Yesterday Jason Thibeault, no stranger to these parts, wrote a great summary of the recent fight to get trans rights legislation passed in Canada. Basically, no one at all is taking the bill seriously. What’s interesting is that while the petition to get the MPs and media to take notice is languishing in obscurity there is another petition protesting a trans woman being kicked out of a beauty pageant. The petition to get trans people the rights they deserve and need is being mostly ignored while the petition to protest a cis-normative appearing trans woman being excluded from a venue for objectifying women is crazy popular, guys. The takeaway: Society wants to masturbate to trans people but not allow them any basic rights or dignity.

Blogs get a lot of searches in the form of questions. Occasionally I will be answering those questions. Sometimes I’ll answer a themed group, sometimes it will be a miscellaneous collection.

[Even your grandma got called a slut.]

###How do I know if I am a slut?

The cynical answer is “Someone will tell you.” The truth is that “slut” is, as our friend Matt Gubser has pointed out , a stupid insult. Calling a woman a slut or a whore is simply a way of policing and controlling her sexual freedom. Society has a complex about female sexual expression and in the mainstream women are either prudes (not sexual enough) or sluts (too sexual, or sexual in “inappropriate” ways). Being called a slut or a whore simply means someone has noticed that you have a sexual life and wants to make you feel shitty about it, wants to distract from your actual accomplishments or points (see Limbaugh v. Fluke), or wants to convince people that you’re not worthy of associating with. Those people are wrong and are failures at being good people.

There seem to be a lot of men that enjoy gawking at hot chicks on the street. No matter how old the man is, whether he is married or single, he sees no problem with checking out all the women in sight. We are men after all, and we find women attractive, and have an urge to look at them. So, why not? It’s a powerful urge anyway. It’s almost impossible to resist. So why feel guilty about doing something that is fun, harmless, and that we can’t even help anyway?

Sunday at the American Atheists’ National Convention those of us paying attention heard of a new group: Secular ProLife , who tag themselves as “Pro-life for a reason.” They may be religious people in secularists’ clothing, trying to tap in to what they see as an anti-woman market for their ideas in the secular community. They may also be genuinely secular people who want to share their message with their fellow atheists. In either case I’m disgusted, angry, and disappointed. What I am not is shocked or surprised. There are many examples of anti-abortion atheists , and how many are surprised that the late Christopher Hitchens wasn’t entirely on board with a woman’s right to choose? The fact is that there are anti-abortionists in our ranks and they have been for some time.

I’ll give Rush Limbaugh one thing, he’s good at meme-generation. Though he says his friend at the Cato institute coined the word , “feminazi” sure has caught on over the last 20 years. “Feminazi” is, of course a ridiculous auto-Godwinning slur to throw around but it represents something much more widespread: the fact that the straw feminist is what so many people see as the “real” feminist.

It’s an old joke that anything someone says that follows " I’m not a racist, but…" is always going to be horribly racist. How often do you hear people, especially women say “I’m not a feminist, but…” and then say something that is, frankly, feminist? When did being a feminist become the moral equivalent, in some people’s minds, of racism and homophobia? What’s next? “I don’t hate feminists, some of my best friends are feminists.”

Sasha here. Of course. I’m going to be awfully busy for the next week because in addition to running MTM I work full time and am also recently returned to college. This week school is monopolizing my reading and writing time and I haven’t had a lot of guest submissions or anyone interested in being a staff writer . So, unless I get more time or we get some new submissions I expect this place to be quiet until next week. Sorry about that, but it is what it is.

Ouch. Yesterday Crommunist , who I admire and like, referred to my post about International Men’s Day as an example of “woefully ignorant, knee-jerk reactions to misogyny” . I’m not gonna argue with him, but instead see if we can talk about things. [Crommunist has clarified. He was referring to the “Why isn’t there an International Men’s Day” question – not my post in reply – as woefully ignorant and kneejerk. We are, and always have been, all good.]

[caption id=“attachment_727” align=“alignleft” width=“210” caption=“I’m not the only one thinking of goatse, right?”]

Today is International Women’s Day , which is awesome. If you don’t know much about the history of the day, I encourage you to look in to it. Pretty awesome stuff. But today I’m addressing the inevitable “What about the men??” cries that we always hear. Last month we heard people (like we do every year) ask why there’s no White History Month. (There are 11 of them.) Today some casually sexist curious people are wondering why isn’t there an International Men’s Day. Well, the short answer is that there is one .

[Today’s guest post is from a teacher who would like us to examine our assumptions about people based on appearance.]

Today I read an article about a 13-year-old student who said that the white teachers were not letting the minorities succeed. The student said the teacher just gave hand-outs that half of the students could not read. Later in the article it says that if there were more black teachers that the white teachers couldn’t hold the minorities back.

On Friday there was a bit of a kerfuffle about a new billboard from American Atheists, Inc . The billboard is a response to Pennsylvania’s stupid new “Year of the Bible ” as designated by the state legislature. I think most atheists, non-believers, and secularists see the problem with the government decreeing any year a year for Biblical thinking and study - that pesky 1st Amendment we all love. The problem many people had is the imagery and message used in the ad. It struck many of us as racist at worse or insensitive at best. Here it is: