Famous scene screencap from the 1936 film Reefer Madness in which a snearing dope dealer takes a puff in a lounge chair.Lock up your wives and daughters. Polyamorous men are going to seduce them! That’s the new panic emanating from atheist anti-feminists. Along with horror at Bacchic orgies at atheist conferences, and a denigration of sexual liberation as the scourge of society and a sure sign of the decline of public morality. Christian reactionaries? Nope. This is coming from atheists. Seriously.

Anti-feminist atheists are rarely logical and always fact challenged. They live in a bubble of impenetrable mythologies like moon landing deniers and people who vote for Ted Cruz. So none of their reaction to my coming out as polyamorous ought to be surprising. But since one of them is making a lame attempt at harassing my employers, it’s time to document and make fun of it.

The featured villain of the day is some guy (?) who goes by the charming moniker Shermertron. It would be truly awesome if that was actually Michael Shermer but reality is never that sweet. I’m assuming it’s an obsessive Shermer fan. He writes a vile blog called Orwellian Garbage, which is basically just a bunch of illogical rants about me and PZ Myers that rarely contacts reality. His silly & sad sidekick goes by the moniker Yeti’s Roar who does basically the same thing on his own blog (I suppose they could be the same person).

Shermertron and his associates suffer from the following delusions:

  • They can’t tell the difference between sexual harassment and consensual flirting.
  • They can’t tell the difference between appropriate and inappropriate ways of pursuing intimacy with someone.
  • They can’t tell the difference between being pleasantly drunk but still in possession of your faculties (and thus fully able to consent when asked) and being so drunk as to not even comprehend what is happening or where exactly you are.
  • They can’t tell the difference between advocating for ethical sexuality and being against all sex.

They are also liars.

If you want the full skinny, then sit down, secure your safety belt and hang on for the ride…

Trying to Get Me Fired (or Something)

Old 1920's era poster against drugs, with slutty girls getting shot up by dapper dans and ending up all sad and half naked about it, filled with slogans like daring drug exposure, shame, horror, despair, weed with roots in hell, misery, not recommended for children, smoke that gets in youth's eyes, what happens at marijuana parties, lust, crime, sorrow, hate, shame, despair, weird orgies, wild parties, unleashed passions.Since I’ve appeared on a few of their episodes the hosts of the always entertaining MABOOM Show threw a public party featuring me as a guest of honor to draw interest in local atheist community in San Diego. And just have fun. Over forty people attended. I circulated as best I could. It was a blast. In the midst of which one of the hosts of the show, Sean Taylor, mentioned laughingly that someone was trying to insist on Twitter that I’d promised to sign a chastity oath, and for failing to do so I was a danger to any women at the event (I immediately wanted to warn my girlfriend she was in danger, but she was happily conversing with someone else at the time). He was perplexed at such a bizarre non sequitur. And overjoyed at having schooled the douche.

Their exchange went like this (I’m transcribing the text; you can see the Twitter thread in situ here):

MABOOM: Join us at this free Meetup in San Diego with Dr. Richard Carrier. Check it out and RSVP!

Shermertron: Careful. To my knowledge, Dr. Richard Carrier has not yet pledged not to use his speaker power.

At which he links to this bizarre website without explanation.

In that link he claims “we” at “#FTBULLIES” (yes, he’s one of those) have said only monsters would have sex with anyone at conferences and that such behavior should be banned and therefore we should take a chastity oath, one that I guess Shermertron wrote, although he implies it is the “PZ Myers” pledge, as if it was something PZ once said or wrote. It isn’t remotely anything close to anything PZ has ever said or wrote or even remotely proposed. Like I said, this guy has very little contact with reality.

Anyway, one has to infer after reading that weird rant that by my “speaker power” in his tweet he means some Dracula-like ability that being a speaker gives you to subvert the wills of hapless women and steal their virtue. Which we must therefore take an oath never to use. Never to use a power we don’t have. I know, it doesn’t make sense.

