Today I am writing as a woman customer of a technical service.

I use an account with Gravity Forms (for a school website) and it comes with a default avatar of this:

It is a picture of a man wearing a tee shirt with the Gravity Forms logo on it, right? So I’m a user, but not a man, and this graphic doesn’t reflect me, so I decide to drop them a note on their customer contact form. My note says this:

I am a member of Gravity Forms for my school organization but I have a personal comment to make, so I am using my regular name. I am disappointed that under my member profile picture space/avatar the default setting is of a man. Men and women are users of this technology, and it’s off-putting to be excluded from the outside by something so easy to change and so visible.

Maybe instead of an icon of a man you could put something a little rocket like the rocket in your logo? Or even just a yellow smiley face? An image along those lines would be much more inclusive, and would send the message that you appreciate the business of the women in the community as much as the business of the men.

Thank you for your consideration.

One day later (today), I get a reply from Kevin at Gravity Forms. He took umbrage with my note. Let’s read his reply together! (Bold and caps text in original.)

Karen,

Thanks for your feedback. I’ll be very frank, I found it somewhat entertaining and then mildly offensive.

I don’t know why you would ASSUME that we appreciate our male customers more than our female customers. You don’t really know us, our beliefs or how we do business so I’m not sure where you came up with that idea but you couldn’t be more wrong.

I personally feel that THIS kind of thinking is what helps to propogate and sustain the notion that women are somehow unequal to men. I’m certain you would disagree but that’s to be expected.

This is the first time ever in several years of business that anyone has ever expressed anything even remotely related to this. We have literally thousands of customers and I would bet most have never even considered the gender of the default user avatar. Many of our users have very generic usernames/email addresses (very much like your own school organization ) and we have absolutely no way to tell their gender. EVERYONE gets equal treatment regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, race or nationality. We simply don’t care about those things. If you’ve paid for our product, we will gladly assist you, love and appreciate you as a customer.

Now, The default user avatar you refer to is an intentionally generic, faceless, genderless icon that’s almost globally associated with a “user” or a user profile. Do a quick google search for “user icon” and you’ll see what I mean ( http://bit.ly/XsjwT2 ) Using a rocket or smiley face as you suggest wouldn’t have the same connotation and wouldn’t follow well established user interaction guidelines.

Since you obviously don’t care for the avatar, you’ll be happy to know that’s easy enough to fix. We use the “Gravatar” service to provide custom user avatars in our forums. You can sign up for one for free and then have the new avatar reflected on our site automatically when viewing your profile or posts. Easy peasy.

https://en.gravatar.com/site/signup

I’m sure that my reply hasn’t changed your way of thinking, but please be assured that all of our customers are COMPLETELY EQUAL in our eyes and in terms of how we support our products.

Best Regards,

Kevin

So, I just want to make some points.

1. That’s a genderless icon, my ass.
2. A customer service rep told a customer he was offended by her suggestion.
3. I didn’t ASSUME men were more valued than women–I said I felt excluded and that they could send the message better that they valued everyone.
4. Following the link to the icons brings up women icons, too, which they could have picked from but didn’t.
5. A customer asking for visible representation is what makes women seem lesser, but excluding women from images and chastising them does not. No way.
6. They are officially gender blind and so not causing problems.
7. Despite all this, Gravity Forms loves me as a customer.
8. “Easy peasy” is pretty condescending in this context.
9. He’s correct that my reply hasn’t changed my thinking. It has, however, magnified it, and pissed me off. I can think of so many canned customer service responses that would have indicated a lack of interest in changing the icon without blaming me for the disparity of men and women in technology.

Wow.

So where’s my Likert scale, Gravity Forms? Where’s my Likert scale?

UPDATE: A few hours later, I get an email from Kevin:

Hi Karen,

We’ve chosen to refund your Gravity Forms purchase of $39 USD and cancel your account/license key.

You’re obviously unhappy and you’ve been encouraging people to spam our customer support email address. This would create slow-downs as we try to actually help our clients who have real problems.

I hope you have better luck with other solutions.

Best Regards,

Kevin

I didn’t ask to cancel my account and didn’t actually want to cancel my account, but canceled it was. I did manage to save my data, which maybe I wouldn’t have lost. So that was fun.

What to look for here: The exclusion of sexism from the realm of “real problems.” This is just one in a long line of examples of this separation of sexism from problems that matter. Also, complaining about me from Twitter accounts that identify you as a representatives of the company still count as bad customer service.

The Sexy Lie: Caroline Heldman at TEDxYouth@SanDiego

So that’s the resource I am directing you to, and if you have problems with the analysis in this resource, please address them at the YouTube site. I didn’t make the video and don’t want to argue about it. If you think have a better resource for people about sexual objectification, leave a link in the comment section.

But then I hear things like this: “I’m not sexually objectifying her–she’s sexually objectifying herself!” and that’s a misunderstanding I want to clear up. Women do not sexually objectify themselves. Women make choices for themselves that may result in other people sexually objectifying them (homework: read up on the “Patriarchal Bargain”), but that is not their responsibility if someone else sexually objectifies them. The responsibility for sexual objectification falls on the person doing the objectifying. And this is a lot of what feels like talking in circles, so let me try to make it clearer with examples from grammar class and sentence construction.

Remember the lessons about how it’s not a complete sentence if there’s not a subject and a predicate? Well, the subject is the part of the sentence that is doing the action. Objects are the part of speech that have actions performed to them, with no input. The action affects them–they do not affect it.

She (subject) bought (action) the book (object).
The dog (subject) ate (action) his barf (object).
The car (subject) hit (action) the garage wall (object) at what I swear was essentially zero miles per hour.
He (subject) objectified (action) her (object).

