Over the last few months I’ve given a few public speeches on how things said by some of the top front men in our movement are divorced from reality. Including Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Peter Boghossian. One of those speeches I delivered last year as the keynote speech for the Humanist Community of Central Ohio’s Solstice Banquet. A resounding standing ovation at that was reassuring. They have since put a transcript of that speech online.

Info graphic showing Pat Robertson's face and displaying his ridiculous quote about feminism, which is included in my Ohio speech (so you can read it there).

The points I made were well received. Not surprising, as self-identifying humanists tend to get it, in a way nihilistic atheists don’t. In Portland last month I extended the argument even beyond, pointing out that in fact feminism doesn’t just follow as a core value of humanism, but is essential to any kind of movement atheism that expects to grow and earn the world’s respect. As well as make the world a better place, of course. But I understand some atheists don’t give a shit about that. Yet even the heartless “I’ve got mine, fuck everyone else” Machiavellian will have to admit, if movement atheism never grows very much larger than it is, and simply reinforces all the stereotypes of atheists as amoral threats to human welfare, who treat women and minorities and gays and the trans community so poorly it just stays predominately a white man’s club, then it will have strangled itself with its own umbilical cord.

At Ohio I already explained how critical thinking plus compassion entails feminism. And fully justifies a lot of the criticism feminists have leveled at movement atheists lately. I don’t pretend all of it is justified (I haven’t even seen all of it), but enough of it is to warrant our attention. That speech was titled Oh No! Humanism Means Stuff! Why Compassion + Critical Thought = Feminism. I’m reproducing the whole transcript here with minor edits and more formatting and hyperlinks. Tomorrow I’ll post some additional material from my Portland speech, in which I examine Peter Boghossian’s remarks about gay pride and his hobnobbing with infamous misogynist Stefan Molyneux. But first, here is the Ohio speech…

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Introduction

When I asked the organizers of this event what I should speak on, they said, oooh, something about humanism and philosophy and critical thinking. You know, something that’s about celebrating who we are, and bringing our community together.

That was a bit vague. Thanks.

But hey, challenge accepted!

So I thought about it. And you know what actually hits every item of that request?

Feminism!

Yeah. That’s right. I’m going to talk about feminism. Those who take offense at that had better leave now. You can send your death threats through the contact form at www.fbi.gov.

I’ve been researching and writing about feminism for several years now, and I’ve been an outspoken feminist ever since I started reading modern feminist authors over twenty years ago, when I was in military training to hunt submarines for the United States Coast Guard. And yes, the military made me a feminist. (If you’re interested in that, my talk about it is online.)

I’m well aware that someone might say, “Hey, this is supposed to be a speech about bringing our community together. Surely feminism is too divisive for that!”

That it should even be divisive, though, is precisely the problem I want to address, and that has to be addressed if we really want to bring our community together. And certainly if we want to celebrate our humanist values.

Feminist causes abound in this country, from fighting for women’s rights in health care, abortion, birth control, and sex education, to combating the sexist abuse and mistreatment of women throughout our social system, which we find everywhere, from the internet to the street, from the office to the home. You can find plenty to read now online about the disproportionate way that even in our own American society women are harassed or assaulted, or regarded as liars, or their thoughts or concerns ignored. And how they are subjected to an oppressive culture of double standards, being asked to act more like men, then socially punished the moment they do so.

Numerous scientific studies show that women are even treated as inferior by educational institutions and hiring committees that don’t even realize they are doing it. For example, several studies show [e.g. this and this and this and these] that merely replacing a man’s name with a woman’s name on a resume can cause a lower chance of being hired, and a higher chance of getting a lower pay offer. In another study, over two hundred performance reviews from 28 major companies were examined, and among various sexist disparities was this finding:

[The word] abrasive … was used 17 times to describe 13 different women, but the word never appeared in men’s reviews. In fact, this type of character critique that was absent from men’s reviews showed up in 71 of the 94 critical reviews received by women.

The evidence indicated that when men engaged in essentially the same behavior, they were praised for it. This disparity was probably not even conscious. And yet it certainly must cause women measurable financial harm, by increasing their rate of dismissal, decreasing their rate of promotion, and negatively affecting their pay scale. All for doing exactly what those same employers reward and expect from men. In other words, they are being punished simply for being women. [Many other studies confirm this.] [Such as this. And this. And this. And this.]

Combine numerous things like that, with everything else—suppressing reproductive rights, street harassment, internet harassment, magnified risk of sexual assault, disparities in treatment even in casual social situations—and this can no longer be regarded as trivial. Even if each of these injustices were to be regarded as small, their cumulative effect is large.

And these are not just feminist causes. These are humanist causes.

Fear of Feminism

One of the coolest things I saw recently—and hat tip to the Skepchick blog network, which I follow regularly and highly recommend—was a video interview with Terry Crews about why he is an outspoken feminist. And if you don’t know who I mean, I mean the actor, author, and ex-football star. He’s currently one of the funniest members of the cast on the TV show Brooklynn 99. If you’ve seen him, you might swear on a statistics textbook that he’d be the last guy to say he was a feminist. He’s a gargantuan black man with an incredibly built body. His biceps alone are thicker than my chest [a fact often used for comic impact on B99]. He’s starred in action movies. He played pro football. Feminist.

In the interview, he gives astute observations on feminism and gender theory, and fully cops to being a feminist. So he was asked why so many men and women are afraid of the word, afraid of calling themselves feminists, and Crews said he thought it was because people fear losing control. And feminism means you have to share power, and influence, and importance, and opportunities. It means women get to criticize men as much as men criticize women. It means women’s voices have an equal chance of overriding a man’s. It means a woman can get your job.

Creating an equal society means those who have been enjoying an unfair excess of preferences and privileges have to start sharing those preferences and privileges, and thus won’t have advantages anymore. That’s scary. Especially if you’ve been taught all your life that you aren’t a man if you aren’t on top, if you aren’t in charge, if you aren’t more important than everybody else. If you profess to believe in equality, then you may have to give up some power and influence, when you have an unfair share of it.

That’s the gist of his point. But Crews was answering mostly with respect to men being scared of feminism, the same way Republicans are scared of socialized health care. And the response to that fear is the same: they fabricate elaborate and false mythologies about the thing they fear, and actively try to push that narrative on everyone else. Which is why even some women end up buying into it, in just the same way some among the poor buy into the Republican myths about socialized healthcare, and thus end up fighting something that could actually help lift them out of poverty, while supporting corporate welfare for the rich.

Notice the themes here. Mythologies. Assertively spread. Bringing widespread harm to the welfare of humanity. Sound familiar? The enemies of feminism, in fact, do the same thing the enemies of atheists do: make shit up, and claim we are awful, and will ruin the world if anyone listens to us. The enemies of feminism, are the enemies of humanism.

The core values of humanism are the exercise of compassion toward bettering the lives of all human beings, and doing that critically, evidentially, and with a passionate concern for the truth. And that requires fighting all the social and cultural assumptions that get in the way of that goal, regardless of whether those assumptions are explicitly religious or not. So when women as a class are not treated with the same respect or concern as men, and when lies and false beliefs are deployed to accomplish or maintain that status quo, that is precisely the sort of thing humanism must oppose.

If you are like several people I know, you might not want to call yourself a feminist, because you are scared of how you will be treated, about the bigoted false assumptions people will then immediately attach to you. And that’s a lot like atheists, who are often scared of calling themselves atheists for exactly the same reasons. But of course, they are atheists all the same. They don’t believe in a god. They are, quite simply, not theists. Similarly—just like closeted atheists—if you support the cause of feminism, you want women treated as equals, you want sexism to end, but don’t want to call yourself a feminist for fear of how people will treat you, I’ll understand. But please know, I think that’s sad. And it does hurt the cause of feminism—the same way not coming out as an atheist hurts the cause of atheism—by making it harder for atheists in finding each other, coordinating action, showing the true strength of their numbers…and by allowing myths about atheists to prevail. As they will, until there are too many openly observed counter-examples for those myths to survive. After all, what has made gay people, and gay rights, more popular? Coming out. More people, knowing more gay people in their life.

Even Terry Crews said in that interview, that the people who are silent about their feminism, are akin to the people who silently said nothing about Jim Crowe segregation before the Civil Rights Act, even when they were secretly against it. They allowed racism to dominate and control the culture by not actively taking that control back. Declaring yourself a feminist—openly—empowers every cause women fight for, in exactly the same way everyone who held a sign or marched in the streets for civil rights did. Social change requires visible numbers to reach a tipping point, until the accumulated light is so bright that it melts away the lies and myths and the status quo. To make you too scared to openly join in bringing that about, is precisely what the enemies of feminism want.

You Can Develop Your Own Feminism

The first step to escape that trap is to realize that, just like your atheism, you can define your own feminism. You don’t have to accept the lies and myths or fringe elements, in feminism any more than in any other social movement. The myth about atheists once was that atheists are communists. To declare yourself an atheist, subjected you to bigoted assumptions everywhere that you were not just a communist, but a fan of the Soviet Union even. But that was never true. It was true of some atheists; but not of atheism, nor of most atheists. Do you have to endorse communism to openly declare yourself an atheist? Obviously not. You can be any kind of atheist you want. And still be an out and proud atheist.

Feminism gets exactly the same sham treatment atheism does. You don’t have to agree with every feminist; just as you don’t have to agree with every atheist. And you don’t have to buy into the myths about either. You can instead break them, by showing the world what your feminism looks like, just as you can do for your atheism.

A political fundraising letter written by Pat Robertson in 1990 captures the religious mythology against feminism that attaches to the word still today. He wrote:

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.

You laugh. But a lot of atheists are saying very much similar things about feminists. The Pat Robertson of atheism today is the atheist video blogger Phil Mason, popularly known as Thunderf00t. His anti-feminist channel has over 150,000 subscribers. He is one of the most watched atheist thought leaders in the world. And for over a year now among his primary activism has been publishing videos denouncing feminism. He actually makes a comfortable living at it.

Of course, as an atheist, he doesn’t believe in witchcraft. But he does believe in the secular equivalent of witches: he declares that feminists are all professional victims, and shameless liars, who literally, in his words, “poison everything,” and are “toxic parasites” who are “poisoning atheism” by, as I have seen him argue, opposing all sex and sexuality, supporting false rape accusations to destroy men they don’t like, and fabricating death and rape threats against themselves just to get attention, and that even the real threats and harassment they get, they actually deserve to get and have no right to complain about. So yes, we atheists have our own Pat Robertson. And our own myths and lies about feminists.

One of many secular myths about feminists, for example, is that feminists are against women dressing sexy. But that’s false. Almost no feminists are. Most feminists actually quite like the idea. What feminists do want is for women who dress sexy to be treated respectfully as people and not objects. In fact, almost all leading feminists today even campaign against slut shaming, not for it. But even if, let’s say, you meet some weird fringe feminist who is campaigning against all wearing of high heels as a manifestation of patriarchal oppression, do you have to agree with them? Obviously not. As an atheist, you don’t have to agree with those fringe weirdo atheists who think the Soviet Union was a bona fide utopia, either. Neither, as a feminist, do you have to share the opinion of high heel haters. Although you certainly, as a humanist, ought to listen to women who wear high heels, and be more sympathetic to what they have to say. And you certainly shouldn’t, even inadvertently, be pressuring any woman to wear them who doesn’t want to. But that’s not the same thing as being against them.

Just as the existence of debates among atheists doesn’t mean you can’t be an atheist, so the existence of debates among feminists doesn’t mean you can’t be a feminist. On my own blog network, FreeThoughtBlogs, we have one feminist blogger who is against sex work, regarding it all as intrinsically degrading and exploitative. We also have at least six feminist bloggers, myself included, but most are women, who wholly disagree with her and are actively pro sex work. Like atheism, feminism is not a monolith.

Enter the debate. Consider all sides fairly. Look at the evidence. That’s how you approach debates in atheism. You don’t steer clear of atheism because of it. You remain an atheist in spite of it. You should treat feminism exactly the same way.

You’ve Just Been Critically Thinked

By the way—you might not have noticed that I’ve just been using a critical thinking skill on you. It’s a skill that, as a humanist, should be a common one you employ—whenever you can—to question and test your own thinking. A lot of the reasons people give for not wanting to call themselves a feminist, or for saying feminism is bad, are identical to reasons people give for not wanting to call themselves an atheist, or for saying atheism is bad. If those reasons make no sense in the case of atheism, why should those reasons continue to be used in the case of feminism?

The tool being used here is an intellectual manifestation of forced perspective: look to see if the reasons you have for maintaining a position or attitude will hold up when used analogously on something else suitably similar, especially something you hold the opposite position or attitude about. And if they don’t hold up, ask why then are you still using them?

A good example of that is how I now apply this rule whenever forming or hearing judgments about women: I immediately reverse her gender and query whether the reaction or opinion would be the same. I’ve done this for so long now that it has become an almost automatic check on the sexist filter my culture installed in me. Which in turn has exposed to me how many sexist assumptions I had in me that I wasn’t even aware of. And likewise in others.

