So billybush has this cute little diary up, wherein Richard Dawkins hilariously reads hate mail from Christian fundamentalists while Dawkins' off-camera staff laugh their heads off.
It's a thing of delicate beauty! You simply must view it, if you have not already! Lots o' fun.
But the comments in the diary were occasionally overshadowed by people asserting that Richard Dawkins is a "misogynistic creep" (that's an actual quote), and those people did not fancy giving Dawkins any kind of venue for anything.
I disagree with said people that billybush's diary was the place to bring up Richard Dawkins' record on his treatment of women, but I do agree that Dawkins made a foolish public spectacle of himself on several occasions and definitely came across as a misogynistic creep. You can certainly object to that statement, because it's obviously just one person's opinion, but in thinking about the intellectual movement's attitude towards women overall, I came to the realization that science truly does have a sexism problem.
It's all over the place. It's everywhere you look, it's insidious, and it's not all that subtle.
And it's starting to seriously piss me right the fuck off.
The Big Bang Theory is my favorite TV show, and has been for a number of years now. Little Shiz likes it, too, and we can watch reruns of that show for hours on end. I even gave Little Shiz a Big Bang Theory board game for her 13th birthday, for fuck's sake. My sister loves it, and so do my friends, and it's in the public consciousness pretty consistently.
It's also the easiest and most reliable way to prove that sexism in science is so prevalent that it is automatically accepted as part of the dynamic between the characters on the show. It's not even a thought we entertain as we watch a goddamned TV program that mimics how socially inept nerds relate to the world at large.
So it's a thing.
I'd like to make it clear that I'm not suggesting The Big Bang Theory is condoning sexism. To the contrary, the writers often make sexist behavior the butt of the joke in each episode. However, it's tolerated as to appear normal within the culture. I realize that Hollywood makes obvious exaggerations, but the point still remains.
Here's a clip from the BBT that makes both sexism and racism appear ridiculous and tone-deaf, all the while framing Sheldon Cooper, one of the main characters on the show, as a total asshole:
It is this unique tone-deafness that is the result of so much of the sexism within nerd culture. I have read unbelievably terrible things men have said or communicated about women recently, and I feel like it's on a frightening trajectory upward. The excuse I often hear for this loathsome attitude towards the feminine is two-fold:
1) These men were bullied in adolescence; and
2) Girls and women are to blame for them being bullied by not having sex with them.
Of course, logically, this makes absolutely no sense, but plenty of men have stepped in it bigtime lately, and lucky for all of you, I'm going to highlight a few of those incidents here. Get your barf bags ready.
In mid-December, an MIT professor named Scott Aaronson wrote a clumsy and insensitive response to a woman on his blog who asserted that there was misogyny in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). And lo, he made the feminazis very, very angry:
Alas, as much as I try to understand other people’s perspectives, the first reference to my “male privilege”—my privilege!—is approximately where I get off the train, because it’s so alien to my actual lived experience.
But I suspect the thought that being a nerdy male might not make me “privileged”—that it might even have put me into one of society’s least privileged classes—is completely alien to your way of seeing things. To have any hope of bridging the gargantuan chasm between us, I’m going to have to reveal something about my life, and it’s going to be embarrassing.
(sigh) Here’s the thing: I spent my formative years—basically, from the age of 12 until my mid-20s—feeling not “entitled,” not “privileged,” but terrified.I was terrified that one of my female classmates would somehow find out that I sexually desired her, and that the instant she did, I would be scorned, laughed at, called a creep and a weirdo, maybe even expelled from school or sent to prison.
(snip)
My recurring fantasy, through this period, was to have been born a woman, or a gay man, or best of all, completely asexual, so that I could simply devote my life to math, like my hero Paul Erdös did. Anything, really, other than the curse of having been born a heterosexual male, which for me, meant being consumed by desires that one couldn’t act on or even admit without running the risk of becoming an objectifier or a stalker or a harasser or some other creature of the darkness.
My takeaway from that is this: females are not human beings per se, but only exist insofar as to please men. Females are an extension of the male ego. They are not allowed to have thoughts or feelings, and they are most certainly not allowed to express them, specifically if those thoughts and feelings go against a man's desire.
Oh, yeah! And being a white, male nerd in 2014 is way worse than being a black, gay woman every day of the week. And twice on Sundays.
(Amanda Marcotte has a brilliant takedown of Aaronson, because she is Amanda Marcotte and she is perfect.)
