speakers, just one of whom is a woman. That’s eight percent. It’s one thing to spout buzzwords like diversity, but here’s the question I’m burning to ask. When women from churches like my hometown’s break free of faith and, in search of community, glance toward us, what do they see? Are we better than those churches, or just more of the same, even—whisper it—worse?

If secular conferences have fewer women speakers than churches with thousand-year histories of banning women from public speaking, what are we telling female escapees of those churches about the opportunities for participation our community offers them? This isn’t about the sheen of diversity. It’s about what kind of movement we are. Do we want women fleeing churches like mine to know we have their backs—or that, like those churches, we want them there, working silently and behind the scenes, but never acknowledged or listened to, paid or let on the stage?

There are other reasons to invite female speakers, and plenty of women are qualified. There are reasons to care about visibility in its other forms, particularly, in OCFAC’s case, race. Those have been enummerated in other posts by authors better qualified than me, and I expect they’ll continue to be. This post isn’t an exhaustive treatise on why atheists should invite women to speak at cons—but if you’re wondering why you need to, here’s one answer from me: because when I look at this ad, I see the church where my mum never got the chance to preach.

The post Atheists: Here’s Another Reason You Need To Book Women At Conferences appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

‘David Bowie was wonderful. He was also an abuser. How do we handle that?’

* * *

I dreamt about David Bowie last night. I forget the details, but I woke up thinking I’d write a post about how he seemed to regenerate rather than age. (The first Bowie was Cockney and a mod, the second was Byronesque, et cetera.) The first thing I saw on starting my computer was a friend’s Facebook post: ‘I don’t think I ever really believed it was possible.’ The headline underneath took me a moment to digest: ‘David Bowie, the Legendary Musician, Has Died at 69.’ Oh no. Don’t say it’s true.

While there was me, I’d always assumed, there would Bowie. At eight, a clip of Ziggy’s arm round Mick Ronson was a queer wake-up call, and later ‘Life on Mars’ would help keep suicide at bay. Having died three short days after a new album’s release, it seems music sustained him too, and it hurts to have been denied the songs the twelfth or thirteenth Bowie would have made. After ten years away, The Next Day and Blackstar were considered two of his best records, and it would be a fair statement that he meant far more to me than any other singer.

It would also be fair to call him a child rapist. (Details ahead.)

Bowie did bad things alright. In the seventies he fixated on Nazis, calling Hitler one of the first rock stars and himself a believer in fascism—a phase which, to be fair, he grew out of and came to call ghastly. More disturbing are the stories of hotel room threesomes with fourteen year old girls. Former groupie Lori Mattix describes Bowie disrobing and having her wash him in the bath before ‘devirginising’ her. Both Mattix and the friend of hers who joined them later had been plied with drugs.

It’s hard to know what to do with this knowledge except rehearse it. I know the above to be true, according to Mattix’s nostalgic account, and that it deserves to be remembered. I also know without Bowie, my own obit would have been written long ago, and I can’t help but remember that too. How do you find room in one eulogy for both those facts? Just for today, I’ll mourn the hero I saw in Bowie, thankful on behalf of the kid who needed all those songs; tomorrow and the next day I’ll let one more hero go. That’s the best I can manage—sorry if it’s not enough.

It’s the legend more than the man I’m grieving in the end, the performances that have stayed with me. ‘Starman’, aforementioned, on Top of the Pops, a Technicolor explosion in a monochrome world. ‘Footstompin’’ on Dick Cavett’s programme, Bowie’s mic trained on joyous, gyrating Ava Cherry. ‘Under Pressure’, where Annie Lennox stares undiluted lust at him after that last breathy note. ‘Heroes’ live in Berlin, where Bowie’s voice rises over six minutes from a mumble to a shout. And then, of course, this week, the video to ‘Lazarus’.

You wouldn’t call it a live act, but surely that’s the point. How much sense it makes now, that song that was so inscrutable days ago, the deathbed pose, title and lines about release, even the rush to productivity between this album and the last, the decision not to tour or perform. Unmissable as it is in hindsight—how visible the cancer’s impact is, quite suddenly—no one took ‘Lazarus’ literally because no one imagined Bowie could die. How unlike anybody else, how entirely like him, to stage his own death as performance art. Now ain’t that just like me?

Hard to think someone who did that could have much faith in any afterlife. (Bowie, for his part, called himself ‘not quite an atheist’.) I don’t often wish I believed in one, and it’s hard to wish heaven on a man with his history, but at eight I longed to travel to Ziggy’s world. It hurts to know for the first time that where he is, I can’t follow. But I do live in David Bowie’s world—the world where everyone followed his tune, where he was sometimes a hero, sometimes a monster, always singular. I don’t feel good about all of that. All the same, I’m glad it was my world too.

David Bowie, 1947-2016.

* * *

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Richard Dawkins is in the news again. This times it’s the Muslims. In September, Texas teenager Ahmed Mohamed was arrested for making a clock that — mainly due to being next to him — looked too much like a bomb; when Barack Obama asked to meet him, Dawkins speculated Mohamed ‘wanted to be arrested’ for exposure and cash. In the US, where police shoot young black and brown men for breathing too loudly, you’d think posing as a bomber would be high-risk, but perhaps your experience of anti-terror laws isn’t confined to jars of honey on domestic flights.