It makes even less sense when you continue. Because, take note: Shermertron is actually against such pledges. He’s trying to mock them. He hates us because he believes we proposed them, except we didn’t, whereas everything Shermertron ever says is anti-sex, evidently lying to event organizers under the false guise of being concerned about people having sex, because he wants to oppose our trying to stop people having sex, which we’ve never done, and thus there is nothing for him to actually stop, except all the sex he is actually telling event organizers to stop. If you are confused at this point, you have my sympathies.

Anyway, MABOOM had his number and outsmarted him right out of the gate. He didn’t let Shermertron troll his way out of looking like a confused fool…

MABOOM: I’m confused, why would one make a chastity vow under all circumstances? Also why do I need to be careful of others doing same?

Shermertron: The organizers have a responsibility to protect attendees. Zvan and McCreight (carrier’s friends) want harassment free events.

MABOOM: Sorry, but I still don’t understand. Not harassing people is very different from being chaste, right?

Shermertron: “Being chaste” is different from considering attendees your personal hunting grounds.

MABOOM: I still don’t follow. A vow of chastity is not required to not consider attendees your personal hunting ground. If 2 are free, open & interested in being intimate with one another; happen to be at a conference; they’ve now broken a vow?

Shermertron: Have you missed the past four years in the community? You’re talking about normal human behavior. Unacceptable to FTB/A+.

MABOOM: You misunderstand me entirely. I do not approve in any way of harassment and am aware that it exists.

Shermertron: Do you currently have a harassment/speaker diversity/transgender inclusion policy for your events?

MABOOM: Yes. It simply does not include a vow of chastity for all under all circumstances and I don’t think it should.

Shermertron: I understand you; we agree. Consenting adults sometimes have sex. I’m just annoyed that Carrier and his friends have split the community and have accused others of rape for doing the EXACT SAME THINGS THEY HAVE DONE AND CONTINUE TO DO.

At which point it was obvious this was a delusional troll so MABOOM gave up.

Notice Shermertron broke the fourth wall eventually and admitted he isn’t actually concerned about me preying on women, that he actually thinks my hitting on girls at events is “normal human behavior” that is totally okay because he “agrees” that “consenting adults sometimes have sex.” So his feigning concern earlier is lying. He was falsely representing himself as concerned, in the hopes I suppose of drumming up concern from anti-sex community members, thus using the very people he despises (who “annoy” him) to make trouble for me. Fortunately those people generally don’t exist. Just tinfoil hatters like him.

The real tell here is that he is doing this (lying, harassing my employers, and making trouble for people who are doing what he actually thinks they should be allowed to do and not be harassed for) all for no other reason than that he is “annoyed” (Shermertron is a very emotional person, you see, who lets his emotions overrun his reason). And get this. What is he annoyed at so much that drives him to act in this deceitful, illogical, self-defeating way? His belief that I “have accused others of rape for doing the exact same things” I have done and continue to do. Which is as false a belief as that the moon landings were faked. I have never done any such thing. I have been excruciatingly clear in specifying the difference between acceptable sexual pursuits and actual or even approximate rape. In other words, I have been an explicit and public advocate for exactly the position Shermertron favors. Boggle. Mind.

Trying to Get Me Fired Again (or Something)

Shermertron tried this tactic again, trolling the event organizers for the David Smalley appearance in San Jose this week, where I will also be, doing a stint on his show and tabling (selling my books). I’m told he also trolled Smalley on this, but I don’t have the feeds for that so I don’t know how that went down. But in the case of trolling the event leaders directly, once again Shermertron’s bizarre tactic is to use lying: pretending to be concerned about any and all sex as sexual predation, when in fact he was covertly, and untold to the event organizers, in favor of pursuing sex at events.

Again I’ll transcribe, but you can find the thread in situ here.

San Jose Atheists: Dogma Debate Live Show – San Jose, CA, Mar 27 at Harry’s Hofbrau. Special Guests Greta Christina and Richard Carrier.

Shermertron: In light of Carrier’s history, do you have a policy regarding speaker/attendee sex?

