#40 Misconception: Women are asking for special treatment.

Women are not asking for special treatment when they ask you to stop doing sexist things that discourage them from participating in the skeptical community. Nope. Yet people accuse them of asking for special treatment all the time, which is unfair because it is not what they are doing. What is happening is that they are being singled out for special treatment, and they don’t like it, and they want the special treatment to stop.

Here are some (very broad) examples of the special treatment that women get when they participate in the skeptical community that men do not get:
1. Strangers put their hands on them.
2. They get interrupted.
3. Their ideas are ignored.
4. Their physical appearance is commented on.
5. They are propositioned–directly and indirectly–for sex.
6. Their gender is used as an insult.
7. They are personally attacked instead of being disagreed with.

Here are some (equally broad) examples of the regular treatment women would like when they participate in the skeptical community:
1. For strangers to keep their hands off of them.
2. To be allowed to speak all the way through until they’ve completed a thought.
3. To have their ideas considered without some guy having to repeat what they just said and get credit for it.
4. To have their ideas and contributions commented on instead of their appearances.
5. To not be propositioned–directly or indirectly–for sex outside of social environments, and then not by complete strangers.
6. To not have their gender flung around as an insult to them or to other people.
7. To have intellectual disagreements stay intellectual.

Women being singled out for special treatment is so pervasive that it just feels like regular treatment, but it’s only “regular” treatment for women. Generally men don’t treat each other like this (not even homosexual men in intellectual environments, when they might be interesting in dating some of the other men there). They refrain from the engaging with men in the kinds of behaviors that marginalize women’s ideas when women appear in spaces dominated by men. And because it’s mostly men in the skeptical community, that restraint is actually the regular behavior, and that kind of behavior allows people to be respected for their abilities, instead of relegating some people to (sexual) support positions.

When women ask that men stop engaging in the behaviors that marginalize their ideas, all they are asking for is that men interact with them the same way that they interact with each other. That’s it. Honestly, people should be grateful for this. The way men go on and on about how women want special favors and are asking for all this extra stuff and it’s just so many things to keep track of and it just makes skepticism that much harder to perform is kind of a mess of their own making. By cultivating a set of behaviors they pull out only when women are around they are making skepticism more complicated and trickier because they’ve got all the regular behaviors to keep track of on top of these special behaviors they use for women. By eliminating the special behaviors they’d have only one set of social rules to have to remember, and everyone can concentrate harder on accomplishing the goals of the skeptical movement. Wouldn’t that be nice?

Of course, if you want very much to keep women from fully participating because you really, really like those special behaviors you get to engage in around them, like touching strange women and reserving the right to ask them for sex at any time–and that may be important to you–you ought to fight for those privileges with the right arguments. Come up with a reason for why it helps skepticism to maintain two standards of behavior within the movement instead of whining about how women want special treatment when they actually want no special treatment. It would be a better demonstration of your rational faculties and critical thinking skills and would make you look like a better skeptic. Better person, though? Maybe not.

#39 Misconception: Protesting sexism is divisive.

“We don’t like the sexist behavior and aren’t going to accept it silently anymore,” women in the skeptical movement say.

“They kind of have a point,” some guys in the skeptical movement say.

“Women are dividing the community by stirring up this trouble!” other guys in the movement say. “There’s all this fighting! And now we’re splintered! And we’ll never ever be able to do those important skeptical things because who’s going to listen to a bunch of skeptics who can’t even get along! You’re hurting the movement!” they add, and more words to that effect.

But they are wrong.

When women (the minority group) speak up about ill-treatment they’ve received from the dominant group (men), it stirs up all kinds of trouble, for all kinds of reasons (which I’ve addressed a few times already, like here and here). Heated discussions erupt, and true feelings are revealed, and yes, when emotions are expressed and judgments passed, a group loses a certain level of comfort that had been taken for granted. (Well, the dominant members of the group were comfortable before and now aren’t, anyway.) And because it’s women who, by speaking up, undermined this sense of comfort–the illusion that it was all OK for everyone and everybody was just fine until certain people when looking for trouble–it’s women who get blamed for the conflict that appears.

This is called “being divisive.” Calling it that is a mistake. An actual misuse of the word “divisive” kind of mistake.

Women are not, by protesting sexism and not ignoring it anymore, being divisive. Women are, by protesting sexism and not ignoring it anymore, revealing a divisiveness that was already present. Women were already separated from full participation in the community because of the effects of sexism, and nobody in the dominant group was noticing or doing anything about. Not protesting sexism and just ignoring it is divisive, because that reinforces the divisions between the dominant and the minority group. This divisiveness could go on forever if nobody speaks up. Fortunately, women speak up and begin the process of erasing the divisions.

By protesting sexism and not ignoring it, women are being inclusive. They are identifying the forces that hinder them from fully participating in the skeptical movement, and they are suggesting strategies to remove those barriers, in order to better reach all available intellectual resources and improve the community’s public reputation. They are doing everyone a favor. Arguing about it, or fighting back against women, or declaring that you will continue to behave as you’ve always behaved and they can suck it up or get out supports the division that is already in place. That is what “being divisive” really looks like.