The basic idea? Flip the gender (or race, or religion, or nation, or person, whatever the analog is), swap one in for the other, and then see if your thinking gets the same results. Question why it doesn’t.

And to do all that, you have to follow rule number one for all critical thought: check the facts. Especially, go directly to the source: not what someone says a woman said, but what she actually said, and the actual context in which she said it.

The Elevatorgate Paradigm

Consider this example: Elevatorgate. I won’t assume everyone knows what Elevatorgate is (although by now you really should; these days, not knowing all about it would be something akin to only knowing how to operate a rotary phone [it’s covered on Know Your Meme and RationalWiki]). But be that as it may. It’s ground zero for the anti-feminist movement within atheism.

The Elevatorgate “controversy” originated with a remark made years ago by Rebecca Watson, who is a magician, comedian, media specialist, and social commentator, founder of the Skepchick network, and one of the most famous feminists in movement atheism today. She video blogs regularly, like Thunderf00t, only she’s way funnier. And not evil. Although, she is the most evil thing ever according to thousands of anti-feminist atheists. (And yes, we have thumb counts. There are thousands.)

The mythology goes like this:

Rebecca Watson advocated for draconian anti-harassment policies at atheist conventions that would forbid all sex or any hitting on anyone ever, because some guy innocently asked her for coffee in an elevator once. And therefore feminism is ruining atheism.

Okay. Step one.

Go directly to the source.

The video in which she supposedly said this is easily found. In it you’ll find she merely said “Guy’s, don’t do that,” and calmly and reasonably explained why. That’s it. [Statement at timestamp 5:02. Context starts at timestamp 4:30. Metacontext starts at 2:38.]

She said nothing there about anti-harassment policies, nor called the incident in the elevator harassment. And she has never called for any harassment policy that would forbid sex or hitting on people in respectful ways. In fact, what she did say should be, to any humanist, obvious and decent advice: don’t approach a woman you’ve never met or spoken to before, in a closed elevator, at four AM, in a foreign country, after you just saw her say she was tired and needed to go to bed, and just watched her give a talk about how she doesn’t like being treated like that…and ask her to join you, alone, for coffee in your room. That’s not how you make women feel comfortable at events. It is, actually, how you make women feel very un-comfortable at events, and thus less likely to attend them.

Besides this illustrating the most rudimentary critical thinking skill of checking the source against a claim being made, we can also apply that “analogy” tool I’ve been talking about. In fact, here we can tie that tool into the fundamental humanist value of compassion: swap her out, for yourself, in all the same circumstances, but without any advantages you have that she lacks. Imagine being literally in her shoes. How would you feel in that circumstance? Don’t you think you would end up giving people the same advice? If you can’t see that, your compassion module isn’t working very well. And my advice to you is that you need to work on that.

I myself first imagined being not her but me, in the same circumstances, being hit on by a strange guy in that elevator, who wanted me to come to his room. I have been hit on by gay men a lot throughout my life, but always in comfortable circumstances and appropriate ways, so I’ve never been offended or creeped out by it. But that way, in that circumstance? I’m a man and that would make me very uncomfortable. Reverse the physical power dynamic, and it would only be worse. Add on top of that the shitty way society treats women who are victimized when they say yes in situations like that (a major feminist issue), and the way saying no in situations like that often doesn’t end well, because of widespread assumptions of male entitlement (another feminist issue), and it would be even worse still.

If you aren’t thinking about these things, or aren’t aware of them, you aren’t being the humanist you could be.

My main point, though, is that here, with Elevatorgate, we have the whole thing I’ve been talking about in all its parts: an atheist system of lies and mythology, promulgated within our own movement, designed to attack feminism and feminist goals, and to conceal and ignore the real concerns of women and what they actually said, and which is therefore harmful to women and promotes and abets the harming of women, which a simple application of basic critical thinking skills would inoculate you against, and wholly explode. And in this case, we see that a basic critical thinking tool, cognitive forced perspective, also happens to be what compassion as a virtue actually consists of doing: putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, which requires you to find out, and thus actually understand, how they differ from you, and how their circumstances differ from yours, which requires actually listening to them, and many others like them.

So the humanist lesson here is that as a result of applying a basic critical thinking skill to anti-feminist mythology you will learn something about the lived experience of women in our movement, and how they actually think and feel about things, which knowledge you can use not only to make yourself a better person, but also to make this a better, more inclusive movement.

