feminist blogs in english

by Amanda Marcotte

In my new book Get Opinionated, I discuss something I learned while “debating” a right wing relative, which is that one of the talking points that’s floating out there in the right wing noise machine is that scientists who study the climate---and therefore climate change---are the real money-grubbing assholes who’ll do anything for a buck.  The oil and coal industries are, of course, nothing but concerned citizens who are indifferent to profit, which is why the entire global warming denialist movement is funded by them.  (I won’t give any more away; read the book for a fuller discussion of how to push back against these blatantly bad arguments.) The evidence for why climate scientists are nothing but liars who are in it for the money?  The fact that scientists get research grants to do research.  Yep, that’s the basis of the entire argument.

I flashed on that today when I saw this post from Mike the Mad Biologist.  I can say I initially missed the story about Virginia attorney general Ken Cuccinelli subpoenaing all of Michael Mann’s emails in an attempt to build a case that he somehow defrauded the government by demonstrating the reality of climate change.  This is everything that it seems and more---an attempt to pander to right wing nuts, an attempt to scare scientists whose conclusions aren’t what right wingers want to hear, harassing someone for the sheer joy of it---but it’s also an attempt to make it harder for climate scientists to get research funding.  The moral justification that Cuccinelli and his allies have created for themselves is that the funding encourages what they consider lying.  The reality is that they want to cut off funding so that the evidence for a very real problem is covered up until it’s way too late.

Cuccinelli has made this obvious:

If Cuccinelli succeeds in finding a smoking gun like the purloined emails that led to the international scandal dubbed Climategate, Cuccinelli could seek the return of all the research money, legal fees, and trebled damages.

This is about making it expensive to discover facts that are inconvenient for right wingers and the corporate polluters they protect at all costs.  Will they succeed?  It’s hard to say.  There’s almost no way there’s a “smoking gun” in the emails that Cuccinelli is subpoenaing.  The emails that were leaked before caused a lot of fuss, but there wasn’t any smoking gun in them.  Right wingers had to project one in by taking comments out of context and deliberately misreading jargon words to mean something they didn’t.  But the reality of the situation may matter less than being able to baffle and cajole a judge or jury into not seeing the facts. 

I’ve been hearing for days now a bunch of conservatives suggesting that law students should make fact-free claims about the genetic inferiority of black people without being subject to criticism, and the reason is the sanctity of free scientific inquiry.  (The kind that can only be performed without scientists, evidence, or willingness to entertain the reality that the questions you’re asking have been answered and you just don’t like the answer.) I’d suggest that we start waiting expectantly for these same people to defend actual scientists who use real evidence to research issues of immediate importance, except I know that we’d be waiting until the end of time.  Which may be sooner than we think, if we don’t do anything about global warming.

I’d also like to point out that Cuccinelli doesn’t just hate reality, environmentalists, scientists, and gay people.  He’s also got hate in his heart for the humble female nipple.  I suspect his libertarian supporters will take this into advisement and vote against someone whose basically hostility to sexual liberty has caused him to lash out against art.  You know, right after Michele Bachmann renounces right wing nuttery and chooses a career of anonymous service for the underprivileged. 

by Amanda Marcotte

I want to follow up Jesse’s excellent post on this ridiculous tide of people pretending that there’s legitimate, unresolved questions about intelligence differences between black and white people as groups, and I want to continue teasing out something Jill picked up on.  The defenses of Stephanie Grace from the likes of Eugene Volokh and others---and her own email---are a classic example of what skeptics like to call “JAQ-ing off”.  Ironically, I just was dealing with a cruder, stupider version of this from Jill Stanek and the other folks claiming that aborted fetuses in vaccines cause autism.  But because the people that are “Just Asking Questions” about whether or not black people are stupider are more sophisticated, it might be hard to see that they’re doing the same thing to the same effect as the fetuses-in-vaccines nutters, which is making ridiculous, unscientific claims while pretending to be interested in scientific inquiry. 

A refresher on what ”JAQ-ing off” means:

JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of “Just Asking Questions”.[1] The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners’ views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are “just asking questions”, albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general.

I would definitely say that the people JAQ-ing off on the “question” of intelligence here are denialists, and what they’re denying is the historical turn towards a progressive, humanitarian, and not coincidentally more scientifically sound understanding of our common humanity.  Like most denialists, they eagerly ignore the mounds of evidence that the questions they’re claiming to raise have been settled beyond a shadow of a doubt, because they’re not really raising questions.  They’re lobbing accusations.  Volokh’s bad faith might be hard to smell since he buries it in a pseudo-sophistication that no doubt took him years of wanking off to cultivate, but his work is showing all over the place.  Like here:

One absolutely should not rule out the possibility that African Americans are, on average, genetically predisposed to be less intelligent. Likewise, to give examples involving three groups I myself belong to, one absolutely should not rule out the possibility that Jews are (say), on average, genetically predisposed to be more acquisitive, or more loyal to their narrow ethnic group than to broader groups, or that whites are genetically predisposed to be more hostile to other racial groups, or that being nonreligious is genetically linked, and that people who have those genes are genetically predisposed to be more likely to commit crime or cheat on their spouses or what have you.

Note what questions he doesn’t entertain.  Like Jesse said, he doesn’t entertain the possibility that whites could be less intelligent.  But he also doesn’t ask this question of Jews, even though historically this accusation has been lobbed and was part of the justification for the Holocaust.  Which in turn leads me to believe that Volokh’s stated willingness to entertain “hard” questions about himself and his people is just a put-on. 

JAQ-ing off crops up a lot when the conspiracy theorists/denialists in question are trying to refute a giant wad of evidence against their claim that basically settles the question beyond any reasonable doubt.  Creationists dwell on what they considered unanswered questions about evolution.  Holocaust denialists, 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, you name it---they all hide by saying, “I’m not saying for sure, I’m just asking questions,” as if the answers weren’t readily available.  And that’s what Volokh does here:

Whether there are genetic differences among racial and ethnic groups in intelligence is a question of scientific fact. Either there are, or there aren’t (or, more precisely, either there are such differences under some plausible definitions of the relevant groups and of intelligence, or there aren’t). The question is not the moral question about what we should do about those differences, if they exist. It’s not a question about what we would like the facts to be. The facts are what they are, whether we like them or not.

