Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
U.S. women’s chess champion Nazi Paikidze-Barnes has started a petition protesting FIDE’s (the international chess organization) decision to hold its Women’s World Championship in Iran, where all players, Muslim or not, will be required to wear hijabs. On top of that ridiculous religious requirement in a secular venue, I just realized that one’s chess game, which demands terrific concentration, could be thrown off by having to wear a scarf over your head.
Nazí’s original goal was 1000 signatures, and I’m sure she’s terrifically pleased that it stands at a much higher number now—more than 3400. But I’d like it to go higher, as I have a feeling that FIDE may have to respond to the petition. So, if you object to women being made to veil against their wishes, do sign the petition; click on the screenshot below to add your name and perhaps a message.
I should add that Pikidze-Barnes’s husband was the first signer, and added a nice message:
I write here for free, and rarely ask anything of readers; but there are 40,000+ subscribers out there, and if only half of you took the one minute to sign the petition, there would be an astounding 20,000 signatures. Do it for Professor Ceiling Cat, Emeritus.
UPDATE: The goal of 1000 signatories has been exceeded, thanks to many readers here, and has now been raised to 1,500. Given the 40,000-odd subscribers here, many who surely agree with Paikidze-Barnes, I’d like to see thousands of signers. Click on any screenshot to add your name.
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As I mentioned a few days ago, FIDE, the World Chess Federation, is holding the Women’s World Championships in Iran, and all women players are required to wear the hijab while playing. Nazí Paikidze-Barnes, the U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, has simply pulled out of the competition because of this ridiculous dress requirement, whose violators are subject to arrest. 64 women are slotted to appear there, but Paikidze-Barnes, courageously, won’t be one of them. Other women players, too, are calling for a boycott of this event.
Paikidze-Barnes has organized a petition to FIDE (click on screenshot below to see it) to do something about the requirement that chess players adhere to religious and misogynistic definition of “modesty”. The requirement that women players veil themselves makes a mockery of the claim that wearing the hijab is a matter of “choice,” although of course Iranian law requires that women be veiled in public. And the requirement for a hijab, as noted below, breaks FIDE’s own principle that players not be discriminated against on the basis of nationality, politics, race, sex, or religion.
This is more than an issue of dress in a sporting event; it’s an issue of whether fundamentalist Islam has the right to make non-Muslims adhere to religious dictates in a non-religious venue. If you click on the screenshot below, you can go sign the petition, and given the number of readers here, it should be easy to get the number of signatories over the goal of 1000 (there are 803). But I’d like see that goal exceeded by a substantial margin. I would be DELIGHTED if, in the next few hours, those readers who agree with Paikidze-Barnes could sign that petition and perhaps, by posting it on Facebook, get others to do otherwise. If you play chess yourself, you’ll have a special interest in this issue, as it puts religious restrictions on players.
The Change.org plea, written by Paikidze-Barnes, proposes alternatives for FIDE:
In its handbook, FIDE explicitly states its guiding moral principles and one of them is that the organization “rejects discriminatory treatment for national, political, racial, social or religious reasons or on account of sex.” (F.01(1)(2)). Yet, by awarding the Championship to Iran, it is breaking that pledge to its members and subjecting them to discrimination on all fronts.
We propose two solutions:
Change the venue or postpone the competition until another organizer is found to host the championship in a “no conflict” venue.
Require that wearing a hijab be optional and guarantee no discrimination based on gender, nationality, or any other human rights as pointed out in the FIDE handbook (listed above).
These issues reach far beyond the chess world. While there has been social progress in Iran, women’s rights remain severely restricted. This is more than one event; it is a fight for women’s rights. By signing this petition, you can help support the cause and make a real, positive change in the world.
Thank you for your support!
Nazi Paikidze
U.S. Women’s Champion
As Asra Nomani has pointed out, this is equivalent to requiring male players in Iran to wear hoodies. But of course they wouldn’t be, for the dress requirement applies only to women. Is that fair? I can’t see how.
