How to Suppress Women's Writing

I’m borrowing my title from Joanna Russ’s 1982 skewering of the ways that women and minorities are prevented from having a written voice. In the book Russ examines 11 ways the writing of women is suppressed:

• Prohibitions
• Bad Faith
• Denial of Agency
• Pollution of Agency
• The Double Standard of Content
• False Categorizing
• Isolation
• Anomalousness
• Lack of Models
• Responses
• Aesthetics

I’d like to propose a 12th method for our new internet age: Call her names and relentlessly stalk her online until she can’t take it any more. Way to go, shitlord crusaders of our bold new age of global communication. You piled on Jen McCreight until she decided that she’d rather just have a nice life .

I am angry. I am furious. A movement I once felt proud to be a part of has been shown to harbor a loud faction that represents the worst of internet culture and human nature. There are people, people who not only claim to be a part of our community but are a part of our community who have dedicated themselves to threatening, insulting, bullying, tormenting, and intimidating women and minorities who have the audacity to challenge the status quo. It’s complete fucking bullshit and I’m sick of it.

Skepticism and atheism are all about challenging the status quo, but here are people who are not only uncomfortable when what is being challenged is their entitlement to a comfortably superior place in society, they dig in their heels. They abandon reason, they show themselves to be not lovers of reason and justice, but self-important pieces of shit who liked our movement because we allowed them to bully creationists, psychics, crop-circle believers, homeopaths, etc.

I’m through with coddling the worst in humanity just because they recognize that there is no god and that psychics are frauds. I’m sick of the apathy from those who disagree with what is being done by these weeping pustules in our name and don’t speak out against them. I’m disgusted with the leaders in our community who say we should just try and get along. I am thoroughly sick of us all.

The people who are piling on feminists and anti-racists in our movement are the same people who threw rocks at civil rights workers in the 1960s. These are the same people who beat up queer people in the 1980s. These are the people who have infected us. They haven’t just infected our movement they have infected us. In the same way that we, with justification, pillory moderate theists for harboring extremists in their ranks, we should be taken to task for harboring these disgusting wretches in ours.

Every moment, every day that these fucking vile and depraved people are not repudiated by every decent member of our community is a day that we should be ashamed of ourselves. I am watching us, and I hope the world is, too.