Okay, fine.  But you cannot have it both ways.  If it’s a matter of scientific fact, then it cannot by definition be resolved by a bunch of law students and bloggers “debating” it.  I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Volokh is just hiding behind “science” here, since he never bothers to even ponder if science has ever looked into this question.  He stubbornly ignores the fact that one of the most famous and well-respected popular science books of all time---The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould---rounds up all the major reasons that these “questions” are stupid and makes it clear that this is about as legitimate a form of debate as debating whether or not evolution happened.  Volokh doesn’t actually talk about the actual scientific inquiry, because it says what he doesn’t want to hear. 

He gets very close to stabbing at why, before recoiling and running off into the wilderness of his own ignorance. 

But we still know very little about which genes produce intelligence, how exactly those genes operate, and even how intelligence can be defined. We obviously have vastly more left to learn about this.

He’s close, but misses by a mile because he wants to leave the “question” open.  Actually, there’s entire fields of scientific study about how the brain works and develops. We actually know quite a bit about cognition and what he likes to call “intelligence”.  It’s just that what we know makes it clear that this debate is stupid.  But he is right about one thing!  Which is that “intelligence” is hard to define.  Well, and then he’s only kind of right.  The reason that there’s no magic bullet studies about “intelligence” isn’t that it’s because it’s a set thing that’s simply hard to measure.  It’s because “intelligence” is an inexact, meaningless word.  It’s not culturally meaningless, of course.  When I say, “Oh, you’re so smart” to a friend that figures something out, I’m not full of shit.  But as an actual trait that can be measured?  It’s meaningless as a term. 

It’s like the way anti-vaccers talk about “toxins” in vaccines.  It’s an empty word that means whatever you need it to mean in order to keep the “questions” going.  Intelligence is tricky to measure, because there is no such thing.  For instance, if I devised an IQ test that only measured how well a person understands scientific inquiry, Eugene Volokh would probably score incredibly low.  If you measured intelligence by how well someone understood legal jargon, I’d score incredibly low.  Or take my cats, for instance.  One would kick ass at the drawer-opening test, and the other at the figuring out how doorknobs work test.  But if you reversed those, suddenly the super-smart cats would seem like really stupid cats.  Add to this that not only isn’t intelligence a single quality, but it’s also not a fixed trait.  I may not have a high “IQ” on legal jargon, but if I went to law school, my “native” intelligence on this question would rise dramatically. 

What’s amazing to me is what Jesse was pointing to, which is the ease with which people I would consider ripe morons, like Eugene Volokh and Stephanie Grace, consider themselves the pinnacle of intelligence.  Actually, I’m pretty sure that they’re good at what they’re good at, even though they’d seem like complete idiots if all you know about them is this debate.  If you devised an IQ test around questions like, “Should questions of science be resolved by not asking scientists but instead having a bunch of law students faux debate about it?”, they’d not do so well! 

I could keep making jokes in this vein, but I’d like to finish off by pointing out that this whole non-debate has another classic hallmark of denialism, besides just ignoring the actual evidence while “asking questions”.  And that is the conspiracy theory element.  Granted, this is another way that these denialists of a pro-racist stripe are surprisingly good at dressing themselves up in sophisticated clothing, because it’s hard to see initially how they are basically engaging a conspiracy theory.  They’re able to argue this in the margins.  They hint, but never say outright.  But their implication is hard to miss.  They’re implying that there could be scientific inquiry into this, but that the evil Political Correctness Army won’t allow it.  And you can tell, because the Political Correctness Army shuts down the most valid form of scientific inquiry known to man, which is drunk law students debating something they know nothing about with nothing but vague terms and a resolved unwillingness to look at actual evidence on their side.  And the Politically Correct Army does this through the most pernicious form of censorship ever invented, which is criticizing conservatives, and making fun-killing if accurate points about how this “debate” was put to rest eons ago by simply looking at the non-evidence put up by racists to uphold their unscientific claims. 

by Amanda Marcotte

It was really just a matter of time before the anti-choice movement embraced anti-vaccination nonsense.  Anti-vaxxers hit on all sorts of anti-choice buttons: the loathing of people who know more than them, the suspicion of science and modernity, contamination fears, the obsession with allowing unnecessary human suffering because it’s “natural”, and of course the bundle of anxieties about motherhood and reproduction.  And of course, the second a vaccine that prevents a common STD was invented, the melding was inevitable, because anti-choicers are big fans of cervical cancer and its ability to kill the bad girls.  I realize that most anti-vaxxers really don’t want the alliance, because anti-choicers are objectively pro-disease, and anti-vaxxers maintain that they’re not, but alas, some marriages were meant to be. 

And so it wasn’t exactly a surprise to hear that anti-choicers are running with a bullshit story that vaccines are made with aborted fetuses, and that’s what causes autism.  This article and the one it banks off of from Jill Stanek, are both amazing examples of what can be produced when a person has no respect for their audience’s intelligence or the truth.  The “evidence” that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses comes from a story about how vaccines are not made from aborted fetuses, from Life News’ own site, no less. Both the Stanek story and the Life News story imply that the EPA report asserts a) that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses and b) that vaccines cause autism.  Life News was smart enough not to link to the report itself, because that would prove that they’re lying fucktards, but Stanek trusts her audience is stupid enough to take these assertions on faith and not check for themselves.  So she did like the report. 

Sadly, while her intended audience is no doubt a bunch of morons who don’t care that she lies through her teeth to them, I’m smart enough to actually read the report.  Needless to say, there is no assertion that vaccines cause autism.  The opposite, in fact.

