I may get tired of using Pete Campbell pulling faces to illustrate my posts, but not yet. Not yet.

I remember how, just a couple of years ago, there was a lot of hand-wringing in skeptic circles over whether or not to apply rationalist thinking to religious claims, mainly because some skeptics---who were all atheists themselves, by the way---were concerned that it was impolitic not to create a giant Shall Not Touch bubble around magical claims that were deemed "religious". Well, the Reason Rally this past weekend shows that the pro-atheists basically won that debate, and the increasing racial and gender diversity of the community demonstrates that it was a good idea. No, now it turns out that there's a cow more sacred than religion, with a number of self-identified skeptics and atheists freaking out at the increasing willingness of writers and thinkers in the community to apply critical thinking skills to political claims. Apparently, you can criticize religion all you want, but to dare insist on the facts when it comes to global warming or especially the offensive claim that women are full human beings? That's where some folks are drawing the line. 

Rebecca Watson has a post up about the problem of pseudoscience proliferating on the right, and the unwillingness of the supposed warriors against pseudoscience to do anything about it. She uses her spot on The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe to, on occasion, talk about things like states forcing doctors to read scripts full of medical misinformation to women seeking abortion, and every time she does, she gets a rush of letters from dudes scolding her to keep her focus on the important issues to skeptics, such as Bigfoot and UFOs.

Now, don't get me wrong. My eyes roll like a motherfucker whenever I see an advertisement for a Bigfoot or UFO show on TV. Still, there's a top limit of how much damage some of the more apolitical pseudoscience out there can do. Skeptics like to draw attention to when homeopathy contributes to illness or people waste money on fantastical claims, and these are important issues, but they are absolutely dwarfed by the amount of pain and suffering that misinformation about reproductive health causes. I rail against anti-vaccination idiots all the time, but even in the worst case scenarios---measles outbreaks, etc.---the cost in money and human suffering from the misinformation is really limited next to the cost in money and suffering from political pressures to force women to bear children they don't want. And that's just in the U.S. In other countries, where misinformation about abortion and contraception have even more influence on the law, maternal mortality rates are sky-high because of unwanted child-bearing and illegal abortion. I don't even want to talk about how much of the AIDS crisis stems from political concerns that these idiot so-called skeptics want to believe are hands-off. Without taboos around sex, homophobia, misogyny, and religious groups spreading misinformation about the effectiveness of condoms, we'd be looking at a much lower transmission rate worldwide than we're seeing now. 

Interestingly, one political issue tends to get widespread support in the skeptic community across partisan lines, and that's regarding evolutionary theory. Everyone is for it, and everyone thinks that religious claptrap denying it should be taken out of schools. I will bet you a lot of money that Rebecca doesn't get nasty emails about not getting political when the topic comes up on Skeptic's Guide. This, even though the opposition to evolutionary theory and the opposition to abortion rights are the same group of people, nearly exactly. I support this political activism against creationism, obviously. But let's not pretend it's not political. It stems from the same theocratic impulse as does the opposition to abortion rights, and frankly I see them as very similar issues.

But while I support activism around the evolution vs. creationism debate, I have to point out that the global warming issue is far larger and more immediate of a problem. If we can't get to a point where science trumps political bullshit on global warming, THE EARTH IS DOOMED. Okay, perhaps not completely doomed, but seriously fucked. We're already irreversibly fucked in many ways on this, but if we continue to treat it like a weird side issue, we're going to be fucked in all sorts of amazingly novel ways. I suspect a lot of global warming denialists don't really believe their own bullshit; they just figure they'll be dead before it's time to pay the piper. They may be right, though there's reason to believe the effects are coming faster than scientists previously thought, so their gamble may not be paying off. Either way, the utter lack of compassion for the rest of humanity is galling. Skeptics who refuse to discuss this issue because it's "political"---even though they happily dive into other political issues like creationism---are being cowards and babies. 

Sebastian at Obsidian Wings wrote a post that probably got lost in the holiday shuffle, but it's something incredibly serious, which is the use of drug dogs as nothing more but an excuse to turn illegal searches into legal ones. Turns out the dogs are probably not sniffing drugs so much as they're reacting to their master's subconscious signals that they want to search Person X. This is an important issue for everyone, but skeptics especially need to be on this, because it's really ovious what's going on here, which is that drug dogs are a modern update of the Clever Hans problem. 

Clever Hans (in German, der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.

