Contra Rehabilitated Feminism

Following a link from Ace: "Christian, Patriot, Conservative, Feminist", by Danusha V. Goska (if that's her real name . . .).

So, first of all, no. I get that not everybody is a conservative about everything, but if you identify as feminist, and specifically if you advocate for female clergy (as she does), then at a minimum there is a huge-ass carve-out in your conservatism.

Her article contains this paragraph:

Oh, and by the way, as a former leftist, I can let you in on a little secret. Misogyny is alive and well on the left. Some-not-all leftist men feel personally inadequate. They conduct a perpetual, spiteful war with authority. When a woman speaks or acts with authority, they feel especially intimidated. They attempt to buttress their shaky manhood by lashing out against women in ugly ways. Misogyny is a major, and so far ineradicable feature of the New Atheist Movement, several of whose celebrity leaders have been credibly accused of sexual harassment and assault. On the other hand, Some-not-all right-wing men feel confident in their manhood. These self-confident men can enjoy, rather than feel threatened by, smart, strong women.

I tried to copy all the original links into the blockquote above, and I confess to not having read them all, but basically they tell the story that Scott Alexander tells (from the opposite perspective) of the capture/cannibalization of New Atheism by Social Justice. What Scott doesn't say is that feminism had a leading role in the early days of this process, at least according to the links above and in particular this 2014 Buzzfeed piece that covered the state of the conflict up to that time.

For instance, I know I read about "ElevatorGate" when it happened, probably at VoxDay, but from Buzzfeed:

On June 20, 2011, [Rebecca] Watson posted to her Skepchick site an eight-minute video titled “About Mythbusters, Robot Eyes, Feminism, and Jokes.” . . . Around the four-minute mark, she turns serious, discussing a talk she had recently given at an atheists’ conference in Dublin in which she decried “blatant misogyny” in freethought. The audience seemed supportive, she says, but that night, after leaving the hotel bar, something had happened. “A man got on the elevator with me and said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’” Watson felt deflated, as if her speech had meant nothing. “Just a word to the wise here, guys: Don’t do that … I was a single woman, in a foreign country, at 4 a.m., in a hotel elevator with you — just you — and don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I have finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.”

PZ Myers reposted Watson’s video in early July, and soon thereafter, in Myers’ comments section, Richard Dawkins posted a satirical letter, addressed to a generic Muslim woman. “Dear Muslima,” Dawkins began, “Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and … yawn … don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you … But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” Then Dawkins gets personal: “Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep’chick,’ and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee … And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about!”

But I'm pretty sure this is the first I had heard of Michael Shermer:

“I ran into Shermer in the hallway," [Alison] Smith said recently, speaking publicly for the first time about what happened that night. They began talking, and he invited her to a Scotch and cigar party at the Caesars Palace hotel. “He was talking about future articles we could write, and he mentioned this party and asked if I could come, and I said yes.” At the party, they began downing drinks. “At some point,” Smith said, “I realized he wasn’t drinking them; he was hiding them underneath the table and pretending to drink them. I was drunk. After that, it all gets kind of blurry. I started to walk back to my hotel room, and he followed me and caught up with me.”

On their way from Caesars to the Flamingo, where they were both staying, she chatted briefly with a friend on her mobile phone, she told me. They got to the Flamingo. “He offered to walk me back to my room, but walked me to his instead. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. I know we had sex.” She remembers calling a friend from an elevator after leaving his room. “I was in the elevator, but didn’t know what hotel.”

There is a facet to the practice of corporate (meaning, as a body) Christianity that has sometimes been perceived by its usually-now-former practitioners -- I apologize for all these weasel-words, but I do in fact believe that the Christian ethic of chastity is more complicated than this caricature, I'm just saying that it would be foolish to deny that people have experienced it this way -- as kind of longhouse moralizing about sex. I'm not an atheist and have no standing to speak on their behalf, but let me pretend to be one for a couple of paragraphs. Atheism -- of the New Atheism, conference-going variety -- offers me two specific things with psycho-social cash value:

• Another topic I can nerd-out about; and
• the opportunity to screw without guilt.

So . . . who let these scolds into our tent? Sure the labels have changed -- Christians are now Feminists -- but it's the same d@mned thing! It's just another excuse to sex-shame men (and some women!) into folding our hands politely and following rules that aren't in our interest!

</PretendAthiestRant> Not saying I agree. Just saying I understand the point.

The parallels aren't always lost on feminists, either. On Scott's recommendation (I guess), I've been reading the online comic strip Sinfest, mostly backwards; I've finished as far back as 2017. It's written from a Second Wave Feminist perspective, though contra Scott, that didn't really change in 2019. What did change was that establishment culture went all-in on tr@nnies, and Second Wavers couldn't help noticing that the Christian Right were their only remaining tactical allies. So yes, from 2020 the strip is much more Right-friendly than it had been.

Reading it from before 2019, I noticed, first, that Second Wave Feminism, just like all other waves, is toxic. I could go on about Sinfest's particular brand of misandric toxicity, but read it yourself. My point here is that, among the very small number of male characters given a positive representation is a Christian Fundamentalist cleric. This isn't my reading -- Sinfest specifically identifies him by that label. (Sinfest also gives him a clerical collar, which of course no Fundamentalist would be caught wearing, but it's useful as an artistic device.) And note that this is pre-2019, before the strip makes its Rightward turn.

There is something admirable about Sinfest's consistency. There is something admirable about the consistency of those New Atheists who mounted a doomed defense of their thing. But consistency is a minority taste. Most feminists/atheists fell over themselves to embrace Islam, notwithstanding that its present record on the issues they pretend to care about is vastly worse than Christian civilization has ever been.