Some research has examined possible contributing environmental factors, including measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine (31), thimerosal-containing vaccines (32), tetrachloroethylene, trichloroethylene, and trihalomethanes in drinking water (33), and certain metals (e.g., mercury, cadmium, nickel) and chemicals (trichloroethylene and vinyl chloride) in the ambient air around birth sites (34). Subsequent studies on MMR vaccine (16, 18, 35, 36) and thimerosal-containing vaccines (see review (37), 13, 18, 20, 38, 39) did not support a relationship with autism. In a 2004 report, the Immunization Safety Committee of the Institute of Medicine determined that the body of epidemiological evidence favors rejection of a causal relationship between either MMR or thimerosal- containing vaccines and autism (40).

Emphasis mine, not that it will matter to the assholes who believe the crap that Stanek dishes out. 

The claim that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses is farcical on its face.  But it shouldn’t be surprising.  I think your rank and file anti-choicers probably believe that stem cells are cultivated from aborted fetuses (they’re actually take from embryos created for IVF that were going to be thrown away if not used in research), and that they’re already being used in standard medical care like vaccines (they’re not).  But I thought I’d go ahead and do what the anti-choice audiences will not, and read this EPA report to see if they do in fact assert what Life News and Stanek imply, which is that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses.

I can safely report that no such assertion is made.  In case I missed something after reading the very short report, I did a search for the words “fetus” and “fetal”, and found that the word “fetus” does come up.....when addressing the issue of whether or not in utero environment could be a factor in the development of autism.  Right now the working assumption is that autism is genetic, but that its expression varies enough to suggest that environmental factors could be in play.  And that if exposure to certain chemicals can increase the autism rate, it’s likely happening during pregnancy and early infancy. 

If I were to summarize the report, I’d say that it’s basically, “More research is needed.” Which isn’t shocking in the least.  But while it doesn’t say much other than that, what is firmly stated is that some potential causes have been ruled out, with vaccines being at the top of the “not this” list.  And of course, the aborted fetuses thing is just pure wishful thinking.  The assertion that vaccines are made from aborted fetuses is such a weird idea that I don’t imagine the EPA even examined that assertion in the first place.  They certainly don’t mention it, even to discount it. 

by Amanda Marcotte

I’m probably the last person on the internet to post this video, but I promise I have a point.  And there’s always the off-chance that you haven’t seen the Insane Clown Posse’s ode to ignorance, “Miracles”.

Prior to watching this video, if pressed to think about it, I probably would have concluded that ICP is Republican.  I would have based this information off this site’s long-standing history of making fun of conservatives who can’t rap trying to do so, a particularly comical brand of entitlement poisoning.  But I would have never guessed that ICP was Christian rock (or I guess rap).  But that is indeed what they are. 

I had the good fortune to watch this video after reading Ta-Nehishi’s smackdown of apologists for the Confederacy, where he accurately described the stance of movement conservatives as “proud of being ignorant”:

This is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn’t “have had all these problems,” this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a “Real American” with no demonstrable interest in “Real America” then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you.

He got the usual “don’t stereotype all Republicans” blowback, which of course is a comical strawman, because I think most of us are aware that movement conservatives aren’t all Republicans.  There are also the David Brooks of the world, happy to exploit movement conservatives for economic gain.  But I swear to you, the chest-thumping proud ignorance of this “Miracles” video really captures the zeitgeist of movement conservatism. Check out the lyrics:

Stop and look around, it’s all astounding
Water, fire, air and dirt
Fucking magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying, and getting me pissed

It’s true!  Scientists are conspiring to hoodwink the public about magnets.  You thought the conspiracy to make up global warming was thick, but the conspiracy to make us think that magnets work because of magnetic fields, created by electrons in motion?  They’re out to prevent us from seeing that it’s pure fucking magic.  And that conspiracy has been going on for more than a century now. But I can’t make fun of it better than Cracked, so I won’t.

I just loved seeing the “proud of being ignorant” stance distilled so neatly into a shitty rap song.  Or, for that matter, such a naked expression of the fact that people who reject science and hide behind god are lazy ego-monsters, who don’t think they should have to read a book or listen to an expert in order to feel like they know something.  What’s interesting is that so many more movement conservative types put way more effort into defending their aggressive intellectual incuriosity, demonizing college professors and the liberal elite for thinking they’re sooooooo smart.  The creationists and defenders of the idea that the Civil War wasn’t about slavery could take a page out of ICP’s book and just belligerently declare that it’s all magic, instead of trying to create arguments that mimic the rhetoric of the hated smarty-pants who actually know what they’re talking about.  The mimickery is sort of sad, really.  Conservatives lay claim to moral superiority because of their ignorance, but apeing the knowledgeable they claim to despise demonstrates an underlying insecurity.  But not the guys of ICP!  Their pride in being ignorant is untainted by any residual shame. 

by Amanda Marcotte

I don’t mean to keep hammering at Bitch Blogs for this, but it’s just irresponsible at this point.  Earlier today, I criticized an interview with anti-pill activist Laura Eldrige for engaging in unscientific fear-mongering.  Well, there’s a part two up.  In the first part, there was the pretense that this is about “asking questions” and “broadening the discussion”, a cover story that skeptics like to call ”JAQing off”. 

JAQing off is the act of spouting accusations while cowardly hiding behind the claim of “Just Asking Questions”.  The strategy is to keep asking leading questions in an attempt to influence listeners’ views; the term is derived from the frequent claim by the denialist that they are “just asking questions”, albeit in a manner much the same as political push polls. It is often associated with denialism in general.

In my experience, JAQers usually drop the pretense fairly quickly, and that’s exactly what happens in part two of this interview.  The pretense that this is about demanding more options and greater variety is dropped, and it’s full-blown demonizing of the birth control pill, complete with characterizing women on it as hapless victims who don’t have control over their lives.  If you think I’m overstating it, let me say this---Eldridge basically says that being on the pill makes you a junkie.

