My Life for the past year...
Source
I've talked about this a bit, but things are getting really ugly in skeptical circles. After a year of talking, arguing and decrying misogyny in atheist circles, I thought we were staring to make headway. Jen McCreight talked about harassment at skeptical events--harassment that is ignored, or minimized or goes unreported because many events don't have a clear sexual harassment policy. Many smart women (and men) began to sketch out what such policies would look like, and work with convention organizers to put them into place. The president of a major skeptical organization came out and said that attendance by women was way down. Who to blame? Why the women writing about harassment at conventions, of course. It couldn't be the harassment itself keeping women away! Nope--must be those pesky women, trying to drum up page hits by blogging about it.
What is most infuriating about DJ Grothe's idiotic assertion is that it comes after a year of heated debate about the place of women in the atheist and skeptical communities--a year in which we have seen prominent speakers threatened with rape, violence, even death. And now, many of these same speakers--whom DJ called out by name--are being threatened again and have had to pull out of speaking at TAM. (I won't even go into DJ's other assertion--that there have been no incidence of harassment at TAM, because its been so widely and soundly refuted. I need only say that DJ's tenure as president of the JREF has been an embarrassment and I truly hope that this latest fracas leads to his resignation.)
This all comes down to a fight for the soul of the skeptical movement. On the one hand, we have the old guard--the Big Foot debunkers, the debaters of Creationists, and the Roswell-deniers. These are almost all men, many libertarian, many who deny that a problem exists. Their attitude is that women should just deal with it, and that complaining = being a feminazi, man-hating bitch. On the other, you have the crowd that is mostly at Freethought Blogs--ardently anti-theist and interested in social justice and humanism. What we want is more than just to poke at Creationists, fundies and the credulous. We think that a legitimate non-theist ethical movement is vital to real change. We are dedicated to the idea that atheism isn't just about denying the existence of gods, but about sharing certain philosophical values and about trying to bring about a better world through education, challenge and debate.
What this fight comes down to, in my mind, is a fight between conflicting ideologies. The libertarian or conservative status quo, and the humanist opposition. It really is about people who believe that their first duty is to society, and people who believe that their first duty is to themselves. And with 20% of people under 30 now claiming to be non-theist in the US, this fight is important. It's important to me that my side wins because I am leaving this world to my daughter and to her children. I can't, in good conscience, bow out of this fight.
But being part of it has been so, so painful.
It pains me to see women I know posting about threats they've received. It pains me to see the same, tired arguments trotted out time and again, all 'But what about teh menz?!?!' It pains me that it is sometimes women that makes these arguments, that some of us have internalized misogyny to such an extent that we will defend it's existence in the hope of being called a Chill Girl. It pains me to see friends triggered by these arguments; by rape-apologizers, by rape-denialists, by rape-wishers. It is immensely frustrating because I naively believes that the secular community would be better than the fundamentalist bubble I grew up in. But no--the justifications are different, but the denials are the same.
So, I'm tired and I'm frustrated.
But I'm also hopeful. There are lots of great people fighting this battle beside me. Lots of really great people, saying really profound things. I'm proud to cyber-know them. I'm proud to be a part of a pivotal time in the (hopefully much longer) history of skepticism.