The headline is a quote from atheist Alison Smith, describing her hookup with atheist Michael Shermer at a 2008 atheist conference in Las Vegas, in a BuzzFeed article headlined:
Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?
My headline is better. Just sayin’ . . .
Also, the BuzzFeed headline is asking the wrong question. It should be, “Will Feminism Bring Down The Atheist Movement?” The problem is not necessarily that atheist men are feral swine — are we surprised? — but rather that women are attending conferences with these feral swine and expecting to be treated like ladies. Or treated like “equals,” even if they are manifestly not equal.
Men started this atheist conference — known as “The Amazing Meeting” — paying their own money to fund it, and then the women showed up and wanted to change the rules. The atheist women complained that they were not adequately represented on the panels, despite the fact that, y’know, the big-name attractions were all men who had done actual work that mattered to the atheist movement.
And then, in 2008, this “incident” happened: Alison Smith, 26 at the time, met the eminent atheist Michael Shermer, 54 at the time, at a party during this conference in Las Vegas. Even among the feral swine of atheism, it seems, Shermer has a reputation as an aggressive lecher. Anyway, Smith and Shermer left the party at the Flamingo, when to another party at Caesar’s Palace and then, after Smith got sloppy drunk, she and Shermer returned to the Flamingo and ended the evening in Shermer’s hotel room, where he boned her.
As I said, are we surprised?
The BuzzFeed article goes on and on about how this drunken Vegas hookup in 2008 is emblematic of A Larger Problem, namely the “misogyny” in a movement which is and always has been male-dominated. But some men in the movement wanted to attract more women (so they could get them drunk and bone them, obviously) and it seems that, when young atheist women did begin showing up at these events, they did not consider it particularly flattering that feral swine like Michael Shermer wanted to bone them.
Having written about this last year (“No Love for the Godless,” American Spectator), I don’t have much more to say, except to point out the obvious question: Why would these women assume that an egalitarian ethos must prevail in the atheist community? Doesn’t this egalitarian assumption reflect the pervasive influence of feminism in our culture — especially in our higher education system — so that every “movement” must now also be a feminist movement? Every institution is expected to operate on a de facto feminist quota system so that unless a certain percentage of seats are filled by women, the accusation of sexist discrimination is automatic.
These egalitarian assumptions are illogical and, while I certainly don’t endorse the misbehavior of feral swine like Michael Shermer, I’m amazed that these atheists — who pride themselves on their strictly scientific view of the world — don’t have the brains or courage to challenge the quota-minded radical feminist assumptions that some atheist women are attempting to smuggle into their movement.
Of course, all these atheists are going to hell, which will be a very equal place, because there will be so many feminists there.
, Bond was a reaction to the loss of Empire and the drastically narrowed horizons of postwar Britain; his glamorous life of derring-do and hot dames was a sorely-needed antidote to the misery and rationing of not-so-Merrie Olde England. Of course, Ian Fleming’s hero became even more (in)famous in America thanks to Alfred “Cubby” Broccoli’s film adaptations, initially starring Sean Connery, which further stoked interest in the books lauded by John F. Kennedy. Our interest, of course, is in the Bond Girls, the women who were never just arm candy in the films and usually came with a name guaranteed to make the feminists gnash their teeth, e.g. Pussy Galore.