I went to a conference with Barbara in 2007 and a doctor was talking about HRT (which by the way, is made of the same chemicals that are in the Pill but at lower doses) - and I asked her about women coming off of hormone treatments and how they could get, perhaps, addicted to them and she was very adamant that women do not get addicted to these drugs. I couldn’t believe her contention. These are powerful chemicals, and people have the potential to get addicted to powerful chemicals. Many women describe experiences coming off the Pill that sound like addiction. That said, not all women find coming of the Pill or HRT tough – I didn’t have a problem with it.

Oh, good to know she doesn’t think we’re all junkies!

The slim excuse for this hyperbolic language is that she’s talking about physical dependency, but let’s face it.  Calling the pill “addictive” is about aligning it with recreational drugs, which is something that I expect from sex-phobic anti-choicers who think we all have abortion parties, but not from a feminist.  Using that frame is sex-negative, whether Eldridge intends it to be or not. 

That’s the weirdest part of the interview, but it’s far from the only weird part of it.  Eldridge mentioned a whole bunch of contraception alternatives in the last post, but in this one, she talks about how she settled on using a diaphragm.  Yes, the much-reviled method that was so popular in the anti-feminist 1950s!  The one that has fallen out of fashion because it has all the negatives of condoms without any of the positives (STD protection, getting men involved).  And as if daring me to call her a crank, Eldridge practically delights in the fact that the doctor thought she was loony for wanting a diaphragm. 

In all seriousness, I’m sure the diaphragm is fine.  Like Eldridge says, it worked fine for a lot of women in its heyday.  According to Planned Parenthood, it has a 6% failure rate if used correctly.  Not as good as the pill, but not so horrible, either.  And since I’m into vinyl collecting and vintage dresses, I can’t pick on someone who enjoys a little of that retro flair, though I can’t say that it seems very satisfying to have it hugging your cervix.  But it’s funny to me that someone who, in her JAQing off phase, bemoaned the lack of innovation in contraception is now applauding a method that hasn’t changed much, if at all, in the past 60 years.  And while she says it’s easy to use now, the fact that it took her three weeks to figure out how to use it properly doesn’t do much to dissuade me from feeling that Eldridge is working from the premise that sex should be a hassle.

And then there’s the conflation of science and superstition.

There’s a certain amount of superstition that comes in to trying to avoid getting pregnant. You put your faith in one method or another. Being more in control of the process and taking responsibility for what happens can be scary. It’s amazing that we have this one size fits all Pill where someone who is 4’10’’ and 95 pounds takes the same one as someone who is 6’2’’ – that doesn’t seem right.

I’m sorry, but this is just stupid.  Women don’t use the pill on “faith”.  Those hormones and chemicals Eldridge is trying to raise fears about?  They are scientifically demonstrated to suppress ovulation. To hear her talk about it, people are just swallowing random shit and hoping it works.  In reality, the effectiveness rates for birth control pills come from scientific studies, with controls and everything!  She can’t have it both ways.  Either the pill is some kind of chemical that affects your body, or it’s like trying to control your fertility by praying.  She’s just throwing everything she’s got at it, even arguments that contradict each other. 

As for her concerns about body size?  Guess what! That’s actually accounted for.  In one of those non-faith bona fide scientific studies, they found that the pill is slightly less effective in overweight women.  If you’re overweight, that means that a pill that would have a 1% failure rate goes up 1.6-1.7% failure rate, if I’m doing the math correctly.  Not great, but I have to point out that it’s still better than the diaphragm.  Of course, there are more health risks for overweight women on the pill, which is something to consider.  Good doctors discuss all this with their patients.  But the reason it’s less effective has less to do with Eldridge’s kind of goofy understanding of how the pill works.  It’s not that you get less “coverage” over your whole body, it seems.  It’s more that overweight people tend to have higher metabolisms, so the drug is used up faster.  Losing weight would lower their metabolisms.

And to round off this interview, we get a little paranoia about the male birth control pill that hasn’t been invented yet.

But pharmaceutical companies are much more wary about inflicting the possible side effects on men. They say, for example, that the male contraceptive can not have any effect on men’s sexuality, when the female Pill certainly does have this impact on women. Women are supposed to tolerate these problems and possibly until they hear men stand up and say they don’t want to take the male Pill then they won’t think any further.

There’s a lot of real sexism in the world, enough that you really don’t need to make it up to be against it.  While individual women have anecdotally said the pill drove down their sex drive, the only study I’ve found that indicates that is a very small one that has control problems.  Whereas I do believe the research on the male birth control pill was pretty conclusive on the sex drive issue, and the dip was severe.  What’s so funny to me is that anti-pill arguments often go into the “have it both ways” bin when it comes to this.  We’re told that the pill was invented by men so they could get laid more, and that it drives down a woman’s sex drive.  Why would those diabolic men push a drug that makes women say “no” more often?

The real reason there hasn’t been a male birth control pill is mundane.  No one really knows how to do it.  Despite Eldridge’s constant banging on about how unnatural the pill is, it works because it mimics a process that a woman’s body has all on its own, which is ovulation suppression.  Right after you ovulate, your body starts sending out hormone signals that keep you from ovulating again---this presumably evolved so women can’t get pregnant after they get pregnant.  (Though on very, very, very rare occasions this fails and a woman does get pregnant while pregnant.  Weird, right?) What the pill does is keeps your hormones at the level they would be after you ovulated.  That’s basically it. 

The problem is there isn’t a natural process in a man’s body that stops sperm production.  (Except death, but seems like it has even more drawbacks than a diaphragm as a birth control method.) Without a model of how to do that, researchers are kind of stuck in the throwing-darts-at-a-map phase.  To make it worse, I don’t think the research funding is ever going to be adequate.  Drug companies believe that the demand for this product just isn’t high enough to turn a profit to justify the research expenses.  I think their fears are overblown because of sexism, but they probably have a point, too.  Except for women who really have bad luck with the birth control pill, not many women are going to see the need to hand the control over to someone who doesn’t run the risk.  The perception is that we’re more likely to take care of ourselves than others.  The research that shows that men are more likely to hope for an oops pregnancy than women only makes me more certain that a lot of women have a good reason not to trust that their partners would be diligent.  (Not that they’d purposefully get you pregnant, but they may not be highly motivated not to forget the pill.) That research is only going to make drug companies less inclined to invest money in researching a male birth control pill without an obvious path to success. 

