This rant is prompted by a recent post by Libby Anne of Love Joy Feminism, but it is something I have found annoying for much, much longer.
Stop saying “women” when you mean “feminists.”
To be clear: I agree with her point! Scientists were not raised in a Science Bubble free of all cultural influence. When we look at historical science, we see many claims that are clearly the result of sexism or racism, rather than what the data actually say. In retrospect, too much education does not damage a woman’s uterus, women do not become insane during menstruation, and killing millions of Jews is an extraordinarily bad way to improve the human race, and probably the only reason you would believe those claims is that you are an anti-Semitic, sexist fuckwit. Given that our current culture is sexist and racist, and we know that sexism and racism can affect science, we should watch for our science being racist or sexist. I am less certain about evolutionary psychology than Libby Anne is. Certainly it’s true that human psychology is a product of adaptations that helped us survive as hunter-gatherers, and certainly pop evolutionary psychology is extraordinarily awful, but I haven’t investigated the field enough to know whether the media is misrepresenting it (as it often does to complex, nuanced fields) or evolutionary psychology is failing at the very difficult task it has set itself. But her general point is something that cannot be said too often.
But the thing is… when you say “women are more reluctant to endorse evolutionary psychology”, that is a claim that requires evidence. I can certainly think of prominent women who oppose evolutionary psychology, such as Rebecca Watson and Libby Anne herself, but there are also a lot of prominent women who support evolutionary psychology. This list includes two of the founders of evolutionary psychology and the coeditor and many of the board members of the journal Evolutionary Psychology. They don’t seem to know that women don’t support evolutionary psychology. Perhaps someone should tell them?
The thing is that just because you are oppressed does not necessarily mean you understand oppression. Everyone grows up in a sexist, racist society; everyone is taught to believe sexist, racist things, including women and people of color. I mean, women are half the population. Would patriarchy really have survived this long if it didn’t get women to believe that they deserved subservience? We would have had an armed revolution long ago! Sometimes women become feminists and begin a long process of unlearning their internalized sexism. Sometimes they don’t. The latter group, however, is still women.
Besides, what if it turns out that women are more likely to support evolutionary psychology than men are? (I couldn’t find a survey on the matter.) Does that mean pop evolutionary psychology is any less sexist? Of course not. Libby Anne’s argument works perfectly well without invoking the possibly nonexistent consensus of women.
The problem with saying “women believe X” goes beyond Ozy being a pedant, however. It sets you up for things like #NotYourShield, the Gamergate offshoot that consists of women, people of color, and LGBT people saying that they support Gamergate, in response to people saying that the only people who supported Gamergate were cishet white men. Some people responded to this by saying that all the women, people of color, and LGBT people who supported Gamergate were sockpuppets, because it is apparently totally unthinkable that there exists a woman, person of color, or LGBT person who disagrees with you, despite the observable existence of trans female trans-exclusive radical feminists, black supporters of the human biodiversity movement, etc.
But there’s a way better way you can answer that! You can say, “it is still wrong to misogynistically harass female game developers. Video games are still sexist, like literally every other piece of media in a sexist society. It doesn’t matter that Christina Hoff Sommers disagrees. Christina Hoff Sommers may be female, but that doesn’t mean she’s automatically right about everything having to do with gender.” Anti-gamergate arguments don’t actually have anything to do with what women as a whole believe. They stand firmly on their own; they would be true even if every woman in the world disagreed with them. To say “this is true because this is what women think!” actually weakens our arguments.
(Also, Zoe Quinn is an abuser. Sorry, have to mention that every time Gamergate comes up. It’s karmic balance for the number of times Eron Gjoni has been called a jilted ex.)
Libby Anne implies that one of the reasons that movement atheism is very white and very male is that movement atheists tend to believe things like evolutionary psychology. On the other hand, Catholicism, Mormonism, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and evangelicals are all quite sexist, and yet they all have more female members than male members.
To be clear: making movement atheism more feminist– that is, less likely to support gender norms which, I believe, are harmful for people of all genders– is an awesome goal which I fully support. Making women more likely to identify as members of movement atheism is also an awesome goal which I fully support. I would just like to open the possibility that these are, in fact, two separate goals. If it turns out that making movement atheism more feminist increases the number of female movement atheists, great, we’ve hit two birds with one stone. But we need to keep open the possibility that it won’t.
And you don’t need to endorse biological essentialism to believe that that might happen. One of the effects of gender socialization is that women often have different desires, preferences, and personalities from men. It is possible to have an environment that’s hostile to women without necessarily having an environment that’s sexist. To pick a gender-swapped example: knitters are more likely to be female than male and many men would be quite uncomfortable at a knitting meetup, but that doesn’t mean that knitters are sexist against men. It just means that men as a group have been socialized differently than women as a group, and some of those differences mean they’re a lot less likely to pick up a pair of knitting needles.
To be clear: I am not saying that sexism doesn’t make environments more hostile to women. Of course it does! I am just saying that sexism is one of many factors affecting whether women participate in something, and we should remain open to the possibility that movement atheism’s problems lie in some of the other factors as well, so that we can actually solve the problem.
In conclusion: I think everyone should be more careful to distinguish between “what women believe” and “what feminists believe”. If you are going to make claims about the former, please cite a survey or make it clear you’re working off anecdotal data. Similarly, we should remain open to the possibility that making movement atheism less white and male and making movement atheism less sexist are separate problems with separate solutions.
Thing of Things 
Thanks for this– it recently hit me that “helping women” isn’t necessarily the same thing as being feminist. I’m not sure what examples would be– perhaps inventing things that make work that women typically do easier, perhaps helping women who want dominant men to identify and attract benign dominant men.
When I pointed out on a blog that Eron’s original Zoe post wasn’t misogynistic as far as I could see, I was told very firmly that it didn’t matter, because by posting it on 4chan, he was setting Zoe up for a misogynistic attack. From one angle, this seems like missing the point, and from another angle, it seems reasonable. What do you think?
LikeLiked by 1 person
IIRC Gjoni didn’t post it on 4chan until after SA had already declared it anathema and cast him to the outer reaches for daring to speak ill of the Chosen One, Zoe the Blameless.
(I may be very, very sore about this particular point. For some reason the sight of supposed supporters of equality rallying around an abuser has that effect on me.)
LikeLike
More specifically, after it was banned on Penny Arcade and SA, he posted it independently on a WordPress site. When it reached 4chan, his reaction was, verbatim, “Fuck. 4chan found it”.
I imagine the same argument could be made with very little alteration to condemn him for knowing that 4chan would probably get a hold of it, though. Clearly, what he should have done was cast a magic spell that would allow him to speak out about his abuser without anyone *bad* hearing about it. Or the other option, which is not speaking out about his abuser, because that is totally the option we want to encourage people to take.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Fuck, I didn’t even know that. So I went and had a dig to find out more.
Umm… yeah. To bring things up to date:
– Abuse victim tries to out his abuser, who is a well-known figure.
– Multiple sites immediately ban all discussion of his abuse.
– Abuse victim releases details of his abuse online.
– 4chan finds details, begins shitflinging like only 4chan can.
– Entire media sides with abuser.
– Everyone calls abuse victim a “jilted ex” and accuses him of recruiting 4chan as his own personal army.
– Abuser takes out a restraining order against her victim.
– Abuser whines in court about how abuse victim “harassing” her by continuing to reveal details of her abusive behaviour.
– Judge refuses to allow abuse victim to present any evidence in his defence and allows use of a statute specifically intended for use in physical violence cases.
– Abuser then returns to her regular schedule of tv interviews and arguing with Brianna Wu about who is a bigger victim in all this, apparently failing to see the gargantuan irony.
What’s left to say at his point? How much more obviously can society at large side with an abuser simply because she’s female? I’m quite serious, here. Do we need to reach the point where she’s allowed to electrocute him on live TV before people acknowledge that this whole situation is horrific?
LikeLiked by 3 people
I honestly didn’t know much of the story about Zoe Quinn’s abusive behavior until very recently. I suppose I read more social justice people than gamergate types, but for the most part those I have encountered on the gamergate side (and I don’t just mean those quoted by the social justice side; I read a few sites where such people speak for themselves) have focused on calling Quinn a slut who slept her way to success in game making (usually expressed much less politely), and have said hardly anything about the abuse. Those generally offensive and absurd charges were probably the biggest thing that for a long time prevented me from suspecting that there was any merit to the anti-Quinn side. I guess I’m glad to have a more accurate picture now.
LikeLiked by 1 person
“How much more obviously can society at large side with an abuser simply because she’s female?”
It’s not that simple– she was egregiously abused by 4chan for being female, and they dropped her abusiveness out of the story.
My temperament inclines me to be sympathetic to victims, but I’m beginning to see the problems with putting victimhood at the moral center.
I recommend Ordinary Vices for more than a little about how such things can got wrong, including the intriguing idea that if you think cruelty is the worst thing, you’re at risk for hating the human race.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yep, Zoe’s supporters literally spin some of this out of whole cloth.
LikeLike
I might be misunderstanding your point, and also derailing this into what is feminism. Inventing things that make things that women do easier is surely a major part of feminism? A lot (I would say most) of what Marilyn Waring has done has been about making traditional work of women easier, and she is certainly considered a feminist, and the founder of feminist economics by many people.
So do you mean that a person who has no feminist intentions (a random engineer) invents something that helps women in traditional tasks, which is a feminist outcome but wasn’t a feminist act?
Or are saying that making traditional women’s tasks easier is not a feminist act, because we should be aiming for the long term goal of no longer having women’s tasks, which means ignoring their existence now?
LikeLike
As Audrey said in more detail, I think things that deliberately help women are feminist. I’d label both of your examples feminist.
So while I wouldn’t say there’s a difference between helping women and being feminist, I would say there’s a difference between helping women and promoting the ideology of feminism. It’s like what Ozy says, that you can make a group more friendly to women its members adopting more feminist beliefs. And I think doing so is a feminist act.
So all I’m really saying is that there’s a difference between doing feminism and making more feminists. I do think that making more feminists is a type of doing feminism, but it’s not always the most efficient way available to you.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Stop me if this is treading on a forbidden topic, but — in addition to all the above, another problem it sets you up for is when all the men trying to be good feminists actually take your advice to “listen to women” and end up very confused when they are told entirely contradictory things!
Of course, “listen to feminists” wouldn’t be much better here, because, as they say, feminism is not a monolith. But that’s a different matter. For now, I’d basically just like to agree with your points that A. feminists should expect that not all women will agree with them, B. taking aribtrary people and turning them into authorities is bad, C. really when possible let’s not turn people into authorities even when we know who they are.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Yeah. Nietzsche is no feminist icon (for good reasons), but unlike most people I’ve read a bit of the writings of Lou Salome, a woman Nietzsche was exceedingly impressed with and perhaps in love with. An awful lot of the problematic things Nietzsche said about women seem like they could easily be based on what Salome told him (especially plausible as it wouldn’t be the only case where Nietzsche seems to have been led astray by trusting personal connections).
LikeLike
Man, those are some great examples there. Consider them stolen. (Also, thank you, I always feel awkward when someone says this.)
“trans female trans-exclusive radical feminists” link is broken, or possibly to a defunct site.
I feel like this may be *slightly* too strong. In the sense that women’s opinions are somewhat-valuable bayesian evidence, that is.
I do think there’s a failure mode – relatively rare, because it requires disagreeing with so many people – where we get *so* caught up in a neat theory, or a rule of thumb, that we forget to make any reference to people’s expressed preferences at all and just sort of make stuff up based on what sounds good. (Usually “consent”, for some reason, but “nature” is also common.)
It’s most common among Libertarians, but I’ve also seen it in feminism – declaring harmless acts “coercive”, and therefore wrong. And I may or may not have fallen victim to it myself; I used to be very confident that most sex work should be illegal pending utopia. Now I’m much less confident, largely for this reason.
LikeLike
Link fixed! I mixed up two bloggers. 🙂
LikeLike
All of this is excellent and I am grateful to you for it.
There’s one other thing that needs bearing in mind, too, and while I’m going to point it out I think I’m not doing so because you’ve ignored it but because you may have considered it so obvious as to not need to be stated. Conflating “women” and “feminism” has numerous failure states that you’ve enumerated, but none of them are nearly so big as “What if you’re wrong?”
If the modern feminist view of society is wrong, then not only is conflating “women” and “feminists” broken, but by doing so and insisting that X Thing Is Bad For Women you’re actually advocating for the restriction of something women want to do for no reason other than your particular tribe thinks it’s bad, which seems pretty close to a Platonic form of sexism.
It doesn’t even need to be wrong in the general case, in fact – if only one specific element of feminist theory is objectively wrong, then any conflations of the interests of “feminists” and “women” is oppressive in the same way. After all, intent isn’t magic; you may have meant the very best for those you’re pushing your ideas on, but you’re still restricting women because they disagree with Your Tribe. In that light, arguments about “internalised misogyny” melt away in the face of obvious motivated reasoning. This is one of the many dangers of building ethical & moral cases out of social science theories.
To be very clear – it does seem to me that you’re unusually careful to avoid this failure state, both by carefully phrasing things to avoid being proscriptive except when you think it’s of overwhelming importance and by being as careful as you can be to Not Be Wrong. This is one of the reasons I’m happy you’re blogging again. 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
Argh. No edit function. Third paragraph first sentence should read “then any conflations of the interests of “feminists” and “women” in that context is oppressive in the same way.” One failure case doesn’t break an entire belief system, of course.
LikeLike
>If the modern feminist view of society is wrong, then not only is conflating “women” and “feminists” broken, but by doing so and insisting that X Thing Is Bad For Women you’re actually advocating for the restriction of something women want to do for no reason other than your particular tribe thinks it’s bad, which seems pretty close to a Platonic form of sexism.
This strikes me as a Fully General Counterargument.
LikeLike
The failure seems dependant upon the feminist veiw of society being wrong, thus this seems like a GIGO argument. (i.e. if the premises are wrong, the conclusions will be too.)
LikeLike
It’s not fully general as it’s reliant on multiple axes at the same time. For the phenomenon I’m describing to occur, both the following things must be true:
A) Feminism is wrong regarding the domain in question
B) Feminists are conflating “women” and “feminists” regarding the domain in question
The argument doesn’t work with A alone. “Feminism being wrong means feminism is wrong” isn’t so much fully general as tautological, while B means it can’t be fully general as it only applies to a specific set of behaviours (B) in a specific set of circumstances (A).
If you’re arguing that Fully General Counterarguments can apply in such a limited context, I have to wonder whether the term has meaning any more.
LikeLike
Zorgon, your criticism there of “conflating women and feminists” was that it leads to ” insisting that X Thing Is Bad For Women … for no reason other than your particular tribe thinks it’s bad”, right?
That criticism seems like it would also apply to any reason for saying “X is bad for women”, or indeed “X is bad”. It proves too much.
LikeLike
Any time you have to clip part of an argument out, it’s a pretty good indication that you’ve missed the point. A and B both need to be true.
I think modifying someone else’s argument to make it fit a rationalist – community construct or shibboleth might well be an anti-pattern.
LikeLike
Fair enough. Sorry. What *was* your argument, then?
LikeLike
I should not have clicked that “Zoe Quinn is an abuser” link. The link text is enough of a content warning, true, but I naively thought I knew the entire situation already. Oops.
Do you or anyone know of any real evopsych that has more substance than the just-so stories that trickle down to blogs? I’m not up to searching the university library for it today, or probably any time soon, but I could skim a paper or two to form an opinion.
LikeLike
I’ve read parts of “Natural Selection and Social Theory: Selected Papers of Robert Trivers” and I recommend it.
LikeLike
> trans female trans-exclusive radical feminists, black supporters of the human biodiversity movement
Male feminists /wink/
>pop evolutionary psychology is extraordinarily awful
Pop psychology is extraordinarily awful.
LikeLike
I have a pretty low opinion of feminists already, but then, I’m a straight white man, so I suppose that’s to be expected
That said, I see the trend to say “women” when one means “feminist” as a pretty blatant attempt to co-opt others to one’s cause. When one says, “feminists believe X”, one is easily dismissed — because how many feminists are there, really ? Do they all agree with each other ? Why should we listen to what they say ? But when one says, “all women believe X” — well, now she’s got the support of 50% of the entire humanity behind her ! She must know what she’s talking about ! We’d all better do what she says, or risk antagonizing all women everywhere…
LikeLiked by 1 person
Rule of thumb: Generally speaking, people aren’t evil monsters who’ll lie and mislead in every conceivable way to further an argument (though a few people are).
Women are negatively portrayed and negatively affected by X, therefore women do not support X, seems intuitively correct. It seems pretty damn reasonable, if it’s just written out like that.
But it doesn’t understand how oppression works. An oppressed group may not recognize that they’re being oppressed, or may even agree with the parts that make up the oppression.
This leads into what’s effectively a trick argument. If X implies Y, then if not Y, not X, is standard logic. But if you believe that X implies Y, when it really doesn’t (for example, believing that women who are oppressed are against oppression), then by showing Y is false (some women aren’t going to be against oppression), it would imply that X is false (women aren’t oppressed). Thus, you turn the statement “Oppressed group is against oppression!” into “Oppressed group isn’t oppressed”.
LikeLike
The problem I have with the concept of “internalized oppression” is that it’s unfalsifiable. If a woman disagrees with anything a feminist says, then how can we tell whether her disagreement is genuine and deserving of merit, or a side-effect of internalized oppression ? If the answer is “we can’t”, or “it’s always the oppression”, then how is that different from saying, “feminists are always right about everything by definition” ?
LikeLiked by 2 people
>Generally speaking, people aren’t evil monsters who’ll lie and mislead in every conceivable way to further an argument (though a few people are).
I don’t think anyone claims that most people are evil monsters. Most people are people, and as such extremely prone to having very narrow and selective views of reality, which tend to support their narratives, and tend to choose for themselves self-reinforcing communities of shared values which further narrow those views. Case in point: The huge number of voices weighing in on Gamergate specifically from two specific narrative points, and the relative dearth of voices who read the original document that putatively kicked this whole boondoggle off.
