I titled my last post Shermertron the Bigot: Polyamory as the New Reefer Madness because of how this story ends. And here is how it ends…

Being Dicks to Women

Remember delusion number three? After the Yeti’s Roar post was getting bandied about I went over there and I exposed their lies and bullshit (as you’ll see shortly). After which one of my girlfriends, unknown to me, stumbled across the thread. She had been googling the issue on her own to see how the reaction was going to my coming out, since she is contemplating coming out as poly as well, and wanted something to judge by. She discovered the Yeti post and the comments thread. I had by then left and declared that a waste of time. Because they just kept lying and ignoring everything I said. Standard troll behavior. So I didn’t even know she had weighed in there after the fact. She told me about it later.

Of course they were total dicks to her. They ignored half of what she said, lied about what she said, and then tried to convince her I raped her because we were drinking when we flirted and got to know each other and eventually fell into bed together. Because that’s exactly the same thing Shermer did. Again, of course, they are literally lying, in that they don’t really think a woman can be raped on account of inebriation, and are only pretending to believe that, in order to attack people who believe that, although in reality they are the ones promoting the very view they are attacking, by pretending to hold it and actually trollistically defending it. Bizarre.

Which is delusion number three: 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. No one at FtB has ever conflated those two facts. We have always, consistently, maintained that alcohol only equates to rape in the latter condition, not the former. And the law agrees–and years ago, in a post they claim to have read (because it criticizes their god, Michael Shermer), I discussed and cited this fact in detail to make the distinction absolutely clear. And yet still they can’t tell the difference. This means they think it’s okay to have sex with a woman who is so drunk she is incoherent and can barely walk and isn’t even sure where she is. That’s scary.

But they also were belittling of women generally. They dehumanized my girlfriends repeatedly, calling them “pussy” and “fuckbuddies” and assuming the only thing my girlfriends thought about or could talk about was sex, and that they all had STDs. Indeed they maintained the Christianized moralizing prudish position that having an STD is morally shameful. Even someone in the Slymepit had to admit, “one point that [Carrier] sort of made (but not very well), is that Christians (like Ray ‘banana man’ Comfort) add a moral layer to STDs that they don’t apply to diseases transmitted by food, mosquitoes, or aerosols.” Yeah. Funny that. Anti-feminist atheists have the same backwards values as Christians. As Ray Comfort even! Their morality is still the antiquated, 19th century flesh-taboo nonsense you would expect atheists to have shed by now, instead of trying to keep that Christian anti-sex morality alive.

Obsessed with Protecting Their Wives

One thing that kept coming up, in fact, was their sexist obsession with their wives’ moral virtue and a pearl-clutching Christianized fear of polyamory leading to broken families and abandoned children. They even assumed that the fact that some of my girlfriends are married meant those women were cheating and I was going to destroy their families. It apparently didn’t occur to them that married women can be poly, too, and have full permission from their husbands to do things like this. And their kids are just fine. My girlfriend who came into the conversation after I left was an example, and tried explaining this to them at length, but they all essentially ignored her and kept trying to insist I was breaking up families (even though, of course, they can cite not a single example of this ever happening or even being in danger of happening).

Their moral panic appears to be quite generalized: they are terrified that polyamorous men will fuck their wives without their knowing it. Which means they are wracked with a moral fear of polyamorous men. Shermertron in particular exhibited this obsession, by repeating this fear over and over again, laced with related sexist and anti-sex sentiments (these lines are collected from numerous comments in the Yeti thread):

You may also want to consider calling the cuckolds you created so those men will know to get tested and so they will have an accurate understanding of the relationship they have with their wives.

[So: Assumes my married girlfriends are cheating on their husbands and that having sex with someone not your husband gives you STDs. And that I’m not already tested and know I’m clean.]

YOUR sexual escapades led you on a beautiful journey of self-discovery in which you found a true image of yourself. Not in a mirror, but reflected in the vagina of other mens’ wives. You are not good or safe company and men shouldn’t leave their wives in a room alone with you.

[So: Terrified that I will seduce men’s wives, which incidentally denies those women have any agency or ability to make their own decisions. Assumes all my girlfriends are married. Assumes consensual sex between two people is not good or safe.]