But! But! But! they say. But, but, she was in a low-cut blouse! She WANTED to be sexually objectified. I did it, yes, but she did it to herself, first. This is a misunderstanding of what has happened. Once more for emphasis: A woman does not sexually objectify herself. She is the subject of the sentence that is her life, not the object..

She (subject) wore (action) sexy clothes (object).

When a woman is being sexually objectified, someone else’s sexual dreams/goals/desires are being projected onto her. These dreams/goals/desires have everything to do with the subject of that sentence and nothing to do with the woman being gazed at or objectified. It’s all in the subject’s head. All of it. The woman is a stand-in for what he (almost always a he) wants in this (metaphorical) sentence, and her dreams/goals/desires are totally irrelevant. She doesn’t matter beyond the point of what she can deliver to him for is own purposes.

What gets overlooked so often is that the woman has made decisions and has dreams/goals/desires of her own. There is a chance that her dreams/goals/desires overlap with the man objectifying her, but that still doesn’t mean she’s an object. She decided to wear those clothes in order to portray an image that suits her purposes. She has agency. She is acting. She is hoping to gain some personal benefit with her actions, and she has used her brain to think up a strategy that will help her meet her goals.

So this woman wearing sexy clothes to a bar? She is probably seeking a certain kind of attention that she wants (woman as subject). She’s not there to make the bar more fun for you by giving you something to look at (woman as object). This woman working as an underwear model? She is probably trying to earn a living and garner some security using skills and assets she worked hard to gain (woman as subject). She’s not there so you can jerk off to the catalog she appears in (woman as object). You want to have fun by seeing women in sexy clothes or jerk off to pictures of them in their underwear? Fine. Be the subject of your life! But don’t make the HUGE mistake of forgetting that you only have these women around performing these actions that you find personally beneficial because they had something to gain from the interaction. They aren’t there to serve you; they are serving themselves. They don’t dress or undress to make your life better; they are making their own life better.

Women are subjects, not objects. If you forget that… if you forget all that context in which women are making decisions that help them navigate a world that is structured to diminish their agency… if you fail to see them as people doing their best to get by just like you are… if you persist in assuming that women with goals that coincidentally match yours were working to meet your goals and not their own… you are developing bad habits and causing great harm.

1. I decided to finally sit down and write again.
2. I went to the local skeptics group meeting, which I haven’t done for years and years and years. I used to be a member of the local skeptics group but got out of the habit, but then two OTHER things happened tonight (and that’s as fractal as I’ll get): a) The topic was Women in Secularism and b) my rehearsal was canceled so I had a free evening. (Does that sound glamorous to say my rehearsal was canceled? Because it was.)

I am happy I went. Everyone was very nice, and it was nice to see some of the people still participating that were there when I was a regular, even if they didn’t remember me (and I did not make a real effort to reintroduce myself). Their scholarship program for the giant annual student science fair is still going strong, and I think they said they gave out eight awards a year–cash and organization membership–and that it was a very positive experience for adult and child participants. I got to sit at the discussion table with all the members, and there was a big friendly dog there and cookies, and I got to speak a few times and even though I was a stranger who wandered in basically off the street what I said was taken as seriously as anyone else. I had some good conversations after the meeting and even left with a phone number and an invitation to meet for coffee!

I had absolutely no idea what to expect.

In the end, the meeting went exactly as I should have expected.

I’m not really sure what to say about it. The attendance was heavily skewed toward retirement age, but I’d say that men and women were equally in attendance. It was pointed out that three of the five board members were women, and despite the president’s initial confessions of apprehension over the sensitivity of the topic and the fear of acrimony, it was a civil conversation about a lot of different things, none of which actually really addressed the topic of women in secularism.

The meeting started with a reading from an article by Susan Jacoby in the September/October 2012 issue of The Humanist. It was a very interesting article, that I’m not really going to recap or discuss here. It was a great start, and it led almost immediately to a lot of pontificating and Interesting Historical Reporting about Things Barely Tangential to the Topic. We learned about quirks of ancient religions, about passages from the Quran, about all kinds of things! You know what we didn’t learn about? Why secular women worked so hard last year to put on Women in Secularism 2012, and why they decided it was worth the effort to put in on again in 2013. We were told quite definitively that there were not and had never been “real” matrilineal and or matriarchal societies, even though one member had described her travels to a modern-day one within the past 20 years (because science). It reminded me, really, of how online you’ll see these discussions deflect immediately to Lamentations of Women in the World Who Have It Way Worse than You. I don’t know if people just liked to hear themselves talk, or show off what they know, or if this was a deliberate avoidance tactic because people were nervous about an angry conversation if they really got to business or what, and it lacked the patronizing tones of “Dear Muslima,” but the effect was the same. (And I said so as forcefully as I could while trying to be a polite guest in a new environment.)

Interestingly, after I said this, one of the women regulars expressed concern that skeptics and atheists in the US weren’t taking strong enough stands against the attacks on women’s reproductive freedoms (which started to turn into another pontification/mini-lecture about Rand Paul), and the moderator said something along the lines of “We’re here to discuss whether politics even belong in skeptical conversations and you’re both off topic.” And there it ended. And then it was suggested that because there was so much to cover about sexism online and sexual harassment, they’d probably have a continuation of the discussion at the next meeting.

At the very end, a different woman member made the observation that the list of topics within the women in secularism discussion was created by men without asking for any input from women at all.

The next meeting, then, is when they’ll be discussing “what happened to Michael Shermer” and whether sexism exists, and if there’s any truth to the claims that women are being harassed and name-called online, and if it’s really just some anonymous rabble-rousers who may not even be skeptics doing this divide and conquer thing (yes, they admitted that sounded a little conspiracyish), and also to present the male point of view about sexism in skepticism, because, well, obvious, because balance? I dunno. It wasn’t really explained why the men’s point of view needed to be brought up. And it’s kind of the meeting I thought would be happening tonight. And it’s a sad thing to say, but it’s highly likely I’m not going to be there.

And not because I’m going to be busy, because I probably could get myself there if I wanted. But I was talking to the president after the meeting, and I asked him what the organization was hoping to get from discussing this topic, and he said he’d been surprised to learn about all the controversy (it’s finally bubbled to the awareness of people who get all their information from offline sources!) and that the best course of action for a skeptics group to take would be to examine the evidence and decide for themselves if sexism really was happening.

He said they would probably come to that conclusion–that it was actually happening–next meeting. Which is good, because, well, yeah. But they had to examine the evidence for themselves because–again–that’s what good skeptics do. And I asked, then what? So what happens if you decide that sexism is happening? And the answer was a good one: They want to put anti-harassment policies in place.

Yay!

But, sigh.

Really? IF it’s happening? I’m trying to put myself in the shoes of people who aren’t fatigued by this subject, and who are exploring the controversy for the first time, and are probably sincerely hoping that the skeptical movement (and this group definitely puts itself in the skeptical movement rather than the humanist movement) has its best foot forward. And I wish I’d taken the time to write it down but I thought I would remember the quote the president ended with about how a community will never thrive if it fails to fully respect half its members. That was the take-home idea, and he read it twice–with feeling.

But even within this group with its 50/50 membership and leadership, it was a lot of splaining by men to the women of What It’s Like Out There and How Things Used to Be, and some You Didn’t See What You Thought You Saw, with a dash of Women Are Complicit in Their Own Oppression and Those Topics Don’t Belong Here, and I’m just tired of that, and it doesn’t make it more palatable even in the complete and utter absence of Hey You’re So Pretty and If We Joke about Harassment That’s Funny. I feel like I can predict that the guys next week will find some reasons to explain why the women who complain about harassment are influenced by their emotions, how they shouldn’t complain so much because focus/remember when/derailment, and even when they all do agree that sexism exists within the movement and harassment policies help, it’s more of an intellectual exercise for them to go through. That women’s topics are still just for women. That men blaming women in burkas for being too sexy instead of taking responsibility for their own behavior only happens Over There. That science shows no viable, alternative ways of men and women interacting have ever existed. That the status quo is too hard to change. And next month’s meeting–despite being part 2 of the conversation*–is also the last meeting before science fair business comes up (the science fair is in March and they’ll have some organizing to do with volunteer judges and settling prize amounts et cetera), and no one wants to have the kind of discussion that leaves people angry, and I honestly can’t see much productive coming out of it. The kind of conclusions they are going to draw have already been drawn over and over again, and I don’t think I can add much to it.

*In which we discover what has happened to Michael Shermer, which wasn’t answered when I asked the question at the meeting tonight because it’s functioning as a teaser to get me back there, I guess…

I know, I know, with women and socialization and manners and stuff, but I don’t really want to be the stranger that shows up and antagonizes everyone because I think THEYR DOIN IT WRONG. It’s not my group. They want what they want and are perfectly capable of identifying and meeting their own needs, and honestly, I can’t imagine a single thing bad coming out of this. And if their pace is slower than my pace, that’s my issue to deal with, which I am dealing with quite nicely from home.

That said…

The conversations I had with the people–the president, the members–were so nice and welcoming, and I was amused in one of those sad, cynical ways how the women gathered afterward to reaffirm amongst themselves how the guys basically missed the point and yep. The guys basically missed the point. There was some minor self-blaming for the guys missing the point based on the women not being clear enough, which is silly because we all understood exactly what the point was. And I am really looking forward to calling the one woman on the phone who had to leave early and talking to her more, and I wish I had the free time to join those two women who drove all the way out to the next county this morning to go to an atheist book club at The Coffee Bean with twenty other people and who attend Civil Conversations at the Coco’s every Monday night (and put up with pontificating, interrupting men there), and I wish I could hang out more with the woman who brought up the fact that women weren’t asked what they thought was important to discuss, but, well, I stopped attending these meetings regularly for a reason. I’d already hit my fill of dowsing and Bible codes (once you get it, you get), and my patience for pontificating is low. I would love to have some sort of women’s group that met separately from the main group, and I’ll express that if I ever do actually end up meeting that one woman for coffee (she doesn’t email. ), but the rest of it… I dunno. I’m not really in a position to organize that myself. Interloper I can do fine, but poacher? Plus I’m supposed to be looking for a job, which, if found, would take up a lot of my time.

I do promise to look more regularly at the meeting calendar, however. You never know when things might change! And there was not a single person there I wouldn’t mind talking to again outside of the meeting context. The possibilities are endless.

I read (avidly) and reviewed (positively) The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. The other novels shortlisted for the prize are Bringing Up The Bodies (Hilary Mantel), Narcopolis (Jeet Thayil), Swimming Home (Deborah Levy), The Lighthouse (Alison Moore), and Umbrella (Will Self). Enjoy!

Update: And the prize was awarded to Mantel for Bringing Up the Bodies, which I found out today is a sequel to Wolf Hall.

Seemingly large and very vocal groups of atheists and skeptics who do not want to splinter away from the main groups are quite unhappy that the splinter groups have been formed, and are spending a lot of time arguing about it, for a variety of reasons like these:

1. It divides the movement.
2. The new group is off topic.
3. It makes everyone in the old group look bad.
4. It drives away potential new members.
5. What the new group wants is stupid and/or pointless (and they’ve cut themselves off from criticism).
6. We need to let them know what we think.

Let’s briefly address these concerns.

1. It divides the movement.
Guess what? The movement was already divided. Just because the majority of your group fails to see a problem of inclusion doesn’t mean there wasn’t a group of people feeling marginalized. And these marginalized people–these ones you weren’t really aware of already–are likely the ones leaving. And here’s the thing: People you don’t notice in their presence certainly won’t be noticed in their absence. Your status quo will keep on status quoing even after they’re gone. The net effect is the same.