The last Texan to con his way to the White House had ideas the New Atheists quite liked, and this week Dawkins compared Mohamed to a child filmed beheading a prisoner of ISIL. (That both were Muslims is apparently incidental.) What’s striking about Dawkins and his fans at times like this is their portrayal of critics as fragile, oversensitive flakes in whose world dogma is king and emotion queen, despite flinching at the slightest rebuke. ‘That actually hurts,’ Dawkins told a friend after I called his tweets racist. Some people’s emotions, it seems, just matter more.

The post Thin Skins And Male Tears: The Tragedy Of White Atheism appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

Greta has a post from last week on social media and the risks of reading-in — how it’s possible to conclude too much from who someone else adds or blocks, or what they like or share; why guessing their motives is a bad idea.

I mostly agree with the thrust of it. On being unfriended, I’ve learnt not to assume the worst — I also have closeted friends whose parents monitor their feeds, and I’ve had my online presence dissected creepily. I doubt I’d go as far as Greta does — I check my mutual friends with strangers who add me, gauge who people on Twitter are by who else they follow, delete contacts who share posts from Breitbart uncritically. (There are things there’s no good reason to Like.) Reading the Facebook leaves is like reading body language — not bunk, but only reliable if you know someone, or when there isn’t room for doubt.

At Butterflies and Wheels, Ophelia Benson complains people made assumptions about her motives on Facebook before she left this site. (‘Greta herself blocked me’, she writes, followed by the words ‘presumably’ and ‘because’.) To quote one preoccupied-sounding commenter,

Alex Gabriel spent an entire blog post of several hundred words to say, basically, ‘I can’t point to anything wrong that Ophelia has said or done, but I really think she’s up to something . . . the entire thing was composed of exactly what [Greta] is now lamenting.

That post — the one post, hitherto, in which I ever criticised Ophelia — seems to provoke similar thoughts in her. It was, she wrote in late August, ‘not a matter of disagreeing with me, [but] of sniffing out my heresy and denouncing it.’

I pointed, it turns out, to a long list of things she did that readers were interpreting — not, I thought, irrationally — as trans-antagonistic. Namely:

• Treating requests she acknowledge Julie Bindel’s public, well documented, continuing anti-trans history as demands for cultish, unquestioning belief.
• Writing ‘I’m not all that interested in the exact quantity of transphobia contained in Julie Bindel’ when commenters brought it up.
• Uncritically citing anti-trans activists ‘quite a lot’.
• Uncritically sharing an anti-trans author’s attack on the word ‘TERF’.
• Displaying more hostility to trans commenters than transphobic ones.
• Displaying no regret on misgendering a trans commenter.
• Responding to Vanity Fair’s ‘Call me Cait’ story solely by objecting to Caitlyn Jenner being told ‘You look great’ by staff at Jezebel.

Anyway.

Between the post and her comment section Ophelia says this (dashes added for readability):

Greta was vocally and explicitly happy to see the way our colleagues were trashing me on their blogs, partly on the basis of that creepy intrusive secret-police-like trawling through my Facebook. On the back channel — I think I blogged about it shortly before I left the network — Lilandra had the bright idea of starting a thread with my name in the subject line suggesting we all discuss me, so several people jumped at the opportunity to rip me to shreds. Ed said let’s not do this this is a really bad idea, but they ignored him. I said using our blogs to shred each other wasn’t a fabulous idea and I’d assumed we all knew not to do that. That’s when Greta made her brave stand for the importance of using our blogs to shred each other.

I have a few things to say about this. To begin with, I left this comment in the thread at B&W just now. (When last I checked, it was still awaiting moderation.)

Ophelia: While I couldn’t care less what you or your commenters think of me, that isn’t remotely what happened on the backchannel. If you remember, and the most charitable conclusion is that you don’t, I was the first person to reply on that thread, and the first to suggest we not argue on-list — I said ‘Let’s not do this, this is a really bad idea’ before Ed did. (Thirty-seven minutes before, to be precise.) This was six weeks after my first and last post about you, and the one time it ever came up on the back channel. The point was not controversial: no one, let alone ‘several people’, jumped at the chance to attack, either in that thread or the following one, perhaps because using the mailing list for infighting is against the site rules.

Speaking of the site rules, and things it seems you’ve forgotten, perhaps these two sentences — from the bottom of every email at FtB — ring a bell?

All emails sent to this list are confidential and private. Revealing information contained in any email sent to the list to anyone not on the list without permission of the author is strictly prohibited.

Considering you were on the site for four years, during which time numerous violations occurred, I have to assume you noticed those words. What did you imagine they meant? Did you think, for instance, that ‘confidential and private’ was a polite request? Did you spend four years thinking ‘Revealing information contained in any email sent to the list to anyone not on the list without permission of the author is strictly prohibited’ applied to everyone but you? Or did you have a recent change of heart, and decide to mark your departure the same way Thunderf00t did?

