Rebeccae Consilium de Coitu!
"Rebeccae Consilium de Coitu!"
"Rebecca's Sex Advice!"
I love it:
Ha ha, look at the clueless comments!
I know sarcasm when I see it!
But here is a comment that I have been wanting to make about that Elevatorgate business. I was hoping that I would not say anything else about it, but I feel compelled to added to more than what I have already said.
If I were a woman, this mess would have made two things perfectly clear to me: First, the sort of welcome that I would receive, if I were interested in taking part of this skeptic-atheist movement, is one that includes the expectation of my having to "rationally justify" any kind of creep-out instinct that I might have, lest I be summarily dismissed as one "overreacting." Second, the fear of being seen as sexist is so visceral, and the semantic scope of the word sexism has been narrowed so much, that the distinction between being called a sexist and being a feminist who nevertheless has been shown to have made remarks that display sexism fades to the point where the latter is tantamount to the former.
Because, you know, only sexist people say sexist things, and since people in are movement are feminists, clearly what they say is not sexist! And if it is, clearly these people are really sexist!
But that is not how it works in the real world. This point is what I was trying to get at with my previous post on the subject. There is this apparent inability to distinguish between being called a sexist (or whatever) and being called out on account of one's sexism. Even the most conscientious feminist can fall into saying or doing things that contain an element of sexism. It is hard not do this when we are living with the andronormativity (like heteronormativity, but pertaining to men instead of heterosexuals) of our world. It is embedded in our language and our various ways of expression (e.g. "sissy," "sugar and spice and all things nice," "the weaker sex," and so on). What a feminist should not do is take another's criticism of using sexist language as meaning that the later is calling the former a sexist.
And yet people in our movement are doing just that. Hemant, for instance, says that Amanda Marcotte called him a "sexist paternalist, and even put those two words in quotation marks, when in fact Amanda said that Hemant's previous post displayed "Sexist paternalism." One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference, but as Cliff Walker points out:
When you say that I said (or labeled people) something, and then place that something within quotation marks, you indicate your intent to quote me. If what is enclosed within those quotation marks is not something that I have said, you have attributed that quotation to me falsely. I am not making this up: this is how English works.
Yes, that is how English works. This is not so much an issue of knowing how to format text as it is a conflation of syntactic relationships between a person who is and a person who happens to be doing something. Honestly, this is not any better than Ray Comfort's idiotic, "Have you ever told a lie? Yes? So what does that make you, then?" argument. A pathological liar is not "just as bad" as a person who tells a white lie every now and then.
Somehow, the word sexism, as I mentioned above, has been abused in such a way that it is thought only to apply to Really Bad Sexism In Which No Self-Respecting Freethinker Could Possibly Be Engaged, and should be reserved for people who are practitioners of female genital excision in Those Backward, God-Forsaken (ha ha!) Countries. This is much like how the word racist has become a general insult reserved for Nazis and KKK members. In either case, the semantic narrowing serves the same function: to pull a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy on such words, by trying to use them only for True Sexism or True Racism, such that sexism or racism is exhibited only by sexists and racists. And consequently, with the narrowing of definition, it is easier to gloss over apparently mundane acts of sex-derived abuse and intolerance. It makes it hard for us to see any kind of sexism or racism that we happen to exhibit from time to time. It makes it so that any accusations of racism or sexism is nothing but an attempt to label the person as a racist or sexist, one who is "just as bad" as the Nazis, the KKK members, the rapists, and all of the other applicable individuals associated with the narrowing of the words. And it becomes easier to feel righteous in calling Rebecca Watson a misandrist and Richard Dawkins a misogynist.
The response to that abuse of the word racist is the same as that of the abuse of the word sexist: No, we cannot afford to use words like this, as it gives us an excuse not to look at any problems that we may have with this issue. And when someone calls us out on comments that happen to exhibit racism and sexism, that should not be an invitation to take it as a personal insult.
One more thing: Here we were, priding ourselves -- falling over ourselves, even -- with the delusion that we were some sort of post-feminist movement, one whose only apparent problem was to appear more welcoming to women. And then this Elevatorgate happened, showing us all that we are not even there yet, not by a long shot, because the andronormativity is so deeply ingrained that we seem unable even to be more welcoming to women in the first place. It is difficult to "move on to more important things" until we have dealt with this important thing.