2. The new group is off-topic.
Yes! They are off-topic! The message they want to deliver is different from the message you want to deliver, so they went somewhere else to do it. It was annoying how they kept trying to change your mind about what message to send, wasn’t it? And your goals for skepticism and atheism were totally different than theirs, weren’t they? They are doing you a favor by walking out. They got the hint you didn’t want to spend time away from delivering your message to deliver their own. You should be thanking them for going, not lambasting them. They’ve left you alone without distractions to do what you’ve been wanting to do all along.

3. It makes everyone in the old group look bad.
It might, that’s true. But probably only to the people in the new group, who are people you don’t care about, right? Because if you cared about them, you would have taken more steps to accommodate them, and you didn’t. And you didn’t because you didn’t think what they had to say was important or because what they had to say was harmful to atheism or skepticism somehow, and would turn away the kind of atheists and skeptics you were hoping to attract to your old group. And there’s not the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell that anyone cares what they have to say in the grand scheme of society because they are all just insular and arguing semantics and clusterfucking around, right? So the kind of people that they could make you look bad to aren’t the kind of people you consider valuable anyway. I mean, you don’t care if you look bad to creationists, do you? And you’re trying your darnedest to make the splinter group look bad, too, aren’t you? By criticizing them? No big deal. It’s part of the process.

4. It drives away potential new members.
It might, that’s true. But if those potential new members are more attracted to the splinter group than to the old group, then they weren’t going to stay members for long anyway. And if the other potential members think what the splinter group is doing is not what they have any interest in, they’ll find their way to you easily enough. It’s like having a sushi place and a pizza place in the same strip mall. People who set out to have pizza might change their mind and go for sushi at the last minute, and the pizza place lost their business. But it works in reverse, too. And then the strip mall gets the reputation for having lots of choices, and attracts even more people in the end than each restaurant separately would have attracted in two disparate locations.

5. What the new group wants is stupid and/or pointless (and they’ve cut themselves off from criticism).
Perhaps. You may be right. It could be a huge waste of time what they are doing, and you might all be better off staying far away from it. Time will tell. But what better way to teach them a lesson about how stupid and pointless their goals and efforts are than to let them pursue said goals without interference or help? Let them fall on their own swords. Set them free–completely free–and don’t join their forums or make comments on blogs or offer advice and they’ll run themselves into the ground faster and this fad will burn itself out. Or not, but you won’t know until you let them go run the experiment. Then you can use whatever data is generated as you wish to prove whatever point you need to make about the splinter group. Until then, until you let them run their splinter group experiment, you’re just making unfounded assumptions about what’s going to happen, and that doesn’t make you look like very good skeptics.

But they haven’t cut themselves off from criticism, no, no. Criticize them away! Write articles, make videos, speechify at conferences, lobby against them one-on-one at local meet-ups… you’ve got lots of opportunities to make your points, even if they tightly control access to their own spaces and delete and ban dissent on comments and blogs and with restricted real-life meetings.

6. We need to let them know what we think.
You do not need to let members of a splinter group know what the members of the dominant group think about them, their plans, and their abilities. First of all, they already know. They’ve become experts on what the dominant group thinks of them, because there are far more members of the dominant group than the splinter group, and wherever they go within the group odds are they are hearing from members of the dominant group. Repeating it just wastes your time. Second, they don’t care what you think. If members of the splinter group cared what members of the dominant group think, they would have made an effort to assimilate into the dominant group instead of fighting back and trying to change it. And they didn’t. Your opinions and ideas are not valuable to them. Third, it is not necessary to keep updating them on your thoughts after they are gone. They are gone. It no longer concerns you. You didn’t care about them while they were there, so it makes no sense that you care about them more when they are gone. And pretending it is “concern” fools no one.

Instead, it looks suspicious, like perhaps you have some ulterior motive, like ego or power trip or need to prove you are right or to put subordinates in their place, instead of actually trying to promote their well-being. Seriously, it does.

So there’s this group of marginalized people you gave no thought of or consideration to while they were hanging around–even when they were asking for your attention–who decided they got tired of waiting and went out to do their own thing and now you care so much about them you have to chase them? Pretend you are kids on a playground for a minute. There’s a kid who wants to play ball with you, and you don’t give her the time of day, so she eventually says never mind, I’ll go find some other friends and we’ll play our own game, and when you see that happen you leave off what you were happily doing to go bust up her game and accuse her of causing problems for you way over there on the other side of the field? And you keep hounding her and hounding her about it, and calling her stupid and off-topic and accusing her of making you look bad to the other kids?

There are names for kids like that (and the nicest one is hypocrite), and you warn your own kids against them, and you get teachers and parents involved when it happens, and you make yourselves look bad without anyone else’s help. Don’t chase people who run away from you. It’s aggressive and thuggish and, dare I say it, the behavior of a bully. The most dignified response to people who decide to hang out with other people is to ignore them. And to succeed achieving your own goals, and bask in your own glory. And then this splinter group will look back at you longingly, and want to be a part of you again, and make amends, and admit defeat, and won’t it be worth it? Or maybe they won’t, but you’ll at least have successfully met your own goals, which is all you wanted in the first place, isn’t it? And which the splinter group pre-splinter was keeping you from being able to do?

Embrace the distance. Don’t fight it. The world is wide; there is room for everyone. And if more marginalized people are joining the splinter group than yours, it’s still a net gain for skepticism and/or atheism, isn’t it? This is not a zero-sum game, and the splinter groups are not your enemies. Don’t become theirs.

This went long, but there was a lot of crap to address. I’ve been socialized to say sorry, but it’s not crap of my own creation, so I won’t. It’s the people who won’t let splinter groups go who are causing the trouble.