If you are really worried about a divided community, listen to women’s explanations of how they have been kept away from the skeptical movement and then change how you behave toward them so they feel more included.

#38 Boycotts are perfectly rational responses to sexism.

You hear a lot about boycotts in the (online at least) skeptical community lately, particularly when a woman suggests that she’s hit her limit for –insert behavior– and will no longer be participating in some aspect of the community. People do not like to think about boycotts, and usually react badly, blaming the woman for even daring broach the topic and acting as if a boycott was a disproportionate response to whatever upset her.

We can go backwards through time for a few examples of what I’m talking about:

In a January 9  post on Greta Christina’s blog, “Two Questions for DJ Grothe,” DJ Grothe leaves a comment contrasting boycotts with “reasoned arguments” and associating them with “public punishment and public shaming.” He also says a few paragraphs later that boycotts hamper the skeptical community from flourishing. (Christina had said she would no longer attend The Amazing Meeting except as a speaker, and the crowd picked up “boycott” from there.)

In a July 5, 2011 post on Skepchick, “The Privilege Delusion,” Rebecca Watson made the remark that she would no longer be purchasing books by Richard Dawkins. She clarified later that she did not call for a boycott of Dawkins’s works after  comments on that post criticized her for calling for a boycott, using words like, “the latest in a series of overreactions by everyone involved in this elevator incident,” “boycott is the exact opposite of skeptic,” “boycott Dawkins for being insensitive to you or the concerns of female atheists, seems really hypocritical,”  and “boycotts seek to do harm to someone,” “please don’t boycott it’s the same as letting the bastards win,” and other things.

In Ancient History, I once got into an Internet Argument with someone about a group of women protesting a beer company that had portrayed a woman being burned at the stake on a beer label. My Internet Opponent called the protests “emotional blackmail” which was “demonizing the brewery” in an attempt to “control without a rational argument.”

So how does all this relate to more women in skepticism?

Vilifying boycotts when women suggest them–or something like them–is a silencing tactic that suggests women’s opinions aren’t worth considering, and that you prefer women tolerate what bothers them for your benefit instead of taking action against it. Boycotts by skeptics are all fine and good when it’s a television show with a sponsor that promotes creationism, or a celebrity speaking against vaccines, or a company with anti-gay policies, it seems, but when women make the decision to stop supporting institutions or people that offend them–institutions or people you may love (TAM, Richard Dawkins, beer), the entire concept of boycott becomes distasteful, irrational, divisive, or offensive itself.

What’s funny about this is that boycotts are a perfectly rational solution to a problem. What’s behind them is a simple cost-benefit analysis: What does it cost me to hear crap like this? women ask themselves. What will I gain from pulling my support? In the case of a beer company, if you are a highly offended Wiccan who dislikes seeing the execution of a comely witch in front of a bunch of men used to sell beer, it’s worth it to you to speak out against the company that made the product. Enough of you do it, and the beer company might face real financial losses if they don’t change the label. If you are a woman who dislikes the way DJ Grothe handles women’s concerns, it’s worth it to you to skip events that he oversees. If you are a woman who as been personally attacked by Richard Dawkins, you may reasonably decide that your money is better spent elsewhere than helping him maintain his wealth. And if you are such a woman with these or similar issues, you speak out to other people because, well, people like to talk and if it’s a subject that is important to you, so that makes it worth discussing.

Subjects that are important to women are worth discussing, even if they have the potential to cause an author to lose money, a conference to lose attendees, or a beer company to sell fewer bottles, because women are just as important as the men who host conferences, write books, and engage in commerce. It is as acceptable for women to speak out against these things as it is for non-prof leaders, authors, and beer brewers to speak their minds, too. Just because you love the events, authors, and beers that the women are criticizing does not mean that the women should shut up. They don’t owe you their silence to help you feel better about products you want to consume. Suggesting that women calling for boycotts is a problem reveals that you only care about women so long as they don’t get in your way. And women who think that you only care about them so long as they don’t get between you and your events, authors, and beer are not going to waste their time with you or the skeptical community in general.

What kills me about the protests of women protesting is that boycotts are a perfectly rational response to a perceived injustice. Women identify a problem, and announce a solution. The pain caused by the problem is greater than the pain caused by avoiding the source of the problem. These are straightforward calculations and easy decisions to understand. When you accuse them of behaving irrationally or abusively by calling for a boycott, you are the one being irrational and/or abusive. Also, when boycotts and protests work, and events create things like Codes of Conduct or manufacturers pull offensive products from their shelves, it makes no sense to get mad at the women for making a protest in the first place. If you are mad at anyone, you should be mad at the people who conceded to their demands. If an event you love changes to appease a bunch of women who threatened to not attend if their demands were not meant, all that means is that the event coordinators valued their point of view over yours. And if your point of view was unknown to them because you failed to organize and speak up and insist that you would boycott the event if they did not preserve the status quo, then you have only yourself to blame.

If women are going out of their way to spend extra time protesting something and organizing a boycott, it’s probably because they feel very, very strongly about it; maybe you should consider that something has really gone awry instead of trying to shame them into taking no action. Besides, boycotts are a time-honored tradition of getting shit done. (Montgomery bus boycotts, anyone?) It’s a course of action with a proven track record and evidence to support the decision–nothing opposite of skepticism about it. If women have found flaws in something that you love, you should probably spend more time listening to their point of view than lambasting them for it if you want more women to join the skeptical community. And if something that you love within the skeptical community is causing enough pain to so many people that they agree to take a group action like a boycott, it’s not the boycotters who are being divisive or hampering the skeptical movement from flourishing. You know how to finish this paragraph.

#37 Diversity is objectively valuable.

Here are some reasons people give for not caring about increasing the number of women in skepticism:

Women are free to participate if they want. Nobody’s stopping them.
Men are just more interested in science.
I care about ideas–not demographics!

It is nothing new at all to say that the community of people actively participating in skepticism is composed by and large by middle-class white men. It’s more or less a homogeneous group, and it behaves like one, engaging in activities that the members of the majority like because they’ve never had to do it any other way. And that’s fine, I suppose, depending on your goals. If the goal of the skeptical community is to be a social club of people of like minds in a comfortable, non-challenging environment that is fun to be in and provides a social network of people who can hang out in small groups at the local level to talk and have some more fun, great! Clubs benefit their members in a lot of ways, as anyone who has ever joined one can tell you.

Even better, there are many formal skeptics and atheists groups built on the desire to improve the world we share, and that work very sincerely towards that goal by solving problems identified by and via the methods identified by this homogeneous group of people, who are used to thinking about themselves and what causes problems for them, and also sometimes the problems they perceive other people experience with strategies they suppose will work for those other people they don’t really interact with. Because, you know, homogeneity. Which has a very limited scope, in the end, and is likely to only solve problems for people just like you, and you’ll eventually run out of those people to reach and chances are good that no one from among the group of everyone else haven’t even heard about you and probably don’t care about your problems. They care about their own problems, but you don’t know what they are because you have no representatives from them in your group and get fussy when asked why not. Which may not matter if you’re just into skepticism or atheism for the fun clubhouse times but may matter if you are having trouble growing your influence or solving widespread problems on a large scale.

Does that make sense? I’m not saying that insular groups can’t have a positive effect in society–after all, they are part of society and changing people like them turns out to be a gain–I’m just saying that it’s likely going to be a pretty small effect. And that you aren’t even going to realize how small your effect is because you don’t have anyone else to talk to about it. And then very often you’ll fall into the trap of blaming everyone else for being stupid or stubborn about your efforts instead of realizing that they’ve never given you a second thought because you never approached them.

If everyone in your group has access to a private car, for example, it might not occur to you that you impede attendance by hosting events at night in places far away from bus stops. If everyone in your group is white, you might not realize that attitudes towards the value of religion as an institution (versus individual belief) vary by culture. If everyone speaks English, it might not occur to you to advertise your free vaccine event in the Spanish newspaper, to reach groups of people who would like to be vaccinated but have no easy access to health care. If everyone is male, it might not occur to you that women might not feel welcome or safe in your community. It might occur to you instead that they just don’t like it because science.

And these are just errors of omission and misunderstanding. You are missing out on opportunities to expand your organization and promote your goals because you lack diversity. You set yourself up to make other errors, too–errors that can create profoundly bad PR and public embarrassment, and depending on the kind of organization you are running, make yourself vulnerable to lawsuits. (That probably won’t happen to a skeptical group, but it affects corporations all the time.)

Consider the drama that hit HP when it developed face-tracking software that couldn’t see people with dark skin. Had they had people with dark skin represented in their organization, they could have caught the error before it went public, as well as saved themselves a lot of money in redeveloping and retesting and then apologizing. YouTube video here.

Consider the drama that ensued when Apple released Siri, a helper software that couldn’t find women’s services like abortions but could find men’s services like strippers. It’s just a glitch and not a conspiracy they say, but you know who could have caught that glitch? Women on staff in the right places.

And on a basic civil rights level and of probably more immediate concern: Not having a multilingual police force hampers the ability of Houston police to do their job. It’s probably difficult to find enough language speakers or teach police new languages, and maybe it’s not their fault, but it still creates big problems.

But there are also success stories, like when IBM went out of its way to cultivate diversity, and ended up in profit.

So let’s revisit the reasons people give for not caring about increasing the number of women in skepticism:

Women are free to participate if they want. Nobody’s stopping them.
Men are just more interested in science.
I care about ideas–not demographics!

If you care about ideas and not demographics, bully for you! But realize that you’ll be insulating yourself from the large community–which is maybe what you want–and relegating yourself to an ineffective social club–which is maybe what you want–and strips you of the right to complain about your situation as a marginalized skeptic or atheist or an ineffective world-changer, and of the right to blame everyone else for not treasuring the points of view you treasure. If you want to be exclusive and irrelevant, celebrate your homogeneity! But if you are sick of being marginalized, look around you and honestly analyze the efforts you’ve made to fit yourself in with the larger society and the efforts you’ve made to include people from it. They are probably minimal to none. Being marginalized is probably your fault. And when women–the largest untapped audience possible–actually volunteer to join a group that hasn’t been welcoming them even though they share goals and could double your task force, and pretty clearly tell you what you need to do to align themselves to your organization, listen to their suggestions and trust them as the experts in solving this problem. Don’t marginalize them instead.

