Really pathetic, pussy-licking thread up at Pharyngula, on The problem of the oblivious white male atheist.

I say again: When a Richard Dawkins book-reading has a two-thirds male and 95% white audience in multicultural Toronto, and when meetings of skeptics’ groups in pubs are 80% (or whatever) men, what the hell do these damned feminists and cowardly, whining race-fuckers want, anyway? Answer: Proportional (i.e., 50%) representation, independent of accomplishments/meritocracy, even when they’re not even bothering to show up for the meetings. Fucking pathetic.

You can see just how much the commenters on Myers’ site have drunk the feminist/minority-ist Kool-Aid from the fact that they think Ophelia Benson’s middling-at-best Does God Hate Women? is a great book. (Not to mention that the “Greg Laden with breasts,” the utterly unimpressive and even less-accomplished-than-Benson skepchick Rebecca Watson, also has her name bandied about for the same invitations.) If a man wrote a book as weak as that, on any topic other than “minority oppression,” good fucking luck getting it published.

Again, a woman with her name on three books, each of which was co-written by a man. First write your Very Own Book, little girl; then carp about how the Men in Positions of Power aren’t giving you a fair shake, when you’re already getting more than you’ve earned.

The “disturbing” comments at RD.net have got it exactly right: There are no “entrance barriers” to atheism (or to skepticism), no external reasons why women and minorities shouldn’t at least bother to show up. Especially at something like Dawkins’ reading, where they’re not having to compete with outspoken men. (And anyway, what’s wrong with sitting and listening while others talk? That’s what I do, for fuck’s sake!! That’s how you fucking learn!!!) Yet they don’t even bother to show up, and it can only be some “white man’s fault,” for them not being proportionately represented as speakers at atheist conferences.

Fucking pathetic. I wouldn’t have thought PZ Myers was this totally clueless, but he is.

P.S. You want solid numbers, for the demographics? Here you go:

[A] new study confirmed something essential about women, something that refuses to budge, even though many say it’s long past time. Professors at Trinity College in Connecticut analyzed the numbers of Americans unaffiliated to any religion. While the number of male nonbelievers was rocketing, the overall totals were slowed by women hitching themselves to the anchor of faith: “Gender difference is a brake on the growth of the No Religion population,” says the study, which found that 19 percent of men were no longer denizens of a religious America, while only 12 percent of women live outside the faithful fold. In the past, one could say that women tended the hearth, and men participated in the marketplace. But today?

That means 12 out of (19 + 12) atheists are women, in America. That’s 39%. And how many will have given up their social lives and done enough previous writing and speaking to qualify as being in the top 5%? Maybe half that percentage? i.e., maybe around 4/21? (How “underrepresented” are women in, say, philosophy in general? Keeping in mind that even the renowned Ophelia Benson needs help from a male philosopher, even just for doing Moral Philosophy 101. These things are not irrelevant: To have anything to say that’s worth hearing on the subject of atheism, you need to have a good amount of philosophical and rational-thought competence. So why is it, again, that women and blacks are “underrepresented” among the atheist and skeptical elites? Yeah, that’s why.)

And again, what about gaytheists? Are they, too, being scared away from the meetings by a bunch of outspoken white heterosexual men? And blacks—are they still being intimidated by “massah,” and a history of slavery that they know of only from reading history books pop culture? Even in Canada, where there is no such history, but they hate whitey (e.g., me) all the same?

The (partly) black American astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson brings up some interesting points about his life-experience, i.e., about being suspected of shoplifting just because of his skin color, and being expected to go into sports, etc., rather than into an intellectual pursuit. And then he wonders out loud how many other blacks might have been as successful as he is, in the sciences, if society only gave them “equal opportunities” to succeed. (He doesn’t mention the race of the people who were encouraging him to became an athlete rather than a physicist. Given how studying is equated with “being white” in the black community, what do you figure the odds are that a big chunk of the people discouraging him from going into the sciences were black? And that’s whitey’s fault? That a black culture which we’re not allowed to try to change without being “racist,” was probably more to blame than anything else, for that misdirection?)

