Content notice for mentions of sexual assault, racism, and torture.
This post is short and sad and there is no optimistic spin at the end, though I have provided a kitten with a pretty cool nose that you can scroll past all the text to see.
You have been warned.
Continue reading “Torture & Eugenics (& a Self-Care Kitten)”
Remember when Sam Harris said a misogynistic thing and doubled-down on it by talking about how he has a wife, a mother, and a female editor whose contributions to his work he highly values? Most white liberal atheists saw that for what it was and mocked him. It’s the “I have a black friend” argument.
Reza Aslan did a version of that yesterday regarding #AnApostatesExperience, the hashtag we at EXMNA started.
I guess folks doing #AnApostatesExperience think that I – a Sufi scholar of comp religions married to a Christian – have a problem w them
— Reza Aslan (@rezaaslan) October 14, 2014
Continue reading “#AnApostatesExperience: A Plea to Reconsider Your Love for Reza Aslan”
In conversations regarding Sam Harris on a recent post, it was brought to my attention that Harris is collaborating with a noted Muslim reformer, Maajid Nawaz, on a forthcoming e-book. This, along with Harris’s statements that he does not think all Muslims are terrorists, was used to claim that I was misrepresenting Harris’s views.
When I said that “Maher and Harris would have you believe that violent “jihadists” à la ISIS / ISIL / IS / [insert other initialism permutation of your choice here] represent all Muslims”, I was referring back, in the case of Harris, to his paper trail regarding Islam. All the protesting that he doesn’t think all Muslims are like that doesn’t eliminate his history of writing about Muslims and Islam.
Continue reading “Sam Harris Might Be Changing His Tune on Islam”
I’ll mince no words here: the premise contained in the title of Sam Harris’s response to #EstrogenVibe (you can easily find his piece if you want to read it) doesn’t offend me — it disgusts me to my core. As it’s on his personal site, the title can’t be blamed on a clickbait-hungry editor or website, either. He defensively chose to claim that atheist feminists like me are constantly and eagerly looking for a sexist pig to chide.
Speaking personally, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
Continue reading “An Ex-Muslim’s Quest for Pigs (Hold the Sexism)”
Sam Harris said something… well, interesting is a word.
There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically [sic] male and more attractive to guys than to women,” he said. “The atheist variable just has this – it doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.”
Of course, as soon as some of us took to the Intertubes to call people’s attention to its wildly gender essentialist nature, others took to our corners of the Intertubes to tell us that we were wrong. Nothing sexist or misogynist — I’m sorry, “misogynistic” — about it.
The pedant who so bravely corrected me on my misuse of “misogynist” for “misogynistic” very misandrically asserted that the statement made sense because men are naturally more violent than women. Furthermore, he cited the term “evolutionary psychology” but provided no citations. Since neither assertion is very credible, how could such a blatantly generalizing statement be neither sexist nor misogynistic? It seems to blame hormones for a lack of participation by women in a community in the grand tradition of hysteria.
I think I have a theory: sex toys.
Continue reading “Sam Harris: Misogynistic or #EstrogenVibe Entrepreneur?”
