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Lacking that Essential World Series Gene

By Chris Hall
October 28, 2014
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"A worn-out baseball" by Schyler at English Wikipedia - Own work by the original uploader. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

“A worn-out baseball” by Schyler at English Wikipedia – Own work by the original uploader. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

I must be lacking some deeply elemental gene that allows you to enjoy professional sports. I don’t know anyone else in the Bay Area who is so totally uninterested in the World Series. It’s not really snobbery. When I was a kid and my dad was watching sports, I really tried to get into it. I just couldn’t. It was like watching physicists lecturing in ancient Greek. Still is. People keep having to remind me that the World Series is happening.

My geek gene speaks to me loud and strong, though. Tonight, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is on, and that clearly outranks the World Series or any other sports event. Plus, we still have Doctor Who on the DVR. Nerd orgy!

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Filed Under: Ramblings

Sam Harris Doesn’t Get Better In Context

By Chris Hall
October 13, 2014
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I think that Friendly Atheist would benefit vastly if they just dropped Terry Firma.
 Every time I see something that really makes me cringe on that blog, it’s got his byline on it. Today, Terry’s trying to defend Sam Harris using the “out of context” argument. That can certainly be a valid argument, but it’s also something that a lot of people use as a weasel excuse when someone calls them on saying something particularly stupid and appalling. In Harris’s case, he got called on saying something appalling when this image started getting passed around Twitter:

Head shot of Sam Harris with quote: "Some beliefs are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them."Terry thinks that the use of that one line to represent Harris’s views is a dishonest smear. But frankly, it doesn’t sound any better when you place it in context. Here’s what Harris himself considers to the be the proper context. From pages 52-53 of his book The End of Faith:

The power that belief has over our emotional lives appears to be total. For every emotion that you are capable of feeling, there is surely a belief that could invoke it in a matter of moments. Consider the following proposition:

Your daughter is being slowly tortured in an English jail.

What is it that stands between you and the absolute panic that such a proposition would loose in the mind and body of a person who believed it? Perhaps you do not have a daughter, or you know her to be safely at home, or you believe that English jailors are renowned for their congeniality. Whatever the reason, the door to belief has not yet swung upon its hinges.

The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live. Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. This is what the United States attempted in Afghanistan, and it is what we and other Western powers are bound to attempt, at an even greater cost to ourselves and to innocents abroad, elsewhere in the Muslim world. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.

(Emphasis added)

It’s crap like this that made me instantly dislike Sam Harris. Of all the Four Horsemen, he was the only one that I instantly, irrevocably loathed. Dennett I found to be an amiable but well-meaning sort, Hitchens was problematic but could have witty and devastating insights when he wasn’t determined to be a total prick, and Dawkins seemed to be an intelligent and compassionate person with a sense of moral integrity. I could see certain problems with him even then, but thought that he had the moral integrity to challenge himself and find his way past them. That’s turned out not to be true.

But Harris, even in the early chapters of his first book, flaunted authoritarian and racist tendencies that just made me want to distance myself from him as quickly as possible. This is an excellent example of why.

Terry and Harris may think that context somehow changes the meaning of the line, but all it does is expound further on the original theme. Harris really does think that it’s perfectly ethical to kill people for what they think, not what they’ve done or are about to do.

Harris repeatedly finds himself using the “out of context” excuse, trying to explain that the words on the page don’t actually mean what they say. It’s been a theme in his career ever since he started to make a splash in the media. In this case, the only thing I can figure is that he expects that the original context means people that we see as “other.” By conjuring up the specter of ISIL/ISIS, he wants his readers to understand that he’s only in favor of killing people that we’ve already decided are okay to kill:

The flag of ISIL/ISIS

The larger context of this passage is a philosophical and psychological analysis of belief as an engine of behavior—and the link to behavior is the whole point of the discussion. Why would it be ethical to drop a bomb on the leaders of ISIS at this moment? Because of all the harm they’ve caused? No. Killing them will do nothing to alleviate that harm. It would be ethical to kill these men—once again, only if we couldn’t capture them—because of all the death and suffering they intend to cause in the future. Why do they intend this? Because of what they believe about infidels, apostates, women, paradise, prophecy, America, and so forth.