Paikidze-Barnes is of course hurting her career with this move, as she’s simply out of the championships; but she clearly cares more about the plight of women than for her own personal advancement. This is an admirable thing to do. If you share her feelings, please go over and sign the petition.
More and more, The Atlantic, once a bastion of sober and liberal thought, is going the way of Salon; that is, it’s becoming both clickbait and Authoritarian Leftist, devoted to sniffing out anything that could exude even the merest whiff of social offense. One example is a yesterday’s online piece by Leila McNeill, “The constellations are sexist.” Yes, you got the title right. But how can an arrangement of stars be sexist? In fact, McNeill just doesn’t call them sexist, but “misogynistic”.
McNeill’s piece (which apparently came from Aeon), makes a pretty lame argument, and I quote:
To this day, astronomy remains one of the only scientific fields that relies so heavily on ancient Greek and Roman mythology for its naming conventions. Cosmology and mythology have been interwoven throughout human history, so it’s not surprising that modern-day astronomers have inherited this tradition. But classical mythology is deeply misogynistic, and using it to identify celestial bodies contributes to a scientific culture that diminishes the achievements of women like Caroline. Male deities and figures reign with nearly unlimited power, while their female counterparts suffer violence and humiliation.
Among the myths we have used to name and claim the heavens is Cassiopeia, a constellation in the northern hemisphere. It is named for a mythical queen of Aethiopia, whom Poseidon punished for her vanity by lashing her to her throne. Cassiopeia’s daughter, Andromeda, was also made to suffer for her mother’s sins by being chained naked to a rock, where she waited for the sea monster Cetus to rape her. In the myth, Perseus saved Andromeda and took her as his wife, but as a constellation, she still waits chained to her rock.
The Pleiades, also known as the Seven Sisters, is a cluster of stars in the Taurus constellation. The Seven Sisters were once women who danced together under the night sky, but Orion desired them, so he hunted them for seven years. To help the sisters escape, Zeus turned them all into stars—but Orion, another constellation, still chases them night after night.
And get this about “coded male names”:
Male astronomers, when they look at the sky, can find more uplifting role models. The constellations named after men tell stories of heroism and conquest, not submission and subjugation. Even today, NASA continues to recycle the names of mythological figures and great men of history when naming spacecraft and missions. Orion, a crewed spacecraft meant to facilitate travel to Mars, is named for the same Orion that hunted the Seven Sisters. Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, and Cassini—names pulled from the scientific establishment that excluded women like Caroline—are all unmanned spacecraft sent to explore the cosmos. Even spacecraft with seemingly gender-neutral names are coded male: Voyager and Pioneer evoke the men who heroically left home and hearth on voyages of exploration.
McNeill goes on to womansplain how even astronomical objects or probes associated with women or minorities are really tools of oppression. Her contorted take on the seemingly progressive names Sojourner, Artemis, and Juno shows you how deep McNeill’s confirmation bias runs: she can find offense in literally anything. And, of course, most of the misogynistic constellations cited by McNeill were not named by modern sexist astronomers, but by ancient Romans and Greeks!
Her final paragraph is a pathetic wail that once again conflates largely nonexistent sexism with misogyny, which, of course, is the hatred of women:
Today, the skies are still filtered through this tradition of mythic misogyny. Naming conventions for spacecraft and constellations are a subtle but significant way that the discipline of astronomy perpetuates a male-dominated culture. Simply giving more celestial bodies female names is not the solution. Rather, change must begin with the recognition that astronomy’s self-image is built upon an age-old habit of telling stories about the abuse of women.
To get a feminist woman’s point of view, I sent the article to Grania without any editorial comment, and asked for her take. I reproduce it below (with permission):
It’s tendentious claptrap.
You’d be hard pressed to find anyone in society today who tries to glean and internalise life lessons and societal norms from the names of stars and planets. People who look at the Pleiades constellation are interested in the night skies. I’d wager that almost none of them are familiar with the ancient mythology behind the name. But even if every single person who studies astronomy is intimately acquainted with Ancient Mythology, I bet none of them looks at the stars and thinks wow, now I realise that’s what women are : the prey of psychopathic rapists.