After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.[1] In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition.

Sebastian recounts research showing that dogs' tendency to signal has more to do with what the cop is thinking than what the dog is smelling. Anyone who knows dogs should have guessed this one; dogs are basically human-obsessed machines who watch their humans super carefully and try very hard to please them. Of course drug dogs are more worried about pleasing master than producing good results. The real world results are predictable, but no less upsetting for it:

A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time. 

You can read about it at the Chicago Tribune.  The cops are pulling the "well, they're guilty of something" bullshit, saying the dogs are smelling drugs that used to be there. Maybe. But again, I point to the well-documented Clever Hans effect and suggest that it's something else entirely, which is that the dogs are picking up on the officers' prejudices and acting accordingly. 

Obviously, the ultimate goal here is to call off the War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, which is run on magic and bigotry, and does more to destroy communities than to prevent drug addiction. But in the more immediate future, we must demand an immediate end to all use of drug dogs, certainly until it can be demonstrated in double blind studies run by experts that the dogs are detecting drugs and not reacting to subconscious signals sent by police. Since I highly doubt that can be demonstrated, basically I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices. 

Tried to use holiday downtime to plow through some books I've had stacking up, and was successful, though perhaps not as successful as I'd have liked to me. But one book struck me as of being of particular interest to the Pandagon crowd: Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case by Debbie Nathan. For those who don't think that there's a meaningful intersection between feminism and skepticism, I challenge them to read this amazing recounting of how three women, each in the grips of self-delusions caused by needs that Nathan definitely demonstrates were created by the constraints sexist culture puts on women, managed to hoodwink themselves, Hollywood, the publishing industry, the psychiatric establishment, and the entire country into believing that a small town Midwestern girl with a stubborn and baffling set of symptoms (mostly physical at first!) had actually suffered constant rape and other forms of abuse at the hands of her mother, and developed multiple personalities to cope. This story, in turn, created an epidemic of "multiple personality disorder" cases and other claims of repressed memories of child sex abuse that frequently couldn't have happened. Lives were ruined. You have the people (mostly women) who ended up in the hands of the wrong therapists and, instead of getting proper treatment for conditions like biopolar disorder, depression or schizophrenia, got worse as they kept inventing new personalities to inhabit and going further down the rabbit hole of mental illness. You had people thrown in jail, often with multiple life sentences, for crimes they simply couldn't have committed on the testimony generated by people who had been provoked in various ways to fantasize and then believe their fantasies had actually happened. And it all started with this one book and three women who, if they'd grown up in a better, more feminist world, probably wouldn't have been so damn messed up.

Nathan turns out to be the best possible candidate to write the expose of how the case of "Sybil" was generated through a series of self-delusions and outright fraud. Nathan brings a thorough understanding of feminism and its complicated history to this book, which means that she manages to achieve the delicate balancing act by both holding feminists who perpetuated the hysteria over "repressed memories" and "multiple personality disorder" responsible for what they did, but also applying a sympathetic, feminist analysis to the various pressures on women in the 20th century that led to this hysteria. (I'm using "hysteria" in the group sense, as a society-wide panic over nonsense, instead of as the sexist label attached to individual women as a way to shame them out of being righteously angry about something.) After all, child abuse and rape are both real and depressingly common, and the understanding of that that developed in the 70s and 80s basically traumatized the country to the extent that plausible accounts were hard to distinguish from implausible ones. Additionally, unlike with other crimes, the "realness" of sexual and domestic violence is often judged by how damaged the victim feels, which created an unfortunate incentive to highlight cases where severe trauma was claimed in order to get people to understand that rape is, you know, wrong. Now I think feminism has come around to realizing that "victims must display extreme trauma" is a trap used to let rapists off the hook, and have moved on to arguing that we need to treat rape, battering, and child abuse like we do any crime, where the victim's ability to recover doesn't mitigate guilt. But in the 70s and 80s, that wasn't as clear. This doesn't excuse people who generated false stories or made existing mental illnesses worse, but it does explain why there was a sudden interest in stories of greater and greater trauma from sexual violence.