You are publicising details — erroneous, mostly, but details nonetheless — of conversations on a private mailing list. You’re doing something that’s been done for years to intimidate FtB members and make them fear for their safety. If you were still on the network (and judging by your comment above, you did this prior to leaving), this alone would be solid grounds for expulsion. When Thunderf00t did it, it led people to leave and stop writing who knew their information was at risk. Assuming there are still people here and there at FtB who you don’t want to go through that, or just that you’re a minimally decent human being: knock it off, now.

It’s one thing to leak private information from the list, another to leak misinformation. For those of us who take the rules and our own privacy seriously, this isn’t just one security breach — it’s a set of claims we can’t counter without publishing what we did say, and eroding our privacy further. I’d tell Ophelia to stay classy and get on with my life, but I believe she’s had too long to monopolise the story of what went on here, so that’s what I’m going to do. (Please note: because I actually care about this, everything reprinted from the back channel here is quoted with its author’s express agreement.)

As I mentioned, mine was the first reply when someone mentioned Ophelia having been described as transphobic. Here it is — take a breath, fetch sweet tea and a shock blanket.

Since I know there are a range of views about this on the network, I don’t know how comfortable I feel having a back channel discussion where the rest of us discuss whether one member is transphobic in-the-third-person-while-they’re-in-the-room. If Ophelia wants to talk about that on-list, I’m happy to do that (and if a thread like that is unavoidable, which, I don’t know, maybe it is by now, I hope it can be collegial), but since this argument is already all over people’s blogs, Facebook pages and Twitter feeds . . . I think you can probably find out what people think about this by checking what they’ve said online.

Since she’s already published the details of what Ed said, Ophelia isn’t lying about him saying the same; she is wrong about him saying so alone and being ignored. After he said the same as me, the following replies came in:

Just chiming in to agree with Ed and Alex.
—Miri

Agree, I don’t see this going anywhere productive in this venue.
—Zinnia

Agreed. If individuals want to discuss this in private email rather than in public, go ahead. That might be a good idea, actually. But I think it’s a bad, bad idea for this conversation to happen on the FtB backchannel. It drags everyone into it, including people who may not want to be dragged.
—Greta

Yup. This is not the place.
—Aoife

When someone started a thread with her name in the title, Ophelia claims, ‘several people jumped at the opportunity to rip me to shreds’. This is the exchange she is describing.

For the record, there were a couple of replies I haven’t reproduced, since I don’t have the authors’ permission, but neither of them differed in substance. The only one that did came from Lux Pickel, who writes at Zinnia Jones’s blog:

I’m actually interested in hearing what Ophelia has to say about it without worrying about the public audience. Would you please explain what your actual opinions are on the subject and what led you to writing, for example, the post asking why ‘trans’ as a modifier is needed if trans women are just women?

Brutal, I know.

This is what happened when Ophelia’s name came up, the only time it did come up: almost everyone, and most of us who’d criticised her, agreed it wasn’t wise to argue on the mailing list, and after some digression, the thread died. There were no weeks of turmoil on the mailing list, no one jumped at the chance to lay into her there, and both Greta and I said people should refrain from doing so.

After it was settled that that specific argument wouldn’t be rehearsed on the list, Greta did say the following about the idea of a rule against members criticising each other on their blogs, something Ophelia has since posted about having favoured.

Just as with the larger atheist community, we need to be able to criticize each other. If we have a rule that says we can’t speak out when one of us says something we think is deeply not okay, we will, in fact, have become the echo chamber we’re so often accused of being. And as with the larger atheist community, it’s much too easy for accusations of squabbling, infighting, or divisiveness to be leveled at marginalised people speaking up for themselves, or at allies speaking up for them.

That was Greta’s ‘brave stand for the importance of using our blogs to shred each other’, in which Ophelia accuses her of having been ‘vocally and explicitly happy to see the way’ people were ‘trashing’ her. Greta said nothing, explicit or not, about the criticisms I and others made, except that the back channel wasn’t the right place to hash them out — she just argued in principle, in a thread where the idea was being discussed in principle, that public squabbles shouldn’t be banned.

She wasn’t alone in saying so. The first response, immediately before Greta’s, came from Miri, and was as follows:

I’m hesitant to have rules about public ‘fighting’ because I know that no matter how clearly those rules would be written, someone would try to use them to dismiss civil public disagreement as ‘fighting’. The result would be that we would be even more afraid to criticize each other than we already are. At the same time, I also agree that some forms of public criticism are inappropriate and detract from our ability to maintain a network where everyone feels welcome (which is not the same as always feeling comfortable, by the way). So I’m not really sure what to do. I wish it were enough for us to just agree to treat each other civilly.

I added:

I tend to agree with Greta and Miri. One thing I want to mention in particular, though: personally, I tend to find public disagreements/interventions less stressful and difficult than private ones (including on this list) — because there’s more of an incentive for people not to lose their shit and shout at each other when writing public blog posts; because there’s more distance and more time to consider what to say; because having a general audience makes it more difficult for one person to be ganged up on and intimidated. (This is, I suspect, one reason marginalised groups online tend to stage arguments publicly.) Probably other reasons too. So, just on that front, I don’t think we should treat public callouts and fallouts as de facto worse than private ones — they can often be cleaner and more cathartic.