Instead of recounting the story of a depressed and under-acknowledged woman from 1876—an era that hardly marked the pinnacle of modern enlightenment and female emancipation—as “evidence” of her hypothesis, perhaps McNeill could have mentioned actual women in astronomy like Valentina Tereshkova, Sally Ride, Caroline Porco, or add that now there is a whole PAGE on Wikipedia devoted to the names of notable women astronomers. (JAC: Brian Cox has named his cat after one of them.)
Society hasn’t managed to solve all the problems of misogyny or racism or bigotry or inequality yet. But Jesus, things have gotten better; and they got better without re-naming Orion as Gloria Steinem (Peace Be Upon Her).
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JAC addendum: Equally offensive is what happened to one cat-named constellations. I quote from Space.com:
Another faint star pattern now no longer recognized is Felis, the Cat, which was the creation of an 18th century Frenchman, Joseph Jerome Le Francais de Lalande (1732-1807).
“I am very fond of cats,” he said, explaining his choice. “I will let this figure scratch on the chart. The starry sky has worried me quite enough in my life, so that now I can have my joke with it.”
Although this celestial feline does not exist today, cat fanciers will be consoled by the fact that there are three other members of the cat family — Leo (the Lion), Leo Minor (the Smaller Lion) and Lynx — that are well situated and close together in our current evening sky.
Air France is in the middle of a row with their staff members after instructing female crew members to cover their heads and wear loose jackets and trousers when they travel to Iran. Staff point out that it is against French law to require them to wear “ostentatious religious symbols”.
Air France’s response to their objections can crudely be summarised as this:
That’s nothing, just wait until you see what we make our female staff wear when they go to Saudi Arabia.
The staff are not objecting to wearing head coverings while out of uniform in Iran, but object to it being made a part of their uniform.
This is yet another example of the grossly insulting “respect” shown to totalitarian and misogynistic regimes in the name of religion. Worse, it shows very clearly that when the dignity of actual women is measured against respecting religion; religion wins every time, even in the secular West, even in liberal countries, even places where women ought to be safe from the dictates of fanatical parochial conservative males.
Not only does this sort of mealy-mouthed appeasement of ridiculous and misogynistic dress codes betray Western women; it also insults the women and men of Iran who campaign against the hijab and similar suffocating and illiberal laws.
Here’s a thought-exercise for those of you who might be thinking that maybe this isn’t something worth protesting.
If the southern states of the USA still practised slavery, how palatable would you find it if multinationals required black staff members to wear special garments if they traveled to those regions so as not to offend the status quo?
I’m guessing you would think that repulsive and outrageous; and you would be right.
It may seem a little extreme of an example, and yes, it is. It isn’t a perfect analogy. But why is it always the dignity and self-determination of women that is expected to take a back seat when secularism meets Islam or any other ultra-conservative religion?
Whether we are talking about segregation of sexes at gatherings, absurdly archaic dress codes, seating arrangements on airplanes or prohibition of women from entering certain premises; religion is allowed to trump equality even in countries which claim to champion women’s rights. It’s morally reprehensible, and in many cases it is actually illegal. But it won’t go away until companies and organisations realise that they are better off siding with women than with regressive religions. And that is not going to happen until people complain bitterly and publicly every time this sort of thing happens.
Reader Darryl Gwynne described an incident he experienced at his university in Canada, and I asked him to write a brief account of it for me. So here it is. I’ve added a photo to supplement the one Darryl links to below.
Segregation by gender at a University of Toronto event
Darryl Gwynne
So it’s 2016 in Canada. Several students and I turn up at a public ‘science’ seminar where we are astonished to see that men and women are being seated on opposite sides of our campus lecture hall. Segregation began at the entrance when ticket-takers directed the women from our group through a separate door, but was further enforced inside; after we had taken seats with the ‘sisters,’ the males in our group were twice asked to move over with the ‘brothers’ (the second time by the speaker himself). We refused. The January 8th event – God Is Not Dead: Science and Atheism in Islam – was co-hosted by our (University of Toronto-Mississauga) Muslim Students Association and Ilmster Seminars.