Bad Epistemology

So let me back up for a moment and explain how all this ties into philosophy, and our goal to bring our community together. Throughout my life, I’ve discovered countless things I assumed were true, aren’t. In fact, in every subject, after I researched it in depth, I have discovered I had numerous false beliefs. Which means in every subject you haven’t thoroughly researched, odds are you have numerous false beliefs, too. And because you can’t test and research every belief and assumption you have, that means you—yes you—have now—and will always have—a lot of false assumptions, and a lot of false beliefs. That should humble you.

Every time you try to assert some certainty about some view of things you have, something you assume to be true, you should stop to ask yourself, “Wait, am I sure I’m right about this?” The tools you apply to answer that question, constitute your epistemology. Epistemology is that branch of philosophy that is concerned with how you know something is true. One characteristic that is shared by all religions, even the most harmless and liberal religions, is a bad epistemology.

Because good epistemologies sweep all religions and superstitions away. Whereas bad epistemologies put us under constant threat of being highly certain of things that are in fact false. And not just religious things. All things. So our singular aim should be not the combating of religion alone, but the combating of all bad epistemologies.

The first goal of humanism, therefore, must be the pursuit of installing in ourselves the best epistemology we can find, which must be an epistemology that is itself self-testing and self-improving—so that if it is flawed, we will be steered constantly toward finding those flaws and fixing them. We must take that philosophical exercise seriously as our first and continual goal as humanists. Because all other goals depend on it. If we want to better the lot of all humanity, we need to be able to find out how best to do that, and not stumble into yet more false beliefs about how to do it. Escaping religion is not enough. If you stumble into a secular ideology that is just as false and just as harmful as any religion, you have made no relevant progress. You’ve just replaced one kind of religion for another.

One thing we know by now is that good epistemologies should be up to date and well tested and scientifically informed. If you want to see what that means in practice, I teach an online course on critical thinking skills about once a year for Partners for Secular Activism. I also have resources on my website, under the link for naturalism at richardcarrier.info [especially this and this]. In both I illustrate the importance now, of not just logic and fallacy avoidance, but also the science of cognitive biases, which distort how all of us think, and therefore we have to know how to correct for and overcome them; and the science of emotion, which we have to understand better to make better decisions (because sound thinking does not mean bypassing emotions, but listening to them smartly); and the logic of probabilistic reasoning, which teaches us to ask smarter questions about how we know something is typical or not, or how important it is to test alternative explanations of the evidence against our own.

All three factors—cognitive biases, the science of emotions, and probability theory—often intersect.

The Example of Black & White Thinking

For example, a cognitive bias most commonly but not only found within politically conservative minds is black-and-white thinking, an effect of what is called ambiguity intolerance: if you are afflicted with this trait, ambiguity is physically uncomfortable for you, and as a result you are highly motivated to eliminate it. You will thus not be comfortable with something being only likely or unlikely. Instead you will feel a constant emotional need for everything to be either true or false. The idea that it might be, say, very likely but not certain, or somewhat more likely than not, will be really hard for you to cope with. When this ambiguity intolerance encounters disjunctive reasoning, the result is called black and white thinking. We see this at work when anti-feminist atheists assume that wanting to prohibit sexual harassment means banning all sex and all flirting with or hitting on people at events. Because you can only be either for all of it, or against all of it. The messy, complicated, middle area, where some sexual behaviors are okay and others not, literally hurts the brains of the ambiguity intolerant.

So watch for that. When you find yourself slipping into black and white thinking; when you catch yourself assuming something has to be either true or false (rather than some degree of probability), or that someone has to be either totally against something or totally okay with it (rather than a more nuanced view), or any false dichotomy like that, you are no longer thinking critically. Take steps to fix that.

The same goes for many other important errors we are naturally prone to. Good critical thinking skills will include the requisite knowledge to detect and correct for these common errors. For example, sound abstract reasoning requires properly constructing generalizations from particulars. Almost everyone, and that includes you, too quickly skips that necessary step of collecting particulars and generalizing from them, and just generalizes right from the armchair, from limited personal experience, or even no experience at all, and just using the imagination instead.

Don’t do that.

In thinking, always start with the particular and then generalize. And even in communicating, don’t drop all the particulars, because that will only sow confusion, as people wonder what particulars you are generalizing from. Particulars mean specific examples, especially concrete real-world examples. Gather those first, before moving to abstractions and generalizations. Often the worst thing you can do is rant about something in the abstract and never provide a real world example of what you mean. Errors in the step of reasoning from particulars to abstractions are disguised when you do that; and more effective discussion can be had when there is a real-world example to analyze.