Oh, and don’t forget that while you wrote this, you may have had stank on your fingers from a woman who wasn’t YOUR wife, but WAS someone else’s.

[So: Obsessed with the fact that some of my girlfriends are married. Assumes I don’t bathe. Assumes having the smell of a woman on you is bad.]

I’m obsessed with the possibility that your sexual needs are the reason that a child or children may be suffering from the effects of being in a broken home.

[So: Admits to being obsessed with the fact that some of my girlfriends are married. Assumes polyamory breaks up families. Pearl-clutching “won’t someone think of the children!” moral-panic reasoning.]

I’m obsessed with the idea that some chump husbands out there were sitting on their marital beds, weeping their eyes out as they wondered what they did wrong. What they did to push their wives into the arms of another Carrier?

[So: Assumes that a poly woman makes her husband a chump, which presumes women are property and it is unmanly to allow her sexual freedom. Assumes I made husbands cry. Assumes a woman enjoying multiple men is a tear-inducing assault on your manhood. Assumes women are so chaste they have no sexual desires but only fuck other men to avenge not being treated right.]

You admit to fucking married women. The majority of women in your age range have children. It’s a reasonable conjecture that fucking their mother may have caused some problems in the family.

[So: Assumes polyamory destroys families. Disregards the prospect that mothers have sexual desires. More pearl-clutching concern for hypothetical children.]

Shermer’s alleged cheating means he’s probably an alleged rapist. YOUR cheating means that you are a brave polyamorous man who is brave enough to fuck women to whom you are not married and whose hypothetical children may have been wondering where Mommy is.

[So: Can’t tell the difference between cheating and rape. Disgust at the very idea of anyone being polyamorous, and thus having sex with people “to whom you are not married.” Denigrates polyamorous mothers as hurting their childrens’ feelings, or indeed for even not being home all the time, perhaps one of the most sexist assumptions veiled in this discourse yet.]

I feel that the suggestion that some of Carrier’s women may have been “abandoning their families to his wiles” is a necessary one.

[So: Assumes married women can’t have permission to fool around, and that having an open sex-life entails abandoning your family.]

The repeated obsession with “fucking other men’s wives” suggests the real fear here is that his wife might abandon him and his children to cheat with me. And this terrifies and thus angers him. And in sexist fashion, if that happens, it is somehow entirely my fault, even though it would require a willing decision on his wife’s part. And this is so terrifying to him that he insists it is “necessarily” true that this has happened, with at least someone’s wife. Even though he has no evidence it ever has or is even in danger of happening. Polyamory makes the world unsafe for women. It spreads diseases and breaks up homes and ruins the lives of children. It causes rape. It’s Reefer Madness all over again.

Of course, Shermertron doesn’t even consider the possibility that sometimes maybe this feared breaking up of families should happen. If his wife wants to have sex with other men so much that she would actually cheat on him with me, and he doesn’t like that, then maybe they shouldn’t be married. And maybe trying to manipulate her environment (by keeping us from ever meeting or being away from his monitoring eye) in order to keep her chaste, is sexist and controlling. But thinking that would just get you to the even scarier prospect of realizing that maybe our current model of monogamy is a Christian, fear-based, moralistic invention that reduces women to sexual and reproductive property and denies they even have desires much less the capacity to make decisions for themselves.

This Christianized, sexist attitude toward women is reflected again in their repeated demeaning and devaluing of housework, traditionally “women’s work.” They desperately need me to have screwed over my wife somehow (even though there is no evidence of our separation being anything other than entirely, financially equitable), because they can’t abide the thought that I carried through with a divorce ethically and with concern for my partner’s rights and welfare and earnings. That bursts the bubble of their mythical universe. Polyamory can only destroy families. It can’t be a good thing.

When my wife and I divided assets and took into account all I had relied on from her, and all she had relied on from me, over our twenty years of marriage, she got the bulk of assets (including a house and the car), and reckoned into the math was the fact that she had relied entirely on me for all housework and domestic duties for nearly all of that time. Not being a sexist pig, she did not devalue the work of a homemaker. Shermertron and gang made fun of this, belittling the job of a homemaker repeatedly, and arguing it had no financial value, even with such absurd arguments like how hard can it be to refill the soap dispenser once a week, or occasionally boil an egg.

