Let’s play harassment bingo

Time for some more crowdsourcing. Here’s my first bunch of squares for a harassment bingo card. Need a minimum of 24. I have 16.

Y u no name names?
Witch-hunts
Taliban
“hysterical” / “histrionic”
“feminazi”
Leave it to the cops
A policy would ruin our convention
Mistaking TAM for the entire community
“Leave DJ alone!”
Too ugly to be harassed
“dogmatic feminism”
“rumors” / “innuendo”
Denialism that harassment happens
mistaking “not a safe space” for “unsafe”
A pox on both houses!
“you’re being tribalistic”

The free square will be “10+ CONVENTIONS HAVE POLICIES IN PLACE”. Because that’s our current state of affairs.

Ideas?

Let’s play harassment bingo
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Animated film asks why we’re developing tar sands at cost of First Nations and environment

A short animated film by Franke James asks what Harper’s really afraid of. I think this is just one possible answer of many, and it certainly doesn’t help either our country or our planet.

Am I a radical too, then, for posting this?

Animated film asks why we’re developing tar sands at cost of First Nations and environment

Safe

There’s yet another misapprehension about language in the present ongoing discussion about sexism and harassment in our respective communities lately. I say yet another because they seem to comprise vast majority of the most jarring moments in these conversations — when people don’t understand one word or another, and fight for days about whether this parsing or another is more correct.

The entirety of the “witch-hunt” trolling that the pro-harassment-policies folks have endured stems from some misapprehension that the informal “watch out for this guy” network that Jen brought up in the original incident meant that there was actually a written list and that we were planning on trying to make conventions blackball these folks based on “rumors and innuendo”.

The “Taliban” accusations with regard to “dress codes” could be attributable to a perfectly honest misunderstanding about whether or not the proposed sample policy from the Geek Feminism wiki meant by the so-called “no booth babes” clauses. Of course, one would have to be quite charitable to presume the specific people initiating that meme had an honest misunderstanding, since they’ve done so much for so long to fight against the idea of feminism intersecting the skeptical or atheist movements. But one could attribute the meme’s spread to legitimate misunderstandings from people who weren’t skeptical enough to check the source materials and took the words of those authoritative voices.

And then there’s “safe spaces”.

Even DJ Grothe got that one wrong. Which, frankly, surprises the living hell out of me.
Continue reading “Safe”

Safe

An unidirectional “conversation” with an MRA on Google+

Wanted to throw this on the blog for a few days now, but it’s been… busy. Over at Google+, it seems the only people who engage with my linking back to various websites are the MRAs and antifeminists who probably make up the majority of the early-adopters of the technology.

I had posted a link to Chris Clarke’s thoughts on the latest skeptical sexism imbroglio, and the only answers I got were from one guy who was entirely disinterested in engaging with the points I attempted to make in a pithy, I-don’t-have-time-for-fisking-this kind of way.

Seriously, it’s a hell of a gish gallop. You should see it.
Continue reading “An unidirectional “conversation” with an MRA on Google+”

An unidirectional “conversation” with an MRA on Google+

The FtB Conversation about TAM: Transcript Pt. 1

Here’s the first half hour of the transcript for the big FtB Conversation from yesterday, done once again by the indefatiguable Kate Donovan. She’s the poor soul who did the transcript for the “PenisGate Debate”, who volunteered for this as I guess a sort of palate-cleanser.

If you’re just joining in, read these two posts first:

In Medias Res: how to find the plot if you’re just tuning in
The harassment policy campaign timeline

Transcript below the fold. Part two as soon as she’s done.
Continue reading “The FtB Conversation about TAM: Transcript Pt. 1”

The FtB Conversation about TAM: Transcript Pt. 1

FtB and Rebecca Watson want TAM to succeed

A Google+ Hangout with ten of us uppity feminists whose irresponsible messaging have been destroying the secular movement. The takeaway is that we want TAM and the secular movement to improve. We want us all to be better.

I’ll tell you the truth, I was nervous the entire time. If I’m chattery or stupid, I’m sorry.

The harassment policy campaign timeline
In Medias Res: how to find the plot if you’re just tuning in

Same video on Pharyngula.

FtB and Rebecca Watson want TAM to succeed

New Yorker does profile on Bryan Fischer. He then LOSES. HIS. SHIT.

