Transcript of "Hi, Danielle, nice to make your acquaintance..."

Hi, everyone, and hello Danielle Paradis. I just wanted to take a moment to thank you for responding to Eric Duckman's challenge to debate him and myself as far as the question of whether feminism is hate. You seem like a really nice person, you seem really sincere and well-meaning, and I don't want you to think of this as a personal attack on you, because frankly, you just seem very nice.

But, there are a few things.

First, you open your video with the quote that everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts, and then you went on to say that you would, as a feminist, add "or her" to that quote. I agree. One of the reasons I do is that the primary architects of feminist theory--things like The Patriarchy, Rape Culture and the Patriarchal Terrorism Paradigm of family violence--those architects were primarily women, and they seemed to feel entitled to their own facts, or to something I'll call "selective facts". Given that, adding "or her"? That's a really good idea.

I would also agree with your assertion that a person would be hard-pressed to find any feminist who does not believe that women "have historically gotten the short end of the stick", that is, that women were historically uniformly oppressed by their gender, and men historically uniformly privileged relative to them.

So that's two things we can agree on, right off the bat. I don't think there's going to be a whole lot more that we're going to agree on, but at least there's that.

Now, I wasn't really surprised at how brief your video was. I mean, all it contained was typical feminist talking points framed as axiomatic, self-evident truths, the veracity of which you seem to feel no need to defend or substantiate. You just state them, and assume that any person would agree with both their accuracy, and the conclusions you believe they support.

Myself, on the other hand, well, I don't have 100 years of political activism and media representation of my position to fall back on, nor 50 years of the institutionalization of my viewpoints within schools from Kindergarten to university. So this response is going to be too long for one video. Because, you know, unlike feminists, I don't have the luxury of simply making a bald statement, and then moving on to the next one, without providing rational and empirical support for it. Without actually presenting an argument behind it. See, you can get away with saying, "X is X," without saying, "...because A, B, C."  I can't get away with that because my viewpoint isn't the one that's been swallowed hook, line and sinker by most of society.

So, in this video, I'm just going to address the first few points you made, and I'm going to have to leave the other points for other videos, because otherwise this is just going to run really long. What I'm going to try to do in this video is explain some of the reasons I believe feminism is wrong. Wrong about the power dynamics that underpin society (historically and today), and wrong about men's and women's relative positions in society (historically and today). Hopefully we will then be on our way to demonstrating why I believe feminism is based on hate.

Now, right off the bat, you launch into what is one of the most predictable feminist rebuttals to anything anti-feminism that exists: the question of voter rights. You claim initially that denying a person the vote places them in the position of a second class citizen, that not giving them a say over decisions that will affect them is subjugation, and because this was denied to women, it's subjugation based on gender. If this is the case, then ALL but a tiny percentage of men were in the exact same boat as all women were, through most of human history. In fact, the amount of time between universal male suffrage and female suffrage in the west amounted to a paltry one half of one percent or so of recorded human history.

So under your reasoning, all men but those in charge (under a monarchy) or the most wealthy (following democracy but before universal male suffrage) were also subjugated by their governments in the exact same way women were.

Now, if that government was headed by a woman, would those men have been subjugated based on their gender? I find it really problematic to assume that because a man is in charge or because a woman is in charge, that that person in charge is not going to care about the opposite sex. This is an absurd argument. It doesn't hold water.

On the other hand, even men with no say whatsoever, men who were subjugated by their governments by being denied the vote, bore a greater and more costly obligation and burden of responsibility to their communities and governments, and even to their families, than women did.

It's foolish to even entertain the question of "who had the shorter end of the stick?", during a period of history when men and women had very different sticks to carry, and when there was little to no option for anyone to choose a different stick. The end of the stick that men got may indeed have been longer than the ends of women's sticks, but the stick itself was heavier and more difficult to lift, by a long shot. And while I know feminism is largely anti-science, I can demonstrate that through a simple, biological argument.

When the conditions two animals are subjected to over an extended period of their evolution are very different, one of the easiest ways to determine who had things harder or more onerous is to look at what biology has to tell us. If we look at monogamous primates like marmosets, males and females live nearly identical lives. The only real difference between male and female roles in that species is that females gestate, give birth and lactate, and males don't. Males do, however, collect food, nurture and supervise the young, and are chosen as suitable mates by females based on how well they perform the exact same tasks performed by females. In fact, if you want to get right down to it, marmoset females choose males based on how good those males are at mothering.

And when you look at male and female marmosets, you can't really tell them apart--they're the same size and have the same muscle mass and density. Other than their reproductive organs, they're basically interchangeable, because they do all the same stuff, and they've done all the same stuff for a very long time. They are gender-egalitarians.

Now look at humans. Men have stronger skeletons, higher muscle mass, stronger muscles even controlling for mass, and more red corpuscles by blood volume, than women do. Would these differences exist if women's roles through history were remotely as strenuous, onerous or dangerous as men's? If natural selection pressures on women had been as severe and rigorous as those placed on men?

What our sexual dimorphism tells us is that men had to be capable of doing physically harder and more dangerous tasks than women did, consistently, all through our history as human beings, and that women were not subjected to this kind of pressure. If they had, they'd have evolved to be a lot more burly.

And what I find really interesting is that very little of that strenuous, dangerous work that men did was actually necessary to the survival of individual men.

I mean think about it for a minute--how much more work would it be to provide for a family than only oneself? I could tell you a thing or two about that--if the only person I had to take care of was me, I could live like a queen on a waitress's pay. I'd never have to put off buying something I wanted just because the people dependent on me would rather eat dinner tonight than see me in a new pair of shoes.

How much more work would it have been for a man way back when to provide for a wife less productive than he was, and several even less productive children, than to only provide for himself? How much less safe was he if he chose to protect a woman smaller and weaker than himself, who was often vulnerable due to pregnancy and childbed, and several vulnerable children, than if he was the only person he was responsible for keeping safe?

If men had not been prepared to willingly take on those burdens in order to spare women from them, guess what, Danielle? Women would have sturdier skeletons and bigger muscles than they do, because they'd have had to evolve those things in order to survive. I honestly don't know how it was that more men didn't do what the Buddha did, and just walk away from those burdens--I mean, that guy sure had more time to think about stuff and ponder the nature of the universe, sleep in and get himself fat as fuck once he didn't have a wife and kid to look after.

To further illustrate how men can enjoy higher status than women while simultaneously having more burdensome and difficult lives--you know, getting the shorter end of the stick, the worse deal, all that--let's look at an extreme case of a staunchly and severely patriarchal society--something relatively unheard of in hunter-gatherer cultures: The Inuit.

Now in most hunter-gatherer societies, gender roles are just as differentiated as in any traditional society. BUT, male and female roles usually commanded similar levels of social status, respect and admiration. This was not the case with the Inuit.

But one of the really striking ways in which Inuit societies differed from other hunter-gatherer societies was that in most hunter-gatherer societies, men and women brought in roughly the same amount of food--in fact, sometimes women brought in the larger share. Women may not have become dominant, or have higher status than men, because they weren't expected to risk their lives to bring in the food that they brought in, the way men were expected to in the act of hunting. But the Inuit were very different. Not only did men bring in more than 95% of all the food, they did so at extreme risk to their lives and health, under conditions more severe than the conditions almost anywhere else on earth.