I’m sorry that I had to dedicate not one, but two posts to this.  But I have a good reason.  Political activism should be grounded in reality and respectful of scientific evidence in all cases, but this requirement is doubly important for feminism.  Why?  Because feminism is already vulnerable to attacks based on the sexist notion that women are hysterical and irrational.  Feminists are already up against a wall of accusations that we make up sexism and we’re paranoid.  It doesn’t help us when some feminists embody the worst stereotypes of irrationality and paranoia.  And then there’s always the “feminists hate sex” side dish of hate, which is not helped when you have feminists out there exploiting sex negativity in order to push the idea that sex should be unnecessarily cumbersome. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Ah, the perils of woo in feminism!  It’s one of my greatest pet peeves.  Feminists have so many great ideas and insights, and yet we routinely discredit ourselves by tolerating or even promoting the most annoying kinds of woo.  Take, for instance, this interview with Laura Eldridge published at Bitch Blog.  Eldridge’s life’s work is trying to scare women about the birth control pill, and get them to abandon it in favor of less effective methods, or methods that may not be as conducive to the sort of sex lives they want.  But she’s not doing this from an anti-feminist perspective, but from a feminist one that fetishizes the notion of “natural”, a common problem on the left.  Jill linked the interview and offered some criticisms of it, but I have to point out that her title “Thinking Critically About the Pill” is simply off.  The interview is the opposite of critical thinking.  Critical thinking isn’t simply tossing accusations and seeing which ones stick.  It’s about considering logic and evidence, and avoiding fallacies or predetermined conclusions.

This interview is a hodge-podge of logical fallacies, starting with the naturalistic fallacy. The funniest part about complaints about how the pill isn’t “natural” is that none of the alternatives offered to women are all that natural either.  Feminists aren’t about to suggest you spend most of your fertile years pregnant or nursing, so they instead offer other unnatural alternatives like condoms or whatever euphemism is currently in play for the rhythm method.  Anti-contraception fanatics are happy to suggest that you spend your fertile years always pregnant, but that’s not natural, either.  We evolved under conditions that included frequent periods of starvation that probably suppressed menstruation and therefore ovulation, but I’m guessing that outside of the world of high fashion, no one’s suggesting that as a method of birth control. 

The interview also has one of the most comical examples of what skeptics call ”JAQ-ing off” that I’ve ever seen. 

I thought it was the right time to present a reassessment of our birth control choices, to encourage women to broaden the contraceptive conversation..

Just asking questions, right?

Seven years into working with Barbara and I was still taking the Pill. She wasn’t judgmental and it wasn’t like I was hiding it from her, but I had to learn the lessons she’d been discussing throughout her career for myself.

If you’re just asking questions and broadening the discussion, why is it so wrong to come to the conclusion that you want to be on the pill?  Why the self-flagellation, if this is about broadening the discussion?

Eldridge also uses empty scare words like “chemicals” to raise fears, without noting that everything in nature is a chemical.  When you talk about chemicals in the water, for instance, you’re kind of being nonsensical, because water is also a chemical.  I’m not being an asshole who enjoys hair-splitting, either.  Generic concerns about “unnatural” chemicals distract from substantive discussion.  For example, all greenhouse gases are naturally-occurring, albeit in far lower levels than they would be without humans.  And conservatives exploit this fact to the hilt when denying the reality of global warming, even sometimes being childish enough to suggest that environmentalists don’t want you to breath out because that produces CO2.

The thing that really bothers me about this is the underlying assumption that women take the pill because they’re fundamentally stupid and misinformed, and if they only knew there were alternatives, they’d go for it. Except of course for the brainwashing.  This idea crops up in the interview.

I do start with the Pill and it’s descendants – like the shot, the ring and menstrual suppressants - but then I also talk about non-hormonal methods like barriers and IUDs, fertility awareness and emergency contraception.

Let me take the time to point out that anyone who categorizes emergency contraception as “non-hormonal” is a quack, and you shouldn’t listen to them.  But I found this passage surprisingly enlightening as to what’s going on when it comes to categorizing methods as more or less “natural” and therefore good.  The goodness of a method appears to go up as the effectiveness goes down and the pain in the assness of it goes up.  “Fertility awareness” is clearly---if you read to the end---Eldrige’s preferred method, because she says it’s the most green.  I find the obsession with making sexuality “green” to be a leftist way of being puritanical without coming out straight with it.  If only we could get people to give the same level of attention that they give to reducing waste from pills, condoms, and tampons to reducing waste from far more frequent (and wasteful) activities like eating or driving!  If you think I’m overstating the case, consider the amount of feminist greenie energy expended on waxing poetic about menstrual cups and reusable pads, two methods that 99% of American women will reject out of hand.  And imagine if that energy was redirected towards the far more attainable goal of getting women to stop using tampon applicators.  If we did that, we could actually reduce the amount of waste produced by menstruating women, but that doesn’t have the same emotional satisfaction, because there’s still the sense that women using applicator-less tampons aren’t suffering enough when they get their periods.  This need to make sexuality painful or unpleasant underlies a lot of leftist hand-wringing over modern conveniences relating to sex. 