This time linking to the Yeti’s Roar rant against me, which is essentially an updated Reefer Madness, substituting polyamory for marijuana. It’s full of bizarre prudery, sexism, bigotry, and one shameless Creationist-Style quote-mining lie that gets right to the heart of Shermertron’s delusion. You can read about that in my sequel. But back to the San Jose thread…

Richard Sanderson: We need to know if the venue is a “safe space” for women who don’t want skirt-chasers (Carrier) around them.

Shermertron: Women have the right to attend a debate without feeling like prey.

The buzzwords both men are using here are hallmarks for the trolling of feminists and feminist causes, trying to co-opt legitimate uses of terms like “safe space” and “prey” and “right” in wholly weird ways that give away the fact that these are actually anti-feminists who despise such concepts and are pretending to care about them so as to…I guess, stir up trouble for me? It’s not clear what, in their delusion, they actually think coming across as total knob-headed trolls would accomplish. But then, again, like I said, no contact with reality. The event organizers told me they just ignore shit like this, and pegged their tweets as harassing bullshit right away.

Briefly Back to the Delusion Part of the Story

In case you are wondering, Shermertron has exposed his real views before, e.g. in a comment he left at WWJTD:

The atheist movement is simply not a tenable proposition if skeptic conventions and atheist orgs keep turning into radical inequality feminist gatherings and anyone who doesn’t adhere to strict, moving target SJW dogmas is labeled a sexist rapist harasser by those in the “bubble.”

So. Radical inequality feminists (that’s a contradiction in terms, BTW, but I don’t expect an anti-feminist to know what radical feminism actually is) combined with somehow simultaneously strict and changing (!?) SJW dogmas. And anyone who does not kowtow to those two fringe bizarre things (or does he, like most anti-feminists, just mean all feminism and all concern for social justice and the welfare and dignity of others is cramping their style?) will be “labeled a sexist rapist harasser.” Oh no, not just labeled an asshole. But labeled an actual rapist.

It seems like Shermertron doesn’t even recognize a difference between being called a sexist and being called a rapist or a harasser. But the wildest component to his delusion is that he evidently thinks no one is a rapist or a harasser or a sexist. There are only righteous people like him who merely call feminists out on their supposed shit, that’s all, and they are the only ones being called harassers and sexists and rapists. Because, oh no, there’s no actual evidence of real harassment, or real sexism, or both at the same time, or even real misogyny, or even possibly real rape in our community.

This is notable, because Shermertron later repeated a common mytheme in the anti-feminist atheosphere: that I have been “telling people like [him] who rejected Atheism Plus that we were subhuman CHUDS who hate women.” Like they do with Elevatorgate (see Know Your Meme and RationalWiki), everything he just said is false. I only used the word CHUD (from an infamously bad 80s movie of that title, Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers) to describe atheists who sexually harass prominent atheist speakers by sending them rape threats and revolting pornographic cartoons of them, and atheists who joke about anally raping a teenaged girl on her own Reddit thread. So unless Shermertron is one of those guys (and has sent vile harassing shit to women or jokes about raping their underage daughter right in front of her, or is totally cool with guys who do those things), he cannot claim I was calling him a CHUD. Of course, maybe he actually is one of those guys? In which case, he’s a CHUD.

That I called “everyone” who didn’t like what Atheism Plus was about a CHUD I hear a lot. It’s part of the complex of lies anti-feminists have woven to try and stir up moral panic in the less informed ranks of our community. In reality (as in, not in their bubble of mythology), I said Atheism Plus was about kicking those guys to the curb and denouncing them (even as CHUDS), those guys meaning the ones sending disgusting porn to harass prominent speakers or joking about raping young atheists. And if you really don’t think that’s the right side of history, you are a truly disturbed person.

