I felt we were doing important work: making a better, more rational world and protecting people from being taken advantage of. At conventions, skeptic speakers and the audience were mostly male, but I figured that was something we could balance out with a bit of hard work and good PR.
Then women started telling me stories about sexism at skeptic events, experiences that made them uncomfortable enough to never return. At first, I wasn’t able to fully understand their feelings as I had never had a problem existing in male-dominated spaces. But after a few years of blogging, podcasting, and speaking at skeptics’ conferences, I began to get emails from strangers who detailed their sexual fantasies about me. I was occasionally grabbed and groped without consent at events. And then I made the grave mistake of responding to a fellow skeptic’s YouTube video in which he stated that male circumcision was just as harmful as female genital mutilation (FGM). I replied to say that while I personally am opposed to any non-medical genital mutilation, FGM is often much, much more damaging than male circumcision.The response from male atheists was overwhelming. This is one example:
“honestly, and i mean HONESTLY.. you deserve to be raped and tortured and killed. swear id laugh if i could”
I started checking out the social media profiles of the people sending me these messages, and learned that they were often adults who were active in the skeptic and atheist communities. They were reading the same blogs as I was and attending the same events. These were “my people,” and they were the worst1.
Richard Dawkins mockingly complained in a sarcastic letter that "Muslima's" situation wasn't nearly as bad as what women were going through in the skeptic/atheist community, making light of the fact that women in Muslim countries have it far worse and women in the US and elsewhere who go to these conventions shouldn't complain about sexual harassment or assault2.
This stops now. The atheists, I would like to think (though now I might be dead wrong), present a much better alternative to the iron heel of religious dogma. To this end, the mistreatment of women in various religions is a frequent and extremely effective point of attack. However, we may lose the right to use this argument because if this misogynist strain is allowed to fester--there is little to currently combat it in the movement--we cannot say that we treat women any better than the dirty old men in fancy robes, above and beyond the fact that this treatment of women is objectively wrong.
If we are not feminists, if the plight of women even at our own conventions fails to move us, then what right do we have to even attempt to contest the prevailing religious power structure? We are essentially hypocrites: We say that we want a better future, we believe that what we stand for will improve the lives of all mankind, and this has to include the historically most oppressed demographic in all cultures--women.
Tell me, please: If we cannot say that we are able to provide a tangible improvement in the lives of women, then what, I ask you, have we accomplished? What makes us immediately different from the Catholic Church, or the Southern Baptist Convention, if women are still denied a voice and sexualized without their consent; are victimized without recourse?
We would have to admit, then, that it would be possible for Todd Akin to be an atheist. We would have to admit that everything we hate about the religious power structure, and everything contained within it is still possible under our ideology. We would have to admit that we are devoid of positive content, that we have no real reason to exist.
This is where atheism dies as a movement, as an asymmetrical ideology capable of offering a meaningful alternative to religious control; this is where atheism becomes that which it hates.
1) http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2012/10/sexism_in_the_skeptic_community_i_spoke_out_then_came_the_rape_threats.html
2) Ibid
