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UPDATE: Vacula has resigned.
As most of you are no doubt aware, the atheist and skeptic movements have had just a teensy bit of a problem with misogyny in their ranks. You may recall the unholy shitstorm that erupted last year when Rebecca Watson of Skepchick casually mentioned in a YouTube video that it might not be such a good idea for dudes to try to hit on women in elevators at 4 AM. The assholes of the internet still haven’t forgiven Watson for her assault on the sacred right of creepy dudes to creep women out 24 hours a day, every day.
Watson is hardly the only skeptic to face vicious misogynist harassment for the crime of blogging while feminist. Last month, Jen McCreight of Blag Hag announced that near constant harassment from online bullies was wearing her down to such a degree that she felt it necessary to shut down her blog – hopefully only temporarily.
I can no longer write anything without my words getting twisted, misrepresented, and quotemined. I wake up every morning to abusive comments, tweets, and emails about how I’m a slut, prude, ugly, fat, feminazi, retard, bitch, and cunt (just to name a few). If I block people who are twisting my words or sending verbal abuse, I receive an even larger wave of nonsensical hate about how I’m a slut, prude, feminazi, retard, bitch, cunt who hates freedom of speech (because the Constitution forces me to listen to people on Twitter). This morning I had to delete dozens of comments of people imitating my identity making graphic, lewd, degrading sexual comments about my personal life. In the past, multiple people have threatened to contact my employer with “evidence” that I’m a bad scientist (because I’m a feminist) to try to destroy my job. I’m constantly worried that the abuse will soon spread to my loved ones.
I just can’t take it anymore.
McCreight’s harassers and their enablers were delighted in this “victory,” taking to Twitter to give McCreight some final kicks on the way out the door. “Good riddance, #jennifurret , you simple minded dolt,” wrote @skepticaljoe. “I couldn’t be happier,” added @SUICIDEBOMBS. “Eat shit you rape-faking scum.”
One of the celebrators that day was an atheist activist named Justin Vacula, who joked that “Jen’s allegedly finished blogging…and this time it’s not her boyfriend who kicked her off the internet.”
So here’s the latest twist:
Justin Vacula has just been given a leadership position in the Pennsylvania chapter of the Secular Coalition for America, a lobbying group for secular Americans whose advisory board includes such big names as Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, Susan Jacoby, Wendy Kaminer, Steven Pinker, Salman Rushdie and Julia Sweeney.
It’s an astonishing choice. In addition to gloating that bullies had led McCreight to shut down her blog, Vacula has harassed atheist blogger and activist Surly Amy, including writing a post on A Voice for Men (yes, that A Voice for Men) cataloging all the sordid details of his supposed case against her. At one point he even posted her address, and a photo of her apartment building, on a site devoted to hating on feminist atheist bloggers.
Blogger Stephanie Zvan has set up a petition on Change.org urging the Secular Coalition of America to reconsider its choice. You can find further examples of Vacula’s questionable behavior there.
As Watson notes in a post on Skepchick, Vacula’s position with the SCA is likely to “drive progressive women away from the secular cause.” She adds,
I will never, ever get involved with SCA so long as someone like him holds a position of power anywhere, let alone in a state I live in. So Vacula is actively driving people away from SCA. …
It’s all a real shame, because SCA fills an important role in our movement and I’d like to give them my support. … I don’t believe secular organizations should reward bullies and bigots with high-level positions, even if those positions are volunteer-only.
I recommend that everyone here take a look at the petition.
Signed. Oy vey.
Signed. I’ve never been really much of an activist (member of the Secular Student Alliance, but that’s it), but knowing that someone who had so little respect for me, purely because of my gender and my social justice opinions, was leading a group like the Secular Coalition for America would seriously hamper my desire to be involved with them in any way, shape, or form.
Can anyone explain why the atheist movement has so much misogyny? I’ve never been able to figure it out. I grew up in an atheist household, so I’m a little different than most atheists*, I think, in that I just take it for granted and I’ve never felt like I needed to be involved in the movement. I’m wondering if there is a philosophy or set of assumptions in the current atheist movement that leads to the misogyny. Or maybe it came from a person early on?
*I don’t believe in God, but usually I consider myself an agnostic, because you can’t prove that God doesn’t exist.
