This is an intended comment on Thomas Smith's website for his excellent podcast "Atheistically Speaking", which strangely enough would not allow me to post it, either in Chrome or IE.
http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/
It is concerning episode 28 discussing misogyny in the atheist community:
http://atheisticallyspeaking.com/as28-misogyny-atheism-greta-christina/
Well, here goes.
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Thomas, this comment is a bit long for Facebook so I posted it here. I hope you glean something useful although you may already be aware of much of this.
Now getting on to the discussion with Greta Christina, she made some important points about how serious the harassment and misogyny situation really is. I agree with her about most things, though not everything.
I plan to buy her first book and then depending on what I think maybe the new one, but they both sound very good.
The abuse some women receive in our community is dreadful, and I do feel ashamed sometimes. It's probably due to the time constraint, but one thing she didn't mention that would have been useful to emphasise is that, aside from the whole misogyny in atheism issue, there is a big divide in the feminist community about how to "do feminism".
Points of agreement: Harassment and abuse are totally unacceptable under any circumstances and can be called out freely. "Ignoring the trolls" has been shown to not always work. Also the act of calling out discriminatory words or actions is inherently less divisive than those discrimatory words or actions themselves.
Main issue: It is not always useful to talk of all feminists as having the same ideas or intentions, as clear schisms do exist in the community, and Christina's version of feminism is not shared by all women who claim to be feminists.
This is my attempt to provide a brief meta-overview of the situation as I see it. I'm not really totally clued up on these issues so please be forgiving - I am a man after all but I'm not trying to push any particular view here, so sorry if it doesn't come across that way.
We can broadly categorise feminism (and this is a big simplification for the purposes of this comment, but I'm not getting into the intricacies of the Fourth Wave here) between "radical" and "intersectional" aspects. This will become germane later, but not to try and strawman here, generally, the radical aspect focuses more on women's rights, and the intersectional form on any and all types of privilege / oppression dynamic (in other words, social justice). Christina didn't really emphasise it, but it would appear she subscribes to the latter.
I don't know if you've heard of "Atheism Plus" but it's a group of atheists formed to promote social justice . The formation of Atheism+ (along with the whole "Elevatorgate" scandal, if you've not heard about it, you've been warned, it's not much fun) seems to be a turning point in the whole saga of misogyny within our community: since Atheism+'s inception, quite a few people who thought the whole exercise was a bad idea, just won't let it go. Last time I checked, Atheism+ had gone off the rails a bit, possibly from a combination of internal rifts and outside attack. I'm not sure how strongly this holds, but the Freethought Blogs (FTB) community (and Christina) seems to be broadly aligned with, and connected to, Atheism+.
Hence the to and fro between them and their critics. These latter people are not entirely trolls. They seem to be a mishmash of obvious trolls (where most of the abuse comes from), and more genuine critics (including many women) who simply have a different idea of how feminist atheists should be represented. There are also of course some in-between people. Sometimes these individuals too take it too far which is where the problems start.
Thomas, I'm not sure if you got that point, as labelling critics of a particular type of feminist theory as "anti-feminists for want of a better term" as you seem to do in your introduction, may be somewhat dubious, as it pre-supposes that the "correct version" of feminism is being criticised. Whilst that may be true, from what I've seen the debate is still ongoing. A criticism of intersectional feminism is not necessarily a criticism of feminism as a whole.
There are legitimate philosophical issues with combining the two seemingly disparate notions: lack of belief in God (atheism) and desire to help, support and enable those less fortunate than yourself (social justice). It has been pointed out on many occasions that a large movement already exists for just this purpose: Secular Humanism. Although many atheists are also secular humanists, secular humanism as a whole does NOT require atheism, just a desire for social justice and separation of church and state. So I hope you can see that in this sense perhaps, atheism+ was almost a backward step. The reasons for atheism+ being created to be different-but-the-same from Secular Humanism were never really well understood, at least not by me. Of course, this could just be my problem, but it does seem to be quite widespread.
