This is actually a PSA for guys in general, but it was heavily inspired by my reflections of Dragon*Con and things I observed there thus the title. It’s also inspired by other stories I’ve heard and read recently, like this one .

I know the following is not meant for most of the people who read my blog (all 3 of you) or most people in general but I’ve recently observed this first hand and it made me angry, so I felt the need to write about it.

(This post is actually part of my homework in Women’s Studies this week. I hope I get a good grade.)

How to convince men to be allies to women is something I have been trying to master for more than a year now, most actively since I started my blogging project with the new year. It’s honestly not an easy task. The biggest response I get is a lot of apathy from other men, and then I get the occasional outright enmity from some die-hards I can only call misogynists.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes caring publicly about equality and making a point of being visibly not-horrible can sometimes be exhausting and demoralizing. The relentless and obsessive attacks on people, especially women, who speak out against misogyny and hate really fuck with my head. I’ve struggled with depression my whole life and it’s pretty triggering for me. Many is the evening or weekend I spend holed-up at home because I’m just sick of the world and everyone in it. No wonder some of us need to quit.

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 .

Everyone’s talking about Atheism Plus, new-new-atheism, social justice atheism, whatever you feel like calling it. I already shared the thoughts I had been having along those lines, and now I want to really get in to where I stand on things.

I support Atheism Plus, at least in so far as I support atheists caring about social justice and equality. If I could be said that I have any reservations or concerns about this new “movement” it is that apathy will eventually lead to it being a bunch of relatively privileged people paying lip service to social justice and equality, but not really doing much about it. I called for action and I aim to act.

…to make a first impression.

Typically we find this “gem” of advice applying to an individual’s approach to an important meeting of some sort or even daily life. However, as a “First TAMmer”, I had the opportunity to do a little role reversal and get a true first impression from the active skeptic community at TAM2012.

I’ve been a skeptic for a long while, but never really considered seeking out or joining any skeptic community. It never even crossed my mind. However, I had found myself in a position to help out at the CosmoQuest booth this year, which allowed me to jump into the skeptic scene head first. I had heard many different things about the tumultuous situation happening online, but made a conscious choice to avoid reading it. I wanted to walk into this situation with as little personal bias as possible, and I’m really glad I did.

For those who have been fortunate enough to escape biotruth logic, I’ll start by giving a brief summation of the kinds of arguments that fall into that abyss. When it comes to discussions about gender, they take the following form explicitly, but there is always an implicit context to these arguments (which I will include in brackets as part of the quote):

“Men are x, women are y. That’s just how humans are; it’s biology. [And therefore the behavior you’re complaining about is acceptable.]”

For some, skeptical atheism took a turn for the revolutionary this weekend. There’s a mood in the air that had me write an earlier draft of this post. Then Jen McCreight beat me to it with her brilliant post calling for a new wave of atheism. Ophelia Benson , Jason Thibaeult , and Greta Christina soon blogged their support. Jen followed up with a crowd sourced name for this new wave and a report that grassroots support is, at the moment, growing. You can add my voice to that chorus.

“Patriarchy” is a term that is often thrown around in feminist circles. Loosely speaking, it symbolizes the claim that we live in a male dominated society that condescends, controls, and diminishes women. This is a central tenet of feminism, but is a bit hard to swallow to the uninitiated because it makes it sound like there is some ominous, seemingly-conspiratorial group of men that sits in the upper echelons of society that enacts an anti-woman agenda. And although there are powerful lawmakers with agendas that are largely in opposition to women’s interests, this claim isn’t really being made. However, that doesn’t mean that the Patriarchs don’t/didn’t exist. Lets peruse some quotations from a few of them.