When Sex Gets in my Apple-Bottomed Jeans

In case you haven’ t noticed, there has been a firestorm across the blogosphere in the skeptic, atheistic and scientific communities, lately, about the sexualization of women in them. This firestorm has been going on for quite a while, but it has received a lot of new fuel from a recent flare up over at blaghag.

By flare up, I don’t mean a regular tar and feathering over there, I mean people seem to be smearing each other with the sticky, black substance and gluing entire chickens to each other without plucking. I’m really feeling very sorry for those poor chickens, I really am.

Having already lodged myself firmly into related debates, somewhere between the big boulder that is ‘the anti-sex-in-anything-interesting’ debate and the hard place known as the ‘aren’t-all-sexy-people-complete-morons’ debate, I have decided perhaps now is a good time to comment on this tar and chicken blood bath that has been boiling over at Blag Hag. In order to do so, it is first important to understand the trigger to the whole event. Thus, I encourage you to have a look here, at this video:

American Atheists SERAM – Panel Discussion – Second subject

In the video, which is a recording of a panel discussion at a conference, there is considerable time spent on trying to find solutions to the problem of making women feel welcome in the atheist community. Many related communities have voiced concerns over this problem, and as you might see from the video, there is a wide range of ideas on what is causing the differences in the male and female populations within the community. Where the controversy really begins, though, is when a woman pointed out a kind of awkwardness in the use of the word “female” by the panel, instead of using another term, which means the same thing but is less broad. I have to admit that her wording of her question was less than ideal. It makes it sound as if she was offended over the exchange of one word over another, but after I carefully considered what her stance might be, I realized that there was something odd about using a more general term to refer to women. But, based on the commentary on each side of her question, I don’t think any bias was intended and the contributors to the program certainly didn’t seem to be interested in dragging women down through a single word choice.

It was this event, though, that inspired the dual-authored post (not by Jen McCreight) on blaghag.com. Now, I don’t agree with what the woman in the video objected to, but I do think that one reaction to her complaint was uncalled for. Note that towards the beginning of the video, one of the participants repeated the now oft-quoted Phil Plait’s (courtesy of Wil Wheaton) sentiment of, “don’t be a dick.” Yet, during the discussion following the complaint that the panel’s title used the word “Female,” one person suggested using, instead, “the weaker sex.” Funny? Yes. Appropriate? No. In fact, that comment can now show us exactly why the don’t be a dick policy is a good one. Look at the aftermath!

The jury is divided, though, on if this incident should cause offense at all (and by “jury,” I mean you, the denizens of the Internet and by “offense” I mean all this tar & chickening going on). I can understand that, too, but in order to explain why I can understand that and simultaneously agree and disagree at the same time, I need to discuss some things about human behavior.

First, there is what I call “the strip-club heckler effect” (yes, that’s a technical term. Why? Because I just made it up). Strippers spend much of their time soaking in the compliments from their hard labor, much of which is correlated with how attractive patrons of a club seem to think they are. This translates into that which will ultimately pay their bills, clothe their children, buy their house and get them those frackin’ wild shoes with the heart-shaped skulls over crossbones on them. While a stripper’s beauty is actually not all of what makes her money (contrary to popular opinion on the matter), her beauty is seen as something of tremendous value. And, just as with anyone else, she doesn’t want to be told that she’s fat, ugly or lacking in grace or class. This is where the heckler comes in. This woman (I’m defaulting to a gender for the sake of illustration, not to pretend male strippers don’t exist) who hears compliments for most of her day can quickly have a great day go bad by one comment from someone who says she’s fat, ugly or that she smells like a dust mite who endured the relative tsunami on the living room couch from the partially-digested blowback from her boyfriend’s innards after he consumed copious amounts of chili cheese burritos and a gallon of beer. That one comment can literally alter her perception of an entire day. Strippers aren’t the only ones who face this problem. The thing that causes a stripper to suddenly have a bad day after the curve of her buttocks has been unfairly critiqued will also effectively create a bad day for a grocery store bag boy who’s mental capacity for the proper handling technique of a box of soda is questioned.

To make this an even bigger problem, it isn’t just the blowback-stained stripper dust-mite that suffers from the behavior of the heckler. Those who witness such events transpire or for whom the story has been either reenacted, made the subject of much gossip or read from a blog seem to often possess this thing we call ‘empathy’ and empathy has a nasty habit of getting in the way of properly analyzing a situation.  You may be wondering to what extent empathy can possibly wreak havoc on such a situation? Well, bear in mind that most dictators use emotional appeal to gain and keep the loyalty of their subjects (I would give you an example or two involving Hitler, but I fear that I might grow a tiny, vertical stripe above my lip which extends up into my nose).

So, while the guy who made the weaker sex comment on that panel really didn’t intend to cause harm and while I can understand why people don’t understand why there was such a fuss over that panel, I can also see how the the comment by one person was such a major bad move that an entire community is chicken-glued over it. It was a badly-timed joke that met with the natural behaviors I just described to create what I think we might safely call McCreight’s non-consensual clusterfuck debate (It took every inch of my brain’s self-control center to prevent myself typing “tar-fuster-cluck,” just then).

The problem doesn’t end there, though, there are many other things that were brought up in the complaint post by Sharon Moss and Lyz Liddell on McCreight’s site that need to be discussed, as well as many of the things brought out in the aftermath. This post, though, has gotten horrifically long and I fear for the future of those still clinging to my every letter, at this point, as I’m sure there are tummies to feed, rest to be had and, perhaps, a job to actually spend time working on. It is quite likely that, in a future post, I will address why I called this “McCreight’s non-consensual clusterfuck debate and why I referenced sex in my apple-bottomed jeans.

P. S. JesusFetusFajitaFishsticks should at least get credit, in this debate, for referring to herself as “the lone vag” in such a way that I imagined a human vulva doing things that human vulvas don’t typically do but is befitting of an old western littered with bigotry and poorly portrayed history.

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