And that’s why I found this interview so insulting.  When someone essentially says to me, “Did you know you don’t have to be on the pill, because there are condoms?”, I want to smack them on the head for thinking I’m stupid.  There are reasons outside of idiocy and gullibility that women might prefer the pill to condoms or the rhythm method.  Perhaps, and I know I’m being highly unAmerican in saying this, they think sex is more fun if they can do it whenever they want and they don’t have to work around the condom.  Obviously, the risks of STDs outweigh that pleasure if you’re not in a disease-free, monogamous relationship, but if you’re in such a relationship, then why on earth should you feel guilty for wanting unfettered sex?  The obsession with the rhythm method is always so telling to me.  The whole point of the rhythm method---the reason the Catholic church loves it so much---is that it’s the next best thing to abstinence.  After all, you have to abstain when you don’t want to in order to make it work, and when you do have sex, there’s a level of anxiety you don’t have with methods that have the effectiveness rate stamped on the side.  It’s funny and telling to me that Eldridge didn’t include abortion as a method to use instead of the pill, since that’s both something you need to spend more time considering if you use less effective methods, and super environmentalist chemical-free (except for the painkillers). 

Obviously, I’m not being paid by Big Pharma to point this shit out, but to make this very clear, I’d like to link this piece in Salon as an example of good grappling with the impact that pills have on modern life.  Why is this so much better than the hand-wringing over the pill? Well, because it’s evidence-based.  The issue at hand is that anti-depressants are probably being over-prescribed.  There’s troubling evidence that they’re only effective in people with severe, long-term depression, and don’t do much for people with milder forms of the disease.  The question, therefore, is are people using the drugs who feel better only responding to the placebo effect?  There’s reason to think so. 

Beyond just the evidence, I applaud this piece because it assumes that there might be more complex reasons that anti-depressants are over-prescribed beyond just hand-wringing evil minions of Big Pharma trying to rake in the big bucks.  It takes the desires of people who use these drugs very seriously.  There’s no waving off of the severity of the blues, no pretending that it’s not that big a deal if you feel sad all the time.  Contrast that with the pill interview, where the contempt for the intelligence of women who prioritize sexual spontaneity is not so well-concealed. 

None of this is to say that women for whom the pill doesn’t work well are in the wrong.  Even if the side effects women experience are often placebo effects, it doesn’t mean that they’re not a real problem.  Placebo or not, if being on the pill makes you feel sad or is blamed for weight gain, by all means, go off it.  That’s not what’s at stake here.  The problem is passing off arguments that are emotional reactions as “critical thinking”. 

by Amanda Marcotte

My first question upon reading about how non-nutbar home schoolers are having trouble getting decent science books for their kids is this: Why are you giving a single dime to the Christian right?  How could you not know that when you buy a science textbook from a “Christian” publisher, it’s going to be a diatribe against the theory of evolution? 

That a whole market for home schooling textbooks exists isn’t surprising in the slightest, of course.  83% of home schoolers report that they pulled their kids out of school to give them “religious or moral” instruction, i.e. that they’re fanatical Christians who want to exert firm control over their children until they’re sure that they’re brainwashed enough that they won’t stray from the path.  (That this system ensures that wives have no interests or time outside of the family is just a bonus.) What’s going on with the other 17% is probably a grab bag of stuff---bad school districts (or the perception of that), resentment towards the training-you-to-be-compliant aspects of public education, general hippiness---but what I find interesting and sometimes amusing about the other home schoolers is that they seem, to outsiders, way too interested in looking at the religious wackos with a forgiving eye.  Is it just that fundies so dominate home schooling that the everyone else home schoolers feel they either create those alliances or languish in loneliness? 

I’m surprised they found a woman who was willing to go on the record with a story about how she bought a biology textbook from Bob Jones University, and was shocked and appalled that it denied the reality of evolution.  And in a proper twee flourish, gave her small child all the credit for catching the error, as if the child was somehow so brilliant she was born knowing the theory of evolution.  I’m surprised, because I’d be too humiliated by this mistake to talk about it, especially if I was interested in selling the idea that I was all my child needs in terms of pre-university instruction, since admitting to that kind of mistake really undermines your credibility.  Adding the detail that implies that you might have missed it if it weren’t for your child’s intervention doesn’t help matters.  I realize the woman is just participating in that common but annoying cultural trope of, “Me? I’m just a mom, nothing special.  Except that I produced these brilliant offspring!”, but still.  It’s a little over the top. 

Part of me wishes that fundie home schoolers found that raising children to deny basic reality will have a long-term detriment to those kids’ futures, but unfortunately, going to public school is no guard against believing that everything out of your limited understanding must be magic.  And so having one more magical belief doesn’t really make much difference in our society.  We are all swirling down the drain of ignorance about science.  Take for instance, the appallingly magical view a lot of young people have about contraception.  Honestly, estimating that the pill fails half the time is straight up magical thinking, assuming that the pill works like wishes and superstitions, which probably work out half the time on average because most wishes and superstitions are addressing a binary situation that involves chance.  (Like what team is going to win in tonight’s big game.) It may not feel like magical thinking---I’m sure there’s a haphazard line of made-up reasoning to explain where they got this idea---but that’s what it is.  Even a rudimentary understanding of human biology would go a long way to helping people understand things like how contraception works.  (I’m not trying to dog on anyone here; I know a lot of smart people who haven’t managed to get past the incorrect idea that the pill “tricks” your body into thinking it’s pregnant.  It actually just maintains your hormones at a level that isn’t the one required to ovulate.) Fundies are just pushing us further down the path we were already on, where scientific ignorance is normal and practically expected.

So I guess I shouldn’t be too hard on home schoolers who get duped by these textbooks.  I think a lot of people defend evolutionary theory for the wrong reasons---not because they understand it, but because they (correctly) perceive the pro-ignorance, patriarchal bent of fundamentalists who oppose evolutionary theory.  But you definitely see really smart people buy into incorrect tropes about science that are ones that the fundies are promoting.  For instance, the concept of “Darwinism”, as if Darwin created a religion or ideology that people “believe” in.  But that’s not how scientific theories work.  Darwin is an interesting historical figure, but the theory itself has morphed and expanded and diversified and dare I say evolved.  But most people struggle with understanding how a scientist criticizing one aspect of natural selection as an all-encompassing theory isn’t actually trying to bring down the whole thing like a house of cards.  As such, we’re in a poor position to defend ourselves and science, even if we mean well. 

by Amanda Marcotte

By invoking a bullshit evo psych theory predicated on the ridiculous presumption that only men really enjoy and crave sex. T. Byram Karasu may bring all sorts of pedigrees to his argument, but that doesn’t matter.  It’s still choad science that has no relationship to real science.  It’s hard to even get a handle on how stupid Karasu is being.

