Grothe has put his foot in his mouth quite a bit this week with regard to the issue of harassment at cons, but the last straw was him blaming Watson personally for scaring women off by misrepresenting TAM when discussing incidents of sexual harassment that have been her own personal experience in the skeptical community (not just TAM):
Over the past several years, I’ve been groped, grabbed, touched in other nonconsensual ways, told I can expect to be raped, told I’m a whore, a slut, a bitch, a prude, a dyke, a cunt, a twat, told I should watch my back at conferences, told I’m too ugly to be raped, told I don’t have a say in my own treatment because I’ve posed for sexy photos, told I should get a better headshot because that one doesn’t convey how sexy I am in person, told I deserve to be raped – by skeptics and atheists. All by skeptics and atheists. Constantly.
One thing we should be grateful for – Grothe just made the decision of where best to spend one’s non-infinite budget for conferences really, really easy for a whole lot of people. Go to TAM where apparently their much-vaunted anti-harassment policy doesn’t even have a proper documentation protocol so that data on incidents can be tallied (effective ad hoc action there and then is not enough when it leads to your spokes-figure claiming 0 incidents were reported)? Or go to a different conference where reported incidents actually get written down, by staff who actually initiate asking for details about the incident, so that patterns can be analysed, shortcomings identified and improvements made in future years to enhance the attendee experience?
I know which one sounds more appealing to me.
Categories: ethics & philosophy, gender & feminism, skepticism
This my axiom, by me, which is mine 
Give a Voice to Harassment Victims: A legal fund for sexual harassment victim Karen Stollznow 
Debate vs Inquiry and “Reasonable Debate” as a silencing tactic 
Rifts getting riftier: naming and shaming the harassers 
Hoyden About Town 
I was going to mention this yesterday, I’m glad to see you’re on top of it :-). I can’t begin to describe how much headdesking I’m doing (and I imagine a lot of other women) at the “we had zero reported events” when DJ himself kicked out the troublemaker and thus didn’t think it was a reported event.
There’s also some interesting discussion in the first comments of Token Skeptic’s post about the JREF online forum being, at the very least, really bad advertising for TAM. Online moderation rears its head as an issue again!
And today I discover that Grothe is still digging that damn hole. Wow.
The absolute highlight of this debacle is in my opinion the comment here by echidna:
(I’m getting the “this page can’t be found” error when I try to post my full comment. I’m testing if I’ve got too many links.)
TigTog, I’ll post the rest of my comment over at my dreamwidth, as I am getting tired of figuring out if I have too many links, or links to places your commenting system doesn’t like, or if it’s (as is looking most likely) because of the subject matter: child s-x offenses. I understand what a pain it must be to have a commenting system that’s censoring your posters according to rules you don’t have control over.
******************************
[Moderator note: New Content Added from Aqua’s DW post ~ tigtog]
I also haven’t seen many people mention this: DJ Grothe attributes the claims that TAM condones child sex trafficking and violence against women to crazy wimmins rumours out of thin air, but the origins of those claims seem to me to come straight from things DJG himself has said:
Laurence Krauss defends a convicted child sex offender
(note what a mess DJG makes of his first comment on this post, and apparently DJG has defended Krauss since, but I don’t have a link. Krauss is a speaker at this year’s TAM)
DJ Grothe appears to endorse women being kicked in the pelvic region
Further thoughts on the problems of men “running” feminism.
Now in each of these cases, DJG has subsequently re-phrased and clarified. But (as with his recent statements to and about Rebecca Watson) it doesn’t really matter that he doesn’t mean the horrible misogynistic things he says. What matters is that these things are the first things out of his mouth, and that other people need to throw a big fuss to get him to pay attention to what he’s saying and how others, women particularly, might react to them.
And that he doesn’t seem to be learning anything from any of these incidents other than “gosh them wimminfolks sure are noisy!”, as demonstrated by your most recent link.
Rebecca Watson is also being picked on for her statement
.