Notice how he’s changing the rules here: This doesn’t say the same thing as the original line. Here, the action that he’s advocating is only about ideas at the most abstract level. In practice, it’s about defending yourself or someone else against an imminent, physical threat, not an idea.

Sam Harris can rest assured that although I think he’s an asshole with dangerous ideas, I’m not going to advocate killing him for them. It’s too bad that he can’t write clearly enough to reassure other people of the same thing.

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Filed Under: Atheism, Featured, Politics Tagged With: authoritarian, racism, Sam-Harris, Terry Firma

Can We Actually Ban Small, Yappy Dogs?

By Chris Hall
October 3, 2014
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Being as I write for a dog blog and actually get paid for it, I hope it doesn’t make me a bad person that part of me wishes that this headline were actually real. More to the point, I hope that I don’t wind up unemployed. Or more unemployed than I already am. I love dogs, really, but the small, yappy ones sometimes make me want to use them for practice on a trebuchet.

When you make your trebuchet out of Lego bricks, it’s even better. [media-credit]By: Paul Albertella[/media-credit]

SASKATOON – While bans on pitbulls are increasingly common, Saskatoon has become the first city in the world to ban dogs under 5 pounds (2.27 kg) because they are “noisy, annoying and not really dogs.”

In a split-vote decision, City Council passed the by-law to shut the city gates to a long list of dogs that are commonly referred to as “Purse Dogs” because they fit in a handbag, or “Dinky Doo Doo Doggies” because their pooies are the size of Raisinettes.

— The Alpine, Saskatoon Bans “Shitty Little Yappy” Dogs

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Filed Under: Featured, Humor Tagged With: dogs, Humor, quickiies

The Cell Phone: Savior of Democracy?

By Chris Hall
October 2, 2014
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Demonstrators in the streets of Hong Kong, September 28, 2014  I’m starting to love cell phones more and more. They have their share of frustrations, and sometimes corporate policies piss me right the fuck off, but I think that they\’re turning out to be a great tool for democracy. A lot of the discussions that we’re currently having about police abuse would not be happening if it weren’t for the fact that everyone is carrying around a miniature television studio and photo lab in their pocket. We’re not just seeing that these things happen; we’re seeing proof that they happen regularly. Of course, there were always people who knew this — people of color, queers — but by definition, the people who get the shit beaten out of them by cops are the ones without power, and they’re asked to prove what they say over and over again. The pictures coming out of cell phones have been that proof for all but those who are determined to defend the police at all costs. The demonstrations in Hong Kong give another great example of smartphones as tools of democracy. There’s been a lot of furious debate over allowing governments to have a “kill switch” to shut down the Internet in case of crisis. It turns out that might not be as easy as some people might like to think. The demonstrators in Hong Kong are using modern tech to talk to each other and organize whether the networks are up or not:

As throngs of pro-democracy protesters continue to organize in Hong Kong’s central business district, many of them are messaging one another through a network that doesn’t require cell towers or Wi-Fi nodes. They’re using an app called FireChat that launched in March and is underpinned by mesh networking, which lets phones unite to form a temporary Internet.

So far, mesh networks have proven themselves quite effective and quickly adopted during times of disaster or political unrest, as they don’t rely on existing cable and wireless networks. In Iraq, tens of thousands of people have downloaded FireChat as the government limits connectivity in an effort to curb ISIS communications. Protesters in Taiwan this spring turned to FireChat when cell signals were too weak and at times nonexistent.

via How Hong Kong Protesters Are Connecting, Without Cell Or Wi-Fi Networks : All Tech Considered : NPR.

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Filed Under: Activism, Featured, Politics

A Very Old and Very Fake Sex Work Statistic at The Advocate

By Chris Hall
September 15, 2014
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Ten dollar bill sticking out of crotch of blue jeans.I know that The Advocate isn’t the radical firebrand it once was; after all, the entire LG (sometimes BT) movement isn’t the radical hotbed it once was. Still, it kind of hurts to see them making the same mistakes about sex work that the straight media does. Today on Facebook, Melinda Chateauvert pointed out to me that they’d published this infographic, titled “Numbers Crunch: Prostitution.” Most of the info looks right, or at least plausible, but there in the second half, they reproduce one of the biggest pieces of junk social science about sex work out there. Specifically, item number 9 says:

BETWEEN 11 and 13: Average age when boys and transgender youth become victims of prostitution.

