Women in Secularism 2 is underway this weekend, with dozens of badass female leaders scheduled to take the stage. Things got off to an interesting start yesterday with the opening lecture, given by Ron Lindsay, the CEO of the Center for Inquiry. You can read the text of his talk in full here.

To summarize, Lindsay spends a good deal of time arguing against the idea that feminism as a movement has no significant internal disagreements, an absurd idea I have never actually heard expressed by any feminists, but I suppose Lindsay and I travel in different circles. Lindsay doesn’t mention who exactly has argued this point so I can’t check to see why on Earth they’d think something so obviously contradictory to reality. It seems impossible to me that a person could be involved in modern day feminism in any way without noticing the lively and occasionally contentious debates among feminists about topics like intersectionality, particularly with regards to the fringe radical feminists who hold openly transphobic beliefs.

Lindsay then moves on to what seems to be the crux of his talk: he has a serious problem with feminists who use the word “privilege” as a way to silence men – to tell men to “shut up and listen.”

But it’s the second misapplication of the concept of privilege that troubles me most. I’m talking about the situation where the concept of privilege is used to try to silence others, as a justification for saying, “shut up and listen.” Shut up, because you’re a man and you cannot possibly know what it’s like to experience x, y, and z, and anything you say is bound to be mistaken in some way, but, of course, you’re too blinded by your privilege even to realize that.

Lets be clear: there are, without a doubt, people who misuse the term “privilege” and there are those who use the concept of privilege as their sole point of argumentation. To give an example, recently Rhys Morgan criticized the transphobic RadFem conference on Twitter, and in return he got some ridiculous angry responses accusing him of being a male oppressor/rapist. When Amanda Marcotte and I supported Rhys, we were all called “pimp apologists:”

I wonder what #radfem2013 think of the words “frape” and “twape”, cause it’s clear they don’t give a shit about the meaning of the word rape

— Rhys Morgan (@rhysmorgan) April 20, 2013

@rhysmorgan @amandamarcotte @rebeccawatson Libfem pimp apologists need to shut the fuck up and not appropriate radical feminism.

— Terri Strange Inc (@terristrange) April 20, 2013

@rhysmorgan @amandamarcotte @rebeccawatson I’m not talking about you dude.You’re a dude.Yr opinions on feminism mean fuck all to me.

— Terri Strange Inc (@terristrange) April 20, 2013

So there’s an example of feminists vehemently disagreeing with one another and an example of a feminist misusing privilege as a way to stop a discussion. And yet, it is absolutely not an example of anyone – Rhys, Amanda, or me – being silenced. That feminist did not start an entire blog dedicated to calling Rhys slurs. She did not open a forum for people to post Photoshopped pictures of Rhys in pornographic poses. She did not repeatedly threaten to kill or rape him. She did not organize a mob of people to do the same. Rhys was not hounded every day via Twitter, Facebook, email, and comments on his blog. He wasn’t disinvited from conferences where he was expected to speak. He didn’t quit his online activities in attempt to stem the flow of hatred coming at him. He didn’t consult the police when that didn’t work.

That transphobic radical feminist did not silence him, me, or Amanda – though to be very clear, I’m certain there have been transphobic feminists who have silenced transgender people, a group that is already marginalized and abused by society as a whole.

In his talk, Lindsay didn’t give any examples of men who have been silenced, though he has promised to provide some. In the meanwhile, the audience is forced to examine the only example provided: Lindsay himself, a white male who is CEO of one of the largest skeptic organizations in the world and who delivered the 30-minute introductory lecture at a women’s conference. There doesn’t seem to be much danger of his voice being silenced, though of course I may not be aware of some behind-the-scenes campaign to drive him into obscurity.

Meanwhile, nowhere in Lindsay’s speech did he mention feminists like Jen McCreight, who has been so bullied and harassed that she did in fact quit attending conferences and she quit blogging and being active on social media in the hopes the anti-feminists would finally leave her alone. They didn’t. That is silencing. Nowhere did Lindsay mention that every day I and other feminists get slurs, rape jokes, and death threats from fellow skeptics and secularists. That is an attempt at silencing, though it is an attempt that will not work until the day one person follows through on the threat.

