Every damn conversation we’ve had over the past several years in our respective atheist/skeptic communities that even approaches the topic of feminism, or discusses women in any way, seems to attract the sort of person in our communities who demands that we prove that feminism — the idea that women are human beings and should be treated with basic human dignity — is skeptical. Who evidently believes that the natural overlap between skepticism and feminism is insufficient for the topic to be broached. That the feminists in the skepticism community are not turning a skeptical eye to their dogmatically held beliefs that women shouldn’t be systematically mistreated or disadvantaged by any social structure that we humans have built.
This is, to put it bluntly, bullshit. To put it less bluntly, it is a category error.
Asking “is feminism skeptical” is identical to “are ninjas awesome”.
Bear with me. I have a point. Yes, many ninjas, in fiction and in reality, are awesome. Some ninjas are not, though — they exist merely as cannon fodder for the good guys in a piece of fiction. They are nameless set-piece drones designed to prove how awesome the main character is. Many fictional ninjas are given magical powers that don’t exist in the real world, and many ninjas are cast as evil murderers out for blood and mayhem. There are ninjas who will move in silence and infiltrate the enemy base unseen, and there are ninjas who will totally pull a full-frontal assault where they uppercut people and make their heads explode while a wicked guitar riff squeals in the background. There are also, like in Mock The Movie: Laser Mission, ninjas who inexplicably turn up in a garden and are killed seconds after being introduced. And I’m certain the Venn diagram of all real-life ninjas, and all awesome people, probably overlap to a significant degree. But then, there are many real-life people who practice ninjutsu who are simply incapable of effecting any change in this world.
Likewise, there are some feminists who come by their feminist ideals dogmatically, who advocate for social change that would not actually fix the disparities endemic in our system. There are some feminists who are feminists because they believe in egalitarianism and they see the pendulum swung too far toward patriarchy at the moment. There are probably even some feminists who, yes, hate men. (I’ve never met one personally, but I hear that’s what all of us are, so maybe there really is one somewhere.)
Does that mean every feminist is dogmatic? Or egalitarian? Or misandrist? Of course not. Like ninjas, feminists are a diverse group. They are tied together by one common thread — the practice of ninjutsu, or the belief that women are worthy of basic human dignity, respectively. Whether you’re skeptical or not is in fact a separate question. Just like one can be an atheist without being skeptical (think Bill Maher), or a skeptic without being atheist (Pamela Gay springs to mind), one can be a skeptic without being a feminist or vice-versa. And one can, most certainly, be all three of these things — feminist, atheist and skeptic.
The people who are asking “is feminism skeptical” are not, in fact, asking whether or not feminism itself is skeptical, they are asking whether being a feminist is compatible with being a skeptic. Given the vast number of people who claim both, I’d say so.
I’d even go so far as to claim that if you’re anti-feminist, if you like the gender roles or the patriarchal society we live in just fine, or if you just want people to shut up about how women are oppressed, you are in fact evincing an unskeptical attitude in your unwillingness to examine your personal cognitive biases.
Yeah, that’s right, that’s what I said. Soak it in. It’s more skeptical to be a feminist than it is to act contra feminism.
Just like the Scumbag r/atheism meme image I included at the top of this post, evincing skepticism about whether or not women should be treated as fully human beings, is actually a terrible display of overwrought skepticism of the sort that leads to denialist hyper-skepticism. If we present evidence of ways that society — squishy and soft a science though it is — is actually creating a chilly climate for women, and we offer ways to improve society so those effects don’t happen any longer, the correct route is to question the evidence we present, and after interrogating that evidence to your satisfaction, accepting it. Being a skeptic involves actually accepting evidence when it is presented, not denying that evidence on specious grounds because it does not say what you want it to say.
We go through the identical procedure when someone shows us evidence for Bigfoot — they give us grainy footage of a guy in an ape suit, we’re going to say that’s insufficient, bring us something with a bit more meat. But if they bring us a corpse, or a live Bigfoot, or even a whole family, that should be sufficient evidence to accept that Bigfoot is real.
When someone shows you a study that women are asking for raises but not getting them, you don’t go on to repeat the trope that women aren’t asking for raises as often as men — that sort of assertion not only lies about the problem, but it creates a second problem in placing the blame on the victims of the misogynist behaviour.
When pointed to behaviours that disadvantage women disproportionately, you don’t balk at the use of the word misogynist — that sort of objection ignores the grievous crime against women, acting as though the crime of poor language (if it is even poor language) supercedes or is more important than the misogynist behaviour at hand.