"Rebecca's Sex Advice!"
I love it:
Click to viewHa ha, look at the clueless comments!
I know sarcasm when I see it!
But here is a comment that I have been wanting to make about that Elevatorgate business. I was hoping that I would not say anything else about it, but I feel compelled to added to more than what I have already said.
If I were a woman, this mess would have made two things perfectly clear to me: First, the sort of welcome that I would receive, if I were interested in taking part of this skeptic-atheist movement, is one that includes the expectation of my having to "rationally justify" any kind of creep-out instinct that I might have, lest I be summarily dismissed as one "overreacting." Second, the fear of being seen as sexist is so visceral, and the semantic scope of the word sexism has been narrowed so much, that the distinction between being called a sexist and being a feminist who nevertheless has been shown to have made remarks that display sexism fades to the point where the latter is tantamount to the former.
Because, you know, only sexist people say sexist things, and since people in are movement are feminists, clearly what they say is not sexist! And if it is, clearly these people are really sexist!
But that is not how it works in the real world. This point is what I was trying to get at with my previous post on the subject. There is this apparent inability to distinguish between being called a sexist (or whatever) and being called out on account of one's sexism. Even the most conscientious feminist can fall into saying or doing things that contain an element of sexism. It is hard not do this when we are living with the andronormativity (like heteronormativity, but pertaining to men instead of heterosexuals) of our world. It is embedded in our language and our various ways of expression (e.g. "sissy," "sugar and spice and all things nice," "the weaker sex," and so on). What a feminist should not do is take another's criticism of using sexist language as meaning that the later is calling the former a sexist.
And yet people in our movement are doing just that. Hemant, for instance, says that Amanda Marcotte called him a "sexist paternalist, and even put those two words in quotation marks, when in fact Amanda said that Hemant's previous post displayed "Sexist paternalism." One could argue that this is a distinction without a difference, but as Cliff Walker points out:
When you say that I said (or labeled people) something, and then place that something within quotation marks, you indicate your intent to quote me. If what is enclosed within those quotation marks is not something that I have said, you have attributed that quotation to me falsely. I am not making this up: this is how English works.
Yes, that is how English works. This is not so much an issue of knowing how to format text as it is a conflation of syntactic relationships between a person who is and a person who happens to be doing something. Honestly, this is not any better than Ray Comfort's idiotic, "Have you ever told a lie? Yes? So what does that make you, then?" argument. A pathological liar is not "just as bad" as a person who tells a white lie every now and then.
Somehow, the word sexism, as I mentioned above, has been abused in such a way that it is thought only to apply to Really Bad Sexism In Which No Self-Respecting Freethinker Could Possibly Be Engaged, and should be reserved for people who are practitioners of female genital excision in Those Backward, God-Forsaken (ha ha!) Countries. This is much like how the word racist has become a general insult reserved for Nazis and KKK members. In either case, the semantic narrowing serves the same function: to pull a kind of No True Scotsman fallacy on such words, by trying to use them only for True Sexism or True Racism, such that sexism or racism is exhibited only by sexists and racists. And consequently, with the narrowing of definition, it is easier to gloss over apparently mundane acts of sex-derived abuse and intolerance. It makes it hard for us to see any kind of sexism or racism that we happen to exhibit from time to time. It makes it so that any accusations of racism or sexism is nothing but an attempt to label the person as a racist or sexist, one who is "just as bad" as the Nazis, the KKK members, the rapists, and all of the other applicable individuals associated with the narrowing of the words. And it becomes easier to feel righteous in calling Rebecca Watson a misandrist and Richard Dawkins a misogynist.
The response to that abuse of the word racist is the same as that of the abuse of the word sexist: No, we cannot afford to use words like this, as it gives us an excuse not to look at any problems that we may have with this issue. And when someone calls us out on comments that happen to exhibit racism and sexism, that should not be an invitation to take it as a personal insult.
One more thing: Here we were, priding ourselves -- falling over ourselves, even -- with the delusion that we were some sort of post-feminist movement, one whose only apparent problem was to appear more welcoming to women. And then this Elevatorgate happened, showing us all that we are not even there yet, not by a long shot, because the andronormativity is so deeply ingrained that we seem unable even to be more welcoming to women in the first place. It is difficult to "move on to more important things" until we have dealt with this important thing.