Rates of injury and premature death by injury among Inuit men of the past were horrendous. I mean, here are a bunch of guys who were expected to go out in a damn kayak in -40 weather, and chuck spears at whales 200 times their size, or go out on treacherous ice that if you fell through it meant almost certain death to hunt seals, in order to bring home tons more meat than they could possibly eat by themselves, and share that meat with the women and children who got to stay home, safe and sound.

Now I'm wondering what you think would have happened if you'd convinced those men that their wives needed them like fish need bicycles. What would have been the result for women? What if you'd told those men that this woman and these children are not yours, they don't belong to you, therefore you don't have any right to dictate to them and neither do you have any responsibility to take care of them? Or if you'd said that women are every bit as capable as men, and they're men's equals in every way that mattered? What if you'd actually convinced those men of all that? Heck, what if you'd actually convinced Inuit men that women's work was just as important and prestigious as men's work? You think maybe a lot of men might have taken up sewing? 

You know, those men who could, if they wanted to, just go off on their own, club a baby seal every month or two, and do just fine, since chewing pelts into fur and stitching them into clothes isn't that hard, and they'd have plenty of free time to do it without all those extra mouths to feed? 

Do you think maybe those men would have chosen not to risk and sacrifice like Inuit men did, if all they got was the same rewards and status as Inuit women? Do you really think those men would have, or should be expected to, risk and sacrifice the way Inuit men did, for the same rewards and status as Inuit women? Do you think Or would they have said, "Hey, she's my equal, and she's her own person, and her kids don't belong to me either. Let her get her own food." Because you know what? That's exactly what I would have said, if someone had convinced me of all of that.

I mean, hasn't it ever occurred to you feminists that the most extreme patriarchies occur in the harshest living conditions?

Do you think those women would have been better off--you know, less oppressed--by being seen as equal to their men--equal and therefore in no need of men's provision or protection? You ever wonder what it might have been like to be a pregnant Inuit woman, out on the ice trying to find a seal to jab a stick in so she could eat? You ever think that maybe, just maybe, she might have been perfectly happy to trade something valuable in order to secure the cooperation and support that imposed such hideous costs and risks on him? That her survival in that environment was so dependent on him risking life and limb every time he went out, that she might have thought social status and personal autonomy were really small prices to pay in exchange for what it cost him to give her what she needed?

You ever wonder if marriage wasn't a way to force women to become slaves to men, and bear men's children and provide them with free domestic services, the way so many second-wave feminists portrayed it, but a way to force men to become slaves to women, to support women's children and provide provisioning and protection services to women? You ever wonder if just maybe it was BOTH?

OMG, I think I just blew my own mind...

You never stopped to wonder why the very idea of feminism only occurred to women when economic, political and technological development finally meant that trading places with men would mean trading UP instead of down? That idea probably goes a long way to explaining why feminism originated among the wealthiest and most privileged women first, dontcha think? I mean, even Mary Wollstonecraft was honest enough to call women's privilege exactly that in her claims that it should be eliminated. And I just don't get why she wasn't more popular among the working class women who depended on that privilege for their survival!

I don't know if you realize this, Danielle (being feminist and therefore anti-science as you are), but male provisioning and protection of females and young is a gift and a luxury that few females of any sexually dimorphic species have ever enjoyed. Just ask a female Bonobo, who gets to trade sex with every unrelated male in her community in return for foraging rights and male ambivalence toward her offspring--not for actual food or for assistance in caring for offspring, but for the right to do her own foraging in an area a male might actually prefer to have for himself, and the right to not have her offspring fall victim to competitive infanticide by a male who would rather she produce his kids than his brother's.

Because that's the way most of nature works, Danielle, and it isn't the way human society has worked for a very long time.

One of the reasons human women have been able to remain significantly weaker than men is because men were consistently subjected to more extreme and demanding conditions than women, all through history. And one of the reasons we don't have more in common with Bonobos--why we've become the most dominant and intelligent species on the planet, in fact--is because women and children benefitted from men doing that, from being subjected to those conditions. Because men, unlike Bonobo males, were actually willing to share the benefits and rewards of their harsher survival conditions with women and children, because women, unlike Bonobo females, were willing to individually trade something valuable in return for an individual man's investment.

And I know, the whole thing is so cold and uncivilized. Those Inuit men should have been willing to harpoon whales from a kayak and share the meat with women and children, and give their lives to protect women and children, without any expectation of any extra anything. They should have been willing to do it "Just because". For nothing. THAT would have been "fair" to everyone. It was "oppression" of women that Inuit men were granted higher social status, more respect and a few extra rights in exchange for doing a ton of really difficult shit they didn't need to do for themselves, but did anyway because women and children needed them to. And it was really "unfair" that women weren't given power in those societies, because hey, the one who doesn't have to risk anything, pay anything, or go out on the ice, should be given an EQUAL say in decisions that affect everyone in the community.

And you know, I think it's perhaps that feminist framing--the duty of a man to share his labor with women, to put himself between danger and women, to risk and pay for the benefit of women during a history where the risks and burdens of doing that were so very high (which is why women couldn't be expected to bear them)...that's oppression of women simply because men weren't willing to do it for nothing. I think that was the first red flag I had that feminism is based on sexism and hate. Because you kind of have to hate someone if you're going to tell him that his kind have oppressed women all through history by doing what was necessary--including dying--to keep women safe, sheltered and fed. You kind of have to hate someone to claim that the old system only existed to benefit men at the expense of women's enslavement, when that system is the only reason that women are still around, that women are not like the Bonobos. And it's definitely hate to say that women were not complicit in this system, that they have no responsibility for things working the way they did.But feminists do this all the time.

Like Hilary Clinton once said (and yeah, I'm paraphrasing), men have never been the primary victims of their own deaths in war. It's the women who are stuck still alive and raising the kids alone who are the primary victims of men's deaths.

If I claimed that a woman's husband was the primary victim of her death because he's left alive to look after the children alone, you'd call me a misogynist. And you'd be right.

And I know, it's not the same, because women have always had the short end of the stick, right? They've only gotten out of society what they were required to put into it, and that meant that they got less, and that's unfair. That verse in the Bible about women being obedient to their husbands if they wanted to stay on the right side of the man upstairs, that's unfair gender roles. But the several verses that admonished men that they were 100% responsible for the survival of their wives, their children, their widowed mothers, their unmarried sisters, and any other extended family members who could not be self-sufficient, if he wanted god to approve of him. NO! None of that was unfair. None of that was gender-biased. The Bible was only unfair to women. 

All men got was power. Just power. Cookies for having a penis, no other qualifications required.

You know, for three years I was the only thing keeping myself and three children alive and fed and with a roof over our heads and all of that. And you know what? It fucking sucks. Even now, even today, even in this easy world, it fucking sucks. And it would have sucked even more if this was still an era of manual labor and zero workplace standards, the way things were when men were expected to take on the burden of providing for women and children under The EEEVIL Patriarchy.

But anyway, let's get back to the vote, and how not having a say over decisions that affect you is subjugation.

As an aside, there's currently a campaign to lower the voting age in Canada to 16. Do you believe that Canadians between the ages of 16 and 18 are subjugated, Danielle? Do you support those efforts? If not, why not? How about Canadians *under* 16? Are they subjugated? Would you support efforts to expand the franchise to 14? Or 12? 

Do you assume that because children aren't allowed to vote, that the government has no interest in their wellbeing, you know, their safety, happiness and wellbeing? Do you even imagine that being true?