I just published a nearly 4,000-word article in The Atlantic chronicling why this is complete bullshit, so I take the fact that The Advocate can’t be arsed to do their fact-checking a little personally. It’s really easy to find out why this statistic is so bad that it’s “not even wrong” as they say in science.

"Disinfographic" from The  Advocate, with annotations about why it's bullshit.

This statistic has been debunked so many times, it’s not even funny.

Usually, the “age-of-entry” nonsense is used to refer to girls, and implies heterosexual prostitution. But nevertheless, there’s no research backing up the claim that massive numbers of children go into prostitution at such young ages that they could statistically outweigh those who go into sex work in their late teens, twenties, or older. Those studies that have made such claims have focused entirely on samples of people under the age of 18, which automatically skews your results. They’ve also tended to focus exclusively on young people who have been arrested or “rescued,” which also skews the results towards people who are in trouble. For a really good, detailed examination of what’s wrong with these numbers, I recommend reading Emi Koyama’s blog post, “The Average Age of Entry Into Prostitution is NOT 13.” It’s one of the first pieces that I looked at as a reference for my Atlantic article.

There’s also problems with the claim that go beyond the merely statistical. For instance, look at the phrase, “become victims of prostitution,” which immediately erases the line between prostitution and child-rape. In hindsight, I will acknowledge this as also being a problem with my piece in The Atlantic; I should have been more careful about making a distinction between sex work, which is done as an economic choice, and abuse. It’s a very important distinction, and to ignore it also erases the agency of those who do sex work by their own initiative.

Besides failing to check their facts, The Advocate doesn’t even cite their source for the “age-of-entry” stat, probably because they got it through the journalistic equivalent of chatting at the water cooler. I would be very surprised if the person or persons who created this particular dis-infographic knows where they heard it. However, I can make an educated guess at the ultimate source: The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U. S., Canada and Mexico, by Richard J. Estes and Neil A. Weiner. The Estes and Weiner report came out in 2001, and included this snippet, based on interviews with 210 underage subjects:

Average age of first intercourse for the children we interviewed was 12 years for the boys (N=63) and 13 years for the girls (N=107). The age range of entry into prostitution for the boys, including gay and transgender boys, was somewhat younger than that of the girls, i.e., 11-13 years vs. 12-14 years, respectively. The average age of first intercourse among minority boys and girls was younger than that of the non-minority youth we interviewed, i.e., 10-11 years of age for minority boys and 11-12 years of age for minority girls.

Emphasis added, to show it specifically matches the claim in The Advocate’s graphic.

As I say in my own article, I don’t have any particular gripe with the Estes and Weiner study, but I do have major issues with how it’s used. The quote above is referring only to the proportions in their sample; it is not making a universal claim, about prostitution in America as a whole. It is certainly not making such a claim about prostitution in 2014. In a mainstream publication, I would roll my eyes in frustration. When I see this stuff in The Advocate, I feel disgusted at how easily they play respectability politics.

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Filed Under: Featured, Media, Sex Work Tagged With: age of entry statistic, Journalism, lgbt, media, Melinda, Sex Work

The “Age of Entry” Statistic is a Fake: Silencing Sex Workers With Numbers

By Chris Hall
September 8, 2014
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Last Friday, I published an article that I’ve wanted to write for a long time: it’s a debunking of the too-common claim that the average prostitute starts when she’s 13. It’s an excellent example of how myths are privileged over the voices of the people who are actually affected by the laws and policies against prostitution. It’s also my first article in The Atlantic, which is one of the few big magazines that I still respect. Now I know why. Working with Rebecca Rosen, the Business Editor, was a genuine pleasure. She was supportive, enthusiastic, and actually asked me to expand the piece when I expected her to cut it. I think it’s a much better piece because of her.

Most current government and nonprofit policies on sex work define their goals as “rescue,” which makes perfect sense if the age-of-entry statistic is central to your understanding of the sex industry. Child abuse and trafficking are crises that require certain types of interventions. But these crimes do not characterize the sex industry more generally. In reality, many sex workers come into the industry as adults and without coercion, often because of economic necessity. By seeing the sex industry through the lens of the misleading age-of-entry statistic, we overlook the people who are most affected by discussions about sex work—the workers themselves.