Apparently it’s not obvious how it could be the “biggest lesson”? These days, every time she posts anything in skepticism/atheism, she’s got to consider how much abuse, harassment, rape and death threats she might have to deal with as a result. Almost every other female blogger in the community has similar stories. I haven’t joined the community because I don’t want to do all that thinking before deciding whether or not to post on a subject. Half the (possible) skeptic/atheist movement is being censored, either in terms of what they say, or whether they get counted at all. How can that possibly not be the biggest issue the community faces?
Thanks Aqua – I’ll edit in the link to your comment above when I see it over at your DW.
I’ve now edited Aqua’s comment above to add the new material she was unable to post here earlier.
When they write the textbook on convention harassment policy and procedure, this, including comments, will be an example of how not to do it: how a harassment policy can make things worse than nothing at all.
Stephanie Zvan has some questions about that JREF/TAM anti-harassment policy too, especially considering that all published so far looks more like an anti-harassment statement rather than a policy.
Compare that bare-bones statement with what is required of TAs working in tertiary education, as summed up by ischemgeek at Pharyngula (note how this summation is far longer than the Code of Conduct above):
What ischemgeek describes above is pretty standard in most corporate environments. If TAM doesn’t have requirements at least as robust for the written reporting of any complaints, then it’s not actually a policy, it’s just a statement of good intentions. The statement of intent is better than nothing, but it’s not much better than nothing without transparency and accountability.
This harassment-policy furore has continued to boil for the last few weeks (timeline of related posts here) and now another speaker booked for this year’s TAM, Ophelia Benson, has pulled out of her engagement after receiving email threats.
OMG the comments thread! At least the good comments outweigh the bad comments about 3:1 but my goodness there are some people there who don’t have a clue. Well they do now. I only got to 172 of the over 500 though.
NB: rape apologists and ‘you should do this’ comments on the thread.
Yes, this thing is still going, and I predict will be, for at least the next few months – TAM itself is on a month from now, so there’s going to be a lot of analysis/discussion afterwards, I bet. And there’s interesting analysis of the liability risks TAM is exposed to.
What I find fascinating is the way the social justice (or feminist) “side” of this argument keeps bending over backwards to insist that there is no special sexism problem within the skeptic/atheist community, it’s just a reflection of larger society, and also that there is no special sexual harrassent problem at TAM in comparison to any other conference.
And on the other hand, as Mindy points out, the comments. The tale of the BuzzCam. And now OB withdraws as a speaker.
I’ve been to a few conferences and conventions in my time, often as one of a small number of women outnumbered by men. I’ve been awkwardly propositioned at same, heard sexist jokes I didn’t know whether to say anything about, and generally felt less comfortable and welcome than the average man there (but I expected that and didn’t think anything of it, that’s just how it is, you know?). I’ve never attended anything where someone was observed to be carrying around a camera at ankle-height, pointing up. These weren’t particularly women-friendly spaces, but they sure weren’t so women-hostile that someone would feel comfortable and within their rights to do that.
For some compensating warm fuzzies, there are nowfeminist horsewomen of the skeptic/atheist apocalypse, on My Little Ponies.
American Atheists have just announced their Code of Conduct, including strong anti-harassment language. Well done, AA.
JREF is making itself obsolete as part of skepticism moving forward by refusing to do the same.
I’m not part of the atheist or sceptical movement (because I’m neither, and not a joiner anyway) but I find myself wondering what the HELL sort of men attend these things? Yeah, they won’t all be like that, and sexist losers to be found in any movement – but oy, the ‘we are so rational’ crap that cuts out the millisecond it might affect their entitlement to treat women as sperm receptacles who shoud shut up and put out … sickening.
Louise, from what I can see most of the pushback is coming from the cadre of Internet Glibertarian Skeptics, who (like all other Internet Glibertarians) react to any sort of proposed rule or code of conduct regulating behaviour whatsoever by throwing huge steaming piles of “YOU CAN’T TELL ME WHAT TO DO” in all directions (often at the same time as arguing elsewhere that their proposed libertarian utopia won’t need a system of courts because everything will be laid out clearly in binding contracts ( through which apparently the fine details of obligations laid on various parties therein nobody will ever ever ever possibly ever ever even maybe feel the need to dispute the interpretation of maybe someday)).
