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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 the petition. Thanks for notifying us of this issue, David.
@lowquacks
Attractive? No, but that’s a subjective thing. He’s also a sexist, slut-shaming tool who’s about as funny as what I scraped off my boot the other day, but the thing I scraped off my boot didn’t try to be ‘hilariously’ zany by talking like a Victorian who swallowed a dictionary.
@thenatfantastic
Yeah, as far as I can tell his “comedy” doesn’t extend beyond speaking in what still sounds like a fake cockney accent despite growing up in the area and saying stuff that Keith Moon might have on an off day.
Dunno where you got slut-shaming from because I don’t follow the dude at all but if that’s true at all holy god the hypocrisy.
Mostly mentioning him to annoy ex-troll who isn’t present but was being alluded to before.
I know it’s not his fault, it’s the coke, but he’d also be more attractive if his facial expression was more “hey there” and less “BRAINS ARE TASTY”.
I think ALL movements/schools of thought/religions/subcultures sooner or later will have to face that they have members that have not progressed beyond the Calvin&Hobbes G.R.O.S.S clubhouse view of women. And it’s always equally shocking and dismaying to realise that these people whom you thought were your “tribe” isn’t free of misogyny, racism, homophobia and other kinds of intolerance, especially when the basis of what you have in common is a stance against irrational belief. Sadly, I think being A Rational Person has trumped being A Humanistic Person within parts of the atheist movement, and that has made some people think as follows:
“I am an atheist. Therefore I am Rational. Therefore all my acts and thoughts are Rational. Therefore people criticizing me must be irrational. They are stupid and bad and mean poopyheads”
What happens is the same kind of rationalization that happens in all intolerant people, only with rationality in place of the Bible, Bro-Code or other Book-of-Learning-of-Choice.
I’m a secular, skeptical theist (I know, I know, but it’s the best way of explaining my stance). I feel more connected to humanistic atheists than to most Christians. It saddens me that all the good things about secularism and tolerance of others and humanistic ideals get drowned out by intolerant little boys getting mad about playing in the school-yard where they have to share and let others join in, rather than being in their tree-house in their own back garden.
@lowquacks
Him and another ‘comedian’ phoned an elderly British actor to do a telephone interview for his radio show. When the actor didn’t answer (IIRC his wife had been rushed to hospital), they left a series of voicemails for him about how Brand had slept with his granddaughter, including the other guy repeatedly shouting ‘HE FUCKED YOUR GRANDDAUGHTER’ and Brand singing a really sleazy song about it. It was a HUGE deal in the UK, because a right-wing newspaper got up in arms about it and kicked up a huge fuss, demanding resignations left, right and centre. More here.
@thenatfantastic
I do remember that; I never looked into it beyond “Russell Brand and someone else rang someone related to someone or something and said something inappropriate”. Thanks.
Responding to this
and this
I didn’t say a damn thing about y’all’s inner lives nor about my intellectual superiority. Like Ozymandias, I know that many theists are awesome people and smarter than me about many things, but basically just think they’re wrong about the whole existence of god thing. And of course, not all theists subscribe to the platitude that faith is a virtue.
Anyway, it’s a fucking fact that faith is a cognitive error, not a “virtue” of any sort (I’m talking about the believing-in-the-face-of-contradictory-or-nonexistent-evidence kind of faith, not the kind of faith that’s a synonym for earned trust). If thinking that makes me intellectually superior to those who don’t agree, well, you said it, not me.
Being confident about being right about a couple of things doesn’t make me superior to anyone in general. It just makes me confident about being right about the non-existence of god–and the desirability of a world in which we try to compensate for, rather than lionize, the cognitive errors that are a legacy of our particular evolutionary heritage.
The thing about the Brand incident that bothers me is that he took advantage of a former partner in order to get cheap laughs. It’s sad that the ensuing media mess seems to have focused more on how her grandfather/license payers might have been offended and less on the fact that talking shit about someone you used to sleep with and implying that her having slept with you should be considered humiliating is a really crappy, deeply sex-negative thing to do.
TLDR : There’s nothing hip and edgy and sex-positive about trying to use the fact that a woman has had sex to insult or embarrass either her or her family. Honestly, that’s about as far from edgy as you can get – it’s deeply socially conservative.
Very nice – but try it again without the evopsych? You’re veering quite close to a uniquely regressive kind of biological reductionism that really helps nobody.
I agree with everything you just said @CassandraSays, I was too busy cramming lunch in my face to say it 🙂
Thomas what’s your position then? All I have to go on is what you say here.
Based on that it’s, “Im intellectually superior to all of you because I said so.”
Which isn’t a position of strength; esp, when all you do is engage in simple contrarianism with no actual presentation of refutational facts, while admitting you don’t engage in good faith.
I was going to stay out of this aspect of it, but…
So far so good.
The fail starts here. You did say it. You allowed it to be the implicit message, but it was there.