This idea that that’s all that women do when they stay at home to manage a house is a common manifestation of sexism. That I was taking the role of the woman thus allowed them to extend that sexism as a tool to belittle me. Much the same way calling a man a pussy is demeaning toward women, and reflects a sexist attitude, because it assumes the worst thing a man can be is a woman. Evidently, here, the worst thing a man can be is a full-time live-in maid, pet sitter, personal chef, personal shopper, and driver, as well as amateur carpenter, landscaper, plumber, and electrician. All of which, being women’s work, has no financial value.

These are the sexist fools we are dealing with here.

The Lie

But as disgusting and backwards as all this is, the thing that most damns them as morally bankrupt, is their use of deliberate lies as a foundation for their mythology. The Yeti post declares and waxes at length on the claim that:

Given these statements by Carrier [in his coming out post], one would assume that Carrier would have no problem with a speaker who went to conferences and picked up women, even if that speaker was married. However, that is not the case at all.

That is a lie.

That I “have [and have had] no problem” with that not only is the case. It is explicitly the case, and consistently has been. On the public record even. How do they create an entire rambling article about how I said exactly the opposite of what I actually said? By using the standard tactic of Young Earth Creationists: the deliberate quote mine. Yeti quotes a paragraph by me (from my post analyzing the Shermer rape claim) and then omits the very next paragraph which refutes everything he then says and speculates about what I meant by the first paragraph. Which means Yeti knew I said exactly the opposite of what he then at length claims and speculates on. And he deliberately concealed it from his readers, in order to maintain the illusion that I said the reverse of what I actually said.

This is despicable. It is one of the most despicable things anyone can do in public discourse. Because it betrays a complete and utter contempt for the truth when disseminating information to and attempting to persuade the people. Indeed it demonstrates a readiness to deceive and manipulate the public. Just like Creationists. This is what atheists have reduced themselves to. Lying, sexist, and sex-phobic quasi-Creationists.

This is what Yeti quotes me saying about Shermer:

[Given things others have said online (revisit the timeline), it’s possible] Shermer has a habit of getting women drunk and having sex with them (or trying to). Several people online claim to have witnessed his skirt-chasing in general (even propositioning a married woman while her husband was elsewhere in the same room) and evidence of his propensity to have multiple simultaneous ongoing affairs (some of which one source claims his wife eventually became aware and was looking online for others…I don’t know if Shermer and his wife are still married). I’ve been hearing other rumors like this for years, so this isn’t a suddenly new thing. It’s just spilling out into public now.

You can review all there is and draw your own conclusion. This is only my own judgment. But the preponderance of evidence (a civil court burden, whereby a claim need only have a better than 50% chance of being true, so even just a 50.1% chance of being true would win a case) is enough for me to conclude that the general picture is probably true: Shermer pursues sex with women a lot, both one-night stands and ongoing affairs, and he has often enough done so without telling his wife or his various girlfriends. His recent attempt to compel PZ Myers to retract his report of what a witness told him appeared to deny even this (that Shermer has lots of consensual trysts and affairs), which I think is disingenuous at this point.

Note that the bracketed material in bold, Yeti omitted. That’s already deceitful (because it erases my epistemic caution, and my evidence). But it’s not the lie.

Yeti claims this was my calculation and thus my argument for Shermer being a rapist. It is not. It was my calculation and thus my argument for the conclusion that Shermer pursues women a lot, and has cheated (thus challenging Shermer’s implied claim that he did not). I never used this as a premise anywhere in the case for his possibly having raped someone. How can one be sure? Because this is what I said in the very next paragraphs (emphasis now added):

If that were all there were to this story, I would not be troubled by it. Consensual sex, even cheating, is not anyone’s doom. What one does sexually does not (contrary to pop politico psychology) indicate a general dishonesty or unreliability in other matters, or entail you’re a bad person, or make you unlikable or untrustworthy. Or dangerous. Or disgusting. Or any negative stereotype attached to expressions of human sexuality, even the sneaky kind. (This has nothing to do with opposing sex.)

