Shame Shame Shame and Sexism

So a thing has come up lately in the atheist blogosphere; an ugly thing, sort of, and an inspiring thing, sort of. LOTS AND LOTS of people have been posting, commenting, saying things. (I suspect that this post will largely consist in a shit-ton of hyperlinky thingies.) I count myself as a feminist, if an inexperienced and bumbling one that may say the wrong thing at any given instant, and I thought that it was about the coolest thing ever that there was a Women in Secularism conference that took place last weekend, and I so wish that I could have been there. I am also extremely grateful to Ashley F. Miller for providing a good summary of the whole thing and also for live-blogging the entire thing so that I could at least get a flavor of the conference in my head and a fair amount of the detail. I’m sympathetic to her fingers doing all that typing, and would just like her to know that the results did not go unappreciated. I can’t say that I felt like I was there, exactly, but still, it’s as close as I was going to be able to get. (I also just discovered that Ophelia Benson also has a whole slew of live-bloggy posts about the conference as well, but you’ll have to dig a bit to get at them all.)

I absolutely intend to write something about some of the other wonderful and inspiring things that were said at the conference, but just at the moment, I am now going to address the sort of ugly thing, maybe just so that I can get that shit out of my system a bit more and onto paper (however digital it may be – yes, I do keep an actual journal on actual paper as well – no, you will never see it – well, bits of it do bleed onto over here, which gets a bit messy sometimes, but that’s okay) and then move on to parts that make we want to fly.

So, the ugly thing: Sexism is very fucking real. And it happens all the time. Even among those of us that like to self-identify as freethinkers and humanists and skeptics and atheists and the like. For me, all of those things are a completely natural byproduct of and direct consequence of my atheism, which I’ve talked a bit about before so I won’t go on and on about that here. There was a mention of the fact that some not-so-small-fry men-speakers at conferences were behaving in some very sexist ways and that women-speakers, for a myriad of reasons, had formed a sort of underground warning system in order to cope with what in the end amounts to harassment, plain and simple. For more about the details, see Stephanie Zvan’s original post about the topic, and her follow up post. As an example of why women do not very often drag this shit out into the open, the example of the explosion of horrible that happened around “elevatorgate” was pointed to; it is an excellent example of what happens, and boils down to a form of “slut-shaming.” I hate shaming. HATE IT. Violently. Which I’ll come back around to in a minute, I think.

I posted the original article in my local atheist group and got an immediate and surprising amount of push-back on the issue, which largely swirled around the specifics of elevatorgate, rather than addressing the sexism-at-conferences and sexism in the movement issue as a whole. To be fair, that was addressed as well, but the whole underground network system of warning women about skeezy speakers was labeled as something akin to high school girls posting about ex-boyfriends on the internet and gossipy things. All of the push-back took me a bit by surprise, and I felt what I always feel when confronted with confrontation, especially from people that I genuinely like, want acceptance and approval from (which, I know, is a whole other, if related, issue); I felt shamed. I was sorely tempted to just drop it and delete the post. But, I hate shame. And this is important. So I asked for help, which is also difficult for me, so that I wouldn’t feel quite so backed into a corner by myself. With that help, I then stood up and stuck to my fucking guns. I did not back down.

This not backing down is an important part of me dealing with my own sense of shame, and that’s incredibly important to me and for me, so I didn’t want to leave that entirely out. However, that’s not really the point that I’m trying to make in this post, so I’ll leave that for the moment, but it can be expected to return periodically as it is something with which I do and will continue to struggle and work through.

There were many other people that have weighed in on the issue from a variety of different perspectives. Stephanie Zvan had a follow up post addressing some practical aspects of what to do, Jen McCreight (whose off-hand comments at the conference spurred the whole blogosphere discussion) had a great post on it, JT Eberhard (from whom I shamelessly stole the word “skeeve”) asked what he and other men who self-identify as feminists could do to ensure that consent and boundaries are respected while recognizing that sexual people will be sexual people, Greta Christina has a few posts on the topic, Beth Presswood, Matt Dillahunty (who threatened to and, I believe, did block people from his FB wall who were using that same trivializing and slut-shaming technique [“The point of bringing this up at the convention was to note that this should NOT be back-channel communication and that the individuals should be called out on it. Those of you who are STUPIDLY just ranting that this is all just unsupported allegations - that's part of the fucking point. …  It's fucking disgraceful that even the meta-discussion about what to do in the future is being reacted to in a way that virtually ensures that mouths will stay closed.” – Oh my shit, I love that quote]), Ed Brayton, Skatje Myers (who was guest posting at Pharyngula) has a brief discussion of it at the end of her also excellent summary of the event, etc. I know I missed some that I’d read. Feel free to post links in the comments if you know of anymore.

Alright, in closing, and I think this addresses a couple of different things I might be trying to say, I’d like to bring up this thing called the Johari window. It’s a bit Psych101, I know, but I find it a useful model for a lot of things.