There’s a reason, in other words, why we don’t have a rule already against personal disputes on blogs, but do have one against them on the back channel.

Does this sound like several people jumping at the opportunity to trash Ophelia and rip her to shreds? Does it sound like Greta, or anyone, being vocally and explicitly happy about it? Does it sound like us ignoring a lone voice of reason saying not to do so? Three of us said it was a bad idea to ban bloggers here from squabbling publicly: all three of us had said already that the list wasn’t the place to do so.

The only person who wanted to start a fight was Ophelia. Below is an email from me, written in reply to something she said, which many of her statements since have resembled: because I don’t have her permission, I’m not going to reprint it here, but she is of course free to disclose her remarks. (I hope that if she does, she prints them verbatim as I have mine.)

Ophelia, that was not what I wrote. This was what I wrote. I stand by it: I think my post was civil and entirely fair — actually, quite charitable in hindsight — and I’m happy for it to speak for itself. In particular: my claim was not that you misgendered someone who’d told you their pronouns. It was that you’d misgendered them (accidentally, I don’t doubt) and shown no sign of apology or remorse — and that it wasn’t unreasonable for commenters to interpret that, in a wide and now wider field of other things, as trans-antagonistic. I stand by that as well. I have no desire to rehash this for the sake of it, particularly with you now leaving, but I won’t have what I said misrepresented.

For the record, one other person responded to what Ophelia said. Because I don’t have their permission and it was quite long, I’m not including that here either — again, they’ll publish it if they want to — but the tone was considerably less blunt than mine. After that, the fracas such as it was got broken up.

That’s it — that’s the entirety of the ‘shredding’ on the back channel Ophelia got, in the whole eight and a half weeks between first being criticised and leaving the network. All the above took place within twenty-four hours. I’m sure she’ll deem this post an outrageous, malicious lie, fond as she is of doing so when inconvenient things are pointed out, but I look forward to reading exactly which aspects she disputes, and how this summary is less honest than hers. (Subject to authors’ permission, I’ll happily amend this post with any quotations she thinks I need to add — meanwhile, I trust she’ll stop publishing details of private emails without it.)

Come at me, O.

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I used to think I understood rape jokes—then I moved in with someone who laughed at his own. F was young, white and angry at the world, and I met him after he advertised a room. The two of us talked for an hour or two, during which time he spoke more than I did, with the eagerness of a child desperate to make friends but unsure how. Like me F was addicted to TV: the fourth season of Game of Thrones had been the best, I said, except one character being raped despite her pleas and attempts to break free. ‘Come on,’ he said, all jocular. ‘She deserves it.’

It didn’t take my flatmate’s views long to become clear. His favourite authors included Charles Bukowski, who he told me ‘treated women like shit’ (there was no ‘but’), and I once spied Russell Brand’s Booky Wook on his table. My last landlady, he declared, had been a ‘nasty fucking dry old cunt’, and our female flatmate (a ‘silly little girl’) was acting ‘like a total bitch’ when they fell out. He hadn’t had a problem coming onto her—‘I only let girls move in because I want to fuck them,’ F told me once. He was a misogynist, he agreed, but felt he treated his women well.

I took the room looking on the bright side. The flat was comfy, the location neat, the prospect of searching elsewhere uninviting, and F’s response hadn’t been bad when I mentioned I blogged on a feminist site. Living with him wouldn’t, I thought, be the end of the world, and for me it wasn’t. Still, there were doubts. F laughed about his excitement when women online had rape fantasies, not quite sounding as if he knew where fantasy ended. Was rape so bad, he asked another time, quickly assuring me he was kidding. I’m not certain he’d have said so had I shaken my head.

I don’t know if I lived with a rapist, or someone who’d have liked to be. None of these incidents proves anything, but what if that was the idea? Was F, I wonder now, scoping me out the way queer kids scope out their mum and dad, as I’d scoped him out with mention of feminists? Did he laugh about rape because it amused him, or because what might be a joke is always plausibly deniable, like a sexual advance veiled as an invitation for coffee? One’s instinct is to award the benefit of the doubt, but maybe that’s the point.

* * *

Online we’re asked to be charitable: to look on the bright side, argue graciously and assume the best. Most days I see the case for assuming good faith: most days, when trying to say what I mean, I can pay folk the courtesy of acting as if they mean what they say. (Taking sincerity as read even when one has doubts seems both good manners and a good tactic, because attempting to read minds implies the owners can expect you to.) I respect the benefit of the doubt, but remembering F makes me wonder—can we ever be overgenerous?

‘Addressing the best form of the other person’s argument even if it’s not the one they present’ has advocates. Steelmanning, as Chana Messinger describes, is good for road testing one’s own beliefs, but in close combat I’m less keen. If I’m out to change someone’s mind, I want to answer what they’ve said. One person’s steel is another’s straw: if your idea of the best case for someone’s stance differs from theirs, they might see weaknesses in it you don’t. Conversely, if they could argue better, you risk attacking an argument they don’t understand.