What troubles me (and ought to trouble you) are the elements of victimization, exploitation, and insensitivity that are bubbling to the surface in some of the accounts of Shermer’s behavior.

Because I also believe the preponderance of evidence is sufficient to conclude Shermer probably has crossed moral lines. I have seen enough evidence to establish, in my own mind, at least a 50.1% chance that Shermer has not just cheated or fooled around, but has left a wake of victimized women in his path, that he has not conducted himself morally, and that he is probably not good or safe company (especially for women).

Notice how this, even though it immediately follows the paragraph Yeti quoted, completely refutes everything Yeti claims I argued in this article about Shermer. He dishonestly uses the preceding paragraph as evidence I concluded Shermer was a rapist merely because he fooled around, and that fooling around was bad and makes someone “probably not good or safe company.” When in fact I explicitly denied his fooling around weighed at all in favor of his being a rapist, and explicitly agreed that fooling around was good, and not a danger to anyone.

And now, remember Shermertron’s use of the same phrase “not good or safe company” against me? Because these guys can’t tell the difference between ethical and unethical fooling around? This proves he actually read that part of my article, the part he and his colleagues are otherwise ignoring, so they can continue to maintain I said exactly the opposite of what it said. That makes them liars. End of story.

The bizarre thing is that I have always argued in detail and clearly for the position that they actually hold: that fooling around is perfectly okay and does not make anyone unsafe and does not make anyone a rapist. Yet they hate and attack me for saying the exact opposite of that, even though they know I said exactly the reverse. This is so illogical it simply cannot be fathomed. This is delusion number four. They can’t tell the difference between advocating for ethical sexuality and being against all sex. They can’t tell the difference between fooling around and rape.

And that’s scary.

Hypocrisy and Moral Failure Are Not the Same Thing

Remember the myth repeated by JohnGreg? The one that I asked him to adduce evidence of, and he couldn’t, but had to cite this Creationist-style lie by Yeti instead?

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!

Notice how my actual statements in the Shermer article directly refute this alleged sequence of events. Not only could JohnGreg not find evidence of our saying such a silly thing, the evidence shows we have said exactly the opposite of it.

Yeti’s article claims to adduce evidence of my hypocrisy. Of the sort JohnGreg took away. But they couldn’t find any evidence of that. So Yeti fabricated it. He invented the myth that I said what JohnGreg claims. When the fact is, I said exactly the opposite of what JohnGreg claims. Like I said from the start, these guys have very little contact with reality. They live in a bubble of self-fabricated mythology.

Caught in a lie, they continued to try and reassert the lie (just ignoring that they were caught, by ignoring everything I said and documented), but they also tried laying the groundwork for weaseling out of the lie by trying to somehow find some other way to get me to be a hypocrite in their system of mythology, like a Christian trying to explain away a difficult passage of the Bible by spinning yarns about it. Their new tack was to say that I’m a hypocrite because I advocate for ethical behavior, but failed at a common ethical problem (years ago I cheated on my wife, then confessed and apologized to her).

But moral failure is not hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is when you judge someone else by a different standard than you live by. And in this case, I have consistently judged kindly and sympathetically anyone who has fallen into infidelity (as has Dawkins, even more ardently than I have, as I noted in my prequel post). I did so even in the paragraph in the Shermer article that Yeti deceitfully omitted and failed to tell his readers about. I did so even in several other places Yeti actually did quote! (So, he destroyed their new tack before they even resorted to it…so short is their memory, evidently, that they didn’t even notice Yeti had already refuted the argument they were now trying to make.)

They are the ones acting like Christian moralists and obsessing over the evils of infidelity. While ignoring evidence of the infidelities of Shermer and Dawkins. They then attack me for moralizing and obsessing over the evils of infidelity and the threats to women’s comfort and safety caused by any sexual freedom whatever, when in fact I never have done that, but have always denounced such reasoning. Which means they hate me for being not who I am but for being who they are. In other words, they despise themselves. And don’t even realize it. They denigrate and moralize about adultery and liberal sexuality, while attacking me for denigrating and moralizing about adultery and liberal sexuality. Which I have never done. Head spinning. Big time.

Oh, wait. Remember that definition of hypocrisy? Who is the hypocrite in this scenario?

Right.