If I were to say that I was an atheist, that would be a separate part of my identity to the part that desires to support feminism or social justice. It just does not logically follow that atheists need to actively endorse feminism : believe it or not there are many atheists with conservative beliefs (particularly many reformed Christians) who, whilst they may have drifted away from directly opposing women's rights, don't yet feel ready to participate in supporting them. It is in this sense that ideas such as atheism+ can be divisive - if deconverts feel pressurised into accepting something hitherto alien to their way of thinking, on top of the rjeection of God, it may be just the excuse they need to pretend to stay a believer and stay out of our community. Just to provide a counterpoint to this argument (I am trying to be fair), I see no reason why we should favour this type of potential deconvert (typically white male) above someone who may be more encouraged by the Atheism+ approach (typically female and more likely to be non-white), especially if we are interested in fostering a diverse community.
Of course, some would like to say that the problems experienced by Atheism+ demonstrate that mixing social justice and atheism can't work at all. I know Christina would vehemently oppose that conclusion, and not without reason. But it does at least appear that "trying to please everyone", as it were, is very difficult indeed, perhaps even harder than we imagined. That's not to necessarily say that it can't or shouldn't be done. But we can at least see why certain objections may be raised, whilst remaining staunchly anti anti-feminist. If that makes sense.
As an aside, true anti-feminism is the domain of the irrational troll, the keyboard warrior who likes to call themselves a "real man" while hiding in Mama's basement; and who refuses to accept the notion of privilege at all; and views all women as somehow lesser, by fiat. They claim too be on the side of reason but their arguments are about on the level of meaningless pseudo-philosophies like "Never have I seen a wild thing complain about its place in the world" or some such tripe. Needless to say this is an utterly ridiculous attitude, that is inherently unreasonable and regressive, and yet, refuses to die. Just check out Reddit. I myself have been called "beyond contempt" simply for standing up for the right side of these issues.
This article (see further down: hint - it's our friend Pigliucci again), goes into more detail about the issue, and it's also an example of Christina herself showing a less-than-generous turn when it comes to responding to thoughtful criticism.
http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/david-silverman-and-scope-of-atheism_16.html
People who, don't agree with the FTB/Atheism+ version of feminism like to criticise it, and this has doubtless gone too far at times.Many critics of Christina and for example, Rebecca Watson, like to paint them as radical feminists who take offence at anything, but if you actually look at what's happening, that's not at all the case. They are intersectional, and years of harassment have thickened their hides to the torrent of ill-will. I myself am a big fan of both Christina and Watson. They are good speakers, writers, thinkers and skeptics. I never have, nor will, direct anything inappropriate towards them. But they're not perfect . One criticism that I do have, is that the much-lauded and so called "safe-spaces" such as the FTB forum can actually be unfriendly, even for people who have no ill intent. I've seen women with good intentions who have done no more than claimed to not feel underprivileged for being a woman, get attacked in quite nasty ways on social media, simply for "going against the grain".
It appears to be a problem because, in intersectional feminism at least, it is possible (although maybe unlikely) given all the other potential axes of oppression (race, class, gender identity, disabledness, sexual orientation etc.), for a woman to actually be quite privileged overall (in areas apart from gender). Seeing as there exist systems that attempt to weigh overall privilege in a quantitative manner (expressed as a simple number), such as http://privilegechecker.neocities.org/, we must conclude that in theory, a particular man in oppressed circumstances could overall be less privileged than say a rich, educated white woman. This is where radical feminism collides with intersectionality. Some feminists (even those who claim to be intersectional) seem to have a problem accepting this possibility and like to call out other women for saying it. For a group who claim to be inclusive, and skeptical, this would seem to be a significant issue.
I've nearly finished. If you want to look at some people on "the other side" as it were, I'd suggest Thunderf00t, or The Amazing Atheist (lo and behold, he is also on Patreon, though I'm not giving him any money). I have to say I don't really have much time for these people anymore (they were better when they concentrated on religion) and looking at their Youtube comments does get me mad, since they seem pretty focussed on dissing feminism, or at least the types or parts of it they don't like.
If you want a female perspective that may still critique the feminism as displayed by Freethought Blogs/Atheism+, look up Miranda Celeste Hale. She is very well spoken, intelligent and interesting, when I've read her writing and heard her on other podcasts.
Right I'll shut up now as I've gone on far too long!
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This post is ripe for future editing, by the way...
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