Sex addiction is simply a new name for the old evolutionary concept—the innate urge to impregnate as many females as possible. In this sense, every man is a sex addict or was one at some point in his life.....

Unlike addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and cigarettes, in which the craving is induced by external elements, sexual craving, by its nature, is an innate and natural phenomenon. And sex addiction is a specific situation—the frequency of erection and the intensity of orgasm—dependent on the person’s blood-level of testosterone. Man deals with that according to his physical, social, and financial conditions......

At the least advantageous end of the spectrum, a man simply masturbates. In the best circumstances, women throw themselves at him. But in between these two extremes reside garden-variety marriages wherein the wife may complain about the husband’s sexual demand, and the man may seek lovers and/or prostitutes.

I don’t actually have a problem with denouncing the concept of “sex addiction”.  I’ve done it many times myself.  But nor do I think there’s a whole lot of reality in the idea that men and only men are these enormous victims of their outrageous desires that largely asexual women cannot even begin to understand.  Or that a woman’s expectation of monogamy from a man in exchange for monogamy from her is some sort of horrible oppression that stems from women’s inability to understand that men like sex.

Back when bullshit, evidence-free assertions about human sexuality from evo psych bullshitters began in the 60s or roundabout, there wasn’t any hesitation from these men in making wish fulfillment assertions about how men are naturally promiscuous and women are naturally monogamous, and therefore the only real relationship model that will work is one where men get to sleep around and women have to put up with it.  Nowadays, there’s a hesitation to come right out and say that women are naturally monogamous---probably because the immediate problem of who do “naturally” promiscuous men sleep with will come up---but that’s the insinuation of articles like this.  Feminists have forced evo psych bullshitters like Karasu to tacitly accept that women have a minimal, easily satisfied sex drive (he even painfully accepts that perhaps women might not want to castrate their husbands because we’d like to get laid oh so occasionally), but at the end of the day, they prefer to think of the world as one where men are just insatiable sexual creatures, and women put up with it because we are all prostitutes at heart, and we get paid off in actual cash or in wifely security.

I don’t like the framework around “sex addiction” not because I think that every man is a natural dog who will fuck every woman he sees if given the chance, and that women are fools to expect otherwise (or have the duty to milk our men 3-5 times a day to stop him---most men wouldn’t want that, either).  I don’t like it because the framework demonizes sex itself, even as those who push it deny that.  Do I think people act out with sex?  Sure, but it’s usually in service of some other neurotic need.  Call Tiger Woods a “sex addict” distracts from the more mundane reality.  His type isn’t actually that uncommon---ego monster plus a huge Madonna/whore complex. (Hard as it for the “all men are just dogs” crew to believe, but some men with serious Madonna/whore issues will even lose sexual desire for their wives or girlfriends, because they’ve been so conditioned to think fucking a woman is degrading her that they can’t bring themselves to degrade someone they genuinely love.) The cure for a Madonna/whore complex is a little feminism, to stop thinking of sex as something men do to women that’s degrading, and to think of it as a mutual sharing of pleasure between individuals, an understanding evo psych bullshit wards off.  In fact, while theories like Karasu’s tend to offer the belief that men will fuck anything that moves on the surface, they encourage Madonna/whore complexes by painting women as either wives or prostitutes, but always women who trade sex for goodies. 

The cure for ego monster behavior?  Beats me.  Really seeing the people around you as human beings---something that evo psych bullshit also wards off, by actively fighting off seeing the real complexity of human nature---is probably really hard to do when you’re a world famous celebrity and no one around you sees you as a real human being, either. 

I will say this to evo psych bullshitters: Generalizing your experience (women not wanting to have sex with you unless you compensate them somehow) to all men and women tells people more about you than about all men and women. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Via Pharyngula comes this story of the persecution of an 8th grade science teacher in North Carolina, persecution based on the students’ and their parents’ belief that the teacher isn’t a Christian.  Here are the facts: Melissa Hussain was suspended from her job teaching 8th grade science after she complained on her Facebook page about being the victim of persecution from a bunch of ignorant rednecks, which she called a “hate crime”.  This was basically the summation of the complaint that got her in trouble, apparently because that sort of venting from school teachers isn’t allowed.  I’m not sure how I feel about that rule---in general, I think the censorship of employees in our country has gotten way out of hand, so I’m on her side---but I can sort of see why there is such a rule.  But let’s be clear---that this Facebook posting was discovered probably has a lot to do with the general levels of harassment that the citizens of Wake County felt was appropriate to subject Hussain to, because they believe she’s not a Christian. 

The reports I could find on this don’t explain why they think Hussain isn’t a Christian.  It could be her last name---I’d be shocked if that wasn’t a factor---or the fact that she’s a science teacher.  Or maybe she isn’t a Christian and didn’t take pains to hide that fact.  So what?  This country supposedly respects religious freedom, and that counts even for school teachers and even for women and even in North Carolina.  The levels of harassment this woman was subject to are shocking, even for a bunch of ignorant rednecks.  The harassers are admitting that they were provoked by the fact that Hussain taught real world biology that included the theory of evolution.

On her Facebook page, Hussain wrote about students spreading rumors that she was a Jesus hater. She complained about her students wearing Jesus T-shirts and singing “Jesus Loves Me.” She objected to students reading the Bible instead of doing class work.

But Annette Balint, whose daughter is in Hussain’s class, said the students have the right to wear those shirts and sing “Jesus Loves Me,” a long-time Sunday School staple. She said the students were reading the Bible during free time in class.