Okay, Now to Their Stalking Feminists in Atheism

Okay. So next episode. Apparently, in the chatroom during an Atheist Analysis podcast for International Women’s Day, a guest representing Camp Quest, during a discussion about definitions of feminism, posted in the chat a link to a transcript of my feminism talk at HCCO as a good resource. At which (according to a witness in the chatroom) someone lurking in the chat said something like, “You mean the Richard Carrier who cheated on his wife and then left her because he got bored. That Richard Carrier?” The language sounds a lot like Shermertron, or the Yeti, or one of their gang. Everyone ignored them. But it’s typical slut shaming from their gang: pretending to be indignantly anti-sex in some sort of illogical campaign to wage war against the very anti-sex hobgoblins they are pretending to be.

Of course, they are inventing a mythology. I didn’t leave my wife. I was glad to stay as long as she wanted. Our decision to separate was mutual. And boredom wasn’t the issue between us. They simply fabricated those narratives, because it’s the most sex-negative way possible to. Indeed, they curiously left out the part where my wife and I had an open marriage for two years before we decided to divorce. Because that would burst the bubble of the mythology they are trying to sell.

But the most laughable part of this encounter is that it’s what they would immediately pillory as an ad hominem fallacy the moment any Christian attempted it. But it’s totally okay for them to use irrational logical fallacies. For…some reason. I don’t know how they live with themselves doing that. But whatever.

Look at it this way. This crowd fanboys Richard Dawkins…who defended cheating. Indeed, Dawkins argued (and I am not making this up) that a man who cheats on his wife is “entitled to lie about his private life: one could even make a case that he had a positive duty to do so.” Yup. It also looks like there might be evidence he cheated on one of his wives (and I say wives, for he has had several).

Now, I say this not to judge him (I am not voicing an opinion here either way). I say this only to illustrate how ad hominem works. If Shermertron was arguing with a Christian about the definition of and description of atheism as a movement, and Shermertron pointed him to a really excellent speech by Dawkins on that point, and his Christian interlocutor came back with “You mean the Richard Dawkins who cheated on his wife and then left her because he got bored. That Richard Dawkins?,” Shermertron would mock him ruthlessly for trying to dismiss an argument by appeal to an irrelevancy: an attack on Dawkins’ character.

Who Dawkins cheated on when has no bearing whatever on the quality or value of his arguments. Yet notice how in that chatroom this mysterious troll didn’t mention a single argument against anything I said in my speech for the HCCO, or against the merits or aptitude or correctness or value of any of it. His only rebuttal to dismiss it all was “he followed the explicit teachings of Richard Dawkins on covert infidelity, therefore his speech is poopy.” Do the math on that.

In reality, of course, as I explained in my public confession, the discomfort of my living dishonestly is precisely what led to opening our marriage and eventually separating. I wanted nothing more than to be able to live honestly. My wife gave me that. So now I do. And it’s quite a relief that I shall never have to lie about anything serious again (unless I have to misdirect a villain from his prey or win at poker, or anything else everyone agrees is morally acceptable).

Dangerous Delusions One and Two

All of which gets us to their bizarre Reefer Madness panic at the existence of polyamorous men in atheism. It began with a commenter named JohnGregg on my coming out blog post. He responded to my article with this little bit of patented Shermertronic delusion:

This is fun.

FTB/SJW person says: I can’t do monogamy and be happy, so I am going to have multiple girlfriends.

FTB/SJW people response: Yay! Way-to-go brave omnisexual! Stand up for social justice and the freedom to be free! No more oppression from the patriarchy!

Non-FTB/SJW person says: I can’t do monogamy and be happy, so I am going to have multiple girlfriends.

FTB/SJW people response: Boo! Not the way-to-go cowardly serial womanizer! CHUD and killer of social justice; muli-oppressor freedom killer! Patriarchy oppresses us all yet again!

Wheeee!

I asked for evidence of the second sequence of events. Because I know none of us have ever said anything even remotely like that. So, in point of fact, he was lying. All to prop up a Shermertronic delusion that we did say that stuff. Christians aren’t the only ones with mythologies they cling preciously to. This is one of those atheist anti-feminist myths. Accordingly, this being, like Jesus, a myth, he never presented any evidence of it. Not a single example.