Carol Tavris and Laura Miller have excellent reviews of Sybil Exposed that run down the facts of the case, but a quick summary: Shirley Mason was a depressed and neurotic woman with likely undiagnosed pernicious anemia who got caught up with Dr. Connie Wilbur, a charismatic but deeply unethical (though often well-meaning) therapist who always resented that the world didn't see her as the brilliant "pure scientist" she felt herself to be. Mason become emotionally dependent on Wilbur, and when she realized that what it would take to keep Wilbur's attention and interest (and continued services without immediate payment), she started producing multiple personalities, having read about them previously in some literature Wilbur gave her. Excited that she was finally going to make her career, Wilbur encouraged this development, keeping Mason strung out on barbituates for years while exerting massive pressure on Mason to both generate new personallties and come up with "memories" of severe child abuse. Meanwhile, Flora Schreiber, a journalist who, like Wilbur, felt marginalized and underappreciated, got involved by agreeing to write a book about it. Repeatedly throughout the invention of "Sybil", each woman involved has moments of doubt and worries that they're perpetuating a fraud, but their desires (Mason's to get attention and pay her debts, Wilbur and Schreiber's to finally do work that the world has to notice) cause them to tamp down their doubts. At some point, the need to keep the whole thing going gets to the point where Wilbur and Mason deliberately create fraudulent diaries to give to Schreiber, rather than let the fact that Mason's claims about child abuse couldn't be true derail the whole project. It's an amazing story of how ordinary human desires for love, ego gratification, and money can, under the right circumstances, create situations that simply spiral out of control.

Nathan's feminism makes her see the nuances in this situation that another journalist might miss. She grasps immediately why it was women who half-consciously perpetuated this fraud. As Nathan puts it, the continued marginalization of women in American society, added to the newfound ambitions and dreams of a feminist era, created some outright bizarre behavior in women who, in a more feminist time, would have had more productive avenues for their energies. She also suggests that this feeling of wanting so much while having so little created the audience for the book Sybil, and unfortunately created fertile grounds for women to generate false memories and multiple personality disorder. Not to put too fine a point on it, but "repressed memories" and "multiple personalities" had symbolic resonance with women who were torn between their feminist desires and the continued constraints put on their ambitions by a sexist society. Now that those tensions are slowly getting resolved and pressures have lightened up a little, it's unsurprising that these trends have faded away.

The lesson here is a subtle but important one: Skepticism without empathy has its limits. You can make an airtight skeptical case about multiple personality disorder, repressed memories, and the "Sybil" case without understanding the pressures on women that allowed this to happen, but your analysis would be severely limited. You could say that these claims weren't true, but you wouldn't understand why this particular hysteria took off. By bringing a feminist analysis to the situation, Nathan adds understanding, which suggests ways that clusterfucks like this could be prevented in the future. Reading this book, you realize how much damage that sexism and homophobia can do to the mental stability of those oppressed by it---by the time the book is over, you can cite dozens of examples of how sexism and homophobia provoked bad choices and weird behaviors in the people involved in this situation. Sybil Exposed is an excellent example of the best kind of skepticism, one that's rooted in a desire to understand why people believe false things. Highly recommended.

I usually don't post on Sundays, but man, I have to vent.  Nothing gets my eyes rolling faster than the hand-wringing over the way that atheism and skepticism are merging, which is a phenomenon that is due in part to the spate of "New Atheist" publications, but is mainly a reaction to the influx of a younger, more diverse, more political crowd into the halls of skepticism.  And that crowd has grown up under the threat from the religious right, and so are just less inclined to see pushing back against homeopathy and claims about Bigfoot as being a good use of your time when claims about Jesus and miracles have created a radicalized right wing intent on destroying the country.  

Look: atheism is the result of applying critical thinking and demands for evidence to the god hypothesis.  It's not any different than non-belief in all sorts of supernatural claims, such as ESP and ghosts.  All of the weaseling around that is intellectually dishonest.  It's not about critical thinking, but about politics and frankly, not taking on religion because religion is seen as too powerful. 

This latest example of said hand-wringing, written by Daniel Loxton, particularly teed me off because he appears to have a larger agenda of undermining actual diversity attempts in the movement, because increasing diversity comes at the "cost" of running off conservatives who have an interest in disproving space aliens and Bigfoot, but maybe aren't so keen on having the comfortable worldview challenged.  But I'd point out that the squeezing out of conservative interests has been good for skepticism; as another blogger at Skepticblog notes, the dwindling in numbers of conservatives (and conservatives who call themselves "libertarians" in a pathetic bid to get laid more) means that the movement is ceasing to be crippled by the shameful tolerance of global warming denialists.  Seriously, you can't be a skeptical movement if you allow people pushing the "global warming in a hoax perpetuated by a worldwide conspiracy" to go unchallenged. 