We were not the only ones objecting to the segregation that day; a hijab-wearing student quietly thanked us for not moving, stating that dividing the audience by gender was wrong. Our subsequent discussions with her and other women were very interesting (and revealed that they were far better than the speaker, Abdul Malik, in articulating some of the key lecture points).
I complained about the segregation to our campus equity officer, the campus Vice-President, and the University’s Vice President of Human Resources & Equity, and they all indicated that gender segregation should not occur in lectures and seminars. However, there appears to be no policy and very little effort at our university to prevent such segregation. Although our equity officer informed me that, in response to my complaint, she is having an ongoing dialogue with our Muslim Students Association, segregation appears to continue at this group’s recent campus workshops and seminars:
JAC: I’ve added this photo to the one linked above. FB caption: “Dawah workshop happening right now till 5pm with Sheikh Osta in CC2150!”
When I contacted the Ontario Human Rights Commission they refused to give me an opinion on whether gender segregation at a public university event violated Ontario’s Human Rights Code, and simply informed me that any person who believed their rights had been infringed can submit a claim. Importantly, there appears to be no “legal standing” here in Canada on the issue of audience gender segregation at universities. This is in direct contrast with other countries such as the UK where “Gender segregation is not permitted in any academic meetings or at events, lectures or meetings.”
When it comes to prayer, however, our university does allow religion to overcome the right of women to sit where they wish in a student audience. In order to accommodate religious ceremony our campus has a Muslim group prayer room where (to quote one official) “gender segregation during worship services that the Muslim Students Association practices is in accordance with their religious beliefs which is permissible at the University of Toronto”.
Finally, Ilmster Seminars have done the God-Is-Not-Dead thing at several Ontario universities. There will likely be others, and the coordinators of the event will no doubt continue to separate men from women in modern university classrooms.
Thanks to several readers, staring with Greg Mayer, for sending me a link to this story from yesterday’s New York Times. It involves, as we’ve seen several times before, an Orthodox Jew refusing to sit next to a woman on an airplane, for that might lead, G*d forbid, to touching, which is forbidden (see the religious explanation here, which is based not on pollution but sexuality).
The twist on this story is that it is about a Jewish woman, retired psychologist Renee Rabinowitz, 81, suing an Israeli airline, El Al, for sex discrimination: being removed from her seat next to an Orthodox Jewish man. The complainant:
Renee Rabinowitz at her home in Jerusalem. Photo: Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
The details:
Ms. Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”
The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. Soon, Ms. Rabinowitz said, a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat, up front, closer to first class.
Reluctantly, Ms. Rabinowitz, an impeccably groomed 81-year-old grandmother who walks with a cane because of bad knees, agreed.
“Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” she recalled in a recent interview in her elegantly appointed apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Jerusalem.
“For me this is not personal,” Ms. Rabinowitz added. “It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”
This phenomenon is increasingly frequent (see this article in last year’s Times). And now for the first time, the Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC) is suing El Al airlines for sex discrimination. The airline denies discrimination, but uses weasel words:
“We needed a case of a flight attendant being actively involved,” explained the group’s [IRAC’s] director, Anat Hoffman, “to show that El Al has internalized the commandment, ‘I cannot sit next to a woman.’ ”
An El Al spokeswoman said in a statement that “any discrimination between passengers is strictly prohibited.”
“El Al flight attendants are on the front line of providing service for the company’s varied array of passengers,” the statement said. “In the cabin, the attendants receive different and varied requests and they try to assist as much as possible, the goal being to have the plane take off on time and for all the passengers to arrive at their destination as scheduled.”
Translation: we need to cater to the sexist request of male Orthodox Jews because they’ll delay the plane if their requests are denied.