Instead it went like this…

Carrier: Where is the example of the latter sequence of events?

JohnGreg: You don’t do allusion very well do you, Doc.

Carrier: Um, no, you don’t do evidence very well.

JohnGreg: HAHAHA! Doc, your hypocrisy (and mendacity) is nothing short of monumental, spellbinding, and pathological. To wit: https://theyetisroar.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/dr-richard-carrier-phd-a-creepy-dishonest-hypocrite/

Yes, he used HAHAHA in all caps. Like a child.

Anyway.

The link he provided contained no evidence of what he had claimed: that I or indeed anyone at FTB had ever said of anyone poly or unfaithful, “Boo! Not the way-to-go cowardly serial womanizer! CHUD and killer of social justice; muli-oppressor freedom killer! Patriarchy oppresses us all yet again!” Ooops. Sorry. No one has ever done that. So much for that mythical narrative. (Though notice it is exactly the mythical narrative Shermertron tried selling in JT’s comment thread.)

The link he provided was to a barely coherent bigoted moral-panic rant by Yeti (whoever that is). It contains such Christianized moralistic sex-phobia as this:

Carrier’s and Myers’ descriptions make atheist conferences seem like a cross between a swingers convention and a Playboy Mansion party (with less photogenic people). I have never attended (nor do I plan to attend) any atheist conferences, so I have no idea if Carrier’s and Myers’ description of rampant orgies and sex parties is true.  If they are true though, wouldn’t that be a priority issue to address if they were truly concerned about making atheist conferences a more comfortable environment for women?  If this is the type of activity happening at these conferences, why were Carrier and his clique so concerned about one incident where a person asked a person at a convention to coffee in an elevator?

Uhuh. Check the boxes here.

Notice the insults to people’s appearance. An old anti-feminist standard.

Notice the inability to imagine a difference between completely ethical, consensual sex parties and an “uncomfortable environment for women.” Remember the delusion list I started with? They are incapable of comprehending the difference. They don’t know what an uncomfortable environment for women is. They think it’s anything sexual whatever. And weirdly, they simultaneously hate us for saying so (even though we didn’t, but have repeatedly and consistently said exactly the opposite) and hate us for allowing the sex parties, even though they hate us because they think we oppose them. Head spin. Irrational, overly-emotionalized, self-contradictory WTF is definitely an anti-feminist standard.

Notice, again, that he seems to seriously think a conference with access to sex parties is a threat to women. They can’t pick a lane. While claiming we are coddling women by over-protecting them, they are claiming women need protecting from the existence of private sex parties they weren’t asked to attend. Because, apparently, in their bubble-world, women don’t have volition or agency, and can’t possibly like to throw or attend sex parties, and randomly propositioning women you don’t know to go to one is totally the same thing as asking a friend whom you know wouldn’t be offended by the question (which, incidentally, was me, when I was turning those invites down before we opened our marriage). They can’t even tell the difference. But balking at feminists being irrationally over-protective of women while simultaneously actually being irrationally over-protecting of women? Another anti-feminist standard.

And then notice the icing on the cake: Elevatorgate. In movement atheism, that’s the anti-feminist’s Godwin.

How Ethical Sexuality Works (The Real Meaning of a Safe Space)

That they said such a douchebrained thing illustrates again these fools are literally incapable of comprehending what the difference is between that incident and ethical approaches to women at events. You either can’t ever approach or flirt with a woman under any circumstances whatever or in any way at all or you get to corner a woman who has no idea who you are, locking yourself in with her for a minute in an enclosed private box she can’t escape from, after midnight, in an unfamiliar country, after you just saw she was drunk and heard her say she was too tired and wanted to go to bed, and ask her to come with you, a complete stranger, alone, to your room. If you actually think that is ethical, you need to re-examine your worldview. If you actually think there isn’t a more ethical way to flirt with and eventually make a pass at a woman, you really need to re-examine your worldview, because it’s fucked.

