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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