When faced with my criticism of his tone deafness, Lindsay didn’t hesitate to include me in the list of feminists trying to shut him up. He seems to be confused, assuming any discussion about how race, gender, and other attributes influence our outlook and our biases is a call for people of privilege to have no say. This is quite obviously absurd – I myself am incredibly privileged as a white, straight, cisgendered, able-bodied, middle class educated American, but do I demand that I and anyone like me never engage in discussions of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, or class? Of course not – I merely hope that we engage in these conversations with compassion and understanding, ultimately encouraging the people directly affected by those issues to have a voice and an audience. Instead of blogging on behalf of LGBTQ people, I set up Queereka and gave it to LGBTQ people to run. Instead of blogging on behalf of people with disabilities, I asked people with disabilities to tell their own stories. And at no point do I ever tell these people that the real problem is in the way they fight for their rights.

It’s a shame that with so many wonderful, inspiring women on stage at this event, the gut feeling I’ll be taking home is yet more disappointment and disillusionment in the leadership of the organized secular/skeptic movement.

• Fun fabulous female funeral directors wanted – I want to be this fabulous female’s friend, this video is hilarious. Here’s the casting call she references. From Hayden.
• Transgender Studies Quarterly Kickstarter – “TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly will be the journal of record for the vibrant, rapidly evolving interdisciplinary field of Transgender Studies–and you can be part of its groundbreaking debut in 2014.” The opportunity to help an academic journal get off the ground is really nerdily exciting to me.
• Bollywood’s culture of rape - “Rapes in Bollywood films used to be part of the formula, and while they’ve dropped out of scripts in the last decade, many feel the films still present women as passive sex objects.” From Jack99.
• Clothes I’m forced to wear in the majority of MMORPG’s – Love these drawings and really the whole blog is a gold mine.
• What the treatment of Meggan Lambesis tells us about violence, victim-blaming, and silence – Her husband tried to have her killed. But because her husband is a famous musician, she is being vilified as an “evil-ex” who had it coming. From Gregory.
• Cute Animal Friday! Red wolf pups saved from deadly virus. Big cats love boxes, too. Grad student and her service dog graduate together.

Rebecca is off to the Women in Secularism 2 conference, so I’m covering Bad Chart Thursday this week. In today’s Quickies, Amanda included a link about a map showing hotspots in the United States for racist, homophobic, and ableist language in geotagged tweets, and commenters expressed valid concerns and questions about the methodology and data presentation. So I went to investigate further, finding more information in the FAQ about the map and the original post accompanying it.

Several people commenting on the latter post raised additional concerns, such as about the conspicuously absent data for hate speech against women as well as the even more shockingly glaring absence of data on hate speech against white, conservative, pro-gun, Christian men.

So of course I had to remedy the injustice. Below, I give you a map illustrating data on the hate speech oppressing conservative white male Christians in the United States, shown in hot pink. (I lumped it all together because those white guys all look the same anyway, amiright?)

In December I put down my eighteen-year-old cat George Burns.  It was awful, and it still makes me tear up to think he won’t be there when I get home from work today. Bah. Now I live in a one-cat household. Abe Vigoda doesn’t seem to mind being an only, and so far, it’s even made him a bit more outgoing. He’s thirteen, portly, epileptic, stunningly scaredy and doesn’t mind having all the catnip to himself.

So, we haven’t “replaced” George so that Abe has a friend. We do this mostly because Abe seems happy to have all the attention and we’re guessing what’s best because he’s a cat.

Recently, a helpful* friend** insisted we should get Abe a pal. I said we were taking our cues from him, and he seemed fine alone.  She then told me I was being selfish and “unfriendly as always” and she hoped it wasn’t too bad when “what goes around comes around to you.”

Um … yeah. What? I don’t mind the unfriendly part, I don’t understand the investment she has in life inside the four walls of my house, but mostly I don’t understand what will be coming around to me. So, since I’m clearly in for it, I’m asking y’all to tell me what “it” is.

What karmic assault is headed my way for making my cat live a lonely life without a cat companion?  How will it arrive?  Will I need to sign for it?

 *not terribly helpful  **not much of a friend

The Afternoon Inquisition (or AI) is a question posed to you, the Skepchick community. Look for it to appear Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 3pm ET.