After these massive displays of being generally unfit for congenial adult society, they then wonder why women don’t want to join their parties.
Via the comments thread on Pharyngula, here is an excellent field guide to the Pseudosopher, frequently seen in these discussions.
It occurs to me that for a group of people who are very into contracts, they hang quite a lot of their denial of sexual harrassment on ‘miscommunication’ and ‘talking explicitly about what you want ruins romance’ tropes.
Oh FFS – a speaker has just completed her talk at TAM while wearing a T-shirt that says “I feel safe and welcome at TAM” on the front.
According to twitterers, the back of the shirt says “I’m a skeptic, not a skepchick, not a woman skeptic, just a skeptic”.
The woman wearing the shirt, Harriet Hall, goes by the handle “skepdoc” but is just fine about slamming “skepchick”. Wonderful.
The ‘it has never happened to me therefore it doesn’t happen’ brigade are really f’ing annoying.
TigTog, because that T-shirt makes just as much sense when worn by a man as a cool chick(tm).
Bernard Bumner says:
July 13, 2012 at 9:57 am
I’m just head-desking, here. Even if this was a completely irrational fear, one does not demonstrate the safety of aeroplanes by laughing at people who are afraid of flying, and it sure doesn’t make them less phobic. I can’t imagine a much better way to demonstrate profound lack of human empathy. But these people are probably skeptical about the existence and worth of empathy.
This view of identity as a zero sum game is really frustrating, like you’re a jug of identity water and if some of your water is poured into the “woman” or “-chick” (or “-doc”) category then the amount in the “skeptic” glass will be smaller. It is of course a “damned if you do” trap for people with an othered identity: your identity is visible in the conversation and will be no matter what your actions but don’t you dare embrace it or feel pride in it, your mission must be to minimise it!
In Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing, Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher write:
Obviously, parts of the skeptical movement are at best indifferent to whether women individually or collectively persist with it, but insisting that gender identity pride ought to be minimised or is better minimised is not the path to women’s persistence.
like you’re a jug of identity water and if some of your water is poured into the “woman” or “-chick” (or “-doc”) category then the amount in the “skeptic” glass will be smaller
That’s a really good metaphor. And it illustrates the way that “man” isn’t similarly called upon to be an identity.
Also liking the identity water metaphor!
Anyway, the two funniest threads on the internet this weekend IMO are telling the world how everything bad ever is all Rebecca Watson’s fault – [thread 1] and [thread 2].
Pamela Gay gave a kickarse speech at TAM to a standing ovation: and it was about sexual harassment and being the change we want to see.
On the other hand, Surly Amy – WHO IS A SPONSOR OF TAM – left early because she was being continually harassed by arseholes and what with TAM having no anti-harassment policy, there were no systems in place to deal with that.
I still haven’t got the full details involving Surly Amy’s decision to leave TAM early – I imagine that it might well take her some time to decide exactly what she wants to say about it.
On Harriet Hall’s t-shirt, I think this comment by 1000 needles at Ophelia Benson’s blog sums it up well:
and this response from Bill Dauphin clarifies exactly what’s wrong with the tactic:
(and both of those quotes are addressing only the fail contained within “not a woman skeptic, just a skeptic” without the added fail of the dig contained in “not a skepchick”)
Later in the thread, Benson posts a comment by Surly Amy about why she left early.
Thanks for the pointer to that, SunlessNick. So Amy took the trouble to explain to Harriet Hall that she felt personally targeted by the t-shirt on the first day, and Hall made a point of wearing it for the next two days? And then Hall didn’t wear it on the final day, after Amy had changed her flights to leave early?