In this case, it’s really the “blind spot” window that I’d like to talk about just briefly. These are things that other people can see about us, but of which we are, for whatever reason, unaware. The reall challenge is how we react when other people point out some things about ourselves of which we are, perhaps almost willfully unaware. It can be an incredibly uncomfortable thing to have that shit pointed out to us. It has certainly been uncomfortable for me in the past, and I imagine for most people. But it levels the playing field, so to speak. When we get uncomfortable, we often get defensive. Things get said. Words are used. People get hurt.

On the other hand, if we take a step back and look at ourselves, and recognize that perhaps there really was something there (and, of course, it’s not always going to be the case that the person was right, but how will we know if we don’t at least look?), then we can shift those things that were hidden from ourselves into the realm that is not hidden from us, but is rather known to both us and those around us. That is how we become more ourselves, more whole, more self-aware; that is how we change, grow, affect change around us, become better people, become a better community.

That all feels incredibly incomplete and very poorly stated, so don’t be surprised if I come back and edit the shit out of this later, but at least it’s out of me and onto this, and that’s a starting place.

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I Said the Word, or Being "Spiritual" In the Rooms

A few weeks ago, The Skeptical Novice had a post about saying, “I’m an Atheist,” in a context where one might not normally say that and how it felt to say that. I had a very similar (in some ways) experience right around then (in fact, I’m not sure whether I read this before or after, just that when I did, I may have actually said, “FUCK YES!!” out loud and then looked around innocently).  Except I said it at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. At my “home group” meeting. It’s a big meeting. There are a lot of people at that meeting. I love that meeting. I really really like a lot of the people at that meeting. Aaand a lot of them believe in the classical AA Higher Power, i.e. Jesus Christ. (No, I am absolutely not going to get into my very complicated and not un-conflicted relationship with AA – that’s a whole separate post – probably many whole separate posts.) The reading had been on spirituality. The topic was spirituality. People were saying a lot of things about God and prayer and what not.

I have not, in some ways, been terribly shy about being an atheist. I think it comes with the actor in me. On the other hand, that actor bit of me has always also been about being horrendously insecure, and being an out atheist is certainly no different there. One of the parts that I identified strongly with in TSN’s post was this statement, “First off, I did this without thinking too much about it. This is a huge step for me.  Looking back two years, there is no way in hell I would have said to a large group of mostly strangers that I identified as an atheist.” Now, I did think about it. But not too hard. It was unnatural for me to speak, but natural. I owed it to the other people that I knew goddamn well were in that room trying to stay sober without a god to say something, to let them know that they are not alone, that it’s okay to be an atheist. And a fucking drunk. At the same time. Especially then.

When the topic of conversation at AA meetings turns to spirituality, atheists often feel pushed out to the perimeter, and, yes, absolutely pressured to at least try to believe in a deity HP, however vague. We often feel as if it is absolutely taken for granted that we, because we are Atheists, have no spirituality. Which is complete horseshit[1]. It’s just that my spirituality doesn’t have any, you know, actual spirits in it.

My spirituality is other people. My spirituality is aloneness. My spirituality is trees. My spirituality is galaxies.

My spirituality is...

I love others, and I am loved; I care about them, they care about me, and I even care about myself (well, I try to anyway). That is spirituality. Being able to be comfortable alone with myself in a room, alone with myself in the forest, alone with myself in my head, in its dark-and-twistiness and its light-and-airiness, too. That is spirituality. The world around me, from the grass and leaves still before the rain to the universe and the universes beyond the universes flinging nothingness behind them. That is spirituality. Being able to live in the gray, in the tension and uncertainty between blacks and whites that don’t exist; slowly learning to carry my own emotions. That is spirituality. What need for a god in all that?

I didn’t say all of that, but I’ve had more time to think about it now. I didn’t think about it as much then. What I did say was enough, though, enough for them to get the gist that I really do have my own "spirituality" and some of what it means to me. And that I am so deeply grateful that AA (or at least, this AA, this meeting, this group, these warm people) has room for me, too, an Atheist.

(Afterword: It did make a difference. Right afterwards, the guy next to me, an artist that I have a HUGE amount of respect for and who came and picked me up and took me to meetings after I had relapsed once and was still detoxing too acutely to fathom driving, leaned over and said, “Well, you fucked me up!” and laughed. Maybe you had to be there, but that was a good thing. Several other people approached me afterwards to thank me for speaking up and said that they were Atheists, too.  One of them was the chair of the meeting.)

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[1] This is leaving aside for the moment my very real misgivings about language and words. Like, for instance, the whole God thing. So many times I question why, once one understands the concept of the God people are actually trying to defend, they insist on continuing to use that word when it so clearly does not correspond to the meaning that it implies when one actually says the word. (ç VERY EASILY DISTRACTED BY SHINY MIND-OBJECTS, THIS ONE.)