And because the world is by definition bigger and more complex than the theories we have about it, it can be epistemically dangerous to make assertions about things like oppression, which happen in a bunch of different ways to a bunch of different people, sometimes imposed by an outgroup, sometimes reinforced by an ingroup, mostly with a combination of both, and some times in other situations still.
Because of those fuzzy boundaries, it ends up being very difficult to come up with a solid general definition of oppression, free of false positives and false negatives. Really, I wonder if the ideal thing isn’t to focus on the original claim (“This is a bad thing because it negatively affects these people, as shown in these studies here.”), and leave the questions about whether it’s oppression and who among those people are fine with it as irrelevant to the presence or absence of badness.
LikeLike
I’ve always gotten the impression it was based on stereotypes: the Enemy, the Red Tribe, are white cishet religious old men who hate sex.
That isn’t a metaphor for power; it’s literally what many people alieve, and so they make incorrect predictions because of it. And when you have a bunch of people making biased predictions, many of them will just sort of drift into “fact” and get cited in arguments.
LikeLiked by 1 person
I don’t see where you disagree with Libby Anne. In your second to last paragraph, you say that sexism definitely creates a hostile environment and discourages women. (The preceding two paragraphs appears to say that you are not sure, but I assume you meant that you are not sure it is the only reason for lower female participation in atheism.) Isn’t this generalizing about women in exactly the same way Libby Anne does?
On a slightly different note, a few times you seem to be criticizing her for saying that all women oppose evolutionary psychology, but, as you quote, she just said “more.”
A reason I can imagine to distinguish feminists is that some kinds of sexism are perceived as hostile and discouraging by feminists and not all women. Removing these kinds of sexism might not encourage women as a whole, and might even discourage them. (And, conceivably, there are kinds of sexism that are encouraging to feminists.) This seemed like where you were going when you said “just because you are oppressed does not necessarily mean you understand oppression” but in the end you seemed to just agree with Libby Anne.
LikeLike
The funny thing is that I feel like the thing pop evo-psych says about men are at least as unflattering as the things it says about women, and probably more so.
I guess some feminists might say that evolutionary psychology calling males demonic is really excusing their behavior, by implying that it is in their nature rather than being either a consciously malign choice or as a result of cultural programming of the patriarchy. (Amanda Marcotte, e.g., often makes the case that Homer Simpson-type portrayals of men are really misogynistic, because their portrayal of hapless men effectively perpetuates the expectation that women have to take up the burden of doing the laundry, dishes, and such lest Homer Simpson-ish men shrink the laundry, break the dishes, etc.)
LikeLike
So portrayals of stupid men are sexist because it implies women have to prevent hapless men from ruining everything and portrayals of stupid women are sexist because it implies women might not be able to handle responsibilities that come their way. That seems contradictory.
LikeLike
Anonymous, can you please get a name? IME moderating blog comments, there are inevitably multiple anonymouses and then it gets very confusing for everyone involved.
LikeLike
>I can certainly think of prominent women who oppose evolutionary psychology, such as Rebecca Watson and Libby Anne herself
The most prominent anti evo-psych women you can think of are the Elevatorgate woman and the “How I lost trust in the pro-life movement” woman. Meanwhile, the pro evo-psych side include giants like Nancy Segal and Sarah Blaffer Hrdy.
Call me back when an actual scientist doubts evo-psych.
LikeLike
I’m not an expert in evolutionary psychology or its critique, as I explicitly stated. The only reason I know that some of the founders of the field were female is that I happened to find a really helpful article about it. I don’t think that “Ozy can’t think of anyone except Rebecca Watson” is good evidence about the quality of critiques one way or the other.
Also, Rebecca Watson had a whole career and I sort of resent
LikeLike
Was the second paragraph cut off? But I can imagine what you would write and I concede the point. It would have been more appropriate to call her the “Skeptics guide to the universe woman.”
LikeLike
We all sort of resent
LikeLiked by 3 people
Shoot, I forgot to finish my sentence. I mean, “I sort of resent people making her entire career about one off-handed comment in a video.”
LikeLiked by 1 person
Professional sort-of-resenter reporting in.
LikeLike
PZ Myers, evolutionary biologist, on record as saying evo-psych is crap. (Also for the record, Hrdy’s work is very different from what’s normally called “evo-psych” and goes against many of the more sexist assumptions in the field.)
Also, if Ozy says “widely known person doubts evo-psych” that does not imply that less widely known people do not doubt evo-psych. There are actually very many researchers who doubt evo-psych.
LikeLike
I don’t know enough about evo-psych to have an opinion on it either way, but I’d take anything PZ Myers says with a huge grain of salt. He’s got a long history of misrepresenting and smearing people, making fallacious arguments, and all other sorts of nastiness. His behavior leads me to believe he’s exactly the kind of person who would discredit an entire scientific field just because it occasionally arrives at conclusions he finds distasteful, regardless of whether or not the methodology is sound.
Mind you, I’m not saying his opinion should be ignored just because I don’t like him. In fact, I’m sure there is plenty of bad evo-psych, just as there is bad science in other fields. But I certainly wouldn’t dismiss the entire field based on PZ’s word alone, just because he’s a biologist. (Also, I’m not saying this is what you were implying we should do, but I can imagine that some people might take it that way.)
LikeLike
Poking around those posts I found this line, not about EP:
I must commend Myers for making concrete claims outside the realm of evolutionary psychology. I wonder why he chose that particular example? Had he recently read papers (easily googled) proposing selective explanations for noses and disliked them? Or did he assume no such papers existed?
LikeLike
PZ Myers, evolutionary biologist, on record as saying evo-psych is crap. (Also for the record, Hrdy’s work is very different from what’s normally called “evo-psych” and goes against many of the more sexist assumptions in the field.)
I think what was even more convincing, for me, is that he asked for people to send examples of good evo psych but didn’t get any that he actually thought were good. How much you trust that will still depend on your opinion of PZ Myers, though.
2nding that Hrdy’s work is very difficult from typical evo psych. I do not believe that she uses the term ‘evo psych’ or ‘evolutionary psychology’ to describe her own work. (I have read ‘Mothers and Others’ and ‘Mother Nature’ in the not-too-distant past and am a fan. I also read ‘The Woman That Never Evolved’ but that was about 10 years ago.) That may be one of the most damning things about evo psych–if the people who actually do good work in what would naively be said to be the evo psych field are unwilling to use the label, then anything that actually is called evo psych is likely to be bad.
LikeLike
Feminists, like any group of people wishing to change society, want to make society better for women in the future. The problem is then that none of us know what life will be like in the future, so different people are going to have different ideas about what will make life better. This creates various fault lines in feminism, including a generational divide. Older feminists can tell younger feminists, you should really worry about issue X, because we have been through it and we know it will come and get you. On the other hand younger feminists are walking into a different future and might need to find a wholly different solution. So it isn’t always a question of other people being wrong or internal anything.
My issue with the discussion around evo psych is this. The argument is that a. science is better than its rivals, b. evo pysch is science and then either c. if you don’t agree with evo psych you hate science, particularly evolution or d. scientists accept evo psych but sometimes scientists gets stuff wrong (Libby Anne being D).
But science hasn’t accepted evo psych. There are numerous different fields that study how human behaviour is modified by past and present environmental influences while human behaviour also changes those environments. For example, human ecology, behavioural ecology, sociobiology, various kind of systems theory, branches of environmental economics, environmental anthropology.
I am certainly not an expert in evo psych. In fact I have never studied it all. I have never seen a book about it on a reading list. I’m in the process of completing my third degree – undergrad, MSc and now PhD on human environmental interactions including studying evolutionary adaptations, at two different universities, and yet nobody has ever mentioned evo psych to me in an academic setting.
Yet when I go online, there are various people who seem to believe that scientists in general, and I have to assume they particularly mean scientists who look at human behaviour and adaptations, have widely accepted it. Well I haven’t accepted it, because other than people talking online, I’d have no reason to even look at it.
And I find it slightly irritating when anybody, regardless of their opinion on evo psych, starts claiming that scientists, whether for good or ill, have any particular opinion on the subject.
I’m slightly embarrassed that I seem to be making the claim that I’m a qualified expert on the topic of being ignorant about evo psych.
So as well as agreeing people should stop saying feminists if they mean women, I’d like people to stop saying scientists when they just mean people interested in science on the internet.
LikeLike
And sorry, your point was people saying women when they mean feminists, which I have reversed to feminists if they mean women. Although both annoy me.
LikeLike
The problem with saying “women believe X” goes beyond Ozy being a pedant, however. It sets you up for things like #NotYourShield, the Gamergate offshoot that consists of women, people of color, and LGBT people saying that they support Gamergate, in response to people saying that the only people who supported Gamergate were cishet white men. Some people responded to this by saying that all the women, people of color, and LGBT people who supported Gamergate were sockpuppets, because it is apparently totally unthinkable that there exists a woman, person of color, or LGBT person who disagrees with you, despite the observable existence of trans female trans-exclusive radical feminists, black supporters of the human biodiversity movement, etc.