She is not the one being divisive. The atheists who have been harassing and abusing her were being divisive. And for all of you out there clamoring (unreasonably) for “data,” here’s another real-life data point for your collection, which falls right in line with predictions.

Short Version
Woman: I am making a complaint about sexism and misogyny in skepticism.
Man: I am making a disproportionate response.

Long Version
I am noticing more and more often in reading the blogs (and probably in following the videos, although I don’t generally participate in the videosphere but have heard plenty about it) that whenever a woman makes a pretty straightforward point about sexism, there are predictably people–usually men, but not always–who show up to shut her down by flooding her with words. Written words, spoken words, short statements by lots of other people saying the same kind of thing… you’ve seen it. A woman makes a point that is met with a disproportionate response so often that you can almost bank on the inverse relationship between worthiness of the response and its word count. It’s like some sort of Feminist Godwin’s Law without Nazis: The longer the blog comment, the less likely the commenter has anything productive to contribute or is even directly engaging in the point.

Let’s get the exception out of the way so we don’t have to play gotcha in the comments section. Here is an example of a proportionate response:

Woman: I am writing a 1500-word blog post about sexism I have experienced.
Man: I am writing a 1500-word blog post in response to your blog post about sexism you have experienced.

But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about protesting too much, which takes many forms:

Gaslighting
Gaslighting is a term that has come into my awareness rather recently, and it refers to a specific attempt at psychological manipulation based on the events in a movie titled Gas Light. It takes lots and lots of effort to make a person doubt their own perceptions, but I’ve seen it plenty of times when a woman describes an experience and receive in response long explanations for how she’s the one with the problem–not the perpetrators of sexism she’s complaining about–or how she’s become so irrational you can’t trust what she says, or how she’s just unable to comprehend the magnitude of what she’s saying, et cetera. Gaslighting requires creating entire frameworks of how to view a situation from scratch (whereas most skeptics would apply Occam’s Razor and go with the idea that the skeptical woman they are talking to is just as capable of being objective as they are), and has to contain recruitment language, too, for the audience watching at home, in order that this gaslighting point of view be understood as the correct one and that the woman’s point of view is unreliable.

If you can make a woman look unreliable, nobody has to act on her wild and unreasonable complaints. Voila! Status quo preserved.

Gish Gallop
Skeptics ought to know all about the Gish Gallop, but there are always people new to the identity, so here’s a definition from Rational Wiki: “the debating technique of drowning the opponent in such a torrent of half-truths, lies, and straw-man arguments that the opponent cannot possibly answer every falsehood in real time”

Within a Gish Gallop on sexism or misogyny, you’ll find points taken to ridiculous extremes (a la if guys can’t corner women in elevators to ask them for sex the human race will die out), demands that one woman explain something another woman said (perhaps even at a different blog), accusations of various types (logical fallacies being particularly popular), deliberate misunderstandings (such as claiming the original etymological meaning of a word isn’t offensive), outrageous claims (like nobody in skepticism likes you), and general ruckus in lieu of arguments. A Gish Gallop is too convoluted to give a response to, would take too long to give a response to, and yet someone invariably will try—which wastes a lot of women’s time–or else they’ll disdain it–which leaves a wall of text sitting there as if it meant something important.

If you can Gish Gallop successfully, you can show how a woman’s complaints are unsupportable because she can’t even keep up with basic arguments, and you can have the last word.

Someone Is Wrong on the Internet
Beautifully illustrated at xkcd here. A woman has said something a man disagrees with, and it is more important than tending to health itself to make sure she knows she’s wrong and that he wins the point. It’s a full commitment to shutting down an argument that precludes actually reflecting on the points being made for any length of time. It’s a public display of rightness and it devalues the actual conversation in favor of crowing victorious about whatever at the end. It requires exhausting the other person until they go to bed first, thus proving that persistence makes truth or something (and thus cementing this point of view more firmly in your mind).

If you win SIWOTI, it proves that Reason was on your side. Bad arguments wear themselves out; only rationality remains.

Mansplaining
Mansplaining–which I covered here, in my Bonus Content–does not always take a lot of words, but it can, particularly when someone steps around the actual problem to expound at length all his thoughts about this, that, and the other thing, throughout history or from his personal point of view, or what women should do different, almost entirely without listening to what the woman has already said. Her input is just a jumping off point, not a point to consider, and once he gets going the essay just starts writing itself. All of which might be perfectly interesting at some other time, but serves as a big dismissal of what anyone has had to say but him.

If you resort to mansplaining, it’s only because man’s perspective is the most important thing to hear and no one was listening properly.

Do not use a hatchet to remove a fly from your friend’s forehead.
Or, to quip again: Do not ride an elephant to catch grasshoppers. Rule of thumb: If you have to scroll through the page to finish reading the your comment, it’s probably too long. You’re probably overwhelming the argument because you think for some reason or another that what you have to say is the most important thing. You probably have, as my mother would put it, an I problem. And women skeptics understand the I problem very well. Whatever observation/argument/recommendation the woman had to make, in an effort to help improve their sense of fully belonging to the skeptical community, has been sacrificed to the I problem, and at some point they are going to disengage.

It is at this point that you can congratulate yourself for shutting down dialogue completely, and for reinforcing the barriers to participating women were trying to erode. And you maybe never intended to do that. So try this next time:

Mind your word count. Think about what point you are contesting before you start to write or record or speak. Address that point. Generally, your response should be no longer than the original comment you are contesting. If you are responding to a blog post in kind, publish your response somewhere else. If you have to scroll through an entire computer screen to read your comment, start over. Better yet, don’t start at all. If all you have to talk about is yourself, stay out of it. If all you have to say to a woman in skepticism is that she’s doing it wrong, or misunderstands what’s happening, turn that around and realize that you have just demonstrated that YOU are doing it wrong and misunderstanding what is happening. If someone throws a TL;DR your way (teal deer! Ha! just stumbled over that phrase today and laughed and laughed), get the hint. If your comment was that long, it wasn’t worth reading. And if you are accused of gaslighting, mansplaining, Gish Galloping, or fighting for no purpose other than to win, your accuser is probably right.