What happens when it’s a person we doubt? Atheist rock stars’ fans can be relied on to call critics uncharitable, obsessed with smear campaigns and witch hunts, denying other perspectives are even competent or sincere: I liked Dawkins too once, but stopped being able to assume the best when it meant thinking thousands of people were lying or mad. One can’t, it seems, be equally generous to both sides, and people’s track records make a good tiebreaker. Eventually my flatmate’s comments about rape did stop, perhaps because he could see my faith in him wearing thin.

What if the very appeal for charity is cause to withhold it? Where doubt exists, people who deserve generosity rarely rely on it, nailing their colours to the mast instead and making what they think clear. Those who evade, equivocate and require others to assume the best sometimes sow doubt for their own benefit: F asked me to believe his daydreams of torturing women were a joke, yet never offered any reason to, sheltering in uncertainty. Without a means of dispelling the fog, I wonder what charity might have forced me to ignore.

The post The Doubt: What I Learned From Rape Jokes, And When I Wonder If It’s Foolish To Assume The Best appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

When Lindsay Lohan is declared homecoming queen in Tina Fey’s Mean Girls – a film about how beauty standards, inter alia, tear women down – she uses her speech to tell all her classmates they look nice. Jessica Lopez, who uses a wheelchair, has an amazing dress; plus-size Emma Gerber must have spent hours on her hair; Regina George, queen bee before a bus hit her, is wearing her neck brace like a rock star.

If complimenting women’s looks on dressed-up occasions is sexism, a patronising well done for being acceptable, Fey suggests it can also be a gesture of solidarity, acknowledging the girls’ efforts to navigate beauty-policing’s impossible demands. (The ‘plastics’, it turns out, are more afraid than anyone.) When Lohan tells her peers they all look like royalty, breaking her tiara and dividing the pieces equally, it’s a statement of affirmation and sorority. I see you, big girls, butch girls, girls on meds. I see the best-and-worst-dressed culture and the pressure and the fear and how you’ve handled them. Here’s to us all for surviving.

With all the surgery, beauty treatments and airbrushing her millions can buy, Jenner certainly meets standards of gendered beauty few trans women can; it’s also true that lauding her for being pretty rather than brave displays a wide array of bigotries, and that trans activists may just have better goals than inroads with the GOP. Meeting an expectation, though, doesn’t make it less smothering. If feminist media is complimenting Jenner, my guess is that the aim might be to put someone agonisingly self-aware at ease, letting the anxious nerd at the spring fling know she looks nice when she arrives: not ‘You look great’ as in ‘Well done’, but as in ‘Don’t let them say otherwise.’

When friends without Jenner’s advantages have transitioned, changing their profile pictures to female-presenting photos, I’ve seen whole threads of you-look-great comments – hell, I’ve left them. Those threads don’t feel reductive or objectifying – they feel like moral support for women whose beauty is policed with singular violence, who are making their way as best they can, seeking affirmation. (In that use of selfies, they’re not alone.)

There are mathletes who are too rad for prom, who deny their lives need be a dress-up event and refuse point blank to care how they look. More power to them – but the go-fuck-yourself approach is not widely accessible. It comes with judgement, harassment and violence of its own – violence Regina George inflicts, do-it-to-Julia style, so as to escape it herself, enough of which the world’s Beckies and Jessicas – ill, fat, black, trans – face as it is. Would not telling women like them and Caitlyn Jenner they looked nice do much to help?

If tomorrow, compliments based on looks vanished from human speech – if the words ‘You look great’ went unspoken, transition photos uncommented on and laboriously crafted outfits and hairdos pointedly ignored – would it end beauty standards’ tyranny, or just strip those hardest hit of a means by which to cope? People deemed beautiful would still be seen and see themselves as such; people able to live with being unbeautiful would survive; but mathletes at the world’s spring flings, outsiders without the option of staying away, would get no piece of Lindsay Lohan’s crown. Beauty culture’s slave labour would go on, but would become thankless as well as forced, with those who failed to measure up harassed and those who succeeded invisible.

I’d rather try and resist that culture by offering support to all those invested in how they look, however they look – Lohanning, if you will – than forcing indifference on everyone. The dynamics of the latter approach are unignorable: when transgender Jenner managed to be deemed beautiful, some commentators responded exclusively by insisting she not be informed she looked nice; when Beyoncé managed the same while black, critics accused her of betraying women; when Laverne Cox managed the same as a black trans woman, her naked form (unlike Lena Dunham’s) was blamed for not ending sexism. Are compliments just off-limits to women who aren’t cisgender and white?

It doesn’t feel reductive to me to tell Caitlyn Jenner you look forward to seeing more of her. It feels reductive to call a twenty-two page profile by a Pulitzer-winning journalist a glamour shoot simply because in it – as well as speaking, one presumes, on no end of subjects – Jenner, known for her religious and political views, poses in fashion photographs. It feels reductive to assume that, on her first appearance presenting as female, ‘You look great’ could mean nothing but ‘You seem fuckable enough.’ And it feels reductive to insist that, since women ought not be judged by their appearance, trans women get no chance to feel good about theirs.