For example, the popular and beloved podcaster Seth Andrews a while back posted a rant telling certain unidentified people who were getting angry about every little thing to stop being overly sensitive and “grow a thicker skin.” He gave no actual examples of who he was talking about or even an example in concept of what he was talking about. He was unaware that the exact same generalizations are used online to attack and harass women, and to dismiss feminism, and any awareness of the harm caused by insensitivity to the issues faced by all targets of discrimination. He would have avoided the appearance of siding with online harassers and right-wingers had he actually given concrete examples (ideally real-world examples, but at least thoughtful or realistic hypotheticals), and then developed his abstractions from those examples.

This is an error so common that once you know to look for it, you’ll be surprised how often it occurs. Ron Lindsay’s disastrous opening speech for the Women in Secularism conference [in 2013] was an example, in which he complained about feminism without providing a single example of what he was actually referring to. That made his remarks sound intentionally broad, which painted him (and his organization, the Center for Inquiry) in a very negative light. Had he researched the matter, to collect and use real-world particulars to make his points, and done this critically—and thus not just selectively choosing examples reinforcing his preconceived notions, but actually looking to see how many counter-examples to his pre-conceived notions there were—he would have found out his complaints were groundless or overstated. The result would have been a much better speech on feminism.

Similarly, in Peter Boghossian’s otherwise useful book A Manual for Creating Atheists, he included a chapter that attacked all feminists as reactionary postmodernist enemies of reason and reality. Notably, at no point in that chapter does Boghossian ever give an example of who he means, or what they actually said, about anything. Had he taken the trouble to research, collect and study actual, real-world examples, he would have written a far better and more accurate chapter on the subject. Instead, he reasoned directly from the abstract, and from his imagination, and never checked it against the particulars of the real world.

Don’t do that.

All abstract argument must begin from a familiarity with the particular examples you are abstracting from. That’s critical thinking 101. Boghossian’s claim that “most” academic feminists fit the profile he constructed would require not just finding examples of academic feminists who fit his profile, but reading widely across all contemporary feminism, to verify that those fitting his profile are the norm, rather than a fringe minority. The same thus goes for any generalization about anything, not just feminists.

Watch yourself, and catch when you do this, when you skip the step of collecting concrete examples and then abstracting from them, and instead just directly launch from an abstract or general premise. And ask yourself, if you aren’t using real-world particulars, Why? Is the fact that you can’t find real world examples significant? Did you even check to see if there were examples? Did you verify if they were normal or unusual? Do the actual properties of those concrete cases support the specific generalization you are basing on them?

This is crucial for humanists. Because real world examples tie you to evidence, and to the way the world really works, so you can test models of reality against reality, rather than what you only imagine in your head. (And for reality, see my article on Fourth Wave feminism early next week.) And humanism is nothing if not a commitment to evidence-and-reality-based thinking. If you need real world examples (because you aren’t already personally or sufficiently familiar with any), admit that this is a state of ignorance you have to responsibly rectify. Talk to people who have examples, and can supply you with full accounts (people who have experienced them, worked with them in a real-world way, researched them as a professional historian or psychologist, or whatever the case), or read widely what such people have written.

I find this is extremely important in subjects where people don’t have enough personal experience for their own assumptions or imagination to be reliable. For example, in the way men often react incredulously to women discussing their experiences with street harassment, assault, or rape; or in the way cisgender heterosexuals often misunderstand homosexuality and transgenderism; and on and on.

Don’t generalize. Don’t make abstract claims. Neither use them as premises, nor reach them as conclusions. Until you have enough familiarity with numerous concrete cases—which you can only reliably learn from people who have direct, real-world experience with them (or others who learned from them). This is literally a logically necessary step.

The Failure of Dawkins

And this is why it matters…

Bringing our community together requires being skilled and honest critical thinkers, so we can purge ourselves of repellant lies and mythologies against feminism, as much as against any other group or idea. Because we need feminism. Not only because most humanists are feminists, so you’d better not be alienating your principle market base. But also because feminism is necessary to bring more women into the freethought movement.

I shall close with two examples of failing at this. Because they illustrate how feminism makes a difference between effective and ineffective behavior in achieving that principal goal I was asked to talk about: Bringing our community together.

How do we reach greater parity between men and women active in the movement, especially among the youngest generations, since that is where our future lies? And especially at the leadership level, as seeing people like themselves in charge is what inspires many people to join? Can we do that by ignoring the interests and concerns of half the human race? Not really, no. The fact that we have more than twice as many men in this movement as women (and in leadership, the ratio is worse than five to one) should be a scandal. We must be doing something wrong.