Anyway, Loxton decided to shit all over the work of people looking at improving gender, sexual oriention, class, and race diversity in the movement by complaining that the panel at The Amazing Meeting dedicated to this didn't have any fucking Christians on it.  He firmly believes that the god hypothesis should be off-limits for skeptics, and that there should be a bright line between atheism and skepticism.  This is ridiculous.  "God" is a supernatural claim just like fairies and ghosts.  Just to show you how ridiculous he's being, I'm going to replace the references to god and religion with references to another untestable claim, that we all have fairy godmothers who look out for us and do little magic things we don't even notice.

The irony of a fairy-disbelieving-only panel on “diversity” did not escape me, but I expected it to pass without comment. The sentiment that skepticism is an anti-fairy club is recent, but it has taken root very quickly. As with other sorts of “do-fish-know-they’re-wet?” privilege in other, larger communities, the assumption of default disbelief in fairies is rarely questioned in the skeptical subculture. Indeed, the panel set out to discuss diversity in gender, sexual orientation, age, race, class, education, and physical ability—but not fairy belief.

See what I mean?  The excuse from "traditional" skeptics for making an exception for religion is that the god hypothesis is an untestable claim, and they're only interested in testable claims.  But as this fairy example shows, that's not really true.  There are plenty of things skeptics are skeptical about because of the preponderance-of-evidence standard.  We don't believe in ESP or ghosts or fairies because no one has ever produced solid evidence in favor of these things existing, and we combine that with an assumption that these things are highly unlikely and so the burden is on the people making the claims to prove them.  I don't see how god is any different.  People try to produce evidence in the way of miracles and good fortune, but the proof always falls apart on inspection.  Yes, it's true that you can't test whether or not there is a god somewhere that simply refuses to show himself, but that's also true of fairies, people with ESP, and ghosts.  And yet it's considered a good use of skeptical time to point out the weakness of the ghost/ESP argument.  So why not god? 

Well, because of politics, which Loxton cops to:

At least one speaker at TAM9 was herself religious (Pamela Gay) and there were, as always, members of multiple religious groups and spiritual traditions in the audience. These skeptics often express that anti-theism is a barrier to participation in our science-based events. Whatever your own feelings about religion, this is obviously a topic which fits under the heading of “diversity.”

Well hell, if the main goal is making people with ridiculous beliefs feel comfortable, why stop at the god hypothesis?  People are also touchy about their diets, and so expressing skepticism, as is done in another post, about food trends such as non-allergic people cutting gluten from their diets, is probably a bad idea, too.  I've probably gotten more defensive reactions from people who suspected my eyebrow twitched because they're on the caveman diet than because they said something about god around me.  I've also encountered people who believe that they figure out what others are thinking not because they pick up on body language and social cues, but because of magic, and they are just as hostile as people who know you think it's a bit silly you think that Jesus was born to a virgin.  If discomfort is to be avoided at all costs, let's just disband now. 

But Loxton has an ulterior motive here:

This empirical focus has allowed the skeptical community—old and white and bearded as it may have been—to enjoy other kinds of diversity. If political ideology is not a topic for our movement, then anarchists, libertarians, liberals, and conservatives can happily share the same big tent. If science-based skepticism is neutral about nonscientific moral values3, then the community can embrace people who hold a wide range of perspectives on values issues—on the environment, on public schools, on nuclear power, on same-sex marriage, on taxation, gun control, the military, veganism, or so on. It’s a sort of paradox: the wider the scope of skepticism, the less diverse its community becomes.

In other words, the kind of "diversity" he supports is one where a bunch of well-off, older white men can enjoy talking about the silliness of Bigfoot without having to bother with those political concerns that are unavoidable when people who get the shit end of the stick---women, non-white people, poorer people, disabled people, gay people---get involved.  There are many flavors of white-dude-whose-privilege-shields-him-from-having-to-be-politicals, but those darn diverse people are forever being political because they don't have an option to ignore oppression that directly affects them.  Personally, I'm far more concerned about a group that's politically diverse only because they all live in the same bubble than one that's got racial and gender diversity because everyone has a shared concern about religious power. 

In other words, I support a diversity of viewpoints, not a diversity per se of views. A group of skeptics isn't made stronger because some people diverge from the norm because they believe they have an army of small fairies to do their bidding, but it is strengthened by improving the number of women and people of color who can speak to communities who aren't currently being reached. 