The Evolution of God

By Robert Wright

Long Story Short: This book has a lot of interesting close-ish reading of the big three Abrahamic religious texts (Torah, Bible, Koran), interspersed with a lot of philosophy and splaining I wasn’t that crazy about.

Why I Chose This Book: I was enthralled by the ideas in Wright’s book, Nonzero, when I read it and I was looking for a book that addressed a more traditional “skeptical” topic to write about between that one about online reputation and the next one about cuddly animals.

The Book’s Strengths: First of all, I like Wright’s writing style. He explains his points well, and he intersperses his texts with just enough humor that it’s a pleasant surprise every time. True, writing style is not a very important part of a book’s message, but it makes it easier to engage with the text, particularly during the slower parts of the book.

I thought the book did a pretty good job of covering the structural evolution of the three Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It starts with exploring religion from pre-literate societies, and it’s very clear on where the limitations are on how much we can deduce about prehistoric religions, and how we know what we know now about the religions of hunter-gatherer communities. For example, we know what the members and/or descendants of these hunter-gatherer societies say, and we have some historical documents from literate people who encountered these groups during the age of exploration and onward, but we can’t say that this is the way prehistoric religions looked because every culture evolves, and Wright points out frequently what aspects he discusses comes from documented sources (and which ones) and what aspects are supposition or speculation.

By and large the strongest parts of the books were the sections–the bulk of the book–about the Abrahamic religions and their major texts. He attempted to demonstrate how Yahweh/God/Allah evolved as a character from a polytheistic entity to the solitary supreme creator He is known as today. I call it close-ish reading because the passages he analyzed from the major texts (Torah, Bible, Koran) were all discussed in English, which, as we know, is not the language they were written in and which have discussions that fill books just on who and how and why they were translated in the way they were translated. When there are major word choice alternatives, Wright would mention it, but for the most part he focused on the story the words were telling. He’d find lines from chapters and books that seemed to refer to immense amounts of backstory regarding the figure of God that were left out of the canonized versions, and seem similar to stories from other non-religious texts, or the way other gods were mentioned in the Bible that suggested they used to have a place in the heavens, too. He brought in information from recorded history and archaeological finds, and slight variances in vocabulary between languages where two groups of people lived as neighbors, and built what I thought was a very strong case for the idea that the God that everyone thinks of in the Abrahamic religions today represents a logical (almost predictable) evolution from a polytheistic character to a monotheistic one.

Note: I am using the word “character” because Wright’s book emphasizes stories from the different religions and the way he discusses Yahweh/God/Allah is as the protagonist of the stories. It’s rather literary, and “figure” doesn’t quite feel right.

Of the three sections on the holy books, I was most interested in the stuff about Jesus and the New Testament of the Bible. It probably has to do with the fact that there is a lot more written work from that era, and because the hard part of building the case for a monotheistic character was in the previous section. I found the information about the Koran very good to learn, but it wasn’t very exciting to read. Wright acknowledges that the Koran itself is a very business-like, heavy-on-government text and lacks the poetry and mythic scale of the Bible and Torah, and presents it as the culmination of the long argument he’s been making, and there’s just not that much to it to catch one’s fancy.

The Book’s Weaknesses: The book really ebbs and flows. The beginning section on the polytheistic religions of pre-history started strong but then just went on and on and on and on. A lot of it seemed like a rehash of the themes of Nonzero, which is bad for me because I’ve read that book but perhaps were necessary for people who hadn’t to understand his large arguments about the world that appear at the end of the book. (More on that in a minute.) It was also a lot of didja know, I know! I told you! now you know. Without original texts to look at–which is a problem there’s no way to solve–it became tedious. I don’t know that quite so many details are required to understand the textual analysis of the next few parts of the book.

By the time we hit the part about the Koran I was very, very tired of the harping about non-zero-sum interactions. It’s a lightbulb moment in the book that’s actually about non-zero-sum interactions shaping history, but in this book you kind of get it the first time, and simple reminders of it would have kept you on track. By the very end I just started flipping pages, and then actively started rolling my eyes when Wright began to surmise that maybe there’s some biological reason from human evolution that made people inclined to seek non-zero-sum relationships and be good to each other and let’s call that “god” shall we? And the epilogues and afterwords that address the god question from various points of view (what would atheists think? what would believers say?) were either silly or else I was just fed up and couldn’t take them in the seriousness they were intended. After a few sentences for each I stopped reading. The book is probably a hundred pages longer than I care about.

For Purposes of Full Disclosure: Right in the middle of the book, within the New Testament Jesus stuff, there is a very long divergence on the philosophical evolution of a concept of Logos, as developed by Philo of Alexandria. Philosophy is my kryptonite, and I followed it for a while and then just gave up. It almost put me off the book, and then it kicked back in with the text analysis and I forgot about it, and then that section concluded with some very wonderful explanation of how Logos fit right in with the Jesus business and if I’d read it I’d probably appreciate it even more. Someone on Amazon.com even raved about the Logos section, but I just couldn’t deal with it. It’s a negative part of the book to me, but I think that it’s my hang-ups making me say that. If you love philosophy, your experienced will be enriched. If you hate it, skip it. Don’t let it bog you down; the rest of that section of the book is worth reading.