And I think one stupid thing we do is let our most famous members get away with denigrating women and women’s issues to the general public, the worst possible PR move, a fact that definitely drives away many women. For example, as I think everybody knows, Richard Dawkins has said a lot of douchy and out of touch things. He rarely has anything nice to say about feminism and feminist issues. For instance, he has a lot of armchair opinions about rape and sexual assault, such as that being molested can’t be that bad because he didn’t mind it [as in, not enough to feel damaged by it–ed.] (it didn’t occur to him that maybe he should gather more experiences from molestation victims to see if his experience was the norm: that’s a failure to follow basic critical thinking in more ways than one); or that being raped by a stranger is worse than being raped by someone you know (without giving any reason how he could know that—again, he didn’t check with anyone who would know). Dawkins doesn’t do any fact checking. He doesn’t get broadly informed about rape or rape victim experiences before pronouncing definite judgments about it. That’s being a bad humanist.

But it gets worse. He also mockingly said of a woman reporting she was raped while drunk, that she was as guilty of getting raped as a drunk driver, comparing her to someone saying, “Officer, it’s not my fault I was drunk driving. You see, somebody got me drunk.” He also tweeted that her testimony shouldn’t be believed because she was drunk. And that no rape victim’s testimony should ever be believed if they were drunk. When several shocked people asked him what the hell he was thinking, he backed up into just trying to insist over and over again that a woman can’t accuse a man of rape if she wasn’t conscious when the rape occurred. That she was conscious of plenty of circumstantial evidence that it did occur, he simply ignores.

A better grounding in feminism would have corrected him on all of this.

Of course, Dawkins insists he is “a passionate feminist.” Because he is so very concerned about how Muslims treat women. Dawkins said:

I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial.

So threats to women’s happiness in the West, how women are mistreated by non-Muslims, is trivial, and he’s sick of hearing about it. This is not humanism or feminism. It is not bringing the community together, but treating with disdain the very women you want to come to events and join organizations and advance the cause—by dismissing the concerns that actually directly affect them.

Why are we belittling real issues affecting our women here at home, and using the issues of other women in other countries we don’t even control the culture of or vote in, as an excuse to do that? We control this culture. We vote in this country. We make the policy decisions for our organizations and events. We choose how we behave at them. So there is a lot more we can do about sexism and unequal treatment of women and minorities here, than anywhere else. This does not mean we should ignore the plight of people in other nations or what causes it. But we should portion our priorities according to our actual resources, needs, and capabilities. We certainly shouldn’t be ignoring injustices at home, ignoring the obstacles to women’s happiness and success right in front of us, that we actually have the power to remove. We certainly shouldn’t be mocking rape victims, and blaming them for getting raped. But we also shouldn’t be dismissing all the things that are making women in our movement not want to be in it. Because if you treat what women say and feel with disdain, you have no right to wonder why they aren’t showing up.

The Failure of Harris

Sam Harris has done the same, alienating women in the movement, and giving women outside the movement a reason not to want to become a part of it. He was asked why so few women buy his books—based on the fact, one must assume, that so few come to his talks and book signings. His answer was this:

[B]eing very critical of bad ideas. This can sound very angry to people … People just don’t like to have their ideas criticized. There’s something about that critical posture that is to some degree instrinsically male and more attractive to guys than to women. …

The atheist variable just … doesn’t obviously have this nurturing, coherence-building, extra estrogen vibe that you would want by default if you wanted to attract as many women as men.

It’s shocking that he would just make that up as the reason women don’t come to events or (he supposes) buy his books, because it means he didn’t even check. He just regurgitated a sexist trope in our culture, that women aren’t into conflict or being critical, and are only into being nice and nurturing. He even insinuated this was biologically innate, by joking about it being an estrogen thing, and thus not a product of an intrinsically sexist society that enculturates women to be that way (a way that is notably intrinsically subservient to men).

The irony is that he then complained about being attacked by countless critical women who evidently didn’t fit his expectation of how women are supposedly not into conflict, and are only into being nice and nurturing. The double irony is that he still hasn’t detected the irony in that. But the sadder thing is, this is the same stupid thing Michael Shermer said years before, when he tried to explain why there are no leading women in skepticism, by saying skepticism was more of a guy thing, which was absurd because even then there were a dozen leading women in skepticism, and he evidently couldn’t think to name even one of them, but instead regurgitated the same sexist trope Harris did.