Regardless of that, the history of the expansion of suffrage is a lot more complex and nuanced than most feminists would lead you to believe. For instance, up until shortly before women's suffrage in the US, the system was not one of secret ballots. Because ballots were public in the early years of universal male suffrage, there had been numerous cases of employers coercing their male employees to vote the way they wanted, and there were real concerns about something similar occurring between husbands and wives, or fathers and daughters. There was a lot of worry that giving women the vote would be the equivalent of giving some unscrupulous men two votes.

On the other hand, if you look at a lot of political campaign propaganda from that time, you'll see a fair amount of "Ladies, tell your men to vote for soandso!" and a lot of stuff like that. I can't imagine with the comparatively minuscule campaign budgets they had back then, and the cost of paper and ink, that anyone would have wasted the resources to print posters like that unless women were seen as fully capable of influencing, or even controlling, their husbands' votes.

And I'm pretty sure you're not aware that some of the most famous suffragette leaders--such as Emmiline Pankhurst in the UK--weren't campaigning for universal female suffrage. What Pankhurst was after was "ten pound suffrage" for wealthy women, and the rest of the ladies of the UK could go fly a kite. How very noble.

It might also interest you to know that in 1917 at the height of WWI, when the US government began sentencing draft dodgers to death, a group of activists brought a constitutional challenge of military conscription. In the Supreme Court's ruling on that challenge, it stated:

“It may not be doubted that the very conception of a just government and its duty *to the citizen* includes the reciprocal obligation of the citizen to render military service in case of need, and the right to compel it.”

So, the draft was ruled constitutionally sound and allowed to continue, because it was considered to be the reciprocal obligation of citizens in return for the rights of citizenship granted by government. Indeed, it was largely because of the huge sacrifice of men during the American civil war (some of them draftees) that led to men being offered universal suffrage in the US in the first place--it was deemed unfair to order a man to die for a country in which he had no say. It was felt that if men have an obligation--social or legal--to go to their deaths to protect society, they should really be allowed a say in what kind of society they were expected to protect. I have a hard time arguing with that kind of logic.

So maybe you can tell me, what did women owe society, what kinds of burdens and sacrifices were they expected to take on if necessary, often by force? Was it anything remotely on the scale of putting on a uniform and charging into enemy bayonets? Was it? Really?

In fact, a LOT of women opposed women's suffrage in the late 1800s and early 1900s--so many and so vehemently that it was pretty much the same afternoon that their opposition was overwhelmed by a general consensus among women that they did want the vote, that women actually got it. Why would any woman oppose women's suffrage, you might be wondering. Well, because citizenship rights and citizenship obligations had always gone hand in hand for men, and many anti-suffragette women were worried that might apply to women, too.

Oh, anti-suffragette women, you so crazy. Didn't you realize? Women get all kinds of shit without having to pay for it, not only on ladies' night.

Needless to say, the vast majority of men who fought and died in the Civil war, whether draftees or volunteers, didn't have the vote. The American men who were still alive after that war were given the vote as payment for past sacrifices, and in anticipation of future ones.You might also be unaware that at the time when that constitutional challenge to the draft failed, the voting age for men in the US was 21, but the age at which they became eligible for the draft was 18 1/2. The same goes for every US war for which there has been a draft, up until public pressure was placed on the US government over wounded veterans returning from Viet Nam without the right to vote--how embarrassing for everyone! Only at that point was the voting age lowered to 18.

Now I wonder how subjugated a 19 year old boy might have felt, bleeding to death on a WWI battlefield without the right to vote? I also wonder what that boy might have thought about the women campaigning for female suffrage safe at home, at the very same moment he was dying at the behest of his government, without franchise? And I wonder if he would have felt more or less subjugated, had he been drafted, or had one of those suffrage-crazy ladies shamed him into enlisting by handing him a white feather?

In Canada, 125,000 men were conscripted in WWI, 25,000 of whom were sent to the front lines of a war that killed 10 million men on all sides. Talk about the short end of the stick--ten million short ends of ten million sticks, to be precise. Our government was a little more sensible than those in other countries, and alongside the conscription legislation it enacted in 1917, it passed a law giving voting rights to all those currently serving in the military or who had served, even if they were under 21.

Good job, Canada! And while you, Danielle, are technically correct that women were given the vote in 1917, that vote was only given to military women, or to women acting as proxies for male relatives fighting overseas.

So even in Canada, military service was tied to the expansion of voter rights. 2000 military nurses (none of them drafted, mind you, but all of them admirable in their voluntary service and the sacrifices required for it) became some of the first women with the right to vote in Canada. The rest of us had to wait a whole 'nother year.

By 1920 and 1918 respectively, the governments of the US and Canada had extended suffrage to all white female citizens of voting age, despite women being subject to neither conscription, nor the social expectation, to sacrifice their lives in the service of their countries' decisions.

A second draft occurred in Canada during WWII, and conscription became a norm in the US in 1948, with the Selective Service Act (which remains in force today). Between 1950 and 1953, 1.5 million American men were drafted. Any of them between 18 and 21 would not have had the vote, even though their government was able to coerce them to serve.

In several modern, democratic nations, such as Norway and South Korea, military service remains a mandatory obligation of the citizen. Well, if that citizen is a man.

And what price did women have to pay, in terms of a citizen's obligation to government, to purchase their right to vote? None, you say? Oh yeah, that's right, only men had to purchase their citizenship rights--women just had to finally agree with each other that they wanted them, and then ask.

And in light of that, you know what's really awesome? Men have, at times, though not always, been exempt during a draft if they were married or had children, because drafting a husband or father was considered an unfair hardship to women and children, and was to be avoided if possible. One of the few ways a man could avoid his obligation to society--to die--was if a woman or child would have to help him pay that price. Yep, society sure was interested in giving women the short end of the stick, all right.

I also find it kind of amusing that you mentioned female suffrage in Kuwait. I'm sure you did that because OMG, 2005, right? However, Kuwait's status as a democracy has been consistently inconsistent since 1920, heck, even since their independence in the early 1960s. Moreover, after a very quick and cursory look at the information on that country, I learned that only Kuwaiti citizens are allowed to vote, and the majority of residents of Kuwait--you know, those who'd be affected by the decisions of the Kuwaiti government--are not technically citizens. Even naturalized citizens have to wait for 30 years before being eligible to vote.

Wow. That's a LOT of subjugation, about half of which is going to be male, but you only seem concerned with women, so of course you didn't bother to read further.

Hey, I have an idea--I think I'll read further and see if Kuwait employs conscription....

Wow, what do you know? It does! Kuwaiti men who are citizens are inductable at age 18, and oh my goodness, wouldn't you know it? The voting age in Kuwait is 21. So Kuwaiti men and only Kuwaiti men, can be coerced into giving their lives for a government they have no say over. How very...well, I can't exactly say it's shocking, now can I?

Interesting as well, is that the vote in Kuwait is actively denied to men currently serving in the military. That's right, you heard me. The very people who are risking their lives (by choice or against their consent) based on their government's decisions are explicitly denied a say in those decisions. How's that for subjugation?

Also interestingly, Bedouin volunteers in the Kuwaiti military often enlist because of promises that military service may result in citizenship, and the right to vote. I think this is what's called "pay before you play," and it seems to be what men have had to do right from the get-go.

I suppose what I'm trying to say with all of this conscription/political franchise talk is that the franchise, in its earliest days, was connected to military service. Even the very first women allowed to vote in Canada were given the vote in return for their own military service, or on behalf of their male relatives who were serving.