What Should Have Happened: I think there could be far less non-zero-sum narrative in the book. I also think that leaving the realm of how God evolved as a character in His story to explore evo-psych/conciliatory?/grand human drama reasons why people believe and the biological “purpose” of the book was a mistake. I’ll concede that maybe it’s a framing device for the text analysis to give people a reason to read this book instead of one written by religious scholars, or else maybe the publisher wanted it to not seem atheist, or maybe it’s just ideas that are in the author’s mind and what he’s really interested in exploring. But the two very distinct parts–the splaining and the close reading–just didn’t really mesh.

Short Story Shorter: I would definitely recommend this book, with permission to skip all the parts that you find annoying. You won’t miss them.

#36 Focus on the message rather than the delivery, Part 2

“Focus on the message rather than the delivery” part 1 is here. I wrote it back in July and it was never intended to be a part 1 of anything, and when I wrote it I had in mind the kind of arguments you get against women speaking up for themselves and being criticized for being too angry, rather than having their points responded to. You know, blowing off what’s actually the problem and inventing a problem with how a woman presents her thoughts, insinuating that what she has to say is not nearly as important as controlling her emotions.

Turns out there’s a flip side to that.

You know what I’ve started to notice a lot lately? Women who speak about sexism being answered with a prim “Thank you for being so polite to me,” or “I appreciate that you are keeping a civil tone when you address me.” It’s the same crap, different attitude. Instead of addressing a woman’s points, it’s still addressing a woman’s tone, and it usually also manages to get a dig in at all the other women who are being angry, or huffy, or sarcastic, or even–gasp–name-calling (which, for the record, is just straight up name-calling and not ad hominem attacks, so you can stop waving that fallacy around during these types of discussions). And it’s addressing a woman’s tone in a patronizing way that is not gracious and not civil and not polite. It’s just another way to tone troll.

Politeness and civility in conversations are standard forms of discourse, and not really remarkable. It’s sort of taken for granted that people will engage in polite discussions, however heated they might be, and it’s hardly paid attention to at all (unless people are being very emotional, and then its absence is noted). So stopping a discussion cold so you can go out of your way to thank a woman for being so nice to you instead of putting what she actually said first indicates that you really do care less for what she thinks than for how she behaves. If you’re in the middle of a conversation with other women who are not being polite, pointing out the woman who is like patting her on the head for being a good girl who knows her manners, and showing the other women what kind of behavior you’re looking for. It also puts your feelings at the center of a discussion that until that moment probably was not about you at all. It probably started with the woman trying to describe things that happened to her, but you’ve turned it around to you–even for just a split second. She wasn’t being polite and civil out of consideration for you–she just wasn’t angry or emotional enough to express anger and emotions (yet)–but by thanking her for treating you well, you can frame it in a way that suggests she’s trying to help you as much as help herself. And it helps you feel better, instead of maybe feeling worse because you had to listen to the ways women are hurt by sexism and how you might be complicit in that.

Don’t believe me? Think about all the times you’ve thanked a woman for being polite when it’s just been the two of you talking. Probably never. Because nobody does that unless there are other women not being polite who need to be taught a passive-aggressive lesson on how it ought to be done, and the women who are being polite need to be reminded that’s how it’s preferred women speak, no matter what the topic. You know, positive reinforcement? Like in preschool?

Which puts people in a tricky spot. I can certainly imagine it’s a relief to find a civil voice in a conversation that has a lot of anger directed at you or your ideas, and it feels good to express relief, but it isn’t necessary to interrupt a conversation about injustices that have been perpetuated on women to let them all know how good you feel that one of them is keeping your feelings in mind, too (especially when she really wasn’t keeping your feelings in mind at all). So what to do? How can you engage in a civil conversation amidst a heated discussion without being patronizing by commenting on a woman’s tone?

Here are some suggestions:

1. Say nothing about anybody’s tone, good or bad. If the people being polite are the only ones you want to engage with, only engage with them and only engage with the points they are making.

2. Say nothing at all. If you are a sensitive person who really does have trouble separating tone from content–and those people exist, and there’s nothing wrong with being one of those people–back away. If you don’t want to just vanish without explanation, admit that you are having trouble separating tone from content and want to wait until you are able to focus on the important parts of the conversation and you’ll see them later.

3. Ask for clarification. If you are finding yourself very unwelcome in a community that you expected would treat you with politeness and civility, ask why. Say that you are surprised what you are saying has generated so much emotion–don’t lecture them on being emotional, but you can certainly acknowledge emotions when they happen–and ask what you did to trigger it. Someone will probably speak up and tell you (although no one owes you an answer, so don’t make petulant recriminations if you don’t get one). Listen to the answer and take it seriously. If you don’t want to make the people you are trying to talk with emotional, don’t do the things they said were causing it. You can even go so far as apologize and promise to try to do better.

