Rebeccapocalypse
gregladen | May 13, 2012
Image from Reddit posted by user Lunam with the text "What my super religious mother got me for Christmass..."
When a young girl put a picture of herself, holding a book she had just gotten as a present, on the social networking site reddit, she was immediately subjected to intense verbal sexual assault by reddit readers who aptly demonstrated how awful it can be when boys and young men are left to say and do what they want without the social control of anyone knowing who they are. When Skepchick founder Rebecca Watson casually tossed out some relationship advice for clueless young men…
gregladen | December 19, 2011As you know, I've shifted some of the topics I have discussed on this blog over to The X Blog. However, some topics can very reasonably go on both. One of these is how we communicate, and argue, and sometimes make progress in this crazy, zany place we call The Blogsophere. Also, as an Anthropologist, I see topics related to gender, sexism, feminism and related topics as fully at home here, as well as at The X Blog. So, I just completed a series of posts over there which I'm sure will be of interest to those of you who tend to hand out here and might not otherwise notice. I hope you visit…
gregladen | July 23, 2011Just an idea ... not entirely work safe ... below the fold.
Imagine that Rebecca Watson, Stef McGraw, Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers, Barbara Drescher, Stephanie Zvan, All the Skepchicks, Me, all the other bloggers, and most of the commmenters on our blogs discussing Rebeccapocalypse all worked for the same big-giant company and this entire discussion happened at work. Imagine what the HR (Human Resources) department would be required to do, would want to do, would want to avoid. Imagine how they would handle the current discussion, and what they might do to avoid future difficulties like this…
gregladen | July 20, 2011People are screaming at me over on ERV blog about not making a formal announcement that Richard Dawkins is god-like because he's donated a bunch of foundation money to a child care project. That's wonderful that he did that, but I'm not a member of JREF, was not at TAM, do not get newsletters from any of these people and the last time I had a conversation with Dawkins it was at a memorial service of a shared fallen colleague which had nothing to do with atheism or skepticism. So, I was never sent anything about this, didn't hear about it anywhere except from ERV, and officially I don't know…
gregladen | July 7, 2011Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. "Drives" is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are drives we can all relate to. In fact, these drives are so basic, consistent and powerful that almost everyone has them, we share almost exact experiences in relation to them, and they can drive (as drives are wont to do) us to do extreme things when they are not met for long periods of time. While eating…
gregladen | July 6, 2011In case you have not heard we are having an internet-wide discussion of ... well, just click on all of the links below and read everything then you'll know. I've included all the current links that I know of. If I've left something out, please put it in the comments and I'll add it.
Meanwhile a group of survivors of sexual assault spearheaded by Stephanie Zvan and Bug Girl have put together a Letter to Richard Dawkins. You are welcome to sign on to the letter if appropriate.
The following links are in chronological order by day (but probably mixed up within day).
06-20 About…
gregladen | July 4, 2011Recently, Richard Dawkins said (full quote below) that a woman should not be concerned about her own safety if she finds herself in an elevator (under some sort of threat, presumably), because it is trivially easy to get out of an elevator if you are under attack. I'm sure Richard is a very smart guy and maybe he's right, but there is evidence to the contrary that women can just leave the scene if they are uninterested in being raped or groped.
For example:
Police are looking for a man they say sexually assaulted a woman in Manhattan about two weeks ago.
A surveillance photo of the…
gregladen | July 3, 2011And thus, structurally, Richard Dawkins, or his distant cousin Richard D. Poe (I am still not sure) has shut down the argument that the Elevator Guy acted inappropriately when he asked Rebecca Watson over for a cuppa joe at four O'clock in the AM, in an elevator, while she was on her way to bed.
Imma let you read all about it by following the threads upstream, but in the meantime I want to point out the fallacy at work here. It's called the Watch the Monkey strategy, and I've written about it before. I even drew a cute little picture of a monkey to illustrate the point. This comes from a…
gregladen | July 2, 2011Rebecca Watson did the right thing when she spoke about McGrew's response too her (Watson's) response to the Elevator Guy, and Barbara Drescher's response to all of that is amazing. If you don't know what I'm talking about here, it might be best to move on. Otherwise, here's my two cents (and there are exactly two) about this Matryoshka Moment.
You may recall this post about "Naming Names at the CFI Student Leadership Conference" by Rebecca Watson. Here's the story in a nutshell. First, some guy known as "The Elevator Guy" hit, rather lamely it seems, on Rebecca in a way that one could…