Nothing you have to say is four or six or ten times more important than what a woman has to say about her own experience in skepticism. Nothing. Chances are, what you have to say about a woman’s experience in sexism is not important at all, or helpful, or illuminating, and if you are protesting too much when they speak up you are definitely not listening enough and you are learning nothing. Nothing about yourself, nothing about how women experience your community, nothing about solving the problem of bringing more of them on board. You might even be driving away the ones who have stuck around so far. And however personally fulfilling it might be to see your words alive on screen somewhere, it’s not going to help you meet your goal of growing your community.

These arguments could be making some very good points. It is entirely possible that my quirky sense of injustice is unique to me and has no bearing on anything else. I’m just finding trouble where I want to, out of boredom or delusion or a highly Westernized sense of middle class woman entitlement or plain old cantankerousness, and if there are so many fewer active women in the skeptical movement than men, it’s for reasons entirely different than the ones I give that require solutions entirely different than the ones I suggest. Such as Ladybrains! and Who cares what the gender balance is? I care about ideas!

And if you’re a mainstream skeptic who likes coasting along and doesn’t really care about sexism and misogyny in the community and is content with the status quo, the path of least resistance is to label me a crackpot and turn your skeptical attention onto topics worthy of skeptical consideration. And if you’re a mainstream skeptic who does care about sexism and misogyny but doesn’t really want to take any responsibility for it, the path of least resistant is to quarantine my thoughts within the boundaries of the label “bones to pick.” And if you’re a mainstream skeptic who really doesn’t want to take responsibility for sexism and misogyny and is starting to bristle under the cognitive dissonance of claiming to approach all things rationally and skeptically and being faced with evidence of sexism and misogyny from lots and lots of women, the path of least resistance is to lump us all into the category of a Fringe, hovering around the edges, blowing in the wind and fluttering about with the smallest shakeup.

And that’s cool.

But are you sure we’re a fringe? Are you sure that I’m a crackpot with weird ideas about the world that have no bearing outside my own head? Are you totally sure? Have you tried to estimate the population within the skeptical movement of people like me, with an alphabet soup of variables arranged in some kind of Drake Equation for the Feminist Age? Have you made any effort to find out from skeptical women sitting this whole skeptical movement out why they’ve removed themselves? Have you made any effort to find out from skeptics within the movement if they agree with you or with me? Have you assessed whether your confidence in representing mainstream skepticism is reasonable? Have you given any thought as to maybe you’re the one looking for confirmation in an echo chamber instead of the Oppressed Sisters and Their Approved Male Chorus? Any thought at all?

Are you sure you aren’t the fringe? Because, you know, it could be you instead. It’s possible that the skeptics lamenting how often women lament sexism, and how disruptive it is that they won’t just get over it already are the ones who are the crackpots, who are assuming that their personal beefs with the skeptical movement have universal significance, and whose proposed solutions to these problems are best left on ignore.

And that’s cool, too. I mean, interesting things happen in a fringe and there’s no shame being part of one (plus that’s where the best summer movie plots come from). But dismissing observations about a woman’s experience within the skeptical community and suggestions for fixing problems she sees on the basis that she’s just some proverbial sidewalk naysayer with a sandwich board is not a rational thing to do until you’ve done some investigating on how many people she might actually speak for, and pursuing that investigation across a wide range of sources. As in, not just a couple blogs you’ve already got bookmarked, or a posed question to your Twitter followers or Facebook friends, or some after-meeting asking around at your local skeptics group, or some official declaration about The State of Things by some Official Skeptical Person. Because unless you’ve done that thoroughly, and sincerely, you have no foundation to stand on when ruling on the practicality of my points. None at all. Which is bad if you want to call yourself a mainstream skeptic who presents the best face about the skeptical community to society at large (as opposed to the scrabbling gaggle of harpies who are ruining it for everyone).

It doesn’t matter to me if I am in the fringe or not; I said a year ago when I started this blog that I was going to speak only for myself, and that you could take my advice or leave it. So, before you ask, no. I haven’t done all this surveying and research and I have no idea if I’m speaking in an echo chamber and I don’t even care. But I’m not the one out there claiming to be superrational and free of biases and skilled at the kind of critical and scientific thinking that leads to true results, and I’m not the one out there fretting in public about the number of women coming to skeptics’ events and expressing actual bafflement as to why. I’m not the one that needs to identify who’s occupying the fringes of the skeptical movement. But I will admit, before you ask, that I have my suspicions. Yes, I do.

For some reason, which could be related to the insidious pervasiveness of the patriarchy if you are feminist/political minded or could be related to the purported benevolent cluelessness and social awkwardness that seems to plague so many members of the skeptical community, women’s failure to provide consent is often perceived as confusing. A woman’s “no” is considered more of a negotiation point than a refusal or as inauthentic or as irrelevant, in a wide variety of contexts (and I’ve expanded on this point previously and do not feel like recapping here).

Gaining consent from a woman is also a point of confusion that frequently becomes a point of contention down the line. Consent for Behavior A or Context A is treated like Consent for All Future Behaviors or All Contexts, and the fact that a woman has provided consent in one situation seems to override all subsequent failures to provide consent, and the situation reverts to No Doesn’t Mean No (see above). What is not understood is that consent is temporary and highly context specific, and must be gained each time you want a woman to do something. Let’s run some scenarios to better make this point.

