The Skeptic Community Has Serious Male Privilege Issues **TRIGGER WARNING**

So I’ve been trying to branch out from the discussion boards I use on Facebook and look into some other really active forums. Using Big Boards, I located a very active board, the James Randi Educational Foundation, devoted to critical thinking and debunking of pseudoscientific/paranormal claims. This seemed in line with my values.

I posted about the Scottish campaign, Not Ever, which was designed to combat the atmosphere of victim-blaming where people assign culpability to the victim’s clothing, the victim’s alcohol consumption, etc.. I personally view the campaign as fantastic and think it’s the right narrative with which we should be addressing the issue of rape: frame the issue to focus on what the perpetrator does wrong, not what women can do to avoid being potential victims. The latter narrative is misleading in that it pretty much states that onus of responsibility is on women to prevent rape, when it is not. And this misleading narrative is tied into a pretty pervasive cognitive bias called the just-world phenomenon. A group of researchers examined this phenomenon in-depth as it pertains to victim-blaming in the context of rape. From the paper (you may not be able to access):

In general, the results show that subjects attribute blame to the rape victim. Attribution of blame helps to reinforce the casual observer’s belief that the world is a safe, protected place, and that occurrences such as rape can be controlled…Blame reflects the way in which people organize data regarding events and behaviors that have actual or potential adverse consequences. It is possible that, given the perception that women are vulnerable, exposed, and more aware of their vulnerability, they are expected to act with extra caution to avoid rape, and are therefore judged more harshly when actually victimized.

I thought the skeptics would consider this point of view pretty reasonable, given I thought it was pretty justified from both a logical and scientific standpoint.

I was wrong. Based on the dominant atmosphere within the group, I was way off the mark. My post about the campaign elicited the following reactions (again, TRIGGER WARNING):

“I think we should do the opposite. In ancient Japan where, before duly punishing the criminal, the court would appoint an orderly to cane the especially stupid and careless victims, as a punishment for their stupidity. Had this been the law today, then in some rape cases — and many scam cases — the court would have quite a lot of work to do.”

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“A drunk 17 year old kid is at a party. He’s been dancing with a girl, grinding their bodies against each other, and he’s horny as hell. Walking into another room, he sees a girl in a short skirt passed out on a couch. In his inebriated and horny state, he pulls down her panties, and has sex with her. She never wakes up, she never fights him, there is no violence or power involved.

Had he not previously gotten so turned on by the dancing with another partner, he wouldn’t have done this. Had the girl not been passed out, he wouldn’t have done it. Or had she woken up, and told him not to do it, he wouldn’t have done it. Or, to be blatantly frank, had she not drunk so much as to pass out unconscious at a party with a bunch of horny teenagers, it would not have happened.

No, its not her fault. But she could have avoided it by not getting that drunk in such an environment. And he wasn’t trying to show his power…he was getting his rocks off during a moment of drunken lack of control.”

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“Suppose I go around in a bad neighborhood with a neon sign on my head saying “I HAVE MONEY AND AM UNARMED” while dropping dollar bills all over the place. If I get mugged, someone chose to mug me, but that hardly means my behavior was beyond reproach.”

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“Rape is an evolved behaviour. It happens for sound biological reasons: because at some stage in our ancestry, rape was an effective means of passing on your genes. It’s not an effective means of passing on your genes any more, but our Y chromosome hasn’t figured that out yet.”

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“If we don’t blame the women for not doing the right thing and leaving these men, then we do the children a disservice. Sometimes we need to lay blame on the victim in order to protect them from themselves and their poor decision making skills.”

[This was on sexual assault.]

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“So women should never be convinced of DUI then? Because women can not be held accountable for their decisions when drunk.”

And there were many other posts of the “I’m not blaming the victim, but the woman’s behavior mattered!” nature. My opinion was definitely in the minority and two of the people defending the campaign were friends I invited to participate. I’ve known that the skeptic community has had some issues with women before, but I didn’t really know the extent of it until recently. The former link is a particularly good read:

When someone does try to share the perspective of being a person of color or a woman in skeptic communities the majority of people in the groups I have encountered dismiss their viewpoint on extremely typical grounds. This article from richarddawkins.net has some really disturbing comments that illustrate exactly what I am getting at; an automatic opposition to the voices of people of color and women. Disagreeing isn’t the problem here, it is the outright dismissal and unwillingness to ask questions in order to understand the point of view she puts forward here. Having an actual discussion, or an actual willingness to understand her and then disagreeing would be a very different picture.

In this thread, there is no sign of genuine skepticism here. There is only this atmosphere that treats the lens of male (and white) privilege as the “neutral” way to view the universe and that’s being passed off as critical thinking. The board is also very old and many of the members have been there for years, which means this atmosphere has probably not been significantly disrupted.

But what’s clear is that the skeptic community is not the enlightened bunch of people they think they are (and I say this as a skeptic male). The skeptic community has critical thinking on “hard” science issues, but there needs to be more critical thinking on social science issues and the only way that’s going to happen is if people demonstrate some more empathy, which I’d argue is the quality severely lacking here and a very crucial component of critical thinking.

The atmosphere needs to be changed, but I would advise anyone who has problems with content of this nature to stay away from skeptics boards. Right now, they’re not feminist-friendly environments.