Anyway, as I noted before, claims that you can maintain scientific discourse while pandering to the emotional comfort of conservatives have been demonstrated to be false.  Even without all that icky race and gender diversity question, you still had the problem of global warming and the fact that conservatives pretty much have to believe the conspiracy theory that it's all a hoax in order to justify their political ideology.  

There's no small amount of irony in the fact that I published this article about how the atheist movement dovetails with other social justice movements this particular week.  I was actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing, because I was writing it while traveling to CONvergence to speak at the invitation of Skepchick about the feminist depths of this issue, on a panel called "Women vs. God", where we discussed fighting the religious right.  Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind---religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history.  Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it's naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there's a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa.  I'm thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists. 

In fact, what makes all this ironic is I did get an eyeful this weekend of how serious the problem of sexism in the atheist/skeptical movement really is, and how much hard work needs to be done to get a male-dominated movement to take the problem of sexual harassment and female alienation seriously.  (Though by and large claims for reproductive rights go unchallenged; there are a few loud-mouths whose virulent sexism will cause them to take anti-choice nonsense seriously, but it's so steeped in religious woo that most atheists can't be bothered.)  Because right as I was traveling, conferencing, and writing about atheism, there was a blow-up that started because a guy exploited his position as a fellow atheist/skeptic to act like a creep towards a movement leader who happens to be female.  The controversy---and this is truly pathetic---is because she decided instead of just rolling over and taking it, she would say something about it. I know!  The bitch.

I don't want to recount everything that happened in depth, because it's really done better elsewhere, but what happened was this: Rebecca Watson, who travels extensively speaking about skepticism and atheism, was at a conference in Ireland and a guy followed her onto an elevator at 4AM and cold propositioned her for sex in this enclosed space without ever speaking to her before.  She mentioned it in a vlog that was mostly about other stuff, mainly to illustrate why this behavior is unacceptable and can turn women off from participating in events such as the conference.

The usual excuse-making for the guy immediately proceeded.  I'm sure you guys could generate all the excuses on your own: Claiming that men don't really know what's appropriate and what's not because women make it so complicated.  (This has been demonstrated untrue with research, though common sense should also apply.)  Denying the difference between flirting and cornering women in hopes that the implication of fear will grease the wheels for you getting your dick wet.  Claiming that introducing a whiff of coercion and fear into a situation is okay as long as you're willing to take no for an answer at the end of the day.  All of which reminds me of one of the great scenes from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia".  

In sum, men who corner women know what they're doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid.  Rebecca may not have  put it that way, but being a mean ol' feminist bitch, I'm happy to say it.  Also: duh.  It also strikes me, in my dealing with geek culture, that there's a taboo against rejecting someone, and creepy dudes also are happy to exploit that, knowing that women who reject them will be condemned for violating the "don't be judgmental" rule. 

And I also know, being a feminist for many years now, that whenever a bunch of dudes start freaking out on a woman who called out some egregious sexism, there are a bunch of women willing to back those dudes up in order to get that coveted male approval and attention.  I call this move Pulling An Althouse.  Or Dr. Helen, if you prefer.  Or maybe just call them Sister Punishers.  And they were thick on the ground in this case, and Rebecca used a quote from one of her female attackers in a speech where she was talking about there's sexism in the atheist movement (as a prelude to the more obvious fact that there's sexism in religion).  You can read the whole story here. Rebecca sounds like she was much nicer about it than I was; I'm prone to making jokes such as, "The guys you attract with this crap don't go down, so I don't know why you bother."  It does make you look desperate, ladies.  I'm just saying.  

Anyway, this launched Round Two of Silence the Feminist.  This time, the theme was, "Sure, you may be right that this dude was a creep but shut up, since you're making people uncomfortable and can't we get back to talking about how religious people are sexists?"  This was greased by a political strategy known as Calvinball---one that the right is really good at, by the way---where you make up brand new rules of discourse that were previously unknown and then chastise the target for breaking the rule that didn't exist before because you just made it up.  In this particular case, Rebecca broke the previously unknown rule wherein you can't actually quote someone's public words and the name they publish under when disagreeing with them, at least if your blog has more traffic than theirs does.  It may also be true that there are exceptions on every other Sunday, but I'm not sure. 