Trigger Warning for Body Image Issues and Eating Disorders

Ah, fat — that charged, overloaded, connotation-carrying word. There is a lot I could say about the word, but for the sake of my point, let us fast-forward past the debates over fat-shaming, Health at Every Size, thin privilege, BMI, and so on. Let us make even more haste as we zoom right past people who simply hate fat people for whatever (or no real) reason.

Oh, and for the love of all that is creamy and delicious, let me acknowledge that I am aware that thin women face incredible amounts of body-shame, body image issues, and lookism as well. My discussing issues related specifically to being a fat woman does not invalidate thin women’s problems and pain. As a lifelong fattie, I simply cannot speak for them.

I want to focus on the well-meaning friends, relatives, and lovers of fat people who, in their haste to reassure the people they care about, can’t see the difference between discussions regarding external reality versus talk about self-image.

Over and over again, well-meaning people take away fat women’s ability to discuss the issues that affect them. Often, when a fat woman dares to mention anti-fat bigotry in society, she is told that she should “accept herself” or some variation of that sentiment thereof. Alternately, she might be told that the person in question finds her attractive. What happens is that the assumption that all fat women need to be cheered up and reassured takes precedence over anything the fat woman in question is actually saying.

Some of the most confident, self-assured ladies I’ve ever had the pleasure of encountering are lectured about self-esteem and self-acceptance instead of having their thoughts acknowledged when they speak of anti-fat bias. How incredibly condescending it is to insist that someone is talking about personal sadness when they are describing the reality of their lived experiences. How disappointing it is to the lady in question to find that others’ perceptions of her self-image automatically override the words coming out of her mouth.*

Although I’ve lost a decent amount of weight in the past 18 months, I still firmly qualify as fat, especially here in sunny, superficial Southern California. After years of self-loathing followed by years of working on my self-image issues, I’ve come to a few conclusions, conclusions about which I speak only using the most carefully-curated of words. No matter how much I try to denote exactly what I’m saying, I still get well-meaning but wholly misguided people attempting to soothe me where I needed no comfort in the first place. Worse, their focus on what they perceive to be the issue, i.e. my self-image, robs me of the power to talk about a real issue that affects me, i.e. fat-hate.

I do not think that I am ugly. Au contraire. Why would I spend so much time and effort on buying fun clothing, experimenting with make-up and hair products, and hunting down cute shoes that fit my size 10-11 wide feet — because I think I’m not worth looking at?

Ha.

There was certainly a time when I thought I wasn’t worth much at all. I shrouded myself in dowdy clothing and applied overly-thick black lines around my eyes, hoping to bring attention to what I thought was my only good feature. That time is well behind me, thank you very much, and I’d like to be treated as the woman I am, not the self-loathing girl I once was.

Though the personal is often political, the political is not always personal.

So if I don’t think I’m ugly, why bring up fat hate? call myself fat or a fattie? mention anti-fat bigotry that has been hurled in my direction?

As good as I feel about myself most of the time, that I don’t live in denial of fat-hate doesn’t mean that I think of myself as unattractive, it means I acknowledge my reality and my lived experiences. I direct attention to society’s hatred of fat people for the exact same reasons that I clamor for attention for unfair discrimination of any kind: in the hopes that people will recognize what they’re doing and, you know, work to change it.

I’m talking not about any perceived ugliness in myself, I’m talking about how ugly society can be.

So, how exactly can you stop patronizing your fat relative, friend, or lover when she speaks of that kind of ugliness? If she mentions society’s shitty treatment of her, you can stop denying her experiences and instead say, “Wow, that is really shitty!” Even better, when you see shitty behavior, you can call it out or at least not participate in it.

* If she is actually hating on herself, that’s a different matter, one to be addressed in a future post.

• Twitter hate speech map shows racist, homophobic hotspots across the US – From Vernon.
• Angelina Jolie removed her breasts to save her life. Some fans wish she hadn’t – Right, because remaining alive to parent her children is way less important than her rack. From Critical Dragon1177.
• Case studies: A hard look at GM crops – From Bug, a refreshingly skeptical look at GMO crops. Certainly much better than all that Jeffrey Smith has to say.
• Some of my best friends are germs – Michael Pollan on our microbiomes. From robro.