Also, I signed.
@clairedammit
Same–raised entirely without religion by parents who were raised the same, so I suppose that makes me third generation? Technically agnostic but functionally atheist and willing to take on either label (as well as secular, skeptic, and Humanist) depending on context.
I can’t explain it, either. I always thought (from my parents) that atheism and rejecting religious dogma went along with attitudes that all people had equal worth and were equally deserving of a basic level of dignity, autonomy, and respect from their fellow humans… horrible people like serial killers who were a danger to others and had to be locked up included as far as “basic level” goes. Things like ensuring that they retain their bodily autonomy, and not treating them or talking about them like animals, or reducing them to dehumanized “it”s. And if I can consider even people who have done horrible, wrong things deserving of this, shouldn’t a random stranger automatically get a much higher level of respect and decency straight off the bat?
But apparently this is not so widespread a belief among my own irreligious community. It boggles the mind.
Things like revealing the personal information of a person whose opinions you disagree with on the internet, to an audience who have a higher-than-neutral likelihood of undertaking stalking, threatening, or downright violent behaviors against the victim, does not seem particularly decent to me.
The MRM and The Great Sexist Atheist Backlash are pretty well connected with each other, from what I can tell. Another example is “Wooly Bumblebee”/”Is God A Squirrel?”, AKA the woman who was hailed by the “anti-FTB-bullies” as a bullying expert and then went on to call Jen McCreight’s father a failure as a parent after the BlagHag went on her hiatus. It’s one great big, uh, slime pit.
Clairedammit, I think some of it might have to do with people giving primacy to the problems they personally have encountered. I’ve met white, straight, cismale atheists who have legitimately argued with me that the biggest problem facing our society was the oppression of atheists, When one can’t see beyond the problems that they themselves are having, and someone tries to discuss things which are objectively larger social problems, that person might get defensive and/or angry and/or turn into horrible people, especially if they already have problems paying attention to their own privilege.
Another example in addition to Vacula, in case that wasn’t clear.
For a group dedicated to advancing the cause of men’s rights, they sure seem to spend a lot of time harassing and spewing vitriol at feminists on the internets.
My theory, and I have only several years of observing parts of the atheist blogosphere to back it but not any hard data, is that the atheist movement tends to attract a) people who were formerly religious, for whom atheism is a big deal, who b) don’t have much else going on in their lives. I mean, there’s many non-White people and women and sexual minorities etc. who also have discovered atheism and presumably would benefit from the movement, but more of them would have more pressing oppressions to deal with than the often merely symbolic stuff that the atheist movement deals with. So, besides the “white dudes dominate everything generally in this culture” bit, you also have a diluted pool of people interested enough in the topic and who have enough time to do activism.
I don’t know if those words in that order made sense. Let me know if they don’t and I’ll rearrange them.
Also, atheists 4 lyfe represent! I always feel a bit out of place in the secular-o-sphere because I don’t really have any dramatic conversion story or anything. Though I do have some super stories about atheist toddler Nepenthe going to religious school.
Linds said it way better than me. Go look at zir post and don’t bother with mine.
@clairedammit: If I knew why so many other atheists were misogynists, I wouldn’t keep it to myself.
It may only have to do with the dwindling percentage of sausage fest in the atheist cons. Certainly Thunderf00t shit the bed over anti-harassment policies at TAM and similar meetups.
And I don’t think it’s down to one person. Dawkins’ reaction to Elevatorgate was to play the only-one-cause-at-a-time card and huff that we must have solved womens’ issues in the Middle East if we have so much time to spend on arguing over trapping women on elevators, but I don’t think he’s the source of the systemic hatred.
Eh. Richard Dawkins is an arse.
Also, lifelong Atheists m/
I don’t have anything more to add.
@ Nepenthe, I think I get what you’re saying, and it makes sense, in that non-white, non-male, non-straight, non-cis people could very well also be atheists, but their non-privileged dimension likely gives them both (a) bigger things to worry about than discrimination against atheists, which, in America at least, is relatively mild; and (b) the resulting perspective on privilege, at least in that dimension, that enables them to see how mild discrimination against the non-religious is compared to other forms of religion.