When shown behaviours that are damaging to women, acting like your objections to the side points are more important than the objections to the behaviour itself is demonstrably unskeptical. Sometimes, pulling out the side concerns and discussing them is warranted (and usually more productive if done in isolation from the main concerns), but often, when taking the microphone on a topic for which someone has opened their private property to the public as a forum is seen — and rightly so — as derailing tactics, as a way to get everyone to stop talking about the really bad thing that the host really wanted to discuss. Derailment is unskeptical — it is avoiding the original topic because you, personally, and your personal biases, couldn’t handle that topic to begin with.
Or let’s say you’re assuming that the gender roles as enculturated into you by society are just fine and don’t need to change, that they can’t possibly be causing any of the problems we face in society where men are expected to be breadwinners and warriors and women are expected to be homemakers and baby factories; that boys like blue and girls like pink; that boys can play with LEGO and the regular plain old minifigs and girls need minifigs that look like dolls and LEGO blocks that are pastel colored. Those ideas are implanted into your psyche through long years of enculturation. If a feminist challenges these ideas, it is grossly unskeptical to not hear hir out. And it’s especially unskeptical to, rather than hearing hir out and examining the evidence for yourself, merely suggest that they have not done so then call it a day. Your work is not complete by merely calling someone unskeptical. If it was, we wouldn’t have a skeptics movement.
I don’t even need to get into how unskeptical it is to march into a conversation with a person who self-identifies by a single label and assume that they must, de facto, believe any number of things outside of the core tenet of that philosophy. To walk up to any feminist on Freethought Blogs and assume you must be talking to a clone of Andrea Dworkin is probably on par with marching up to a random theist and assuming they believe in the Abrahamic god and transsubstantiation and the inerrancy of the King James version of the Bible. You don’t know any of those things from the single fact that they believe there is one or more divine entities in this cosmos. You don’t know that we share any of Dworkin’s beliefs by our self-identification as feminists. You don’t know that we share all of, say, Christopher Hitchens’ ideals by knowing that we’re atheists. You don’t know that we share all of, say, DJ Grothe’s perspective, or priorities, by knowing that we’re skeptics.
You don’t know terribly much, in point of fact, about any person by looking at only one label with which they self-identify. Taking those labels in aggregate, you can find out a lot more about them. Knowing that a person is feminist means you know they are more likely to believe certain things, but does not mean you know for certain that they do. If you’re confused about this, try asking us. It’s the surest way to learn whether a given feminist is skeptical or not.
Don’t try this with ninjas though. If you happen to offend one of the awesome ones, you might get your head exploded by a super ninja uppercut.
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Your argument boils down to “members of group A have historically been more widely recognized and awarded for their scientific and intellectual contributions to society than group B, therefore group A contains more geniuses than group B”, and if someone has to explain to you why that’s a bad argument, it won’t be me because I value my time.
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What the fuck ever. I’m sorry you went out of your way to collect articles before I even showed up just for me to read somehow, and you don’t understand those other words I never wrote that you’ve been misrepresenting, but the content in your communications with ME sounded a hell of a lot like what I wrote above, so when you get done being speechless at how pitifully stupid the mere mortal that stands before you is, would you kindly explain how that is NOT the argument you made to me?
There’s a significant difference between these two statements, actually. Instances of patriarchy under-representing women are abundant both historically and can be confirmed with study even today. On the other hand, there has never been any evidence of a god or gods, while there is ample evidence against most gods.
The difference is that in the first statement, one is asking you to prove something that demonstrably existed and still exists does not influence a situation which is by our current understanding of the facts definitely influenced. The burden of proof is on you, in this case, because you are making an outstanding claim. In the latter case you are being asked to disprove something that has no evidence for it in the first place (and is further defined as being able to exist without leaving evidence, besides). The burden of proof is not on you because the other person is the one making the outstanding claim.
I thought for a moment that your cries of “I’m getting thrown into spam really often” were some sort of preemptive climbing up onto a cross, then I looked in spam and sure enough you are actually landing in there for some reason. I suspect a big part of it is that you morph your email address, your IP, or your name, but never all three at once, but keep saying the same sort of stuff. I don’t think Akismet (the cloud-based software that automatically protects most WordPress blogs) likes that behaviour. Nor do I, frankly, but I can kind of understand why you might start to feel like we’re “all out to get you”. Especially given your repeated disregard for other people being fully-realized human beings with differing levels of engagement with your proffered reading materials.