Sex Phobia

Old movie poster for The Devil's Harvest, and anti-drugs film, showing a devil embracing a sluitty girl with a joint in her mouth, with slogans like The Smoke of Hell, a vicious racket with its arms around your children, sin, degradation, vice, insanity, debauchery, the truth about marijuana.There is something odd about people like these, who get blindingly emotionally outraged that someone would demonize sex (never mind getting blindingly emotionally outraged that someone would demonize sex who never in fact demonized sex), while expressing some of the most derogatory and phobic remarks about sex. Yeti and Shermertron both expressed very sex negative attitudes, talking about stank fingers and diseases and fuckbudies and pussy and “playa’s,” all in the exact same tone and context as a Baptist minister’s Young Republican wigga son. Yeti in particular rants in a prudish way, revealing weird hang ups about sex. He bristles at any healthy talk about sex, sex work, gangbangs, swinging, the phenomena of porn. He regards all such discussion of sex to be creepy and bizarre. Which makes one wonder why he is so concerned that I am anti-sex (even though I’m not). He is more anti-sex than he imagines me to be.

In an article awhile ago I clearly explained the fact that women who get awful harassment for appearing in erotic art while I (a man) do not is evidence of a disturbing sexism in our culture that must be fought against, a sex-negativity and slut-shaming that is particularly anti-woman and thus also sexist (and which incidentally decreases the rate of open sexuality among women by scaring them into not being open, thus having exactly the opposite effect these creeps actually want). Yet they didn’t get that at all. They somehow read it as me “lamenting” not getting harassed for appearing in erotic art. WTF? The disturbing way they read an article, miss entirely the point that was clearly and explicitly articulated in it, and somehow come away with thinking I wanted to be harassed for appearing in erotic art and was complaining about that, is evidence again of a disturbing and twiseted sex-phobia. They can only see sex. And they don’t like it. How people are treated? They couldn’t give a shit.

They also showed a repeated concern with how many girlfriends I have, and how honestly and openly I speak about my sex and romantic life. They are evidently bothered by all that. They showed a further disturbing prudery in the way they talked about and imagined my lovers. When I said in my coming out post that I give permission to my lovers to talk about our relationship freely if they wished, these fools assumed (because no other possibility crossed their mind–take note) that I was asking my lovers to boast about my sexual prowess. This expresses sex-phobia twice over: first, by showing they have a disturbing problem with even the idea of a woman wanting to talk honestly about their lover’s sexual prowess (indeed they have a weird obsession with my sexual prowess), or with women talking publicly about their lovers in any way at all, but on top of that, their sex-phobia is evident in these remarks by exposing their inability to tell the difference between talking about your relationship with someone, and talking about how you have sex with them. They weirdly (and repeatedly) just assumed those are the same thing. Which is not a little disturbing. Because it suggests they don’t know what a relationship is. Apparently it’s all just fucking to them. I worry for their mates.

Indeed, so incapable of realizing this were they, that when I pointed it out, they actually came back with “what is the point of inviting your lovers to come forward in the first place?” (other than to give reports of my sexual prowess). So they were very, very clear: they cannot even conceive of a relationship being anything other than a collection of sex positions. Consequently they can’t even imagine what else my lovers would want to talk about. Or that being open just about the fact of being in a relationship with me might be something they would want and like. Or that they might want to talk about how I treated them. Or why they like me. Or don’t like me. Or both. These things, actual human relationship things, things that require you to imagine women are people and not fucktoys, those things they can’t even imagine. All of this reveals that these guys have a hard time seeing women as people, with their own thoughts and feelings and desires and lives and relationships they’d like to talk about. I suppose I should not be surprised to discover this of anti-feminists, but to see it so blatantly revealed like this was a bit jarring.

Both these disturbing attitudes were evident in their repeated inability to tell the difference between ethical and non-ethical sexuality. They say polyamory is about fucking women without consequence (it’s not). They say they can’t understand why someone would be okay with “orgies and BDSM parties” and still be “all that concerned about women being made uncomfortable by sexual advances or behavior.” That someone doesn’t know why those two facts are compatible, tells me they don’t know what consent means. Being into BDSM or being promiscuous does not grant anyone license to harass you or make you uncomfortable or assume you are always down for sex. What is disturbing is that they don’t know that. And still don’t, no matter how many times you try to explain it to them.