Here is a classic example, from the usually rational Hemant Mehta, of this Calvinball argument:

This was bad form for two reasons. One, it was a distraction from an otherwise important talk. Instead of us discussing the incredibly important issue of how the Religious Right harms women (the subject of the talk), we’re all discussing whether it’s right for someone with a big megaphone to pick on someone with a smaller one, whether someone was being a “bad feminist,” and all sorts of shit that doesn’t need to be aired in public.

Two, whether it was the intention or not, you’ve convinced a young female in our movement that if she says something you don’t like, she better be ready for an all-out barrage of criticism from every “big name” in the atheist blogosphere.

It has it all: 1) Countering criticism that makes you uncomfortable by saying there's something more important to worry about 2) Shaming a woman for having success  3) Sexist paternalism in the form of arguing that a woman has to be shielded from open discourse lest she be too frightened to return and 4) Implying that said paternalism is feminism.  Sarah Palin's P.R. team would be proud. 

Personally, I think that convincing an audience of atheists that the religious right sucks is probably much less of a challenge than convincing them to look at themselves and find imperfections, and I applaud Rebecca for being willing to take the hard road. 

That's the bad news.  The good news is that people in the movement are fighting back against this tedious and predictable sexism,  and they're fighting hard.  PZ Myers, as usual, is on the side of the angels.  So is Jennifer McCreight. Sadly, Richard Dawkins was a dick about all this. 

To sum up a long story, what is fascinating to me about all this is that it's something that tends to happen over and over again, and while it sucks at the time, it tends to pay off over the long run.  Many of the attackers, especially the ones pulling the "you're right but shut up" card, may resist now, but they absorb and learn and often adjust their attitudes, a little at a time.  Now that the issue has been raised, it's hard to ignore it in the future.  More attempts to make things female-friendly usually come out of this.  But it is fascinating how these things have a predictable rhythm to them. 

Disclaimer: I'm not interested in turning this into a tedious thread about how Dan Savage is the worst person who ever lived because he occasionally says something you disagree with.  I'm genuinely surprised he gets shit on so much, since his occasional error is inevitable when you're producing a voluminous amount of work on the often-tricky and complex questions of sexual and relationship ethics and choices.  Most of the time, people who get shit on as much as he does, it's because the shit-ers believe the shit-ee is sensitive and responsive, and they enjoy shitting on them because they know it gets to them.  But Savage strikes me as thick-skinned, so I don't know why the Internet Denunciation Committee even bothers.  I don't really think he gives a flying fuck what you think.

This isn't really part of the news cycle and probably isn't the most important thing to be tackling on a Monday morning, but I have to unload my irritation.  Last episode of the Savage Love podcast, Dan had on Heike Rodriguez, who claims to be a sex educator who teaches women how to do female ejaculation, should they feel that they aren't spending enough time doing laundry.  I'm all for women learning the technique that could get you there, if that's something you're in to, and applaud all sorts of erotic experimentation done for the holy reason called "for the hell of it".  I'm guessing that kind of goal was why Rodriguez was invited on the show.  Unfortunately, she wasn't interested in educating people on techniques that might work for them so much as pushing her ridiculous and frankly sexist agenda on unwitting women like myself who tune in to the show for purely innocent reasons.  (Read: we like to listen to other people's sex problems while running errands or working out.)  See, Rodriguez is a first class pusher of woo, but more than that, she's a big fucking bully. And Dan should have cut the interview and told her to suck it.

Basically, what happened was that Dan was trying to get her to talk about the basics of female ejaculation, to dispel a couple of myths (that it's pee being the big one), and go on her merry way.  She, on the other hand, wanted to talk about how the G-spot is the emotional center of a woman's being and the if you're not ejaculating on a regular basis, the sole and only reason had to be that you are suffering from emotional blockage. Thus, when asked for techniques on how to do it, she was focused like a laser beam on characterizing those who don't ejaculate as emotionally broken women who need to go into therapy or just generally work on their brokenness until they start ejaculating, at what point they can feel like they're whole human beings without all those terrible neuroses non-ejaculators have.

I was surprised she didn't start to claim that female ejaculation is the process by which your body purges thetans and renders you clean so you can move on to the next level, at least after writing a check to her for thousands of dollars. 