And that’s making it explicit. You are right, and irrefutable, and anyone who disagrees is just full of unrealised error, and is; by extension, less self-aware than I am and not as intellectually competent.
And it’s a just so story. There is no proof that the faith you decry is, “a legacy of our evolutionary heritage, and your, apparent, certainty of it is a type of cognitive error, parallel to the nonsense about “women are interested “dominant” men because of evolution.”
I … I can’t get past this one thing.
Thomas. If posting the address and photo was not meant to be a threat, why did he do it?
His explanation doesn’t make any sense, as Dave pointed out. Break it down like I’m one of the lackwits you perceive us all to be, please.
In other news, I have found evidence of the child NWOslave.
My favourite part is the last line: “If you believe in evolution, you can’t be in favour of homosexuality, or the ducks will get you in the end”.
@inurashii
I think you’re looking into this too much. Vacula didn’t have to choose to do those things because they were the most logical and rational options, but the fact that he, an atheist with a penis, chose to do them meant they automatically and instantaneously became the most logical and rational actions in the world. Because quantum.
@thenatfantastic
Is it terrible that I was really not surprised that the kid was home schooled?
@thenatfantastic: Oh god that’s an awesome column. I have tears in my eyes. I think they’re because I laughed so hard, but they may be because of the state of education in this country.
I am an atheist, and I have been for a long time. I never did formally go to church; when I was younger, it was a dull pain to have to sit there for 90 minutes and listen to something I didn’t understand. Now that I’m a professed atheist it seems disrespectful somehow to go to these religious services when I don’t believe.
It doesn’t help that most American churches seem to be snake-oil salesmen. Would we fear an eternity of torment if they didn’t threaten us with it?
But for all that I have family and friends who are religious. Sometimes I have to shut up and pass, which galls, but I don’t think my family and friends are stupid (if they’ve bought into Team Afterlife I sometimes think they’re being swindled out of what they have for what they will never get).
I lost it at “and say, ducks, could take over the world.”
and then I got super sad, because omfg somebody get that poor kid to a real school 🙁
This is the statutory definition of harassment in my state:
emphasis added
I would say posting her home address (as it also is her business address) constitutes harassment.
While the idea of ducks taking over the world is rather endearing, OMG someone needs to get that child to a library, or a real school — preferably both!
Just because the evopsych field is misogynistic, racist, and sad as a whole doesn’t mean that evolution hasn’t left it’s mark on human psychology. It would be utterly bizarre if it didn’t. The standard arguments that SallyStrange is eliding are that theism is a result of several cognitive artifacts, most notable the tendency to attribute agency to non-conscious processes and objects, paradoilia, and magical thinking. All of these can be empirically tested; all of them lead directly to theism (and other varieties of superstition).
I’m anti-theist because I believe that accepting claims without evidence, or with misattributed evidence (like “spiritual experiences”), is a fundamentally damaging and flawed way of approaching the world. I observe groups that, as a matter of course, accept claims without evidence and operate dogmatically, whether they are Republican economists or Western aid workers in the global South or physicians, and see the damage that they do with mistaken beliefs. Raising children from birth to believe things that are not in evidence can’t help.
The reactions of I’ve gotten from theists when they find out I’m an atheist are revealing. “What do you believe happens when you die?” “Why do you get out of bed in the morning?” “Why don’t you steal and murder?” They are not theists because of evidence; they are theists because it gives them warm fuzzies. Warm fuzzies are not valid supporting arguments of a truth claim. Warm fuzzies are what kittens are for.
And yes, obviously I believe that an empirical approach to the world is better than a non-empirical one, otherwise I wouldn’t hold it. I find criticisms like “well, your worldview just posits you as better than everyone else” bizarre. Doesn’t everyone’s worldview posit theirs as better than the opposing view? I mean, look at the flaps that arise when a fundamentalist Christian in Congress notes that, say, Jewish people are going to hell. Obviously he thinks that; it’s a central part of his belief system. The sin is saying it out loud, I guess.
There’s also the fact that ducks have been observed not only engaging in homosexual behaviour, but necrophilac homosexual behaviour. And ducks do a lot of raping.
I for one do not welcome our new anatidae overlords.
Man boobz: Come for the mockery, stay for the detailed information about ducks.
nepenthe: My worldview does posit somethings as being better than other worldviews; because it is, in effect, “My right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins”, coupled to the idea that we are all in this together.
Or, as Hillel put it, “Do not do to other what you would not have done to yourself, that is the whole of The Law, all else is commentary”. The context of that story is telling too, he was rebuking someone who cast the same idea, in an exclusionary way.
Telling people they are defective, for what they believe; as opposed to saying they are fucking up because of what they do; and the implication that if they were better people they’d ditch that stupid faith nonsense, is what I take issue with.
And that’s what I see in the, not so, subtext, of those comments.