They think “telling men to stop being rapey and creepy around women while cheating and banging under the false pretense of infidelity” is hypocrisy because they literally don’t know what the difference is. And it’s not that they think cheating is rapey and creepy. It’s because they think nothing is rapey and creepy. So when we call out and denounce rapey and creepy behavior, they hear us calling out and denouncing all sex whatever. Which is disturbing. Because it means they don’t know what’s rapey and creepy. They think no sexual advances or sexual activities are to be denounced at all. This is why they think what I do is “exactly the same” as what I criticized Shermer for. Because they literally can’t perceive the difference. And yes, that should scare people.

And yet, they contradict themselves in their pose. While they supposedly despise someone who would criticize Shermer’s sexual behavior, they actually reveal that they despise Shermer’s sexual behavior, precisely because they despise it when they project it onto me. As one of them cluelessly said, “You don’t think that parading around like a peacock and pointing out the notches on your bedposts contributes to the atmosphere you condemn?” No. I don’t. Because as I have consistently said for years (Yeti even quotes my sex positive article demonstrating this): abundant and healthy sex lives for everyone, even at cons (as American Atheists said, they want people to have sex at their conferences!) is not what we have ever been against or would ever be against. We have always said, in fact, that having such a community makes us more welcoming, not less, and more respecting of women’s autonomy, not less. But because they can’t tell the difference between that, and harassment and abuse and mistreatment and violating consent, they condemn all sexual behavior I engage in as bad. Which means they condemn all sexual behavior Shermer engages in as bad. And then they attack us for saying it’s bad.

Seriously.

It’s like they aren’t even listening to themselves. Because the people they are attacking, the people who actually express the sex-negative views they are attacking, are themselves.

Their sex-negativity is revealed in a hundred little sex-denigrating turns of phrase, like calling polyamory peacocking, and referring to sexual relationships as notching bedposts, and saying things to me like, “You didn’t apologize for contributing to the atmosphere that you’ve been fighting (that atheist conferences shouldn’t be perceived as misogynist fucksuckfests).” Look at their vocabulary. Consensual and positive sexuality is a “fucksuckfest.” And misogynistic. And supporting consensual and positive sexuality is something we should apologize for.

Wait. Weren’t they asking us to apologize for not supporting consensual and positive sexuality? Oh, yeah. That too. Because they don’t know how self-contradictory their rants are. Outside the myth-bubble they live in, out here in contact with actual reality, I have nothing to publicly apologize for. I’ve been entirely consistent in expressing my sexual values, and I have always endorsed the consensual and positive sexuality these weirdos claim to want so badly that they hate us for opposing it even though we didn’t.

Thus they do wholly self-contradictory things like denigrate human sexuality with expressions of disgust, complaining about my supposedly having “stank on [my] fingers” from consensual sex while typing out articles against nonconsensual sex. They offer that as an example of hypocrisy. Because, again, they actually think, literally actually think, that there is no difference between consensual sex and nonconsensual sex. Otherwise, why would they perceive any hypocrisy? How they can be simultaneously so sex-phobic and so denigrating of human sexuality, and at the same time hate people so much for being (they think) sex-phobic and denigrating of human sexuality, is mind boggling. But that they can’t even perceive a difference between consensual and nonconsensual sex, or between flirting and harassment, or between being poly and being rapey, is not just mind boggling, it’s legit scary.

Conclusion

Since Shermertron, Yeti, and their associates have demonstrated themselves to be unrepentant sexists, liars, and bigots who belittle human sexuality and were total dicks to my girlfriends, I will not be reading anything they write ever again. I consider the evidence documented in these two posts sufficient to prove you can’t trust a word they say. To anyone who encounters them attempting to talk shit in their Twitter feed, treat them as the dishonest trolls they are. Likewise the inevitable sockpuppets they will invent to try and shake the bad rep they now have as liars and bigots. Anytime you see anything like this bullshit, you know where it’s coming from. And, now, where to direct people to who want to know WTF (that link contains the shortlink to the first of these two posts, for use on twitter; and that first article links in turn to this one).

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