To be clear, it was obvious from the interview that Dan was not happy about the way things had turned, and was trying to politely steer his guest in a less judgmental, less wackadoodle direction.  As far as I know, he's never been big on the hippy-dippy crap that links sexual health, acts, or performance to some kind of cosmic wholeness or the amount of patchouli in the room.  If anything, he's often pointed out that people's neuroses can be the root of some of their hottest fantasies, and I think he generally has a wide tolerance for neuroses, on the grounds that most people have them and it's not a big thing as long as it doesn't interfere with your overall wellbeing.  The interview was shorter than usual, and he did eventually get her to the point before shuffling her off.  I wouldn't be surprised if he talks about it for the next podcast and clarifies his point of view.  Which I suspect is very different from hers, especially since he did try a couple of times to correct her gently.  Overall, the interview sounded like a conversation you might have when you get caught in a conversation with someone who has weird, false beliefs but is very insistent about them.  Most of us try to politely disagree, give up, and then try as politely as possible to get out of it.  That's what he sounds like he was doing. 

That said, there was more that had to be done.  He should not have run the interview.  This is something that people in media have to deal with all the fucking time, and it's a tough one and I get that.  I have a podcast (listen to the latest here!), and I've definitely struggled with what to do when I interview someone and they wander off the farm into La La Land.  I've cut interviews before because someone just started riding a hobby horse that I thought was counter-factual. Not often---maybe once or twice---but still.  A couple more times, I've cut the part of the interview where the guest said factually incorrect things or promoted woo.  It's really a matter of how the interview is framed.  If I bring someone on to offer an opinion and I disagree, I run it.  I'm not endorsing the views of anyone I interview so much as letting them have a chance to express themselves and let the listener decide what they think.

But when an interview is explicitly about educating the audience, I think the standards have to be a little tighter.  When I bring someone on because I think they have information to impart and not just because I think they have opinions that are interesting, I raise the standards of what they're allowed to say on my show. I just cannot support setting up an education framework and then injecting untruths into it.  It runs against the very purpose of education. 

I realize that the line between fact and opinion is blurry, especially when it comes to sexual techniques and whatnot, but this woman crossed it big time.  Blag Hag has more information on why Rodriguez was unquestionably in the wrong here.  It sucks and feels rude to cut someone's interview, but your responsibility to the people you claim to be educating should take priority  in these situations.

One last thought: I have no doubt that Rodriguez considers herself a feminist.  Women who push this particular brand of woo invariably do.  But I really have to question a "feminism" that centers a woman's life around her vagina and is bullying and essentialist in this way.  If you suddenly declared that the amount of ejaculate a man produced was indicative of the state of his soul, because the penis is the emotional center of the man, we'd probably have no problem seeing you as a sexist who blows the differences between men and women way out of proportion.  The reality is that men and women have way more in common than not, and that's especially true when it comes to the physiological manifestations of our emotions, which, as far as I understand, are basically the same.

Since the 4th was a Sunday, it looks like everyone’s basically taking today off, so I thought I’d skip anything news-driven and instead whip out a little skeptical posting.  Sadly, I’ve been avoiding this somewhat out of cowardice, but frankly, that’s no excuse.  Most people are in the “ignore them and they’ll go away camp” when it comes to conspiracy theorists, but I’m not, so I’m a perfect person to try to push back against them.  And I want to push back against the zombie conspiracy theory about Sarah Palin’s 5th child, Trig. Andrew Sullivan just won’t let this one go, and the conspiracy theory mania is spreading amongst people I otherwise respect.  The theory, in case you haven’t heard it (but I’ll bet you have, which is why simply ignoring conspiracy theories doesn’t work), is that Sarah Palin only pretended to have her son Trig, but was actually covering up for Bristol’s pregnancy.

The “evidence” for these claims:

1) That Bristol took some time off school in 2008. This is the least interesting evidence to the theorists, from what I can tell.  The reason is that focusing on Bristol is rhetorically unwise of them, because if you believe the theory, you have to accept Bristol conceived a second time while still pregnant.  So they shy away from this one. 

2) That Bristol cuddles Trig a lot. You rarely see this stated so bluntly, but theorists enjoy putting up pictures of Trig being cuddled in public by Bristol, implying that she, as the mother, cannot resist this.

I’m forced to point out that an alternative theory is that people in general like to cuddle babies.  And that families that have much-older daughters and infants at the same time are known to employ the daughters in baby care.  The pictures of Bristol cuddling Trig invariably are taken when Sarah is doing something like, oh, speaking at a convention, and therefore can’t be holding a baby right that second.  The natural person to shove the baby off on is Bristol. 

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