But what really angered me about Harris’s remark is that he is supposed to represent us, and definitely does do so to the general public whether we like it or not, and that fact places a great responsibility on him to know what this movement has had to say about things like this, and thus represent us correctly. For years before he said that stupid thing, we had been engaging in a large and open discussion within the whole movement, everywhere at conferences and online, about why women aren’t coming to events. Harris exhibited not one sign of having heard any of that. Why?

In contrast to Harris, do you know what people like me did when posed that same question years before? We actually asked women themselves why they weren’t coming to events. Harris chose to regurgitate a sexist armchair assumption from his imagination. We chose to base our answer on the dutiful collection of actual empirical facts. The answers I have seen accumulated over the last five years have been repeatedly consistent across hundreds of localities in several Western nations:

  • Women did not like how they were being treated at events.
  • Women did not like that their interests were being ignored by our leaders and organizations
  • And women did not like that we were not asking many women to serve in leadership roles or to deliver lectures and presentations.

Not once did any woman ever tell me, or anyone I know, that they didn’t like atheist books and events and organizations because they “weren’t nice enough” or were “too critical.” We found not one whiff of that supposed estrogen vibe Harris imagined.

Now think about this. Sam Harris is allowing his sexism to prevent him from ever discovering, or acknowledging, or doing anything about the actual reasons women are under-presented in this movement. He instead rests on a false sexist trope, and just perpetually defends it, never once learning anything, and consequently never once doing anything that can actually bring more women into the movement, and improve how they are treated in it, and by it. He ignores the first rule of critical thought—to gather the facts—and instead just draws on his armchair imagination, which has been molded by his sexist culture to think things are true about women, that in fact are not. This is the very kind of error in thinking that feminism has long been dedicated to stamping out. And stamping it out is why we need feminism. Because we need to stamp it out, in order to start hearing the real reasons we are turning women off, and to start doing something about them, and thus actually bringing our community together.

I also think there is some black and white thinking at work here. Harris assumes being a sexist means actively and openly saying women are inferior (like the president of Turkey recently did), when there is a far more common phenomenon of subconscious or unintentional sexism. In fact you often won’t know your views and assumptions are sexist, because you don’t consistently self-monitor, and you don’t check the facts, to question the cultural assumptions you are simply taking for granted. To assume you are either an obvious and intentional sexist, or not sexist at all, is a good example of black and white thinking. Which is bad thinking.

Good critical thinking requires self-criticism, it requires self-checking, self-monitoring, to control for your own biases, hidden influences, and inherited assumptions. And it requires empiricism in place of armchair reasoning. Don’t just pull reasons out of your ass. Actually ask women, investigate, find out what they are saying, discover the actual causes of what’s happening. And when you discover the facts aren’t what you thought, ask yourself why you thought differently.

Conclusion

That’s enough to make my point. Let me just summarize what I’ve been getting at with all this.

Humanism entails feminism.

Because humanism means wanting to better the lot of all human beings, and you cannot really value doing that, if you do not value doing it for half the human race. And that’s what feminism is about: shining a light on all the ways we are disproportionately making things worse, or harder, or less fun, or more unjust or unfair, for the women among us than for men; and then working out how to fix that. We have to face the fact that we may be perpetuating these disparities without even realizing it. And that it may be subtle. And that it might not be visible to you because it isn’t happening to you, but is happening to a lot of other people.

And that requires listening, and compassion, and critical thinking. It requires listening to and reading what a lot of women in our movement are saying. And caring about it. Critical thinking, meanwhile, requires applying the same critical thought to ourselves that we do to the religious; because that is exactly what we are asking them to do, and we have no legitimate argument that they should do that, if we won’t do it ourselves, every bit as much as we wish they did. If humanism is to be a superior replacement to religion, it has to actually be a superior replacement to religion. [The same goes for all of atheism.] Which means we have to actually behave the way we keep insisting religious people should. And that means we have to combat sexism, inadvertent and intentional, within our own movement, every bit as much as we expect them to. It means we have to pay attention to how we may be ignoring or mistreating the women in our own movement, every bit as much as we expect of them.

And above all, this means applying our own compassion, critical thought, skepticism, and willingness to change in light of evidence, not just to religion, but to ourselves. We should likewise apply to our own women, and the issues affecting them, our compassion, our skilled reasoning, and our desire to improve the lot of every human being, through our own human action. Because those are the very core principles of humanism itself.

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