At least Scott Aaronson later tried to walk back his comments. Tony Harris did no such thing. Harris is a critically-acclaimed comic artist who's been working steadily since 1989. Although it's since been taken down, here is what he posted on his Facebook wall in November 2012:
I cant remember if Ive said this before, but Im gonna say it anyway. I dont give a crap.I appreciate a pretty Gal as much as the next Hetero Male. Sometimes I even go in for some racy type stuff ( keeping the comments PG for my Ladies sake) but dammit, dammit, dammit I am so sick and tired of the whole COSPLAY-Chiks. I know a few who are actually pretty cool-and BIG Shocker, love and read Comics.So as in all things, they are the exception to the rule. Heres the statement I wanna make, based on THE RULE: "Hey! Quasi-Pretty-NOT-Hot-Girl, you are more pathetic than the REAL Nerds, who YOU secretly think are REALLY PATHETIC. But we are onto you. Some of us are aware that you are ever so average on an everyday basis. But you have a couple of things going your way. You are willing to become almost completely Naked in public, and yer either skinny( Well, some or most of you, THINK you are ) or you have Big Boobies. Notice I didnt say GREAT Boobies? You are what I refer to as "CON-HOT". Well not by my estimation, but according to a LOT of average Comic Book Fans who either RARELY speak to, or NEVER speak to girls. Some Virgins, ALL unconfident when it comes to girls, and the ONE thing they all have in common? The are being preyed on by YOU. You have this really awful need for attention, for people to tell you your pretty, or Hot, and the thought of guys pleasuring themselves to the memory of you hanging on them with your glossy open lips, promising them the Moon and the Stars of pleasure, just makes your head vibrate. After many years of watching this shit go down every 3 seconds around or in front of my booth or table at ANY given Con in the country, I put this together. Well not just me. We are LEGION. And here it is, THE REASON WHY ALL THAT, sickens us: BECAUSE YOU DONT KNOW SHIT ABOUT COMICS, BEYOND WHATEVER GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH YOU DID TO GET REF ON THE MOST MAINSTREAM CHARACTER WITH THE MOST REVEALING COSTUME EVER. And also, if ANY of these guys that you hang on tried to talk to you out of that Con? You wouldnt give them the fucking time of day. Shut up you damned liar, no you would not. Lying, Liar Face. Yer not Comics. Your just the thing that all the Comic Book, AND mainstream press flock to at Cons. And the real reason for the Con, and the damned costumes yer parading around in? That would be Comic Book Artists, and Comic Book Writers who make all that shit up.
Oh, Jesus H. Christ. I could rant for days about everything wrong with that extreme run-on paragraph. But let's do something completely different here just for kicks, because it's time to learn a new word! Yay! Wiki:
Hypergamy (colloquially referred to as "marrying up") is the act or practice of marrying someone wealthier, or of higher caste or status than oneself. Although the term is not gendered, it is generally used by social scientists to refer to women marrying higher-status men, rather than to men marrying higher-status women.
So apart from this Tony Harris dude being an absolute dickhead and being able to show Dick Cheney at thing or two in the evil department, we are now introduced to a concept that is very popular in Gamer and con and STEM communities: not only do women flaunt their sexy bodies for attention and exist simply to torture men, but you can buy them at a price. All women are golddiggers. And all women are not people, but commodities to be exchanged.
Hypergamy is just a rich man's prostitution, after all.
Yesterday, a British teen named Ben Moynihan was convicted of attempted murder for stabbing three women. Moynihan says he tried to kill the women because he was still a virgin and, I guess, that was all those bitches' fault:
Kerry Maylin, prosecuting, said Moynihan had left two letters for police confessing to his crimes.
In one letter, left on a police van, Moynihan wrote: “All women needs to die and hopefully next time I can gouge their eyeballs out.
(snip)
The letter said: ”When women won't talk to you it's heartbreaking, why are they fussy with men nowadays.“
(snip)
Ms Maylin described how in video footage found on his laptop, Moynihan is recorded saying: ”I think every girl is a type of slut, they are fussy with men nowadays, they do not give boys like us a chance.
I recognize that Ben Moynihan is a sick individual, and I realize that he needs mental health assistance along with his prison sentence. But, when I become stressed out and lonely and frustrated, I do not just suddenly and simultatenously become racist, sexist, or homophobic. Similarly, when I used to get drunk, I never became anti-Semitic, like Mel Gibson.
If you're not already a misogynist, being psychotic is not going to make you one.
I wonder how many of the Ben Moynihans start out like the Tony Harrises, or even the Scott Aaronsons. How many go downhill in a culture that subverts and represses women? How many start to believe that women are simply objects to use? How many think women are not actual human beings?
Too many.
Because this crap keeps happening, and I have a geek daughter. Get your shit together, science, because we have other things we seriously need to talk about and fix.
Like, say, global warming.