Consent does not transfer from person to person (A).
A woman wears revealing clothing to a bar for the purpose of getting sexual attention. She flirts with some people. You walk up to her and try to flirt and she rejects your attention. She is not a hypocrite. Just because she said yes to that person does not mean she has said yes to all people. Her consent applies only to the people she granted it to.

Consent does not transfer from person to person (B).
A woman takes on a task with specific responsibilities, and then agrees to do extra work in addition to the specific responsibilities. Then a different woman takes over the job, but refuses to do the extra work. You were lucky the first woman agreed to do the extra work, is all. Now you have to figure out who else will do it. The second woman is not being uncooperative or causing trouble for you. You have no justification for thinking badly about her refusal. You should have rewritten the specific responsibilities before getting a replacement if it was going to be that big of a deal.

Consent does not transfer from place to place (A).
A woman flirts with a person in one location, and consents to accompany that person to a second location. Then she decides flirting isn’t fun anymore and decides to go. Just because she flirted with a person over there does not obligate her to flirt with that person over here, and that doesn’t make her a tease or a liar or a flake or whatever word is invoked to angrily mask disappointment over her decision, even if the other person wasn’t done flirting yet.

Consent does not transfer from place to place (B).
A woman poses nude in a calendar that you buy so you can look at her nude. Later, you see that woman fully clothed. Even though you bought the calendar so you could look at her nude, and she posed for the calendar aware that people were going to buy it so they could look at naked pictures of her, she has not consented to being treated in other contexts as if she was nude for the personal pleasure of anyone who knows about that calendar picture. If you want to interact with her nude picture, you have to buy the calendar.

Consent expires immediately.
A woman gives consent to a behavior, and then engages in the behavior, and then concludes the behavior. Next time there’s a question of her performing the behavior, the request for consent starts at the beginning. It cannot be assumed that because she said yes before, she has an obligation to uphold the expectations of people who want her to say yes now. If she has changed her mind in the interim, it doesn’t mean she was wrong before or wrong now or wrong in the future if she says yes the next time someone asks. It means only that she doesn’t want to now.

I repeat: Consent is temporary and highly context specific, and must be gained each time you want a woman to do something. One of the reasons women are turned off by active participation in large groups of men is because they do not perceive that their wishes are respected. It sends a pretty clear signal that you are not considered an equal when people put words in your mouth all the time (But you said yes when…!) or think they have access to your time or attention now based on something you’ve said or done with someone else. It’s rattling to encounter some unstated expectation of what you are willing to do and then have to justify yourself to people insisting you’ve already said yes, and it hampers how comfortable you can feel in a group–how much fun you can let yourself have–if things you say in one context (like at a party) come back to haunt you in another context (like on a speakers’ panel). It is very inhibiting, and you can more or less guarantee that if your skeptical community is operating on the assumption that consent is universal, it is not benefiting from the full potential of its members (and it’s not enjoying the full membership from the local skeptics).

On the other hand, if women know that your group of skeptics is one that takes their words at face value, that makes no impositions, and will not hold women to fantasy obligations, women will be far more likely to trust you, chip in, speak up, help out, take risks, and generally further your cause. Strength in numbers, hidden talents, et cetera et cetera.

The Skeptics Guide to the Universe is a podcast and panel of skeptics “dedicated to promoting critical thinking, reason, and the public understanding of science through online and other media.” I don’t know about the demographics of the listening audience, but a cursory stroll through the discussion board audience via threads on the forum reveals that by far the majority of posters are men. A stroll through the blogosphere reveals that there are far more skeptics who are men than women, to the point that the conversation frequently revolves around how to involve more women. (Hence this blog.) A recent uproar reveals that it is such a point of concern that too few women have registered for The Amazing Meeting 2012 that the president of the hosting organization (James Randi Educational Foundation) attributed this decline to women bloggers discussing the unfriendly environment women encounter in real-life and online communities. In fact, one specific woman blogger, Rebecca Watson–SGU panelist and podcaster–was named as especially responsible and she has decided to sit out this event to make a point.

Because it must be the women warning other women about potential opportunities for personal and online harassment who scare the women away (and maybe it is) and not at all the fault of the people (usually men) harassing women in person and online. Or the behavior of skeptical leaders big and small that sets the tone for what kind of behaviors general members can engage in, how they will be tolerated, and what women can expect.

For example, the moderators of the SGU Forums feel free to fight against the women who are trying to make skepticism a more welcoming place for women, and so the forum itself has become a place where people can go to fight women who are trying to reduce misogyny and sexism in the skeptical community. And you get gems of threads like this one…

…which turns into a screed against Rebecca Watson in which at least two moderators (one is the administrator) participate, and includes commentary like this:

You used to be right all the time, back when you were a skeptic who promoted feminism. But lately, now that you’re a feminist who targets inequalities in skepticism, you have been harder and harder for us folks who are still in it for the woo-bashing to follow and agree with.

I hypothesize that you see it as personal evolution. But for those of us who haven’t evolved the way you have, we see it as bridge-burning. You are burning bridges, and then you bad-mouth the people who didn’t follow you across the bridge. It should come as no surprise that the members of this board perceive you the way they — we — do. In fact, it would be irrational to expect otherwise.

(Emphasis mine. Except for the “we” inside the em-dashes. Those italics are in the original. Must fully disclose, you know.)

So you’ve got your head moderator–your board administrator, in fact–letting women know that it’s OK to be a feminist, but if you are the kind of feminist who burns bridges by targeting inequalities and criticizing sexism and misogyny (the bad-mouthing), you cannot expect support. Your board administrator emphasizes that he will not support you. That it would be irrational (ergo, not worthy of a skeptic) to support these feminists and that women should not be surprised when their attempts at eliminating inequality make them unwelcome in this skeptical community.