No, if it's your position that a person is subjugated by having no say over decisions that affect them, then it was men who could be required by their governments to die who would have been more subjugated than any woman by being denied the vote. The draft is a particular decision of government that has NEVER affected women as directly as it has men, and it only stands to reason that in countries where a legal or social obligation to put one's life on the line for the benefit of government or fellow citizens exists, that decision was considered important enough for those directly affected by it to be the first to be given a say. Eventually. Once a whole bunch of them had already died.

I also wonder if you might have considered the inverse of this equation as it stands now--that women today have a say in the decisions of government-- a greater collective say than men in many countries, due to sheer numbers. In any country with universal suffrage and male-only conscription, the female electorate as a unified bloc could conceivably unilaterally make the decision to send unwilling men, and only unwilling men, to their deaths. That's quite the moral hazard, when you think about it.

I'm sure you and your feminist sisters are going to get right on rectifying that--either by actively and tirelessly demanding an end to conscription and selective service in countries where they exist, or by vigorously campaigning to include women.

I mean, you feminists want equality, right? And inclusivity! Or do you only want those things in areas of choice and rights, and not in areas of obligation, expectation, responsibility and government coercion?

So, to reiterate:

Yes, though I believe that all feminists (and most mainstreamers, for that matter) honestly feel that women were historically second class citizens, things are a lot more complicated than that. Women may have been considered different citizens than men, but it's dishonest to use a term like "second-class". That term doesn't address the exemptions from the burdens and obligations of male citizenship that women enjoyed historically, and still enjoy today, or any of the entitlements they received through the enforcement of male gender roles.

The bulk of the "extras and bonuses" that men received--in legal rights and social status--were a result of the greater obligations they had to society, the higher price they were expected to pay in terms of protecting and providing for people other than themselves--especially women and children--and the fact that they were held socially and even legally accountable for other people's survival and wellbeing. None of these burdens were ones women were ever expected to carry. They were burdens women were entitled to expect of others, and they still are, and they would have enjoyed no such entitlement in the much harsher past had they been seen as the equals of men.

So when feminists insist that women got the short end of the stick compared to men, they're only telling half the story. And half-truths are more dangerous by far than lies, because they're easier for people to swallow--so easy, very few people have ever asked you feminists to support your own conclusions by addressing all the facts in the entire context, and not just the facts you cherry-pick.

My next video will address your contention that feminism isn't as powerful as the men's movement thinks it is, and in anticipation of that I want you to ponder this quote from Warren Farrell: "Men's greatest weakness is their facade of strength, and women's greatest strength is their facade of weakness."

And, if you're still listening, Danielle, if I haven't made you slam your computer shut in a huff, I guess I'll see you again in a few days when I post my next video.

Why do MRAs bring up the draft?

And an introduction to Salientsights, a new blog featuring John the Other, Integralmath (Justicar), NurdyDancing, myself and others! The full transcript of this video (I'm posting but a teaser, how manipulative!), posted on Salientsights, is linked at the bottom. :)

So a while ago, I stumbled on a video from TheTruePooka (link in the low bar) attacking MRAs such as myself for "blaming feminists for the male-only draft." It leads me to wonder if Pooka has problems listening when a woman speaks.Very few MRAs would blame feminism for something that's been happening throughout most of history, or even lay blame on feminism for being unable to change the situation Pooka. I certainly never have.

Feminists DO, however, get criticized by MRAs for their MARGINALIZATION of the draft and their dismissal of it and other traditional male obligations when offensively speaking about so-called historical "male privilege" and "patriarchy." So let me try to spell this out for you so we can clear the air a bit.

It wasn't even 90 seconds into your video when you drop this astounding strawman: "lately the people who are putting this argument forward are saying it with an implied hostile tone that suggests that America's male-only draft is the fault of women, especially feminists."

/teaser. If you want to read the rest, you know what to do.

The A+ copyright violator social justice league!!!!!

Years ago, in my travels within the book publishing industry and in my incarnation as a writer of erotic fiction, there existed a hot debate. The debate was over text-to-speech enablement of digital books, and whether the accessibility of this software was a violation of the author's copyright.

Even Wil Wheaton chimed in, in his capacity as a narrator of audiobooks, providing a wonderful demonstation of the distinct difference between an audiobook and a digital book rendered into audio by text-to-speech software.

The scandal itself was instigated by the Authors Guild issuing a warning to all member authors to reserve digital rights to their books when negotiating contracts with publishers. The gist of this is that this association was recommending authors not permit digital publication of their works at all, because the text-to-speech software available was a potential violation of often lucrative audiobook rights.

The consensus among most authors--at least those I hung around with--was that the robotic voice of a computer is no substitute for a professionally narrated audiobook, and that TTS is a reading tool, not a book format. That at its essence, TTS was not even the equivalent of a parent reading a book aloud to a child, or a family member or friend reading aloud to a convalescent or visually impaired person. TTS is an imperfect tool for reading used mostly by the visually impaired out of necessity.

As a caveat, I will say I am a staunch defender of intellectual property rights. As a copyright holder, it annoyed me to no end to see conversations on pirate forums between people who had uploaded or downloaded my books illegally, or who were looking for illegal access to them because, "OMG, I LOVE HER WORK! SHE IS SO AWESOME, AND ALMOST NO ONE WRITES ANYTHING SIMILAR! SO CAN'T SOMEONE HERE PLEASE HELP ME READ HER WORK WITHOUT ME HAVING TO PROVIDE HER THE MONETARY INCENTIVE TO KEEP PRODUCING IT, OR THE FINANCIAL WHEREWITHAL TO ENABLE HER TO CONTINUE WRITING?? BECAUSE I LUV HER SO MUCH, I WANT HER TO NOT PROFIT FROM THE WORK SHE DOES THAT I LUV!!!" Can you say "counterproductive"?

I have never objected to book sharing between actual friends, and neither has my publisher. Their policy has always been something along the lines of, [paraphrasing] "If you love a book so much you want to email it to two of your buddies, well, we're not going to complain about that, because sharing an author's work in that way leads to more exposure for the author and his/her future works and backlist. However, given the ease with which one copy of a digitally published book can turn into a billion copies, we do take issue when a reader uploads a book to a website to 'share' with 8000 of their closest friends. We do not encrypt our ebooks with DRM, because this interferes with ease of use, and only penalizes the people who purchase our books--the people who are doing the responsible thing--and creates a product whose illegal format is superior to the legal one. We do not force our responsible and law-abiding readers to pay for the conduct of those who choose to pirate by inflating our prices, because this only penalizes those who reward the authors who create these works and the publishers who bring them to market, and incentivizes piracy. We ask that you respect our authors' copyrights, so they can keep writing wonderful books and we can keep providing them to you at a very reasonable cost."

This policy is one of the reasons I chose this particular publisher, as was their market pricing scheme. As an author, I want people to read my work. I want them to be able to read it without the annoyance of software designed to limit or place restrictions on their ability to do so. I want them to pay a fair price for this work, and have had a number of criticisms of traditional publishers' handling of pricing and rights management when it came to the brave new world of digital publishing. I want anyone in the world to have access to a legal copy of my books--digital rights need to be worldwide, not regional. And they need to be TTS enabled, so those whose eyes don't work so well, or those who need their hands free while they read, can enjoy them as much as anyone else, without having to wait for them to be rendered into audio or Braille by a charity, or be released in expensive audiobook format.