So I started reading some of the literature you linked. I also went on to research the general literature on creativity. And you know what I found that was particularly interesting? That Eysenck’s critics generally criticized him on his definition of creativity being pretty close to useless (where a neuro-atypical person could produce word salad in a free association and be deemed “creative” where someone else who actually comes up with real but novel associations would be deemed less so). Apparently this is something worth checking out, if you happen to have access to a library (I don’t at the moment). Sternberg apparently gives better and more useful definitions for creativity.
Sternberg, R. J. (1999). The theory of successful intelligence. Review of General Psychology, 3, 292-316.
I also found some interesting correlations between these other, better definitions of creativity, and depression: http://www.disabled-world.com/artman/publish/article_1717.shtml
And depression has, historically, been more a problem for women than men.
Therefore, am I arguing women are more likely to be creative? In fact, I say there’s still insufficient data! More than your hypothesis of creativity and psychosis, predicated as it is on outdated models of creativity, but there you have it.
[Chris] #55
Yes, you probably should.
I read the book excerpt you gave in #51. It was full of terms like “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator” and “J-P index” which are just meaningless noises to non-psychologists. I have no objection to jargon being used by professionals writing for other professionals, but you shouldn’t expect non-professionals to understand the jargon.
I’m still wondering why this:
was thought to be relevant by the poster, other than as a shoehorn in which to shit out a bunch of links he’d had waiting for the chance to show all those uppity bitches who told him off.
First of all, that’s playing pretty fast and loose with relationships. Even if psychoticism leads to genius, that in no way means genius is limited to psychotics.
Secondly, who actually said either of these? A feminist is supposed to prefer one statement over the other? And if one feminist were to agree with either, what does that say about feminism? Say whatever you like in response to this asshole, Jason, you’re one datapoint. Surely, Mr. I’ll Bury You in Links can understand what that means.
Thirdly, asshole, have you considered that you’re not being told off because you merely disagree, but because you’re a fucking asshole? (Excuse yourself by calling yourself ‘blunt’ if that’s your preferred delusion.) What good is genius if you’re no more able to read the writing on the wall than those you excoriate?
But, now that you’re running out of links to spam and are now resorting to whining about mistreatment at the hands of the feminist Stasi, I see others are noticing your errors:
Surely he won’t, because that was the entire point of my original post, Brownian.
(Everything else you say, FTW.)
“What can I say? Tiny little minds can be found everywhere.”
Hey, I found one!
Seriously, what you are doing is classic derailing, tuning out…now.
Don’t try this with ninjas though. If you happen to offend one of the awesome ones, you might get your head exploded by a super ninja uppercut.
Feminists are armed with the sharp and shiny shiruken of feminist lingo!
[…] Thibeault recently wrote a great article on feminism and skepticism (here). This article, although it is directly not written in support or criticism of his article, is cut […]
Loved this excellent post, Jason.
Many thanks to Marshall and Brownian for adding spirited comments.
I check your blog every day, Jason!
Let me play around a bit with these two lines:
Let’s try:
or:
But it’s easy to do:
-Take a data-point (fossil record goes from simple and small to complex and bigger)
-Come up with an explenation you like (It’s all animals running from Noah’s Flood)
-Ignore all the research done on the subject so far (evolution)
-Bingo!
Aww, it looks like he left. Obviously since we don’t agree with HIS brilliant interpretation of the data, we’re ‘Free From Thought’.
Not because he’s wrong.
There is no burden of proof on me to prove a negative.
So you’re saying denialists NEVER have any burden of proof? Sorry, but that’s just pure transparently self-serving bullshit. If you wish to deny a theory or assertion that’s backed up by large amounts of documented observation and experience (like, oh I dunno, “women tend to face serious discrimination in most human societies”), then yes, you DO have a duty to provide some countarvailing evidence.
Also, I notice this obnoxious pahllocrat spent lots of time bloviating about various subjects, with generous helpings of bluster and name-calling, but then refused to spend any time just re-pasting a one-paragraph definition of the word “psycoticism,” even though that word is crucial to the thesis he’s trying to support. That says a lot about his argument style, his command of the facts, and his honesty.
Andwhile I wouldn’t call him “sociopathic,” he’s certainly quite obnoxious, self-important, thin-skinned, and dead-set on belittling women and pretending he can’t see any real unfairness against them. I can see why he gets banned from at least some blogs.
Stevarious@67: just to be perfectly clear, in case someone suggests it, I did not throw him into moderation, he’s simply disappeared now that he’s not just arguing against a guy who was unable to immediately spend the half hour it took to find other literature that disassembled his argument.
I’d still love to know what he thinks of the women > depression > genius link. Or that I’m not endorsing it as “probably true” the way he did with Eysenck’s theories from 1993 which have since been superceded.