So, what appears to be happening is that the parents are encouraging their children to disrupt class to harass a woman they believe deserves no respect by refusing to do their schoolwork, and loudly singing hymns.  And when called out on it, they play innocent, acting like open disruption of the classroom is just a legitimate, harmless expression of belief.  This is not all that Hussain was subject to.  Students got into the habit of leaving religious materials on her desk to taunt her.  Postcards with pictures of Jesus were left on her desk so that students could act all butt hurt when she did what you always do when junk mail is left for you, which is throw it away.  Bibles were left on her desk, presumably to create the same kind of faux outrage if she treated them like anything short of magical objects.  After the evolution dust-up, when kids tried to stop the lesson by squawking about Jesus and no doubt freaking out on the teacher, a student left a Christmas card on Hussain’s desk with the word “Christ” underlined.

This behavior, of course, is bullying, and it appears to be encouraged by parents.  Bullying is the absolute favorite tactic of the religious right, from women’s clinic blockades to calling the cops on women who dare admit while pregnant to being anything but as blissed out as a dog suckling her pups.  Men are subject to this kind of bullying, but generally, wingnuts prefer to set their sights on female targets, because they believe women are weak, and like all bullies, they prefer to pick on someone they perceive as weak.

Since I can smell the victim-blaming coming a mile away, I will say that it’s obvious that Hussain didn’t handle this situation with the utmost maturity.  Very young schoolteachers often take students’ misbehavior personally, and then the students smell blood in the water and go nuts.  I definitely saw this happen to teachers when I was a kid, especially in junior high school, when a lot of students turn into complete monsters and enjoy torturing teachers, fellow students, anyone they can act out their angst on.  Maybe some people just aren’t cut out for teaching, if they really can’t control a classroom full of evil little shitheads. 

In addition, Hussain seems to have not really understood what she was up against, in terms of right wing nuttery.  But you have to cut people a break on this---even those of us who’ve been deep in the political shit for a long time now can still have our breath taken away by how vicious wingnuts are, how sadistic, and how much they absolutely love ruining the lives of people guilty of disagreeing with them.  A fight between a decent human being and someone who would kick little old ladies that have fallen down isn’t going to be a fair fight, since the latter is practically begging to fight dirty.  For Hussain, I can’t imagine how frustrating it was to have students act this way with the full support of their parents and the tacit support of the school district.  And she made ill-advised choices that indicate that she didn’t understand the full extent of the problem.  Now that she’s been punished but the harassers have not, perhaps she’ll wrap her head around this. 

The good news is it looks like legal avenues are opening up to people railroaded like Hussain was.  Meanwhile, the rest of us have to really be willing to face up to this---the Christianist right wing teabagger freak out has gotten to the point where these idiots are telling their kids that it’s a good thing to harass their science teachers until they crack. 

by Amanda Marcotte

Very good news from the world of medicine---The Lancet has completely retracted the article they published in 1998 by Andrew Wakefield that links autism to vaccines.  As Phil Plait notes, the link between vaccines and autism has been discredited for a long time, but this is basically the end of even the slimmest scientific argument against vaccines.  The single reputable publication that has ever had anything to do with the anti-vax movement has cut all ties.  This is a moment to celebrate.

And to mourn.  Because despite this remarkable good news, anti-vaxxers won’t lay off, even more a moment.  In fact, I suspect they’ll redouble their efforts.  Like their fellows in the art of science denialism---global warming deniers and evolutionary theory deniers---the very existence of scientists who understand this stuff is considered an affront they’ve been put on earth to correct.  And so when the scientists are right, with their science and their evidence and their understanding, they just piss the denialists off even more. They may adjust their arguments around scientific evidence, but they don’t give up or admit they’re wrong.  Adjusting what you think based on solid evidence is what scientists do, and scientists are the enemy.  Scientists think they know better because they actually know better.  Experts think learning provides wisdom.  And anti-vaxxers are on the side of “mommy instinct” and quite a bit of hostility towards experts.

I don’t want to be this harsh, because I think a lot of people in the anti-vaccination movement got there because they’ve been traumatized by having an autistic child, and they’re looking for answers.  And the anti-vaxxers give them a very flattering answer, which is that the fault doesn’t lie with their genetics, but with the choices made by experts, who can be easily villainized.  The narrative established is hard for some parents of autistic children to resist---that they are 100% blameless, that this disease was caused by doing the right thing in vaccinating your children.  But at this point, the anti-vaccination movement is a lot bigger than a few well-meaning parents of autistic children who’ve been misled by people telling tantalizing lies.  I’d argue most of the true believers at this point are yuppie parents of mentally normal children who are refusing to vaccinate for a bundle of reasons, the two big ones being the hyper-parenting culture that leads you to believe you can control everything with nutrition and good parenting, and probably a dose of exceptionalism that comes with their class status.  Those folks really have no excuse. 

The anti-vaccination movement has edged away from the autism stuff anyway, and like all good denialist movements, it has changed its claims.  Now it’s less panicking over autism, and a lot more demands for “green” vaccines and vague panics about “toxins”.  It’s perfectly pitched to the crowd that’s interested in the “organic” label because they think it has health benefits (instead of on the more scientific grounds that it’s less environmentally damaging).  This claim about “green” vaccines is scary, because it allows anti-vaxxers both to claim they have a standard for vaccines that can be reached, while actually not having such a standard.  Just as creationists won’t give up an inch, but just refine their pitch, anti-vaxxers who fling the word “toxic” around have a perfect word to make sure they never have to concede the argument.  “Toxic” is one of those words that can mean just about anything.  And most importantly, since vaccines are there to provoke your immune system, the dead virus itself could be called “toxic”, making this a no-win argument on those terms. 

None of this is to say we should give up and let the anti-vaxxers win, of course.  But just know that it’s far from over.  In a lot of ways, the emptying out of any real scientific claims means the battle’s probably just begun.