And in keeping with my stand on my own IP rights, I do not engage in pirating. I don't download anything illegally, and I remind my friends and family that illegally downloading pirated material--whether it's music, software or movies--only disincentivizes the creation of the very works they enjoy. If you like, say, hard sci-fi movies but the demographic most likely to enjoy them refuses to ever pay for them, fewer of those kinds of movies will be made. That's just the way these things work.

Wil Wheaton's demonstation of the differences between a narrated audiobook and a digital book read by TTS was striking, but essentially irrelevant. It wouldn't matter to me whether TTS sounded like a robot with a poor understanding of pronunciation, or if it sounded like Morgan Freeman on his best day. Using TTS is not "making a copy" any more than a parent reading to a child is. Using TTS is not violating audiobook rights any more than using the zoom function on your Kindle is violating Large Print rights. If someone purchases my book and then has their computer, their mother, their friend or his  future android personal valet read it aloud to them because it is impossible or inconvenient for them to read it themselves, or because they just feel like it, I'm happy. To me, TTS is like a pair of glasses. It's a tool that enables people to enjoy work they've lawfully purchased from the creator and therefore have every right to enjoy. If my publisher had disabled TTS on their books, I would have parted ways with my publisher.

In my incarnation as a blogger and vlogger, I've been approached by a number of people asking permission to transcribe my vlogs or translate them or my blog posts into other languages. I suppose I ought to put a notice somewhere public, that states what my reply invariably is--that they are free to transcribe or translate my material, or upload it elsewhere, in whole or in part, as long as they provide a link to the original material. I have given permission for several websites--including the Good Men Project and A Voice for Men--to republish my work as they desire, so long as they don't edit it, and as long as they link readers back to my blog or channel. I have given permission for anyone to mirror my videos.

While I don't charge people to view my advocacy material, I do receive a substantial income from it through voluntary donations--a larger income than my four published books bring in. That income is not vital to ME, but it is vital to my ability to continue to produce this material in a consistent and timely way. I can always get more hours on the schedule at my job, if I need to. I could write that final 4000 words of that book I have on hold and submit it to my editor. I could up the rent my tenant pays. I could do any number of things to increase my income.

What the donations do is allow me to reduce my hours at my day job to the point where I can now spend more hours a day involved in MRM advocacy and gender analysis than I do in any other single pursuit.

The donations are important to me. My IP rights are important to me. But more important to me in this context is that people hear what I have to say. This is my work, and though I have a deep respect for any author's intellectual property rights, I'm decidedly moderate about the issue when it comes to my own. I have given permission for my work to be reproduced in other places online, or in other formats, and that is my right, to do or not as I please. Other authors may feel differently, and I respect their right to feel that way, and do as they please with their own IP rights.

So I want you all to keep that in mind when I weigh in on the latest Atheism+ fiasco. Here is Justin Vacula's account of it, complete with screencaps of conversations, and exposure of the tactics used by the feminist-leaning social justice avengers of Atheism+.

What these social justice avengers are saying is that they have every right to violate other people's rights to their own intellectual property. That they have every right to violate copyright law. They have every right to republish another author's work in its entirety--without that author's permission and against that author's wishes. And anyone who opposes them in their unilateral actions--even if it's in an attempt to keep them on the right side of the law so they don't end up prosecuted or sued--is an able-ist and a shit-heel.

I'm not an able-ist. I spoke out vehemently against the Authors Guild's stance on the TTS issue, because it was not only legally unfounded, but because it was morally repugnant. It is as morally repugnant to prevent people from using TTS as it is to tell a mother she cannot read a bedtime story to her child because she's violating someone's copyright, or to tell a Kindle user that the zoom function a violation of Large Print rights, or to tell a far-sighted person to take off their glasses while reading or else they're in violation of an author's rights, or to say that a friend sitting across a table translating a podcast into American sign language is plagiarism.

But what the Atheism+ Scribe people are proposing doing is publishing other people's intellectual property without their permission, and even against their express protests, outside of fair use provisions.  They are proposing publishing other people's works, without permission, and even against their expressly stated wishes. This attitude could land them in a world of legal hurt, and yet an individual warning them, using very reasonable and non-confrontational language, of this very thing is cast as a bully and an able-ist.

What they're saying is that the law does not apply to them, because they say so. Because their ends are just, in their opinion, their means don't matter. And how dare anyone say that we can't or shouldn't or might be courting a law suit! We can't hear you, lalalalalala!

I actually hope that Atheism+ Scribe ignores Anna's warnings. The sooner these people get their asses sued, the sooner they'll be brought back down to earth where the rest of us have to live. You know, us people who understand that we are not the arbiters of other people's rights, and that our right to have our say ends the moment it materially harms another person.

All I can say is holy shit. The hubris, it is stunning.

Transcript of "Are the Vaginas in the House?"

Note: The first few paragraphs of the transcript are not a word for word transcription. Damn my occasional on-camera ad-libbing!

I don't even know where to begin to start.

As far as vaginas go, I don't think I've ever heard that word uttered so many times in so short a period in my life. I think her 30 minute keynote speech might rival a gynecology textbook as far as mentions of vaginas go. At one point, she even came out and admitted she thinks with her vagina. Don't believe me?

"I'm gonna tell you something. Deep down, in my heart, in my soul, in my vagina, I know the women's spring is here."

I suppose this would be one of those "women's ways of knowing" discussed in feminist ethics, then.

Later on, she drops this bomb.

"You might even worship their vaginas!"

And there I am, in a room full of cheering, applauding women, wondering what the hell planet I'm on. These are grown women, for fuck sake. Anyway.

After showing us a video of herself giving a speech on the steps of congress in Lansing Michigan (because who doesn't love seeing oneself on video bellowing the word "vagina" in front of an adoring crowd?) she got down to the nitty gritty.

And that nitty gritty was, of course, rape. With Eve, you know it's gonna be vaginas or rape, right? The entire speech was a paean to female victimhood, a celebration of all the ways women and women alone are subjugated and subordinated and disempowered in society.

I'm going to link to the video in the lowbar for those who have the intestinal fortitude, and ask that you please resist commenting on NOW's channel since it won't do any good. For those who don't feel they can stomach 37 minutes of vaginas and rape, I'll give you a summary:

About midway through, Eve shared the story of Jean, a woman in the Congo who'd been the victim of rape as a weapon of war and economic conquest. If Jean had a husband or brother or son, we don't hear about him. Her village was attacked by militants, and she'd been raped. She sought help for her injuries at an NGO active in the area, and received surgery and treatment, after which she returned to her village only to be tied to a tree by these militants and repeatedly raped for a period of two months. When she was released, she found her way to another NGO, and received nine surgeries to repair the damage to her body. It was then that Ensler, founder of the 85 million dollar V-day charity, found her recovering from her surgeries and her trauma, and asked her what she wanted.

What this woman wanted was a village where women and girls could be safe from the violence. This village, City of Joy, was built in part by Eve Ensler's charity and outfitted by google, and is a place where women and girls can be safe and heal, learn, grow and become empowered--in her words, to become the future leaders of the DRC.

Now please, don't get me wrong. I have a great deal of sympathy for that woman, just as I would for anyone who had suffered what she did. I really do. It horrifies me, when I think of what human beings can do to each other. And if I hadn't swallowed a red pill a long time ago, I'd have probably been thinking exactly what every woman in that room was thinking. As it was, knowing what I know now about such things, all I could think as Eve was talking about the plight of women in the Congo was, if it's that bad for women and girls, I can't even imagine how it must be for men and boys.