The conversation somebody else reported having with her, where Hall claimed to just be wanting to spark a feminist conversation and not target Skepchick particularly, is sounding more and more disingenuous. How horrible for Amy to be so undermined by someone she admired.
Clarifying comment from Surly Amy on Ophelia’s post:
It’s also come out, for those who prefer to avoid TODs, that TAM’s much vaunted “independent security consultant” appeared to have no understanding of the difference between security policies and anti-harassment policies. This is the paragraph of the TAM website’s FAQ section which is being pointed to as telling people what to do if they wanted to report instances of harassment, despite the fact that this paragraph never once mentions the word “harassment”:
There was apparently an undercover dealing-with-harassment squad who were called in by TAM staff if they saw somebody who appeared upset, at which point they would aggressively interrogate the upset person, tell them not to inform anybody else that they existed, and “reassure” the upset person that from now on they would be fully monitored by the venue’s surveillance cameras “for their safety”.
WTFWTFWTFWTFWTF
Proud to say that Oz skeptical attendees, including the women, have distinguished themselves by mocking the “skepchicks do nothing for skepticism” “non-issue” on Facebook and on Twitter for some time now, including their overseas podcast contributors.
Not.
I’m losing count of the current Threads O’Doom stoushes regarding this.
The latest anti-policy trope appears to be than anybody advocating that NOBODY should have to put up with verbal harassment/abuse at meetings/events is actually being misogynist.
How so? These writers always suggest that anti-harassment policies are only meant to protect women, for a start. From there they argue that it’s infantilising to suggest that women aren’t capable of “manning up” and suppressing any emotional response to being treated like shit.
Blithely disregarding the shrapnel from thousands of irony meters exploding, they continue to disparage any signs of emotion as “weak” at the same time as insisting that there is no sexism problem.
BTW, I’ve modified the timeout period for comments on this post so that comments will remain open for an extended period, because I don’t think this particular Deep Rift is going to be bridged any time soon.
The only bright side I can see to this is that TAM has so very clearly demarcated itself from other skeptical events which are growing rapidly, while TAM’s attendance was down 25% this year.
A glimpse into the “tears are weak” mindset from Improbable Joe commenting on B&W:
I think he might have nailed it.
Don’t burn yourself out trying to chase all this, tigtog.
I noticed the decline in numbers of TAM, but it’s a little hard to tell if that’s a real effect, or due to last year being particularly large and successful (because Skepchicks made sure lots of women attended, among other things). The two years before last year seem to have had similar attendance to this year.
My inner 16-year-old keeps wondering if all this “weak emotional women need to man up” stuff is code for “skeptics have to stand erect, hard and firm, at all times. Rigid membership rules apply”.
I’m finding shooting fallacies down in flames over at FtB to be rather therapeutic, Aqua. I just give the edited highlights here every now and then because I note that we’re still getting a fair few hits on this post every day.
Even if TAM just stays static at pre-2011 levels while other skeptical/secular-humanist events continue to grow, then it’s still an obvious slide from JREF’s triumphalism at the growth in numbers for 2011. If they refuse to enact policies which make it more likely for their conference to grow, which is what their efforts this year seem to indicate, then I fail to see a downside for those of us who find skepticism without humanism to be hollow.
I’d add something to Improbable Joe’s analysis, that skeptics prize rationality – which they should of course – but we live in a culture that defaults to placing emotion in opposition to reason, and reads female reactions as emotional rather than rational. And not all skeptics examine cultural dogmas with the same rigour as religious ones.
Which is why Surly Amy getting upset at a slogan designed to isolate her is deemed irrational – as is considering that writing “skepchick” instead of “Skepchick” does not mean it obviously wasn’t targeting the Skepchicks – and yet few if any of the people who do so make the same judgment of the months-long campaign of hatred and threats that’s been thrown at Rebecca Watson over “Guys don’t do that” and daring not to buy Dawkins’s books any more.