Regardless, I, of course, being a Person of White Testicles, have no point of reference for any of that. Sure, when I was walking out of the public library at Yonge and Eglinton for the first time with a handful of CDs and long hair, a middle-aged spinster came chugging after me, suspecting me of trying to steal them. And I grew up in a Mennonite community where I only know of one person outside of my extended family who went to university—Bible college was the expectation, you know, ’cause too much education made you more likely to fall from the faith, into the hands of Satan. (“Zu viel learnin machen Sie im hell geburnen!”)

So outside of my black-sheep family, I had near-zero encouragement to pursue a university education … and, in fact, my insecure, jealous “best friend and worst enemy” in high school made it his personal project, in grade twelve, to fuck me around about that, to the point of telling me defensively that I “wasn’t so good” as to justifiably have any reason to expect that the only university I applied to would accept me. (In the spring of that year, I was awarded a four-year tuition-covering scholarship to that university—the only one in Manitoba which taught engineering—for being, in the opinion of the judges, the best rural student entering the sciences at the U of Manitoba in my graduating year. So, you see, I was good enough. And if I had gone to a school less out-in-the-sticks, perhaps one with a guidance-counseling office, I might even have known that things like full scholarships to places like M.I.T. existed. As it stands, that wasn’t even on my radar, as a possibility.)

Back in third-year engineering, during a compulsory “economics for engineers” class, the tubby white, obviously conservative, $-focused prof informed us all, pretty much out of the blue, that if any of us were to go into a bank unshaven wearing sweatpants and a t-shirt, and ask for a loan, we’d get turned down.

Need I tell you that I was the only bearded guy in a t-shirt and sweatpants, sitting in that class? (With that being one of my “drop-out years,” I skipped most of the classes, didn’t do any of the assignments beyond the first few … and yet still passed the course, even having done no reading in economics at all, prior to that. That’s how easy economics is!)

How many sweatpants-wearing, unshaved/long-haired white male hippies might have succeeded just as much as Dawkins and Tyson have, if only we were given equal opportunities in the world?

And yet, here I am, albeit with short hair now, and black jeans for my “I.T. work clothes” instead of sweatpants, kicking ass. With no one to blame for my bad decisions in life except for myself.

After all, who can a white male eldest-child blame? And that, of course, is how cultural selection works to make groups stronger: By giving them no excuses for failure, and by forcing them to succeed even without any encouragement or affirmative-action helping hands, or generic pussy-licking, from others.

I don’t know about the rest of you but I tried my damnedest to make Christopher Hitchens black but it just wouldn’t take and when I tried to make Sam Harris Asian all I could achieve was getting some pro-meditation crap. I will however take some small credit for letting Dawkins be white and more importantly I most definitely let Ayaan Hirsi Ali be black; Her book Infidel puts her up there as the Fifth Horseman [sic, Horseperson of the Atheist Apocalypse—in which case 20% of those five would be women, in a small sample size ... though I do hope no one is seriously suggested than Hirsi Ali's intellect is even close to that of Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, or even the Wilber-admiring Sam Harris].

By the way, in the near future I’m going to try letting Dennett be an Australian aboriginal. If anyone cares to join me in this I think it works like prayer—you have to reach a critical mass and then, well,… it should be just as effective!

At one time, when I was younger and more insecure, I could be made to feel guilty about being a white male, but not anymore. Yes, it’s great that an African-American lesbian is well spoken, educated AND an atheist. And, YES, it must be harder for her than I to deal with society, but the idea that white males are the assumed spokespeople of atheism is pure BULLSHIT…. If she wants to be a spokesperson for atheism, she can get the fuck in the arena and if she’s worth her salt—she’ll become a spokesperson…. It’s all (or should be) about merit.

Oh-oh: That’s someone in need of re-programming “sensitivity training,” right there.

P.P.S. It’s not exactly obvious from Tyson’s Wikipedia entry what he has actually accomplished in terms of serious astrophysics research, as opposed to Sagan/Nye-like popularization and media appearances. And given that Tyson was doing wrestling and rowing at college (Harvard), the encouragement to become an athlete wasn’t entirely “raciss” now, was it? So what exactly is the problem? Were there simply not enough rose petals strewn on his path, to make every step of the way a cushy and fragrant one?

The whole majoring-in-physics-at-Harvard thing even after Carl Sagan himself tried to recruit Tyson to Cornell—former stomping grounds of Richard Feynman—smells fishy. What kind of a real scientist/geek does a physics degree at Harvard?

And where are my rose petals?

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