There aren't many mainstream venues discussing male victims of wartime sexual violence, but I did stumble across a recent documentary on BBC radio, and I've collected a few other sources I'll link in the lowbar.

The BBC documentary reporter interviewed a Congolese man whose family was attacked by uniformed men in 2008. He was bound hand and foot and beaten for 3 hours, during which he watched as they killed his whole family, including his two children, before cutting off their heads. Then they left him for dead. In 2010, he was attacked again by men in uniform. He believes they targeted him specifically after discovering he was still alive. They took him blindfolded and bound in a van, to a barracks with other prisoners.

There, he was sexually tortured and raped, for 4 or 5 days. He says he was semi-conscious for much of it, the pain was so great. Then they loaded him into a van, drove him out into the bush, and raped him again. He asked them to kill him. They laughed and left him lying there.

When a passing car found him, he asked them to drive him to Kimpala, Uganda, where thousands of displaced people from DRC seek refuge.

Other male victims have been forcibly circumcised, raped with objects like screwdrivers, castrated, or had their genitalia completely amputated.

Unlike the woman Eve Ensler spoke of, there's no heartwarming story of triumph for any of these men to share. Not even one surgery, let alone nine, no City of Joy built for him and furnished with computers provided by Google, no armed guards patrolling his safe village to keep him from harm, no schools provided through the charity of the more fortunate to help him get back on his feet and make his way in life.

In fact, when interviewed, he said his injuries are not healed, and he would rather die than live.

According to the Journal of the American Medical Association, 22% of all men in the Congo, compared with 30% of women, have experienced sexual violence as a weapon of war. Considering the higher rates of general violent victimization of noncombatant men and boys in conflicts like that in the Congo (at least 2 to 1), the numbers of men who experienced sexual violence before being killed by their rapists can't be determined by the study.

The men who survive almost never speak of their experiences to anyone, because under the law, they are guilty of a crime--the crime of homosexuality--and can face severe punishment. They don't typically disclose to family, due to fears of abandonment that are all too justified. One employee of the Refugee Law Project says it's common for a woman, upon discovering her husband has been raped, to pack up the children and leave him. "Is this a woman? Is it a man? If he can be raped, who is protecting me?"

According to Dr. Lynn Lawry of Harvard medical school, reaction within the academic, political and humanitarian communities to the JAMA's study on male rape in the Congo has ranged from shock to puzzlement to controversy to anger. She wasn't prepared for the level of hostility to their findings on the part of humanitarian NGOs. Not anger on behalf of male victims, but anger over the public being made aware of them.

The findings defy the cultural narrative--both that of patriarchy and of feminism. Dr. Lawry herself was shocked not just by the prevalence of male rape in the Congo, but at the level of female perpetration--some 40% of the sexual violence against women in the Congo, and 10% of that against men, was perpetrated by women.

The UN, the law, traditionalism and feminism all view rape as something that only impacts women and girls and something that is only perpetrated by men. According to Lara Stemple of the U of California's Health and Human Rights Project, out of more than 4000 NGOs reviewed, only 3% even mentioned the experience of male victims, and none mentioned them as more than a passing reference. I have to wonder if any of those NGOs mentioned female perpetrators at all.

And while Dr. Lawry sees the resistance of NGOs to address male rape victims as originating in a fear that resources will be diverted from their chosen issue, that male victims will take too big a piece of a finite pie, I think it's deeper and more complicated than that.

Feminist activism may have brought the issue of rape into the focus of human rights bodies in the 80s and 90s, but they weren't telling us anything we didn't already think we knew. Our ideas of rape, in whatever context it occurs, have always existed within a male perpetrator, female victim model. Rape of women has always been acknowledged as a weapon of war and political advantage, a means to demoralize the enemy and destroy communities. Propaganda during the early decades of the last century clearly demonstrates that it was a fear pervasive enough to be exploited, by convincing men to enlist, or by demonizing the opposition.

In her speech, Even Ensler calls rape "femicide", a systematic method of destroying women. And while the rape of women is a horrible thing, rape doesn't destroy only women. The systematic rape of women undermines their relationships and community. The systematic rape of men annihilates everything we believe about what men are and should be, and completely uproots them from their roles in family and community. In a traditional society, male rape tells people that ANYONE can be abused in this way, and that those who have always been seen as the protectors of women and children can no longer be depended on in that way, that the defenders of everyone can't defend even themselves.

A woman who's been raped is a damaged woman. A man who's been raped is no longer a man.

Eve Ensler claims that women's bodies are the landscape upon which all of human conflict and avarice is fought, but she can only believe this because the men upon whom these same terrors are wreaked are silent--the silence of death or the silence of social isolation.

She talks about the hundreds of thousands of women and girls: 2 year olds raped to death, women who are incontinent, leaking urine and feces through their wounds, the walking wounded riddled with infection and wracked with pain.

30% of women in the Congo. But no mention of the 22% of men--hundreds of thousands--who suffer the exact same things without voices and without help or healing.

Feminist theorists were preaching to the misinformed choir when they portrayed rape as at best, a byproduct and at worst the primary motive, of traditional social organization and male sexuality, and cast women solely as the victims of this form of "toxic masculinity" and male predation that exists to subjugate women. That there was ANYONE, in academia, the law or wider society, who believed feminist ideas about rape were revolutionary or novel or ground-breaking remains to me, one of the biggest mysteries in existence. It's the same bullshit people have always believed, and it's just as miguided.

Feminist theory in this area dovetails perfectly with our instinctive perceptions and expectations of gender, and traditional cultural and sociological memes that cast men as moral agents capable only of performing good and evil, and women as moral patients or objects, capable only of absorbing good or evil. Feminist thought concerning sexual violence was never innovative--it was always same shit, different pile.

Still, when you think of how feminists utilized these theoretical models of rape and domestic violence as supporting evidence for their overarching theory of how society works, it's pretty clear why someone like Eve Ensler would be resistant to acknowledging both male victims and female perpetrators of sexual violence. This will be especially true of wartime sexual violence, since everyone, especially feminists, views bloody conflict as a solely male domain.

And while this view is certainly not just a problem with feminism--after all, it wasn't feminism that passed laws in the Congo that punish the victim of a male rape as harshly as the perpetrator--feminist theory seems woefully inadequate to address any human phenomenon absent the lens of the male agent, female object dichotomy.

Ensler's speech at the NOW conference only hammered that nail home for me. Addressing the gathered women as "vaginas" and the male audience members as "vagina-friendly men" was freaky enough--referring to the men as men, but the women as body parts?--but when she spoke of what's going on in the Congo, her every word reinforced the idea that men act and women are acted upon, that the sum of woman is only what is done to or for her, and the sum of man is only what he does to or for others.

What are men to Eve Ensler? They are the evil white westerners out to rape Africa of its resources. They are the evil militants who brutalize and murder innocent villagers. They are the unwilling tools of those evil men--forced at gunpoint to rape their mothers and daughters, not to be mentioned by her again. They are the doctors performing the surgeries that saved that poor woman, the people who built the safe village where women and girls could escape sexual violence, the guards who undoubtedly march the perimeter of that village, and the people who supplied them with computers, internet and a shot at an education. The only mention of male victims in her entire speech was still framed in the context of perpetration--a father forced to rape his daughter, or the son his mother. Once she was done conveying what he did, it was like he didn't exist to her anymore.