Heck, just talking with one of my Jewish friends, I’m pretty sure non-Christian religious people on average have it worse in America than people who have no religion at all. Not like we need to play Oppression Olympics, or anything, but clinging to any shred of discrimination you do have seems to be particularly obtuse in the case of atheism in America, and I think if you do that, you’re more likely to be the kind of person who wants to see maleness or whiteness as Horrible Discriminated-Against Traits, too.
@clairedammit, drashizu
I don’t think they’re more misogynist, they’re just more likely to hang out in more of the same spaces as ‘us’, so we see it more. Also they’re a lot more open about it because they’re on the internet, so there’s the protective veil of anonymity. Finally, I’d posit it’s something to do with the idea that atheist spaces are usually really welcoming of debate, and once they’ve picked a ‘side’ in it, their natural human desire to have picked the ‘winning’ side makes them much more strident about it.
But most of them* are just big jerkface, simplistic, whiny, over-privileged children with serious character flaws who have no more real awareness of social justice issues and oppression than the average potted plant, but think that they qualify as oppressed just because religions still exist, and all other oppressions are solved (because if they’re not campaigning about them, how important can they be?) so it’s fine to act bigoted towards people who insist like they’re still systematically oppressed or some shit, and then back to my third point in the above paragraph (do not pass go, do not collect £200, but do pass the kitchen to make a sammich because women on the internetz lol bitches amirite?).
(*them = misogynist/racist/etc. atheists on the internet, not ‘general atheists’)
At the end of that first paragraph, I meant “other forms of discrimination.” Not “religion.”
Oh also, the women(/PoC/etc.) in the atheist circles are more likely to speak out against that sort of behaviour which leads to the doubling down and determination to be ‘right’ I spoke about in the above comment.
Or you could just ignore everything I said and just read all the people who ninjaed me and did it better.
@thenatfantastic, I can see that. Reminds me of this: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19/
…which I’m sure you’ve all seen before, but I can never stop laughing at the guy’s expression at the end.
In a nutshell: ‘But I’M oppressed? How could I possibly oppress others? My MOTHER is a woman, fer chrissakes??’
It’s the same problem that exists in many parts of the feminist movement (racism, classism), except that feminists seem to be falling over themselves/ourselves to acknowledge and discuss it, whereas many male atheists don’t even want to admit that there’s a problem. I have honestly heard atheist men wonder why more women aren’t openly atheist and – god help us all – start discussing sociobiological reasons behind this (perhaps they’re too busy picking berries to discuss the nonexistence of god?). The same men who call out women for being ‘bitchy’ or even going for ‘alpha males.’ And they cannot for the life of them connect their perception of women outside of their activism– in the worlds of dating, or school – to why women would not feel supported in this community. Like Dawkins (whom I respect, on some levels and some levels only), they are mystified by some women’s ability to care about more than just immediate, life-threatening harm (FGM)… then wonder why more women aren’t marching against school prayer.
As an atheist, I find it quite embarrassing. We have great goals, but this idea that to take away religion is to remove all biases and cultural context… it’s delusional.
Yes! Let’s destroy the career of a young man over pointless accusations and half truths. Yeah, social justice!
I think that Atheists should probably focus on the fact that in a country with separation of church and state as one of its fundamental groundings seems to give a lot of influence to a certain religion in its lawmaking process rather than worrying about how they’re constantly told they’re going to hell.
I mean, British laws seem to be more secular than US ones and we have fucking Bishops in the Lords.
@Thomas
I’m pretty sure that saying he wrote for A Voice for Men is actually a whole truth.
Based on some of the most egregious examples, like Bill Maher, I see some of these dudes treating atheism as proof of their superior intellect and rationality because they don’t believe in silly superstitions like all those sheeples (a sort of atheist analogue to the fundamentalist “people who don’t believe in God are just being willfully disobedient”). So they define themselves as being superior to other people by virtue of being an atheist, and once one has accepted the premise “I’m better than other people because I’m an atheist,” it’s not a very big jump to “I’m better than other people because I’m a Westerner” or “I’m better than other people because I’m a man.” That’s my take, anyway.
Also, has it occurred to you that, if his career does end as a result of his publication of an article on a hate site, it would actually be his fault, and not the fault of people who point it out?
Personal responsibility, how does it work?
Yeah, let’s distort and obfuscate!