In fact a peculiarity of JREF/TAM too is that the member base has been having Deeeep Riiiifts over “too much emphasis on atheism” which is seen as being “too political”, and that they should be sticking to the “pure skepticism” of debunking Bigfoot and moon-landing conspiracy theories (but taking 9/11 and climate-change-is-a-NWO-conspiracy theories seriously, because somehow those topics are not “too political”).
The same members who are hostile to
theany emphasis on atheism are even more suspicious of emphasising humanist ethics as part of the skeptical movement, so that was yet another reason for many members to ostracise Amy.The same members who are hostile to theany emphasis on atheism are even more suspicious of emphasising humanist ethics as part of the skeptical movement
An odd tie-back to what Improbable Joe said, since the Golden Rule – from a strictly humanist perspective – is as close to a moral axiom as I could imagine.
Geneveive Valentine describes two kinds of appalling sexism that happened to her at the recent Readercon (a SFF con): being the belittled token woman on a panel, and a sexual harasser who wouldn’t let up.
The comments are overall quite good, there are the usual “but we have to choose the BESTEST people on panels, and what if they’re all white men?!!???” objections, WJ MacGuffin is your classic sexism hyperskeptic and best avoided unless you need the stress, but there’s no-one excusing the harasser with stalky tendencies. There are real Readercon organisers asking to be emailed details of sexist incidents so they can avoid the offenders sitting on panels again. The commenters often mention the parallel issue in the atheist/skeptical community – Rebecca Watson and That Guy In The Elevator are rather famous by now.
Comment highlight so far is nojojojo explaining why diversity matters – relevance to TAM and the skeptic/atheist movement is left as an exercise for the reader.
Comment headdesk prize to sparkymonster for this anecdote
*****
#34: I don’t see the extended time on this thread (next to the post comment button it says “Comments will be closed in 2 weeks”) but that could be my browser?
#37 I’m glad it’s therapeutic, go right ahead. I just didn’t want it to be a burden.
Ack, that Readercon harassment link. I’m gonna share something that happened to me a couple months ago – outside a shopping centre, not at a con. Longish, sorry.
—
I received mail in my post office box addressed to the previous owner of the PO box. I pulled my scooter way over to the side of the wide walkway, stopped, and pulled out my pen to write “Not at this address” on the envelope.
Whereupon a bloke came up from behind and grabbed my upper arm. I startled rather a lot (I was tired, hungry, and rather cranky; we just got back from holiday a couple hours ago).
This bloke bent over right into my face, and said at me “I’ve seen people texting while walking, and I’ve seen people talking on their phone while walking, but I’ve NEVER seen someone writing while riding one of those things.”
Taken aback, I said, deadpan and in a fuck-off tone, “I was stationary.”
Him, actually literally WAGGING his finger in my FACE: “But that’s still naughty, isn’t it?”
Me: “No, no it’s not.” *glare*
Finally he started to back off and turned to walk away, and I said, “And please DON’T touch me.”
Him, turning, “Pardon?”
Me, very loud now, “DON’T TOUCH ME. I DON’T KNOW YOU.”
He may have said sorry, I don’t know. By then I had put in my earbuds and started to get the hell away from him.
Why do people keep doing this to me? I was proud of myself for speaking up in the end, but I really need to try to cultivate an initial “STOP TOUCHING ME” when they first lay on hands. Somehow it still always takes me by surprise, and I kick into ‘polite'(ish) mode for a moment before getting my shit together to defend my space.
Sorry, I didn’t realise the link needed trigger warnings.
Laudredhel, I am so sorry about what happened to you, that’s so many kinds of wrong I don’t know where to start. No, I do: you were supposed to get out of your parked scooter in order to write “not at this address” on some envelopes????????
I notice that people who are visibly disabled get more than their fair share of non-consensual touching. Now in my experience, able-bodied women tend to get non-consensual touch in sexual contexts (as in the incident described in the link). So I was wondering how the intersectionality works out – do women with disabilities get touched more than men with disabilities, or does the general social attitude towards disabilities mean the sexual context touch disappears, or something more complicated I haven’t thought of?