4. If you actually do feel grateful that someone treated you politely and civilly, remember her name. Later, find a way to send her a message saying that you know it was a tense conversation and that talking with her was a bright spot, and maybe that she gave you a new perspective to consider, or whatever nice thing you liked about her that isn’t a lie. But whatever you do, don’t comment on her polite tone in private and don’t thank her. She doesn’t need or want your approval, but everyone likes to hear that their ideas were received well enough to be remembered.

A Handy Graphic on Mansplaining

Misogyny on the Internet has been a very hot topic these past several days, what with the Reddit business I wrote about here and this new business with Penn Jillette and the Tweet written about by Jen McCreight here (“The Straw Woman of the Skeptical Movement), and like all hot topics online it comes with comments. Lots and lots of comments that follow at this point a fairly predictable pattern. Within the first twenty on any well-trafficked blog you’ll probably see someone accused of mansplaining, and someone else objecting to the term, on the basis of not understanding what it actually is or simply not liking the way the word sounds. With that confusion in mind, I drew something up that hopefully illustrates what mansplaining is and is not.

The term “mansplaining”  is a portmanteau of “man” and “explaining.” A definition of the term can be found in a blog post by Karen Healey, “A Woman’s Born to Weep and Fret,” with an excerpt here:

Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.

I hope to show with my chart how a conversation, particularly a conversation about sexism, can drift into mansplaining despite the best of intentions. I did do a search for such a chart first and didn’t find anything, so if you know of one better, please send me the link and I’ll include it here. Finally, if the term itself bothers you, get over it. It’s mostly men who do it, and yes, we know that all men don’t. If you don’t do it, it doesn’t apply to you. Just because you are a man and it includes the word “man” doesn’t qualify it as a gross, unfair, mean generalization any more than the term “chick flick” is understood to mean that all women like those kinds of movies–and besides, being called “chick” is way worse than being called “man.”

Clicking on the graphic will display it in a larger size. Enjoy!

#35 More confrontation, less explanation.

I frequently read a blog called Skepchick, which anyone who is reading this post probably already knows about. The blog covers a wide variety of topics, but two posts this week addressed the kind of thing I address in this blog: Why aren’t more women participating in the skeptical movement? The first, by Heina, pondered the question of the disparity between men and women at skeptical events; the second, by Rebecca Watson, linked to a thread at Reddit that showed an actual real woman being driven out of the actual atheist movement by actual participants in an atheists’ forum. Comments abound, both at Reddit and at each of the posts at Skepchick, and I’ve noticed some common themes among them, mostly from men, regarding the hostile environments women face and what women should do about it:

Theme #1: It’s just how things are because <reason here>.

Theme #2: I hope you realize not all men are like that and that men that are like that make up a very small minority of men.

Let’s tackle each theme in turn.

Theme #1
You know what? Women don’t care. They don’t care why men harass them–they just want them to stop doing it. Perhaps it’s a topic to explore at some point somewhere, but not with women, and certainly not when women are complaining about being harassed. Trying to explain why men behave badly to the women they have behaved badly to is a derailment, and an especially offensive one. What’s the point of bringing it up? Do you expect women to express sympathy for those poor men? Excuse them for their age? Analyze their problems and offer solutions for how the harassing men can be fixed? It’s not their problem to fix. It’s the harassers’ problem to fix. And if their behavior is unacceptable, it’s unacceptable. There’s no point to finding out why in a conversation about how it needs to stop.

If it’s so noteworthy and interesting to learn why the men who are creating hostile environments for women are being hostile–and it probably is, causes and symptoms and all that–then go talk to the men about it. Approach them about their behavior; engage the men in exploratory conversations about why they behave as they do and what their motivations are for harassing women. Work with the men on this problem; solve it with them. Don’t drag women into the morass. They have nothing to do with it. You’re trying to make it better for women to become active skeptics, remember–not give them more stressful and more complicated things to do before they can participate. If you have so much to say about why those raunchy teenagers or those “neckbeards” or those jokesters with a completely disgusting sense of humor make the remarks they do, say it to them.

If you can’t be bothered to confront the people who are actually causing the problem, then keep your mouth shut.

Theme #2
So there’s this concern that women are unable to tell the difference between the horrible men who are harassing them at skeptic and atheist environments and the regular guys who are made to look bad because of it. In fact, it’s such a concern that whenever a woman brings up the topic of abuse and harassment she’s experienced invariably a regular guy will express some worry that when a woman speaks about a group of men doing a horrible thing that she is including him, and that it’s important to criticize the woman for being sloppy with her language, or tarring everyone with the same brush, or making hasty generalizations, and basically being unfair and hurting the feelings of regular guys who would never, ever harass women. He’s sorry that she has been hurt, but he implores her to change her behavior so that she doesn’t make that mistake in the future, because it would hurt the movement if outsiders thought–because of her–that all the men were like this. And he’s not. No! He’s an ally, and he understands how women feel, but really, they better speak more carefully or they’ll ruin everything. And also you should apologize to him for being rude. Because there’s nothing ruder than speaking in general terms.