The post Caitlyn Jenner is a mathlete at prom appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

Someone on Twitter accused me a couple of months back of ‘ridiculous pomo ramblings’. (Given there are days when I’m not ridiculous, this felt unfair.) Because they’re part of the don’t-call-us-TERFs brigade and I’m a troll, a bit of shade proved irresistible.

Natalie Reed, formerly of this blog network, tweeted me back, and we got to talking – on science, philosophy, atheists and the left. In light of recent arguments, our conversation’s been back on my mind, so I’ve transcribed it, lightly edited, below. I’m reminded why Natalie, having been driven out, is such a loss to the secular scene.

* * *

You know, I’m starting to think pomo is a slur.

— Alex Gabriel (@AlexGabriel) March 15, 2015

NR: People certainly use it as one. Mostly people who have absolutely no idea what postmodernism actually is or means. I think they think of it as just, like, hyperrelativism and Damien Hirst aesthetics.

AG: It strikes me as a tad ironic how the most radical quotes from people like Irigaray and Harding, totally decontextualised, are used by dudebros to go ‘Stupid mad women! Science! Yurrrr!’

That’s another really odd thing – how ‘postmodern’ has gradually come to be a sort of dog whistle for ‘feminine’ or female intellectual achievement, or the invalidation or belittling thereof – ‘women’s thought’ being dismissed as ‘just pomo’ and so on. And then that gets into how femininity and women and postmodern thought alike are both contextualised as weak, artificial, overly fussy, impractical, unrealistic – in contrast to the ‘natural’ and ‘pragmatic’ and ‘realist’ and ‘scientific’ hard-choices-that-have-to-be-made [image] of men, masculinity and not-pomo.

PZ Myers was booked to speak somewhere and there were comments saying ‘He believes in postmodernist concepts like patriarchy!’

Hahaha – that is epic. Also also: the idea the entirety of the humanities and social sciences are ‘postmodern’. The humanities and social sciences are contextualised as ‘women’s fields’ or feminine courses of study, not as ‘robust’ and ‘strong’ and ‘hard’ and ‘rigorous’ and – well, you see my point – as the hard sciences: the rock hard, thrusting, throbbing sciences, penetrating the dark, moist recesses of empirical truth. And of course the fact that the demographics in the humanities really do have stronger representation of women.

You’re sailing perilously close to CALLING NEWTON’S PRINCIPIA A RAPE MANUAL!

WESTERN SCIENCE RAPED THE FEMININE DIVINE OF OTHER WAYS OF KNOWING!

Haha.

The thing that really bothers me is how many people think the proper response to the chauvinistic invalidation of that which isn’t ‘hard science’ is to do the whole western-thought-versus-other-ways-of-knowing [shtick], which is just further playing on the same intellectual field – further contextualising women, people of colour, queers and so on as apart from reason and science – and continues contextualising science and reason and thought and truth as the domain of white cishet men. And I’m like, no – fuck that. Human brains are human brains, we all have those same potentials for reason, intuition etc.

I end up being thought of as a racist imperialistic western aggressor or whatever by a lot of people due to being atheist and believing in the value and validity of science, while at the same time I’m utterly despised as a pomo crazy-trans-lady SJW by the world of atheism and skepticism and science, with my soft squishy humanities brain, undoubtedly incapable of thinking of anything outside of extreme relativism. It’s very frustrating.

This is what pisses me off the most – there’s so much actual woo in outlooks like Irigaray’s that has nothing to do with postmodernism.

Yeah, exactly. And postmodernism isn’t new age. It’s actually very very much opposed to that kind of mentality.

A lot of my secular writing is about building a discourse between two binary outlooks – I feel like that on bashing religion. I and others spend so much time trying to build a responsible, informed, non-down-punching antitheist rhetoric, only for simpering faitheists and dudebro fuckheads alike to piss all over it.

Right? And then all that work doesn’t matter, because the theistic people who are being bashed by the fuckheads end up simply assuming any and all atheists are like that, and of a proselytising, arrogant, imperialistic ‘We need to save everyone from themselves!’ standpoint, and so it becomes impossible to even openly identify as atheist in a lot of socially progressive spaces without being immediately contextualised as aggressive, imperialistic etc. I mostly feel obliged nowadays to never talk about my atheism.

Boy do I feel that.

Which really really sucks. And it’s because if I do, people think of Dawkins, and then think that because I’m a strong atheist, I must therefore have that certain approach.

What makes it worse for me is that ninety percent of others in those spaces are more-or-less atheists, but – wait – my atheism actually matters to me? Vicious and unacceptable!

Yeah, totally. But a lot of them have so internalised the notion atheist equals Dawkbro that they won’t even say to themselves that yes, they are indeed atheists, and do indeed think there are no such things as literal deities. What troubles me is that, like, it’s something that absolutely should matter to people. Religion is a big deal, y’know?