First, I should say that I agree that conflating ‘women’ and ‘feminists’ is something that people do a lot, and it is a bad habit, and the pedant in me hates it. I’ve noticed that a lot of MRAs do it, too. Which is why I’m completely unconvinced that conflation of ‘women’ and ‘feminists’ by by anti-gamergate people was the cause of #notyourshield. I believe that using terms like ‘sexist’, ‘racist’, or ‘heteronormative’ was sufficient to lead to its creation, since plenty of people feel that “I have a __ friend and they say this isn’t __ist” is a good rebuttal.
I haven’t run into anyone who believes that all [people who say they’re] women/POC/LGBT who supported gamergate were sockpuppets, but it’s a big internet; I’m sure they’re out there. But I do think that #notyourshield in particular was probably both started by and mostly used by sockpuppets because there are 4chan conversations about sockpuppeting WRT #notyourshield. Granted, that’s not airtight evidence about what proportion of #notyourshield people are sockpuppets, but I’d need to see actual evidence of what the proportions are to sway my opinion on that.
LikeLike
But I do think that #notyourshield in particular was probably both started by and mostly used by sockpuppets because there are 4chan conversations about sockpuppeting WRT #notyourshield.
I don’t think that link supports your theory. The one “confirmed” case of sockpuppeting it originally described was retracted; what’s left is people in a chat room joking about absurd schemes (note the liberal use of “lol”). Is there any evidence that any of them actually took place?
Here’s one female in #notyourshield who has repeatedly been accused of being a sockpuppet. From the surrounding conversation, it appears that this particular accuser equated writing in favor GG and defending men with “acting like sock puppet profiles”. It’d be sadly ironic if, due to the lack of actual confirmed instances of #NYS sockpuppeting, such accusations were simply based on the accuser’s impression of how a sock puppet might act.
LikeLike
I don’t think it’s obvious that “lol” means “jk” vs. “lol those stupid people will fall for our trick” in this conversation. It sounds like the latter to me. I think we’re left with “It sounds like they’re saying this to me” and “It sounds like they’re saying this other thing to me”. (My opinion is partly informed by previous 4chan sockpuppeting, e.g. bikinibridge, endfathersday.)
I haven’t been heavily investigating this and don’t plan to, but I did recently come across a different confirmed case of sockpuppeting in gamergate.
LikeLike
I guess what I’m saying about the context of my opinion is, given that trolling is highly associated with the phrase “for the lulz” and that 4chan has a history of sockpuppeting, it seems kind of naive to say, “Oh, 4chan was joking about sockpuppeting, but they wouldn’t really do that…”
LikeLike
All right, that’s one guy lying about his race in a post to /r/Bitcoin (of all places). That’s still fewer women than I’ve seen being made to prove that they’re women by #NotYourShield’s detractors, and those are just among the ones I’m following.
To be clear, I’m not saying “4chan wouldn’t do that”. I’m saying there’s no evidence that they have done it, whereas many if not all accusations of sockpuppeting that have been lobbed at #NYS have turned out to be false. I think it’s a mistake to conclude that the movement was “probably both started by and mostly used by sockpuppets” just because you believe it’s the kind of thing they might do.
LikeLike
“just because you believe it’s the kind of thing they might do.”
As I said, that’s not the only reason. It’s not just “the kind of thing they might do”, it’s the kind of thing they have actually talked [or joked, in your interpretation] about doing, which I linked to. I think that the above quote is an unfair distortion of what I said. The only charitable explanation I have for it is that you didn’t notice that you’re talking to the same person that you were two comments ago [scrolls up to make sure I was all logged in for my last comment] or have already forgotten what I said two comments ago.
LikeLike
I didn’t intend to distort what you said, so I apologize for giving that impression. Thank you for not assuming the worst.
Still, it seems we’re ultimately talking about the same thing: you believe this is something they might have done because you read a chat log in which they chuckled at the idea of doing it. The disconnect is that, regardless of how serious either of us believe they were, there’s no evidence that they ever acted on it.
The evidence that they didn’t act on it is that whenever people posting under #NotYourShield are accused of pretending to be women/POC/LGBT, those accusations always seem to turn out to be false; they obligingly post photos of themselves holding up snarky messages, and their followers have a laugh at yet another detractor making the same mistake. If the hashtag were “mostly used by sockpuppets”, I’d expect the accusations to stick at least, say, half the time.
LikeLike
I encountered some (what were probably) socks on Twitter. Thing is, they didn’t stick around long cuz they were pretty obvious. Which of course leaves the people who did stick around. Some of them are surely not-socks. But how many?