♦ ♦ ♦

One of the strongest and most thorough critics of the statistic is activist Emi Koyama. Koyama says that even when applied only to underage subjects, the stat doesn’t hold up, which does a disservice to the most vulnerable in our society.

Emi Koyama has done some of the best research into the problems with the "age of entry into prostitution" factoid.

Emi Koyama

“It conceals the reality that most of the young people in the sex trade come from families affected by poverty, racism, abuse (including homophobia and transphobia in families), parental imprisonment or deportation, or from broken child welfare systems, and do not have safe places to return to,” she told me in an interview. “In fact, many young people are trading sex as a way to escape from violence and abuse that they have experienced in their homes and child welfare systems. By treating them as innocent and helpless ‘children,’ we fail to listen to the young people who are struggling to survive in hostile circumstances. We also fail to address the root causes of their vulnerability, and instead promote further surveillance and criminalization of street culture—which actually harms young people who survive there.”

Even by mathematical standards, the numbers don’t add up. In order for 12 or 13 to represent the national average age of entry, there would need to be a significant number who enter at ages younger than that. “The vast majority of young people who are ‘rescued’ by the law enforcement during Operation Cross Country sweeps are 16- and 17-year olds,” Koyama says, “and there are rarely any under the age 13… For the average age to be around 13, there needs to be many more 5-12 year olds that are forced into prostitution than are empirically plausible.” If the massive numbers of children exist in quantities enough to offset those who enter in their late teens or as adults, they’re not showing up in the arrests made by the Federal government, even high-profile ones like Operation Cross Country.

In addition, Koyama says, the age of entry statistic flatters Americans that their own communities are safe, while playing on the fear of outsiders: “It gives the impression that children were safe until ‘bad people’ came into their communities to take them away, and therefore we must arrest and prosecute these ‘bad people’ (often racialized).” —Read More

Mindy Chateauvert, author of "Sex Workers Unite!" traces the early history of the "age of entry into prostitution" stat.

Melinda Chateauvert, author of “Sex Workers Unite!”

After you read that, I strongly suggest that you go and read this piece, by Melinda Chateauvert, who goes even farther than I do in my article. Just after the article went up, she said on my Facebook comments, “I really wish you’d contacted me about this,” and boy, do I wish I had. Turns out that she had some of the exact information I’d been looking for. See, although the most common reference for the statistic nowadays is The Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children in the U. S., Canada and Mexico, by Richard J. Estes and Neil A. Weiner, it’s been around before 2001. The earliest citation I’ve seen is a 1982 paper by Mimi Silbert and Ayela Pines. Unfortunately, I couldn’t for the life of me find a copy of the paper. All I had was a title. Mindy does a great job of debunking the pre-2001 version of the “average age of entry” factoid:

The original academic article, “Victimization of Street Prostitutes,” was published in the journal Victimology in 1982 (7 [1982]: 122-133). The data came from research conducted by Mimi Silbert of the San Francisco Delancey Street Foundation and Ayala Pines of UC Berkeley, who interviewed 200 women and girls in SF, all of whom were Delancey Street clients. The authors note that the number of juveniles arrested for prostitution had “doubled” from 38 to 86 from 1976 to 1977. Still, this was 86 minors among more than 2,300 adult women arrested for prostitution in 1977. (FWIW, I was one of the women arrested that year. The SFPD and was engaged in a major crackdown at the time, especially in Union Square and the Tenderloin areas as developers had begun eying those neighborhoods. There were arrests across the entire /hetero/ sex industry: clubs, parlors, bars, hotels, streets, etc.)….

It’s important to understand this data from a historical perspective. In 1977, the drinking age was 18. That meant that “juveniles” could work in strip clubs, serve liquor, and obtain a license from the city to work in a massage parlor or encounter parlor. (There were no educational requirements to receive a massage license at that time). A young person only had to show an ID stating she was 18. (And remember, this was when many states issued a driver’s license on paper, and did not necessarily include a photograph.)

 

 

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Filed Under: Featured, Politics, Sex Work Tagged With: Audacia-Ray, civil rights, emi koyama, Kristina Dolgin, Melinda Chateauvert, Sex Work, shannon williams, social justice

George Will, Take Note: “There is No Survivor Privilege, Only Survivors”

By Chris Hall
June 16, 2014
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There's something about George Will that just screams "asshole," even when he's not saying anything.