And it really does have very significant social impact. But I think most social progressives have ended up scared to allow it to matter to them because they’ve never even seen a version of strong atheism that wasn’t this ugly, aggressive, patronising white-cishet-bro thing. And it’s next to impossible for those of us who aren’t that to be able to successfully model such an atheism. For most people, there’s no framework for allowing their atheism to be meaningful at the same time as remaining conscientious about issues of imperialism, relative cultural power or the role of religion for marginalised groups.

It is possible to believe religion is a dangerous thing, and that theist-literalists are indeed wrong, while also acknowledging that religion can be a positive thing, not wanting to go around trying to forcefully ‘educate’ or convert people, being mindful of the nuanced relationship between science, enlightenment and colonialism, not thinking theists are ‘stupid’ or somehow intellectually lesser, not thinking religion is the sole locus of oppression and not thinking being an atheist makes you a less oppressive, more enlightened, smarter or otherwise better class of person. But such possibilities just don’t exist in the discourse as is.

Related posts:

• ‘Marx and the meaning of godlessness: a radical atheist’s response to Kris Nelson’
• ‘Another response to Kris Nelson – guest post by Amber Adamson’

The post “I feel obliged to never talk about my atheism”: Natalie Reed on science, postmodernism and the left appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

I’m sorry today’s atheist movement has inspired abuse.

Specifically, I’m sorry some of its ideas inspire abuse. To name a few things:

• I’m sorry atheists harass and aggressively malign complete strangers online because they think every religious individual personally and equally to blame for religious atrocities – or think all believers mentally ill or intellectually impaired.
• I’m sorry they think calling believers mentally ill or intellectually impaired is a fair tactic and stigmatise disability as a result, in particular with words like ‘crazy’, ‘retarded’ and ‘delusional’.
• I’m sorry atheists join the anti-immigrant far right because they think Muslims are wicked, animal or ‘barbaric’ by nature. I’m sorry atheists defend racist intimidation because they think religious groups can’t be marginalised.
• I’m sorry atheists degrade and dehumanise cisgender women because they think they’re biologically less capable of thought. I’m sorry atheists with ideas based on evolutionary psychology attack feminists.
• I’m sorry atheists with uncritical science-worshipping views harass and misgender transgender people because they they think sex and gender are empirical realities.

I don’t feel personally responsible for these things – I’m not sorry in the same way as when I step on someone’s foot or guess a Canadian’s from the US – but I’m sorry it’s the case today’s atheist movement has inspired them. Simply being atheists isn’t these people’s motivation – atheism by itself prompts no more action than theism by itself – but the particular atheist school of thought we share, which came to prominence roughly in the last ten years, produced the ideas that inspire this abuse just as particular religions produce their own.

Beyond the absence of a god, it has plenty of distinctive ideas – ideas about education, childrearing, the workings of a nation state, science’s primacy, faith’s undesirability, matter’s relationship with consciousness, the absence of an afterlife, the world’s explicability in naturalistic terms, the injustice of religious practises, the treatment of women and LGBT people – the list goes on. And the beliefs above that make some atheists abusive – about believers’ mental or moral status, the barbarity of the ‘Islamic world’, the invalidity of all religious claims to victimhood, the all-explaining role of evolution and biology as pure unconstructed truth? These are distinctly New Atheist ideas, identifiable in that movement’s rhetoric from the late 2000s to now.

Not all New Atheists accept these particular ideas – not even most. I don’t. I’d argue they’re not just nonessential to New Atheism but complete misapplications of its main values – complete failures at reason, inquiry, vigour, skepticism, scrutiny and fairness. But my view of how New Atheism’s philosophy is best applied holds no more authority than anyone else’s, and in any case: even if nonessential, even if the ideas of a minority, the thoughts that inspire the actions above emerge from the perpetrators’ engagement with ‘movement atheism’ in its current form. Quite often they say so themselves, and without it we’ve no reason to think they’d act as they do, whatever other factors are in play.

Again then: I’m sorry this is the case. Beside a multitude of things I celebrate, today’s atheist movement has inspired abuse – and while I hope those parts of it come to be marginal, they remain black marks on its record.

Having acknowledged this, then.

Next time religious aggression or abuse comes up – like oh say, I don’t know, religiously motivated Christian harassment of queer people to give a completely random example – there are a few things I don’t want to hear.

I don’t want to hear not all Christians are queerphobic. That changes nothing: those who are still cite identifiably Christian beliefs as motivation, just as New Atheism’s abusive minority cite recognisably New Atheist ideas.

I don’t want to hear queerphobic Christians have strayed from ‘true’ Christianity, which loves and defends queer people. Unless you’re the Pope – actually, even if you’re the Pope – you’re no more an authority on what ‘true’ Christianity entails than I am on the ‘true’ way to practise skepticism. Queerphobia may, in your view, be un-Christian in a theological sense (just as anti-Muslim racism is unskeptical in mine), but forms of it are recognisably Christian in anthropological terms (just as a clash-of-civilisations narrative is recognisably New Atheist).