The question, then, is whether Ms. Rabinowitz was forcibly moved, against her will, and whether she was clearly told why the move was taking place. According to Rabinowitz, the move was not completely voluntary, though the reason was given—but only when she asked. (I love her comment at the beginning of the second paragraph):
By her account, the flight attendant had a brief conversation in Hebrew with her ultra-Orthodox seatmate-to-be, which she could not understand, then persuaded Ms. Rabinowitz to come and see the “better” seat, at the end of a row of three.
“There were two women seated there,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oy, if they are going to talk all night I am not going to be happy.’” She asked the flight attendant if he was suggesting the switch because the man next to her wanted her to move, she said, “and he said ‘yes’ without any hesitation.”
. . . Still, Ms. Rabinowitz said she felt further insulted because the attendant had tried to mislead her.
And so Rabinowitz sued:
A lawyer for the religious action group wrote a letter to El Al last month saying that Ms. Rabinowitz had felt pressured by the attendant and accusing El Al of illegal discrimination. It argued that a request not to be seated next to a woman differed from other requests to move, say, to sit near a relative or a friend, because it was by nature degrading. The lawyer demanded 50,000 shekels, about $13,000, in compensation for Ms. Rabinowitz.
The airline offered, instead, a $200 discount on Ms. Rabinowitz’s next El Al flight. It insisted that there was no gender discrimination on El Al flights, that the flight attendant had made it clear to Ms. Rabinowitz that she was in no way obligated to move, and that she had changed seats without argument.
I suppose, then, that the case turns on whether Rabinowitz was indeed told that she could stay in her seat, and whether she was clearly given (without asking) the reason she was being asked to move. Still, although requests to changes seats are made all the time so that family members or friends can sit together, to me this falls into a different class: it is catering to religious sentiments and is discriminatory against a class of people.
If anybody should have been asked to move, it would be the man, but presumably there were no seats available that weren’t (G*d forbid) next to women. I am on the fence about whether such requests should even be made by El Al flight attendants, but in general think not. Would a flight attendant cater to a racist by asking a black person to move because the white person didn’t want to sit next to him? I suppose requests for voluntary movement are legal, but when those are based on sexism or bigotry, perhaps they should be banned, or the complainer told to move.
At any rate, I like Rabinowitz’s attitude, which shows the idiocy of Orthodox Jewish law.
Ms. Rabinowitz has since had time to ponder. She said her son told her that “this whole idea that you cannot sit next to a woman is bogus.” She cited an eminent Orthodox scholar, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who counseled that it was acceptable for a Jewish man to sit next to a woman on a subway or a bus so long as there was no intention to seek sexual pleasure from any incidental contact.
“When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman?” Ms. Rabinowitz asked. Citing examples like the biblical warrior Deborah, the matriarch Sarah and Queen Esther, she noted: “Our heroes in history were not modest little women.”
It’s time for Orthodox males to suck it up and stop being asses. Inadvertent touching of a woman sitting next to you is under no circumstances a sexual act, and almost certainly not the precursor to one. The religious principle of “no touching” is not supportable when it inconveniences someone in a public situation, and in so doing discriminating against half of humanity.
Weigh in below: should El Al even try to accommodate such requests?
Life is Savage reprints this Facebook ad that Bic South Africa ran to celebrate Womens Day last Sunday:
Is someone with two neurons to rub together in charge of Bic’s Facebook? Apparently not.
After a stream of criticism, Bic retracted the add and issued a notapology:
“We would like to apologise to all our fans who took offense to our recent Women’s Day Post. We can assure you that we meant it in the most empowering way possible and in no way derogatory towards women. We took the quote from a “Women in Business” blog site. http://bit.ly/1J8SY5x
The blog site explains the quote and what its intentions were when it was written. BIC believe in celebrating women and the powerful contribution women make to our society.”
Yeah, celebrate women and their contributions—so long as they look like girls and think like men.
h/t: Grania (You can find more information and verification, including a funny video by Ellen DeGeneris about Bic’s “pens for her”, at The Independent)