The men are the doers, in Eve Ensler's narrative. The women are merely done to, or done for.

How the fuck is this challenging our gendered views on anything? How are Eve and her ilk going to overthrow patriarchy when all they ever seem to do is preach it?

And how will anything ever change when the people who are supposedly defying the status quo are only entrenching it ever deeper? Feminism is the privileged voice on gender issues, and its as silent about the suffering of sexually victimized men and the actions of female rapists in the Congo, as the staunchest trad-con, because feminism's entire body of work rests on the necessity of those men and those women not existing.

At present, there are no agencies providing funding to male victims of rape in the Congo. Dutch Oxfam has even gone so far as to threaten to pull its funding if too much is spent on the few male victims who do seek assistance. Other human rights advocates, few in number, complain that the focus of the UN and the media, on women as a monolithic victim-class and men as a monolithic perpetrator class, undermines not only their effectiveness in helping and protecting male victims, but in bringing female perpetrators of human rights violations to justice.

When Adam Jones examined the activities of five of the “female architects of the Rwandan genocide”, he noted they not only participated in selecting thousands of Tutsi men and boys to be killed, they were often the ones delivering death. Yet according to author Tim Goldich:

"These cases of female leaders represent only a small part of the story of women’s participation in the genocide. At the grassroots, “very often, groups of women ululated their men into the ‘action’ that would result in the death of thousands of innocent men, women and children, many of them their own neighbours.” Their role was dominant in the post-massacre looting and stripping of bodies, which often involved climbing over corpses (and those still alive and moaning in agony) piled thigh-high in the confined spaces in which many Tutsis met their end. Frequently these women assisted in administering the coup de grâce to those clinging to life."

If Eve Ensler believes women are uniquely equipped to lead without descending into violence, she needs to open her eyes.

The model with which we as humans view gender makes us so reluctant to not only feel compassion for male victims of crime, hardship and suffering, but also to deliver accountability to women who do horrible things.

Just like Taslima Nasreen's childish narrative, "Men throw acid on us, but women still love men," ignores the 30% of acid attack victims who are men and boys and the significant number of perpetrators who are women, Eve Ensler's tale of Jean from the Congo ignores a very great deal of suffering and marginalization, simply because in her mind, all women are victims and that is all they are. And all men are is how they affect women.

And I'm sorry, but Eve Ensler, in her call for women to rise up--a billion of them worldwide next February 14th, to represent the 1 out of 3 women globally who will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes--is apparently thinking with her vagina. Because I'm almost positive she's never even thought to even ask the question, "how many men will be raped or beaten in their lifetimes?" for comparison. If she had, I wonder if she'd like the answer.

She really doesn't get the idea that humans--men and women--are in this together, and that the warp and weft created by our equilibrium is what society is built on. To her, men exist only to help or to harm women, and that means a man who's been raped is of no use to anyone, least of all her.

Eve Ensler is as much a slave to her hominid programming and traditional views of gender as anyone else--a slave to the idea that men do while women are done. And while she noted that since spending time in the Congo she's become fully radicalized, becoming a radical proponent of traditional ways of viewing gender doesn't make her any more special than Rush Limbaugh.

But I think the most cynical and stomach-turning part of the entire speech was the way she drew equivalence between the struggles and suffering of women in the Congo, a place where there is a war on EVERYONE, and the inconveniences of women in the west who are oppressed by lack of free birth control. It's all one big war on women, don'tcha know? And men? If they aren't harming women, or being useful to women, they don't exist at all.

This means war!

I just read an interesting article over at thunderf00t's blog on Atheism+ and the divisive and polarizing tactics they're now using to gain support for their splinter movement. The conflict that began with Elevatorgate has now overtly become "us vs them", with battle lines drawn by righteous feminists and vilification and exclusion of any who voice the slightest dissent. The "Four Horsemen" of atheism have been recast as the perpetually evil "old white patriarchs", an identifiable group which according to feminist agitprop should be dismissed out of hand. If a powerful, educated old white man said it, you can be sure it's garbage, right? Why? Because we say so! We're just trying to be inclusive!

The tone of the article was one of bemusement, which only tells me thunderf00t has not descended remotely as far down the rabbit-hole as he needs to to get a clear picture of what exactly is going on in his community. I know that someone posted my video on female hypoagency by way of explanation, and I've picked up a lot of new subscribers from the atheist/skeptic/rationalist community as a result of his attention. At the same time, he seems hopeful that all of this brouhaha will reach some impervious barrier of rationality, at which point, Atheism+ will fizzle, and I find I can't share his optimism.

He writes in conclusion:

I expect that they will now start trying to weasel their way out of this by any and all means necessary as long as the conclusion is ‘no, it’s okay for ME to attend mere atheist conferences, its just everyone else who should shun and marginalize these mere inferior atheists’

I'm sorry to break it to you, thunderf00t, but I don't foresee any "weaselling out" occurring anytime soon--only more "weaselling in". My prediction is that the conflict in your community will escalate, with the Skepchicks and other feminist "atheists", and Atheists+ pushing their dogmatic agenda ever harder in every single arena, and continuing to pit the men in the community against each other. Give it a few more months, and American Atheist will have a shiny new "plus" sign on their letterhead.

It's amazing how closely this collective aggression and irrationality mirrors what's known in the pick-up artist community as the "shit test". A shit test is basically an irrational, manufactured conflict, attack or complaint on the part of a female partner against her male partner. This is not a "real" complaint, though it may be based on actual annoyances (like leaving the toilet seat up), and though usually interpreted by a man as a sincere concern or upset on the part of the woman, the underlying goal of the shit test is to compel the man into setting reasonable boundaries and maintaining his autonomy--that is, a demand to have the man put his foot down and not be bullied. This has been posited as a subconscious psychological strategy on the part of women to test the mettle of their mates--"if he can't stand up to ME when I'm bullying him, then how's he going to fend off those sabre-toothed tigers?"

The more the man tries to appease the shit-testing woman, the more she will escalate the conflict. The only way to pass the shit test is to put one's foot down. A relationship where a man is easily bullied (by anyone) is one in which a woman will feel more insecure, not less. The more insecure she feels, the bigger and more overt the shit tests will become.

And the horrible thing about shit tests is that they are a subconscious behavior--the woman sincerely believes that what's bothering her is that her man keeps leaving the toilet seat up, and not that she needs reassurance that he's an adequate protector and therefore worthy of respect.

I mean, look at how the conflict in the atheist/skeptic community began--with Elevatorgate. For those not in the know, Elevatorgate was what ensued after a man politely asked Rebecca Watson up to his hotel room for coffee, and then politely took "no" for an answer. It culminated with a call from feminists to boycot Richard Dawkins' books, when he had the temerity to call bullshit on the whole debacle.

You now have Surly Amy, in a recent interview with Amanda Marcotte, explaining what a sexual harassment policy at TAM should look like. At one point, she claims that no one is saying people can't hook up at conferences, and describes "the appropriate way to hook up"--basically, to introduce yourself, to flirt a little, talk a little, and invite someone to have sex with you if they wish. What she's describing as "the appropriate way" is exactly what sparked Elevatorgate--a polite invitation. So what the hell was Elevatorgate all about, then? A months-long screaming match among atheists over a man who behaved appropriately?