And this makes these guys dangerous. Because if they don’t know what unethical propositioning is, if they think that kind of shit is ethical propositioning, then they are the ones posing a danger to women at events. Meanwhile, those of us who actually can tell the difference and actually do care about behaving ethically, we don’t pull shit like that. We get to know someone first. Check. We walk the flirtation ladder first. Check. We confirm a “go” before every escalation on that ladder. Check. And by that point we’ve either hit a “stop” and stop (sorry, boys, you don’t get to hit on her, she doesn’t want you to–that’s how consent works), or we’ve gotten to the point that asking is approved (because we’ve made sure she’s in a comfortable place to say yes or no to us). Even in the worst case scenario, after all that we can accidentally slightly cross a line (not hugely, just slightly…the flirtation ladder is about ensuring every step is small, for precisely that reason) and then back up and apologize and lay off. That’s how ethical sexuality works. What happened to Rebecca Watson? That. Was. None. Of. Those. Things.

(Nor is it anything anyone classified as harassment, BTW. Conflating that account, of her only saying what made her uncomfortable, with completely unrelated discussions of harassment, is also part of anti-feminist mythology.)

If you are at an event with me, you can feel quite safe that I won’t suddenly proposition you, someone I’ve never met, in an elevator. You can feel quite safe that I won’t leisurely fondle my crotch right in front of you (as an eyewitness reports Shermer did). You can feel quite safe I’m not going to wait until your husband is distracted and then randomly pull you aside, having never spoken to you before, and ask if you want to come up to my room with me (as someone Shermer did that to has reported). You can feel quite safe that I’m not going to hide behind a potted plant all the shots of expensive liquor people are handing me right in front of you (as Shermer has himself admitted to doing) while expecting you to keep up with me. And I’m certainly not going to wait until you are incoherently blasted before walking you to my room to fuck you when you are so half-conscious you can barely walk and don’t even know precisely where you are or what has just happened (as one woman has reported Shermer did to her, and key details of her account multiple witnesses have corroborated, while Shermer has told three contradictory stories about the incident, first implying they didn’t have sex, then that he was too drunk to remember, then that he made sure he and she were both totally sober and that she inappropriately hit on him and had him consensually).

I’m not going to pressure you. I’m not going to stalk you. I’m not going to be excessively vulgar with you without asking your permission. Unless you tell me I can cut to the chase, I’m not going to proposition you without having gotten to know you, and having let you get to know me, and having tested the water in small steps of escalated flirtation, and only after I’ve met with positive go’s at every step. And even then I’ll be courteous and respectful, and ensure you are in a comfortable position to leave, refuse, stall me with a maybe (which I politely take as a no), or anything you please. Anything short of a yes, and I lay off. And a lot has to have happened between us before we even get to the point of that even being a question. Because I don’t assume every woman wants me or that the only reason to enjoy talking or even flirting with a woman is to nail her. I quite like just talking to women, as to people generally; and flirting is intrinsically fun, and does not equal consent to anything more or even a presumption of interest.

And I’ve never badmouthed anyone who did the same. To the contrary, I have publicly defended everyone who has. That’s reality. Which is the opposite of the mythology-infused bubble these anti-feminists float around in, disconnected from reality.

Intermission

I’ve only surfed through half of their delusions and it’s entirely possible most readers will be sick of these fucks by now and not really interested in seeing how bizarre and twisted it continues to get. But those who want to read on about these fools’ growing moral panic, their desperate fear I’m going to sleep with their wives (that indeed all poly men are), how they outright lie by deliberately quote mining me to make me say the exact opposite of what I said, how they say sexist and demeaning things about housework, how they slut-shame and prudishly moralize about sexually transmitted diseases (which they think everyone poly has), and how they dehumanize all my girlfriends collectively with sexist slurs and assumptions, and even treat one of my girlfriends like total dicks right to her (virtual) face, then you can read Part II of this saga: The Shermertron Denouement: Why That Ass Can Only Fart at My Hand from Here on Out.

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