There’s something about George Will that just screams “asshole,” even when he’s not saying anything.

I learned to loathe George Will very early in my political consciousness. That means sometime back when Reagan was president. It’s not that he’s more contemptible than all the other conservatives, but my dislike for him is unique in its quality, if not necessarily its quantity. His entire image, his entire career, is based on projecting a certain patrician condescension that makes my skin itch. In some ways he’s more a true conservative than any of the neo-Fascists that dominate right-wing commentary these days, like John Derbyshire, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, or Glenn Beck. He truly is a conservative in his longing to return to the old days; his writing drips with a barely-concealed loathing for the working classes and brown people, and I can easily imagine that he looks back nostalgically for the times of child labor. Given a TARDIS, I imagine that he would immediately zip back to London, circa 1820, and establish himself as an industrial baron of some kind, perhaps investing in a plantation in Jamaica or something. He’s not the kind that I can imagine ever getting his own hands dirty with slave-owning or labor exploitation. Will is much more the kind who likes to enjoy quiet, dignified luxury while allowing other people to spill blood for him.

I could go on for pages and pages about my pet loathing for George F. Will, and it might even be entertaining before it ultimately became tedious. But the point is this: his recent column about rape, where he posited that being a rape victim is what all the cool girls want, just kind of cranked my loathing up to 12. It was already at 11, so he practically shattered the meter with this one.

Rape is mostly an abstract evil to me: I know and have known many people who have been raped, but it’s not something that I’ve had to experience myself. Even with my friends, it’s been something that happened to them in the past, not something I went through with them. But at least I can see it as an evil; Will treats it as a fashion statement.

Dr. Jen Gunter: Occupy Healthcare

Dr. Jen Gunter: Occupy Healthcare

Rape is a much more concrete evil to women like Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN who wrote an open letter responding to Will in today’s Talking Points Memo. It’s not an abstraction to her: She talks, very clearly and explicitly about her own rape and its consequences:

I was specifically moved to write to you because the rape scenario that you describe somewhat incredulously is not unfamiliar to me. Not because I’ve heard it in many different iterations (I have sadly done many rape kits), but because it was not unlike my own rape. The lead up was slightly different, but I too was raped by someone I knew and did not emerge with any obvious physical evidence that a crime had been committed. I tried to push him away, I said “No!” and “Get off” multiple times,” but he was much stronger and suddenly I found my hands pinned behind my back and a forearm crushing my neck and for a few minutes I found it hard to breathe. I was 22, far from home, scared, and shocked and so at some point I just stopped kicking and let him finish. Sound familiar? For several weeks I didn’t even think about it as a rape because that was easier than admitting the truth. Again, sound familiar?

[…]

You labor under the fear (as some men do) that there is an epidemic of false rape. That good young men will go to jail for consent withdrawn after the fact. And while false accusations likely do happen (the Duke Lacrosse case is a recent, well-known example) these are the exception and not the rule and each time a male with a platform spouts off about a false epidemic of rape it only makes it harder for women who have been violated to come forward.

And your confusion about the under reporting statistics? First a woman has to get over her fear of her assailant and the shame imparted by society and then she has to deal with the police. There are no Special Victims Units like you see on T.V. protectively shepherding women through the process of facing assailants. And if fear and shame and being disbelieved by law enforcement were not enough of a deterrent think about having your pubic hair combed for your rapist’s DNA while you are dripping with his ejaculate. And you have the gall to wonder why some women might not immediately (if ever) report a rape? I am a 47 year-old financially and professionally secure woman in a stable, loving relationship and it took 25 years and your jackass column to get me to speak up about my rape. How easy do you think it is for a scared 20 year-old to call 911 or walk into a police station and say, “I was just raped?”

The last line, which is the title of this post, is the perfect response to Will and all the people who think like him. Surviving isn’t a privilege, it isn’t a fashion statement; it’s a right, the first and last one that any person has. If you look at Will’s record, though, it’s one that he’s long been unwilling to grant to those who are less privileged than he.