When you have moderators and board administrators saying these things, it actually should come as no surprise to you when your podcast-affiliated forum becomes a place to say things like women who feel strongly enough about these positions must be mentally ill, that women should expect harassment because it’s natural for men to do it, that women who have abortions are executioners, that women having acid thrown in their faces is a topic to mock, that that false rape accusations are rampant (7/1/12, posted by the board admin) (NOTE: Since writing this post, I’ve started documenting the new ones that I encounter, as of July 11, 2012, you know, for fun, and because I am a bitter shrew with too much time on my hands.), harassment policies hurt conference organizers (7/3/12, posted by the board admin), that rape is sometimes funny (7/10/12), that there’s a thread just of women’s boobs for people to look at (and not the boobs of forum members posted willingly, either–just random boobs from women who probably did not give their permission to have those pictures posted by those people in that online space), that it doesn’t really matter if there are women in the movement or not because they treat all people as equal and it’s offensive to men to say that women should be recruited. And when I send email to the panel pointing out the discrepancy between this atmosphere and their stated desire for more women to participate, and pointing out how moderation creates this discrepancy, I get back in writing from the panel that they do not expect their moderators to take neutral stances (and that requiring them to do so is the opposite of what the goals are for the forum), that allowing conversations like this makes it “worth the time” of active participants, that they believe the forum moderators and participants do “a very good job of policing themselves and keeping conversations fair and respectful.” That if I don’t find this to be the case, I have to take it up with these very same moderators, but that the panel in no way endorse an anti-woman stance. Which leaves me wondering if they even know what an anti-woman stance looks like.

If you are wondering where the women in your community are, you have to look at things like forum content, like moderation policy, like tone. Like who you designate to act on your behalf, with your approval. Who represents you. If this is the SGU Forum, it reflects the SGU Podcast, and there’s no way around it. Their name is on it. They link to it from their website. They defend their moderators. If there are anti-woman aspects of this place, they are responsible for it. It’s hard to take seriously conversations about the lack of women participating in skepticism when all this trouble is playing out in general discussion on this public forum and they say that’s all aligned with their goals for the forum in the first place.

Maybe the forum isn’t a very important or significant corner of the skeptical community, and therefore the hassle of managing it differently is outweighed by the benefits and giving some fringe group a place to be a fringe group doesn’t seem like a very big risk. You could make the case that only a hundred people or so visit there regularly. But you could also make the case that there are 11,000 members (as the board administrator has made before). Maybe 11,000 is also a small fringe group of skeptics in the large scheme of things, and still is no big deal. But maybe that’s a lot of people watching this place, and maybe judging it, and maybe questioning its purpose, and maybe even questioning the motives of a panel that keeps it in place. Maybe it is fun for some people. But what does that say about those people? And if pleasing them is just as important as welcoming women to your community, maybe welcoming women isn’t very important, in which case you could save yourself a lot of controversy and stop talking about the discrepancy between men and women skeptics as if it’s something that matters to you. Or maybe if you don’t want this dubious association between the podcast and the forum, you can hand the forum off to a third party to run under a different name or shut it down all together.*

*Save your breath. That is not censorship. Don’t even bring it up.

And maybe, Gentle Reader, this applies to another forum, or blog, or in-person event, or membership group that you are responsible for, and you can go to the universal from this specific example of what not to do if your goals are to make women feel welcome in your community.

/pointed critique

Addendum, June 19
After a flurry of activity, the SGU Forum moderators have decided to keep all the naked pictures, albeit add one more level of hassle to accessing it. It’s not because they want to make the board more welcoming to women; it’s because they don’t want the naked stuff to be so easy to use against them. And they still don’t want women around who are going to “browbeat” men about inequalities and stuff. Threads here and here. This was a very thorough demonstration of how to uphold the status quo. It is an example of wanting to not appeal to most women but not wanting most women to criticize them for it. I predict there will be no change in demographics of this forum in the future, but they did admit changing the demographics was not their goal.

The new section is described as below:

Explicit (NSFW) Access
READ THIS: Explicit (NSFW) Access is a membergroup that will give you access to the Explicit (NSFW) subforum, a place which contains content with adult, objectionable, and politically incorrect themes. By clicking on “Join Group”, you acknowledge that you understand the nature of this subforum, and will not discuss this subforum with anyone outside of the subforum itself. The contents of this subforum do not reflect the views or opinions of SGU, SGU Forums moderators or administrators, or any of their affiliates or sponsors.

So it’s got all the adult themes you want, plus a promise to not discuss it with anyone outside of the section, so that no one outside the discussion board can find out about it because they don’t want to look bad. They don’t say what will happen if you do. And the last line about how it doesn’t reflect the views of the SGU podcast, the forum moderators or administrators is a bunch of crap, because the SGU podcast lends its name to the whole enterprise and it was the forum moderators and administrators who cooked the scheme up. And at this point their sponsors and affiliates are blameless, but once they find out about the subforum, they’re all complicit too. It’s a ridiculous sentence.

And it’s totally OK for me to say this outside of that subforum, because I did not join the group, so the restriction doesn’t apply.

Addendum, September 18
I was alerted a while ago via Twitter from an SGU forum member about moderation changes, so I went and scoped it out. Forum announcement and discussion here. The new moderators assure the community that they liked the way the moderation had been handled so far and were aiming to keep it that way. And that seems to be true, because in that thread a conversation popped up about swear words (and then was split off into another forum section here, and whether it was worse to make jokes about women posters’ pussies than to use the word fuck. Transitions are always rocky, and I’m sure the moderators and community members will adapt to the change pretty smoothly, and everyone seems happy enough, and they still may someday entertain the idea of making the forum environment friendlier to women, and that is all I have to say about that.

For now… (Does that sound ominous? I pronounced it ominously in my head when I typed it. But that’s probably it.)