Via Right Wing Watch, apparently The New Yorker did a huge in-depth profile on Bryan Fischer after his successful campaign against an openly-gay Romney staffer.

Fischer was clearly excited by the national attention. On his next show, he said, “They went to look for somebody to talk about Governor Romney’s homosexual hire, where did they come? They came to AFR talk network!”

He began a long disquisition about homosexuals, and suggested that they were more prone to domestic violence than straight people. He then denied, as he does routinely, that H.I.V. causes AIDS, calling it a “harmless passenger virus.” It’s a theory derived from Peter Duesberg, a professor of molecular and cell biology at Berkeley, who has been widely criticized. Duesberg has been a guest on Fischer’s program. (Fischer told me, “He has a seven-hundred-page book—I read that thing through from the beginning to the end of it, and was persuaded.”)

Fischer returned to a favorite theme: that homosexual behavior is “always, always, always a matter of choice.” He told his listeners that a scientific study had shown the concordance of homosexuality between identical twins to be only six per cent. “If one of them is gay and it’s genetically caused, the other one ought to be gay one hundred per cent of the time!” he said.

Fischer cites such evidence with ease; he has impressive recall for everything from Bible quotations to academic articles. Yet he draws his information almost exclusively from like-minded sources, and ignores contrary statistics.

Doesn’t sound particularly uncharitable to me, given how the article goes on to list contradicting evidence pointing to heritability of sexuality. How does Fischer respond, though?
Continue reading “New Yorker does profile on Bryan Fischer. He then LOSES. HIS. SHIT.”

New Yorker does profile on Bryan Fischer. He then LOSES. HIS. SHIT.

The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse

Commenter Pteryxx observed on the guest post by Jacqueline S. Homan a few days ago that there were a total of four identified targets of misogynist sentiment in the original guest post and my in-line observation, and that they could therefore be the four horsewomen of the feminist skeptical apocalypse. Of course, there are much more than four women on the forefront of this fourth-wave feminism, even if you restrict yourself to the secular/atheist movements — there were at least eight identified in those comments at last count, and I could probably rattle off a half dozen more.

The comment thread did what comment threads do, and it eventually became a list of feminist women in the secular movement, and which My Little Pony character they’d be riding into battle astride.

Then embertine decided to draw them.
Continue reading “The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse”

The Horsewomen of the Feminist Apocalypse

From the mouths of babes: “He-Man has more power than Jesus!”

It must have been a bumper time to be an evangelical Christian in the 80s, what with all the occultic cartoons tearing young children violently from the Bible and corrupting their innocent brains. With things like He-Man.

While I admit He-Man and She-Ra are horrid examples of reinforcing traditional gender roles in kids, and mediocre Hannah Barbara animation to boot, they certainly aren’t responsible for tearing me away from Jesus. No, I give full credit to a tag-team combination of Voltron and Mega Man.
Continue reading “From the mouths of babes: “He-Man has more power than Jesus!””

From the mouths of babes: “He-Man has more power than Jesus!”

Obama Boy: I sense this is going to backfire.

Remember the “I’ve got a crush on Obama” meme that happened in 2008? The one that arguably helped win a bit of the youth vote? There’s evidently a new variation on that meme for the 2012 election cycle: a guy who has a similar “crush” on Obama.

Considering the very legitimate grievances gays have with Obama’s wishy-washy and states-rights-y stance on gay marriage, regardless of the fact that it is an incremental improvement over previous slavering homophobes in office, I can see this being very ill received by the gay community. It also doesn’t help that the guy doing the singing is apparently straight, and thinks this comportment he’s acting (what with the butt-jiggling and all) is representative of the gay experience. I suppose it MIGHT be, for some individual gay person, but I’m betting someone’s going to take issue with this representation.

I don’t know. I’m seeing this from the hetero-privileged perspective, and I don’t think it’s in any way affiliated with the official campaign in the same sense that the Obama Girl video wasn’t, so I think it might win a few votes and might tweak the noses of the aforementioned slavering homophobe party, but I can see this backfiring otherwise and in a very big and real way by earning outrage and LOSING more votes than was gained. What do you folks think?

Obama Boy: I sense this is going to backfire.