And I don’t want to hear alternative, counterfactual explanations for Christian queerphobia that ignore the perpetrators’ self-ascribed motives and their distinctive Christian provenance – any more than I’d tell you abusive New Atheists aren’t really motivated by the ideas about science, religion and secularism they say they are. We can speculate all day about how people might behave if worldviews didn’t exist and what else in life may have influenced them, but there’s no reason to assume they’d do the same without the religion or atheist school of thought in whose name they act. As a given motive, either is usually sufficiently explanatory.

When Christian queerphobia comes up, I don’t want to hear you defend Christianity – I want to hear you defend me, just as when New Atheist abuse comes up, I’ll tell you I’m sorry it goes on instead of rush to clear my movement’s name. (Rinse and repeat for other transgressions.)

‘I’m sorry it’s the case my religion/atheist school of thought inspires this behaviour. It’s wholly counter to my interpretation, but that changes nothing in the real world, and I hope it can be combatted.’

Notice this acknowledgement doesn’t imply your worldview is a) false or b) a net ill. It’s possible to think Christianity (or any religion) is true while also acknowledging it inspires bad things – and also to think it inspires enough good ones to outweigh them. (This is, quite possibly, where we part ways.) It’s possible to think New Atheism’s core ideas are right, acknowledging nonetheless that it inspires abuse – and also think it inspires more good than harm. (Hmm hmm.) With history, we do this as it is: we acknowledge the Enlightenment produced a freer, more secular public sphere while also legitimising racism – or that churches broadened access to education while also entrenching regressive sexual morals.

Time now to do so with our own worldviews. The fruits of religions and atheist schools of thought in the real world include aggression and abuse as much as whatever happy achievements they claim – if we want to get on or improve how our teams play, we have to own up to this instead of sidestepping it.

I’m sorry today’s atheist movement has inspired abuse. Are you sorry your religion has?

The post I’m sorry today’s atheist movement has inspired abuse. Are you sorry your religion has? appeared first on Godlessness In Theory.

If like me you watch Doctor Who, you may have seen last night’s episode ‘Dark Water’, which revealed who series eight’s villain Missy (above) is. Actually, it revealed her back story – it was clear who she was the moment photos of Michelle Gomez in character emerged.

Missy, as fans have guessed all series, is River Song: a feisty, morally ambiguous adventuress and femme fatale with a murky past who flirts with everything and controls men through sexuality, boasting a hands-on relationship with the Doctor.

In this sense, of course, Missy and River are both Tasha Lem.

And Tasha Lem – with the Doctor in lieu of Sherlock Holmes – is Irene Adler.

As of her most recent appearance, transformed into a pistol-toting, sex-on-the-brain siren since Steven Moffat can’t write actual women, Mary Morstan is the same character.

You might think to include Madame Kovarian here, who’s a close cousin of River and especially Missy, but in fact she’s a slightly different Moffat trope: the executive, a middle aged woman with no first name whose villainy is tied to her professional veneer.

Particularly in Kovarian’s guise, the executive still often appears dominatrix-like due to her seniority – lipstick, nail varnish, formfitting black business suit and (usually) skirt – but has no sexual relationship with the male hero, being a powerful woman in the workplace, thus colder and ‘bitchier’ than the adventuress: in other words, a ‘ball-breaker’. Generally she’s also less action-oriented, commanding soldiers rather than aiming a gun.

The executive’s earliest incarnation in Moffat’s work is probably Ms Utterson, leader of shady company Klein & Utterson in Jekyll (2007):

Ms Utterson; Madame Kovarian. If you’re sensing a theme, it continues with Miss Kizlet in ‘The Bells of Saint John’.

Miss Kizlet, for her part, regenerated into Ms Delphox for recent episode ‘Time Heist’.

Though her episode ‘The Great Game’ wasn’t Moffat-scripted, it’s notable another such woman – gallery owner Miss Wenceslas – appears in the first series of Sherlock.

Ms Utterson, Miss Wenceslas, Madame Kovarian, Miss Kizlet, Ms Delphox – Missy. An argument could be made Gomez’s character is more executive than adventuress (her sinister organisation 3W certainly supports this), but her flirting with Peter Capaldi’s Doctor and willingness to murder in person leave her closer overall to River than anyone else.

River Song starts life, of course, as Melody Pond – a girl who encounters the Doctor as a prepubescent child, becomes obsessed with him, develops adult romantic feelings for him and ends up part companion, part love interest to the detriment of her own life.

She shares all this with Reinette Poisson, also known as Madame de Pompadour…

…with her mother Amelia Pond…

…and with Amy’s successor in the TARDIS Clara Oswald, as established in the prequel webisode to ‘The Bells of Saint John’.

Moving swiftly on because the less said the better…

Another of Jekyll‘s women, psychiatrist Kathryn Reimer, is a lab coat wearing scientific assistant to the series’ hero whose competence and knowledge are undermined by her fangirl crush on him.

Yes.

Yes.

To be fair, Jekyll does feature Meera Syal and Fenella Woolgar as a crimefighting interracial lesbian detective couple.

Oh.

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