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Filed Under: Etc., Featured Tagged With: conservatives, gender, George Will, Jen Gunter, Politics, rape, rape culture

Poe’s Law, As Applied to Breastfeeding

By Chris Hall
June 15, 2014
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Woman Breastfeeding Baby. Her breast is pixellated with a giant caption: Bottle Not Boobs

Bottles Not Boobs

It actually did take me a few minutes to figure out whether this was real or fake, which shows you just how solid Poe’s Law really is, when you apply it to real life. For the record, it is a parody, taken from the Facebook page of a group called Christians for Michele Bachmann. Naturally, that’s another factor against me: Bachmann herself has intentionally taken enough stands that were totally out there that it’s not entirely beyond the scope of reason that this might actually be from her, or a group supporting her.

However, Christians for Michele Bachmann is way too honest about the things that she’s actually said in real life. For instance:

Transcript
“Fred Phelps was hated for saying the truth about the militant homosexual. The militant homosexual is no friend of God, and no friend of America. I’m not saying I agreed with Fred’s methods, I’m just saying that I agreed with Fred.” –Michele Bachmann, Fox News, March 20, 2014
There are also quiet a few people, left and right, who have really weird obsessions about women who breast-feed in public. All that said, I’m relieved that it’s a parody, although I do kinda love the term “sinbags.”

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Filed Under: Featured, Humor, Politics Tagged With: Humor, Michele Bachmann, Politics

Isn’t “Neckbeard” Just a Way to Shame Fat Men?

By Chris Hall
June 13, 2014
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NSID 2010 – Day 9 by Johnathan Nightingale

 

I’ve always hated the term “Neckbeard,” because it seems like a really quick and cheap way of saying “fat, nerdy guy” in a way that’s acceptable to people who would otherwise be against body or status shaming. It is definitely not something that you use to describe a thin, popular guy with lots of money. It’s definitely a shortcut to mocking a guy for being fat, a little socially inept, and lacking a high-status career, but not saying so

Fortunately, I’m not the only person who’s had that thought. Here’s what Ozy Frantz has to say on their Tumblr:

I was totally talking about like “neckbeards” earlier and how mad I am about attributing misogyny solely to low-status men and, like, usually men coded fat, ugly, and mentally and emotionally disabled but I think my true rejection isn’t the things I’ve stated that are wrong with the idea, although I think those are wrong too it is that, over the course of my life, the men who have harassed me, bullied me, done sexualized things to me without my consent, or directed misogyny at me have usually been Pretty and Popular and Well-Liked sorts who went to parties on weekends

It’s a little stream-of-consciousness, and the editor in me wants to scream “OMIGOD! WHERE ARE THE COMMAS?!?!” But my personal neuroses about grammar and stuff aside, the sentiment is one that I fully embrace.

Let me tell you  sometime how much the term “fedora” as a shortcut for “misogynist douchebag” pisses me off. I like fedoras. (Besides, the ones that get constantly maligned are more properly called Trilbys.)

[image-credits]
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Filed Under: Body Image, Featured Tagged With: fat, gender, neckbeard, nerd culture

How is Killing Fluffy Bunnies “Rapey”?

By Chris Hall
May 31, 2014
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Donnie Darko and Frank the Bunny in the Theater

A couple of years back, I wrote a piece called “Why Sex is Not Spiritual” for the SF Weekly arts blog, The Exhibitionist. It’s probably the best piece I ever wrote for them, and one of the best pieces I’ve written on atheism and sex.  It got a lot of comments, many of them outraged and offended. The people who were most pissed off were New-Agey types, Wiccan, and so forth, so there weren’t many comments telling me that I was going to hell. Pagans don’t do Hell. They just kind of shake their heads with a certain passive-aggressive condescension that lets you know that you’re close-minded at the very best, and probably a patriarchal bigot at the very worst.

Anyway, the piece was provocative enough that it still gets comments. Today, it got two from the same person, who goes by the handle startigerjln. (Known henceforth as ST.) The first is some kind of pseudo-scientific garbage that conflates neurological stimulation and temporal lobe epilepsy with spirituality. (It’s not; feelings of transcendence and emotional highs do not demonstrate the existence of spirits or souls.) It’s the second one that first bewildered me, then pissed me off. [Read more…]

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Filed Under: Featured, Sex and Gender, Writing Tagged With: rape, rape culture, Writing

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