Surly Amy goes on to say that the kind of inappropriate behavior she wants covered by the sexual harassment policy is, for example, walking up to someone and starting to have sex with them without asking. So basically, the sexual harassment policy at TAM must include the phrase, "No raping, please"? Seriously?

This entire fiasco is a classic irrational, manufactured complaint on the part of feminist "atheists". And though it may seem as if it's the "no-bullshit" response of rationals like Justin Vacula, integralmath, Richard Dawkins and you, thunderf00t, that is what's causing this splinter-group to escalate the conflict, it's actually the appeasement and supplication of men like PZ Myers that's driving the female psychology underlying this collective shit test to a fever pitch. Validation of the insecurity that lies at the heart of this conflict only generates more of the same.

Meanwhile, true to the tactics of the shit-testing woman, the Skepchicks' own conferences now include a panel discussion of how the male brain is a female brain that's been "damaged by testosterone" and that men are "defective women". Rebecca Watson's platform as a skeptic speaker has transmogrified from actual discussion of atheism/skepticism into a sermon railing against the misogyny in the atheist/skeptic community, an airing of grievances concerning the "thousands of rape threats" she's received from "hundreds of atheists", described in detail but never backed up with screencaps. Demands for evidence of the existence of these threats, and, further, evidence that if they exist they come from within the atheist community, are met with accusations of misogyny and rape apologia.

The women driving all of this are supported and validated in their efforts by supplicating men, men desperate to tell them, "We're the good men, we're not like those bad men over there. We understand why you're so terrified of this HUGE problem of sexual harassment and misogyny in our community, and it's all down to male badness. But not me, because I'm a good man, not like those guys over there, the bad ones..."

They're doing the equivalent of telling a child that the monster in the closet is real, and it's particularly interested in eating small children, and they aren't even doing it to protect the women in the atheist/skeptic community from that monster. They're doing it to distinguish themselves from the "defective male" rabble in the group--you know, the thunderf00ts and the Justin Vaculas--and they'll happily cast you all as monsters just for the opportunity to portray themselves as monster-slayers. They're quite prepared to burn the entire house to the ground to do it, even though the closet monster doesn't exist, and even though they aren't even conscious of why they're behaving in this way.

The people behind this schism are not behaving or thinking rationally. Look at this hypocrisy from FTB over one of hundreds of comments I've made over the last two years concerning domestic violence:

I used to live under a young couple with a baby. I’d listen as she followed him from room to room upstairs, stomping, slamming things, throwing things, screaming. After about an hour, he’d eventually hit her, and everything would go quiet. An hour after that, they’d be out with the baby in the stroller, looking perfectly content with each other.

Here is the response from FTB (complete with photo of man's head exploding) to such a comment made by an "enemy":

So, if you’re annoyed at a woman, that justifies hitting her?  In fact, you should hit her early in your annoyance, lest you beat the living shit out of her later when you’re reallymad?  Of course, the fault will be hers for annoying you, not yours for having the physicality of a grown man but an infant’s mastery of your emotions.

And here, from the comments:

I wonder if she has ever say gone out to lunch with that couple? If she has, I wondered if she noticed that the wife cowered like a fucking sheep when her husband spoke. I wonder if she just so happened to notice that the poor woman’s husband spoke for her, talked down to her, criticized her, all while she sat there and took it. Did she react when he made a swift movement? Does she carefully and painfully choose her words to avoid his wrath?

Okayyyy.... so a woman chasing her boyfriend from room to room, screaming insults and profanity, throwing heavy objects at him (in front of their infant, no less) while refusing to allow him to exit the situation is a clear sign that she's living in terror of him. Huh.

But it was the response to THIS comment that really told me who we're dealing with:

Normally I would say that violence towards women is never justified, however, I did see my dad hit my mom twice. He stayed and put up with her because of me, and every few years she would get in one of these moods where she would ride his ass and tell him what a loser he was for not making enough money, losing his hair, or whatever, put her finger in his face, scream at him, shove him, etc. This would go on nightly for weeks until he would beg her to stop because he was about to snap, which only encouraged her. She got off on it. He would try to go for a walk to get away from her before he lost it, and she would grab him and keep on and on, until he would start shaking and crying uncontrollably, and then he would snap. He said he would literally see red, then have no memory of what happened. I have snapped like this once after having been bullied for years and years, and I couldn’t remember, either. He felt cornered and tried to do the right thing and take a walk, but she wouldn’t let him. I can’t fault him for that. If anyone deserved a backhanding, it would have been her.

Go ahead and tell me I’m evil. I can take it. I think violence against women is deplorable, and I wouldn’t put up with it myself, and would tell anyone who is in an abusive relationship to get out. But I can also understand why someone would snap if they were incessantly poked and prodded and then reacted accordingly.

Wow, an almost identical (if more embellished) situation to the one I described, so you'd expect a TON of exploding heads, right? Oh wait, but that comment came from a "friendly", and is therefore "different":

Your mother was the one being abusive. Men are victims of domestic violence too, not as often, but it still happens. I do not know often women act like this in the US or around the world, but reported domestic violence case statistics say that men are more likely to be a the abuser.

I don’t think it was right of your father to hit her, because I don’t think that hurting anyone is okay. But I think he was justified to fight back.

That kind of situation is not what GWW is advocating though. And even if that’s -all- she was advocating I’d still encourage her to change her stance and encourage the men to get help instead of hurting the women they are with.

Um, wow. And this guy's mom didn't even throw anything at his dad, but somehow the commenters at FTB are prepared to accept that she was the abusive one! Couldn't they tell she was terrorized and cowed, living in such fear of his wrath that she barely spoke without permission?

And if we're to apply the same rules here as were applied to me, relating a situation you've observed means you advocate for it. This must be the case, since me attempting to have a frank, meaningful, grown-up discussion of the complexities of domestic violence--you know, how it goes down in the real world among real people, as opposed to how it goes down in Feminist Theory--is the same as me advocating beating women.

Therefore I'm shocked. Shocked, I tell you, about how absolutely no heads exploded over this guy's domestic violence apologia! Look, here's another understanding comment:

Your mother was the abuser in this situation. Hitting her was probably not the *best* solution, but I certainly am not going to fault your father for it in this case.

I can't believe these three commenters at FTB are advocating for men being allowed to beat their wives! Where are the bits of brain and skull all over the place from everyone's heads exploding? Nary a fragment to be seen, which means they must not only be excusing violence against women, but actively supporting and encouraging it! Where is the outrage? If there's no outrage, that's exactly the same as endorsement!

So from what I gather, what is considered an abhorrent thought when it comes from an enemy is permissible and even apt when voiced by a friendly. For a community that supposedly prides itself on empiricism, universality, evidence and logic, rather than hyperbole, emotionality, and kneejerking, that's really all you need to know to understand how far gone these people are.

I'm sorry, thunderf00t, but your community is in huge trouble. There will be no retreats, tactical or otherwise, not at the American Atheist convention or anywhere else. Only an ever-widening circle of conversion into this new religion where the devil has been usurped by Patriarchy, and god by "women's feelings".

They are the "us" and you and any other rational person who attacks arguments rather than the people speaking them... you are the "them".

And as long as there are men--and yes, I mean men, not just people, but men--in your community who are prepared to preen as heroes by validating and reinforcing the irrational beliefs and closet monster fears of a few hysterical (yes, I said it, hysterical) women, the conflict will only continue to escalate until the entire house goes up in flames.

I'd advise you to call the fire department if I thought for a second that it would help.