Absolutely. And then:
I am certainly NOT trying to be willfully ignorant. Why would I want to? So I did a little looking around, and it seems (and once again, I could be missing something) Eysenck only proposed a CORRELATION between psychoticism and creativity, NOT a causal link. So even if I then simply ASSUME for the sake of argument that there IS a correlation, and that psychoticism IS more prevalent in men than in women, that alone does not in any way indicate that we should find more geniuses among men than women. Considering that the only other evidence he seems to want to present that men are more likely to be geniuses than women is that more men have been lauded as geniuses throughout history than women, I think my reformulation of his argument is pretty damn accurate. But if I’m wrong, I would like to know. I will admit I am not a professional, and I’ll also say that I’m a bit new to all of this, having been educated primarily through fundamentalist Christian homeschooling, so if I’m incorrectly reformulating his argument I WOULD like to know, and I’d certainly appreciate any insight I could gain from the crowd here about this. But clearly [Chris] is still completely fucking speechless that I would DARE to reformulate the argument in that way, and instead of helping me to understand the case he so desperately wants to make (which I’m almost convinced now is just him trying to find a way to make it okay to be an asshole to people) he has decided instead just to huff and puff about how clearly stupid I am. So really, if I’m making a mistake here, can someone please point me in the right direction? Because THIS:
Is, as far as I can tell, equivalent to:
In any event, HI GUYS. I like this crowd. I think I’ll stick around.
Well, I imagine since it doesn’t match up with the supporting arguments for his presupposition, “Men are smarter than women”, that he doesn’t have an opinion on it at all.
It’s enough for him that to observe that men are more historically remembered as being smarter than women. To him, the best reason (and the only one worth seriously considering) is the one that he already believes.
Never mind (warning – incoming personal anecdote!) several times back when I used to work in Corporate America, I would see female coworkers pitch good ideas that would be ignored, and then male coworkers pitch the exact same idea, word for word, and be praised for their cleverness and insight!
Never mind (departing personal anecdote country) that several Nobel Prizes have been given to men for the work of their female coworkers/partners/assistants, and some women who did win were not even given permanent, paid positions until AFTER they had won the prize! (See Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne for an excellent treatment of this subject.)
Is it because men are actually smarter? Or has their been, historically, an intense pressure upon women, geniuses or no, to shut up, sit down, and let the MEN get on with it? Inquiring minds want to know! ([Chris] does not – his mind is not inquiring on this subject, only seeking confirmation for his bias.)
The ‘mistake’ he was pointing at is simply that you seemed to be presenting that as his ONLY argument, when in fact it was one of two arguments he was presenting (the other argument being that men = more likely to be crazy, crazy = likely to be genius, therefore men = more likely to be genius).
The two arguments don’t actually support each other, so I don’t really consider it a mistake to discount one in refuting the other. But HE did, and he actually considered the other argument to be more persuasive, thus the hysterics. He was upset you weren’t even addressing his (what he thought to be) more cogent primary argument in your (perfectly accurate) dissection of his secondary argument.
At least, that’s how I saw the exchange.
Welcome to the party!
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BULLSHIT.
You made very specific claims and very specific arguments, and when people pointed out that there might be things you aren’t taking into consideration you started playing martyr instead of addressing the substance of your opponents’ objections. If you want to deny that there has been (and in many cases continues to be) significant bias against women in academic arenas you are free to do that, but don’t then go on to accuse people of being willfully ignorant unless you WANT to be seen as a hypocrite. All you’ve done here is make two arguments, one of which is fundamentally flawed, and one that you’re doing a piss poor job of linking to your premise that more men are geniuses than women.
Your citations, in an easily readable form, since it’s the sort of thing that someone with an “expertise” in this research instead of a cherry-picked list of studies really ought to know: http://www.personalityresearch.org/papers/porzio.html
Note not only the criticisms of Eysenck’s measure of creativity, but also criticism of psychoticism as a construct. Additionally, other measures of creativity don’t reproduce the same link to psychoticism. So you can go ahead and say, “extensively replicated,” but if you don’t acknowledge all of these problems, you’re either incredibly new to the field yourself or appallingly dishonest. Personally, I’m going with new, since you had to abandon your pomo/critical theory line on feminism after someone bothered to argue it out with you.
Also, you’re a linguistics student (or were), so get off your high horse.
I can assume my conclusions too, you know. I just think it’s a bad idea.
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NOBODY IS ARGUING THAT IT WOULD. Show how you get from this:
Women exhibit lower levels of psychoticism (and are therefore less likely to be creative)
To:
Most geniuses are men
And then link that to your argument that it’s a historical fact that most geniuses are men because more men have been lauded for genius than women.