The thing is, it’s hard to really know. Which is a recipe for terrible.
All that said, the #endfathersday stuff did happen, and there were some other things like that that I cannot be bothered to Google for just now. But there is a history here.
Which, look, it’s 4chan.
Myself, I pretty much just block anyone who is all pro-GG. It’s just easier. I can spend zero effort distinguishing the socks from non-socks.
LikeLike
veronica d:
I can spend zero effort distinguishing the socks from non-socks.
Yeah. I’m not even on twitter, and have little interest in figuring out if any particular person is or is not a sock if I’m not interacting with them–certainly not to the level of accusing particular people of being socks, so I guess this whole conversation is pretty low-stakes for me in the end.
taradinoc:
So, the evidence I have is that some people, taradinoc is fairly certain, are not sock puppets, and some people, veronica d is fairly certain, are sock puppets, which seems to leave ample room for reasonable people to disagree as to what proportion of notyourshield people are sock puppets.
LikeLike
To be clear, this was less than a dozen people who were “eggs” on Twitter — meaning new accounts who had not set up an avi. They had almost no followers and seemed to disappear quickly.
LikeLike
Right. I’m fairly certain that almost none of the folks who have avatars, followers, and a decent number of tweets are fake. If our levels of certainty are what you’re basing your conclusion on, that ought to be enough to question the belief that #NYS is “mostly” sockpuppets: the range has been narrowed to somewhere between “none” and “some”.
But that doesn’t really fit my model of disagreements between reasonable people. One person points out that some lottery tickets are winners; another points out that some lottery tickets are losers; it doesn’t follow that most tickets being winners is just as likely as most tickets being losers. We can observe the number of people who buy tickets but don’t win and conclude that if you buy a ticket, you probably won’t win. Likewise, in this case we can observe the number of false accusations, which have reached the point where “OMG you’re a sockpuppet!” is as much of a snarky punchline to one side as “actually, it’s about ethics in game journalism” is to the other, and conclude that if one person accuses another of being a sockpuppet, they probably aren’t.
LikeLike
taradinoc:
the folks who have avatars, followers, and a decent number of tweets are fake
Well, that last one, especially, may narrow the population down quite a bit from the overall number of people who’ve tweeted about #notyourshield.
I don’t see how it’s been narrowed to between none and some. You and veronica d combined know of examples of both true accusations and false accusations of sockpuppeting. Combined with the example I linked to and the example you actually linked to, I can be certain that some are sockpuppets, and some are not, which is basically where I was at the beginning of the conversation.
I seemed to remember RationalWiki talking about sockpuppets, so I looked up their sources, and the main thing I found was this Ars Technica article.
There is a link to one particular twitter account that appeared to be a sockpuppet. It is now taken down, but I’m willing to trust that it did exist. There is a further 4chan chatlog about sockpuppeting with maybe less loling (no loling in the section I looked at). According to the Ars Technica article,
It may be wrong about “figured heavily”, since that’s somewhat open to interpretation, especially since they hedge with “appear” (though I wouldn’t expect them to be able to know for sure in any case, so in a way, using “appear” makes them more trustworthy). But I doubt that they would have published that without finding evidence of multiple sockpuppet accounts.
So I think we’ve eliminated both the “none” and “all” possibilities, but I was willing to discount those out of hand in the first place. At this point, given my own assessment of the first 4chan chatlog I linked to, your posts, veronica d’s posts, and the further input from Ars Technica, my assessment is that probably most of the twitter accounts at the beginning of #notyourshield were sockpuppets, but probably most that are still using it at this point are not sockpuppets. Given that, the population of people currently being accused of being sockpuppets would be expected to be quite different from the number of sockpuppets when #notyourshield first started, the number of accusations that are currently false doesn’t necessarily reflect the number of sockpuppets involved in the initial popularization of the hashtag.
LikeLike
Thanks for this post separating out feminist v. women – many women do not consider themselves feminist; many men do; many women study evolutionary psychology.
Just as there are women who study evolutionary psychology, there are men and women who identify as feminists and study evolutionary psychology (See http://fepsociety.org). Accepting that a scientific theory is an appropriate point for understanding human behavior is not the same as endorsing all of the research done within a field. Feminism is a broad term with multiple definitions, and arguably there are many feminists who don’t agree will all of those definitions or applications. So too with evolutionary psychology.
As a feminist evolutionary psychologist, I appreciate your mention that media might also distort findings. Certainly there is a bias based on the research picked up by the media (some of which is poorly done methodologically) and there are misinterpretations of the research.
LikeLike