First of all, really? You think women really can’t tell the difference between a regular guy who is talking to them and a guy making rape jokes to a fifteen-year-old girl who had the nerve to post in an online space? Do you have so little faith in a woman’s ability to tell the difference between individuals and loosely bounded groups that you have to remind her that differences exist? Spare me. If all men in skepticism or atheism “look bad” because a few of them predictably commit grotesque harassment, it’s not because women have generally addressed bad behavior–it’s because a few men are grotesque harassers and the rest of the men let it slide. Not when they are talking with women about the harassment, no–they will roundly denounce all the bad parts and tell women they are on their side, and only slip in at the last moment that pesky bit about being sure to explicitly excuse those good regular guys from their analysis so they don’t look bad by mistake.

You know a better way to avoid looking bad because of the behavior of bad men? Confront the bad men. Tell the men who are harassing women in the skeptical and atheist movements and anywhere else that you are tired of crap like that and that all men get a bad rap when just a small minority behave reprehensibly. Tell the men who supposedly make all men look bad how unfair it is, and how their behavior affects the perception of skeptics and atheists in the larger community. Criticize them for their sloppy language, and their tendency to hurt the feelings of women, and implore them to change their habits and avoid sexist mistakes in the future. Demand apologies from them. They are the ones causing problems–why shouldn’t you call them out for it? Instead of telling women that not all men are harassers, tell men not to harass women. If they do it anyway, make a stink. If they still don’t change, find ways to exclude them.

If you can’t be bothered to confront the people who are actually causing the problem, then keep your mouth shut.

If such a small number of men can have such a negative effect on how women perceive the skeptical and atheist movements, why haven’t you contained them yet? If it’s just a few loudmouth jerks with psychological issues who harass women, why haven’t you taught them better yet? Solve problems by confronting the people who cause them, not by explaining to women why these problems exist and explaining why they have nothing to do with you.

The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet

By Daniel J. Solove

Long Story Short: This book discusses the boundaries–social and legal–between privacy and publicity, particularly at the point where the Internet has the potential to expose details to millions of people.

Why I Chose This Book: I’d heard somewhere about the book The Offensive Internet but decided–based solely on the Amazon.com page–that it would be too scholarly for me to read and review for this Reading Club project. The Future of Gossip came up on that page as another suggestion, and it was easy to get at the library, so I went with that.

The Book’s Strengths: The book is pretty short (I’m not considering that a strength or weakness) mostly because it is so straightforward. The author identifies and explains many of the legal codes and mainstream media practices that cover the conflicts that arise between the individual and public reputation, and makes it easy to understand the perspectives behind why certain laws were established and why courts have made the decisions they did. It’s also peppered with anecdotes from the current Internet age as well as examples of defamation/privacy violation complaints/accusations that have occurred in previous decades. The writing style is very accessible, too, and it doesn’t overwhelm you with information or dense passages of texts.

The Book’s Weaknesses: It’s a bland book, with too many anecdotes and explanations and no real insight about the coming conflicts between our personal and public selves. It read like a report on what is happening <em>now</em>, except that “now” has a 2007 publication date and Facebook makes the book’s pages as just having introduced the News Feed. An interesting report, I guess, but with the exception of listing the various statutes and legal codes by name for the reader, I could have found as many anecdotes online to share, too, and the anecdotes weren’t that shocking or exciting or revelatory. It’s not that it’s a dated book–that is, it is a dated book but only in a trivial way, because the anecdotes and Exciting Internet Events that Solove includes are pretty universal examples of what can go wrong, even if nobody uses Friendster anymore. It’s that it doesn’t really make you think very hard about the implications of oversharing online. And it’s not like these past four years have made us so much more knowledgeable/cynical/crafty about the construction of our online personas; more people probably have given more thought to how the information they post online can haunt us, but the book leaves me with a sense of so now what? The recommendations he makes for how to alter specific laws and/or application of current laws to accommodate privacy without stifling free speech are tossed in at the end with no philosophical expounding upon, and the social recommendations that he makes–we’ll all just have to be more respectful but that’s going to be hard–I could have made, and I have no philosophy or law experience at all.

Perhaps I am the wrong audience for the book, and people versed in privacy law and Internet topics would take away from it a much richer experience, but–and I am going to risk making myself look foolish here–I don’t see how. If it’s just a quick reference for people to turn to when they are tackling bigger issues, that’s one thing, but in the Preface of the hardcover copy, he writes that “The purpose of the book is to explore in depth a set of fascinating yet very difficult questions and to propose some moderate compromises in the clash between privacy and free speech.” I found no in-depth discussion of anything. In the Conclusion he writes, “The questions are immensely complex, and there are no easy answers.” I agree with him; privacy versus freedom is complex, but I didn’t see any of this complexity or nuance in the book itself. It’s just an overview. It identifies conflicts without really fully exploring them.

What Should Have Happened: I think the book should have ditched most of the anecdotes in favor of wanton pontificating and assertion-making. I’d much rather have heard more of his opinions than facts, although I understand that the author’s goal may have been to keep it basic and not go off on tangents. I also think that there should have been conversation about global attitudes and foreign laws about free speech, copyright, and privacy, instead of sticking with the U.S. court history, especially because one of the Big Dangers Solove kept warning the audience of was that what unsavory details once stayed within a small group of people can be broadcast worldwide and recorded permanently. If the Internet is making all of us interconnected, then we need to think about what happens when conflicting laws and customs about privacy and freedom get into the mix.