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EVEN IF THAT’S TRUE, and I certainly don’t think that you’ve thoroughly shown that psychoticism (which, as others have pointed out, is a trait that has received criticism from peers, and since I don’t know enough about the subject to say whether or not that criticism is founded I’m going to put that term right in the ‘not enough information’ file) is a NECESSARY ingredient in creative genius, why are you assuming that there are not other contributing factors that play a role in a person’s level of creativity, and that when you take those factors into consideration it paints a different picture?
Would you EVER want to get around to addressing the other argument you’ve made? Because you seem to be avoiding it, and if you’re going to do that, I’d prefer that you concede the point so that we can move past it. But to be perfectly honest, I’m hesitant to even continue this, because you didn’t come here to have a rational discussion and present evidence for a claim you want us to consider. You came here with an agenda. You came here to smack down all the stupid feminists. You came here so you could flaunt your immensely mighty and bewildering powerful brain. You came here to insult and deride people that you perceive as inferior to you. That is the only conclusion I can draw from the way you have conducted yourself, which is to say that you have acted like a self aggrandizing jackass. As evidence of this, I submit the following:
How highly you must think of yourself. How kind of you to step out of the palace and walk with the common rabble to dispense to us your wisdom.
I’m not surprised you’ve been called an asshole. Frankly, I’m not surprised you’ve been called sociopathic, but I will leave it up to you to make your own diagnosis, because this poor ignorant peasant surely does not possess your assuredly gargantuan understanding of the literature regarding sociopathy.
Yeah, I think it’s about time I recognize a fight not worth fighting. $10,000 says your next comment calls this an ad hominem, entirely missing the fucking point.
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(This post included some especially tasty libel against the owner of this blog!)
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I’m sorry, you screamed at me about ad hominems because I suggested that people probably banned you because you were acting extraordinarily antisocially, and then you went off on me with a huge rant containing an absurd number of ad hominems in the real sense of the word by telling everyone that my argument was wrong because I’m an idiot. And/or by suggesting that I’m claiming expertise that I have never claimed.
Additionally, you’ve got such a huge axe to grind against Freethought Blogs because you’re this asshole who decided to show his extreme distaste for Pharyngula by spamming the fuck out of it with German lyrics, causing PZ to change his commenting policy to stop you from abusing them.
Sure you’re not a linguistics student, Chris: [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster – university page showing Chris’ full name, with user-supplied information including the email address used to spam PZ Myers] Better tell your college.
We haven’t told you “there are…problems.” I’ve told you that the validity of psychoticism as a construct is questionable. If you’ve managed not to come across that information in your deep, deep research that truly wasn’t all done in the last week or so, I can tell you why as well. Jason has told you that the measures of creativity used by Eysenck haven’t been validated and that more valid measures produce different results when studied. Those are serious problems with this theory, and all of the “Ooh, somebody else said something positive” doesn’t change those.
Nor does throwing citations around willy-nilly add to your apparent expertise on this subject. So you know what Janet Davidson and Robert Sternberg had to say about Eysenck. That makes you actually dishonest about the implications for women and your statement that “psychoticism is a necessary ingredient in creative genius.” Here is the very next sentence in that book:
Moreover, the research by Kaufman that was cited in this book is research in writers in which female poets were found to be significantly more likely to suffer from mental illness than male poets.
Hmm. Interesting. Especially considering it’s called “The Sylvia Plath Effect”. I wonder if one of the mental illnesses covered was, oh, say… depression?
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Let me get this straight.
You are [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster — refers to information Chris freely gave in this thread], and post from [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster – IP referenced in the post Chris supplied]. Under that nym, you used the email address [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster – email address used in that post]. Under that exact IP/email address combination, you spammed the hell out of Pharyngula under the name of Chris (among other names). You also posted under that email address here, calling yourself Chris [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster – poster’s last name, part of an email address used elsewhere], and in Stephanie’s link in the University of [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster] directory. You additionally posted at Stephanie’s with the email address [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster — from the aforementioned university]. And you posted this [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster – refers to the psychosis Chris described himself as having] under that name.
But you’re not Chris [Removed after legal threats sent by the poster]? Very well, mistaken identity. You’re probably not Horsa or Wotan either, are you?
Chris[Removed after legal threats sent by the poster]@98: have you considered that perhaps you are endorsing a statistical link between green jelly beans and acne by imagining that the entire field of psychology has been mostly static since Eysenck and that nobody might have built on his work since?