Short Story Shorter: I wish I’d read the other book. I might still. I’ll keep you posted.

#34 Stop evoking science to rationalize sexism.

A favorite way to avoid facing up to sexism (or racism, or other institutionalized bias) is to explain its biological origins, often with a little bonus of how such behavior helped the human race evolve. Who can argue, right, with a scientific explanation that has “evolution” in it? And biology? That’s a real science, plus chromosomes that you can see with a microscope. And animals? There’s animals, too–even primates! Plus hunting and gathering, and babies, and it explains so handily all that troublesome business about how so few women really hold any power (political or corporate), and end up in the fields that don’t pay so much (nurses and teachers vs. technology), or why they spend so much money on diets and clothing and makeup, and that strange thing about movie and television roles for actresses who turn forty, and porn and prostitution, and pregnancy makes you less fit to do your desk job than a man, and all that. You know–stuff like this:

Black Women Are Less Attractive than Whites and Asians

Taking Sex Differences Seriously and Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus

Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance (the study is available for download from the linked article, “It Doesn’t Add Up..”)

Is It Cold in Here?

Long story short: Black women aren’t considered less attractive because of biology. Men and women are raised–not born–to behave differently. Girls are discouraged from science and math education, and women are pushed out of those fields once they start careers. It has nothing to do with evolution, and everything to do with how society values women and what activities it considers appropriate for women to engage in. There is a construct of “womanhood” that has been carefully tended for years and years and years that makes it easy for men to justify, well, hogging all the money and power. It’s all made up. There is nothing inherently different about men and women that explains why men and women MUST behave in these ways. People just like it more when they do that. And using science to defend why you just like stuff in an attempt to give your preferences authority is using science irresponsibly.

If you still don’t believe that there’s a construct of womanhood (and manhood, for that matter, and for any sort of cultural identity), think on this: What is considered attractive varies by time and place, from the titillation possibilities of ankles to breast size to the amount and placement of body hair. Humans just aren’t evolving fast enough to explain scientifically why certain looks go in and out of fashion, but if you can throw in some scienciness to go along with your explanation for why you think that actress needs a body double for that close-up of her hands, then you can pretend that it’s not your fault you are holding her to a ridiculous, unattainable standard–it’s just natural! Not arrogant and obnoxious at all! There aren’t that many women on your coding team, or in your lab, or in upper management, not because men are being unfair but because, oh yeah, babies and women just don’t like to worry about the hard, hard jobs and stress like men have to do and don’t have the right hormones to handle it anyway. You might even convince yourself women are lucky that they don’t have to control the whole company or worry about deciding things in government or take home big paychecks and get to stay home all day where it’s peaceful and there are fresh vegetables to can and cats to pet. And also babies.

You might convince yourself of that instead of acknowledging that you are benefiting from women being shut out of power and that at the very best you are enabling systemic, perpetual inequality. It’s hard to admit that, and even worse when you realize that you have an obligation as a decent human being to work to change it. Because then you have to expend extra effort in your life or else feel a little worse every day for doing nothing in the face of obvious injustice.

But let me play Devil’s Advocate for a moment–let’s say that it’s all true. That men and women have evolved certain biological differences which means that the average woman is worse than the average man at some things. Let’s say that’s true, and that it’s true for every other primate in the world, too. So what? That doesn’t excuse bad behavior, or unfairness, or discrimination, or sexism, even if the first and most natural impulse in a given situation is to implement it. Humans have learned to override their natural instincts all over the place, despite sometimes adding extra steps that make an act less efficient and more cumbersome than we evolved to do it. You can unlearn sexism, and put a stop to even natural behaviors that all of evolutionary theory backs you up on.

I’m pretty sure our pre-human ancestors brought food right from the kill to their mouths with their hands. We don’t do that now, however, for no particular reason (although that varies by culture and place, too). In fact, we spend a lot of time teaching children to use forks and spoons despite the fact they could feed themselves faster without it. It’s because of health and sanitation; we don’t have to worry about contaminating food because there’s plenty of clean water around for most of the people who use forks and spoons. We can just wash our hands before and after. It’s a behavior we learn with with great effort for no other reason than manners and etiquette–even though it denies our natural survival instinct to eat food as fast as possible before a rival takes it. We value this non-natural behavior so much that some people go out of their way to learn to use chopsticks in certain restaurants that always have forks available! But there are no scientificky rationalizations to explain this. It’s just what you do if you’ve been “raised right,” and there are social consequences for people who vary from this norm. People may note that it’s arbitrary and maybe pointless, but they don’t come up with reasons why we must engage in this behavior or else species! Doom! They don’t have to, because there is nothing really at stake if the culture changes and forks become obsolete.

If we wanted to, we could easily as a group decide to override any purported evolutionary holdover instincts that lead to the suppression of women’s abilities in certain arbitrarily designated areas (like math and science, or governance, or executive leadership) and make sure that women are given full opportunities from infancy through adulthood to participate in public life and create social consequences for people who weren’t “raised right” enough to understand this. Easily. But we don’t, for very particular reasons, and they have nothing to do with science or evolution and everything to do with power and sharing it.