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.
Given the vagaries of her behavior, I suppose it’s not surprising that erstwhile singer Sinéad O’Connor has become a Muslim, taking the new name Shuhada’ Davitt. (The name on her Wikipedia entry has already been changed.)
She has since documented her new faith, writing that she was “very, very, very happy” after being given her first hijab, and expressing thanks to “all my Muslim brothers and sisters who have been so kind as to welcome me to Ummah”, meaning the Islamic community. She also posted a YouTube video of her making the Islamic call to prayer
Her full new name is Shuhada’ Davitt, using the surname she gave herself when she changed her name to Magda Davitt in 2017. She said at the time that she wanted to be “free of the patriarchal slave names. Free of the parental curses.”
It was 26 years ago that O’Connor caused a huge fracas by ripping up a picture of Pope John Paul II on Saturday Night Live in protest of the Catholic Church’s psychological and sexual abuse of children. It’s ironic, then, that’s she’s adopted this new faith, whose “theologians” and ayatollahs condone many of the same practices. And talking about patriarchal slaves. . . .
Here’s her live act of defiance back in 1992, which was brave. Today, well. . . she’s been through a lot.
Thank you to the many readers who, prompted by my plea, sent in wildlife photos yesterday. Remember, though: I can always use more. We’re putting up today some lovely U.S. moth photos by Paul Doerder. The notes and IDs, indented, are his. Note that “mothing” is now a verb.
You posted some of my moth photos some time ago, and I’ve been meaning to send some more, but it seems this year the mothing itself got in the way. I started in the early spring, setting up a sheet and UV light sources (mercury vapor and LEDs), and going out after dark to see what was attracted. Though I haven’t counted, I probably mothed over two dozen nights, took well over 10,000 photos, and spent many days with the Petersen field guide. It’s become a favorite hobby at our Holmes County cabin, and this season alone I’ve identified nearly 200 species, with many more photos to go.
I find the variety, even in the drab ones, fascinating, trying to imagine the background on which they hide. Typically, I’d visit the sheet 3-4 times a night, and to increase the probability of a photo decent enough for species identification, I’d take 10-15 photos of a single moth (digital is cheap). While some species stayed at the sheet all night, others were transitory, present say at 10:00 pm and absent at 2:00 am and vice versa. Moonless, windless nights were best, and successive nights often brought more than one new species. At sunrise, I’d turn off the lights and shake the sheet to release the moths, particularly as an Eastern Phoebe (Sayornis phoebe) found them easy prey.
Here are 9 of many pictures taken between May 25 and June 1, 2018. Except for the two sphinx species, none are particularly large. I hope to send more, along with pics of some of the other insects that visited the lights.
On this day in 1774, the first Continental Congress of the American “rebels” met in Philadelphia. Exactly one year later, George III of Great Britain declared before Parliament that the American colonies were in rebellion and authorized a military response. So began the Revolutionary War. On October 26, 1863, the Football Association was founded at the Freemason’s Tavern in London. And on this day in 1881, the famous Gunfight at the O.K. Corral occurred in Tombstone, Arizona. Three people were killed in the thirty-second fusillade, but there were two deaths thereafter related to it. The participants were Virgil, Morgan, and Wyatt Earp, and Doc Holliday on one side versus Tom and Frank McLaury, Billy and Ike Clanton, and Billy Claiborne on the other.
On October 26, 1905, Sweden accepted the independence of Norway. In 1944, the largest naval skirmish in history, the Battle of Leyte Gulf, ended with a decisive victory of the U.S. over Japan, with a loss of 6 versus 26 warships, respectively. Exactly three years later, the Maharaja of Kashmir and Jammu, during Partition, allowed his kingdom to join India rather than Pakistan. There’s been trouble ever since. And on October 26, 1977, says Wikipedia, “Ali Maow Maalin, the last natural case of smallpox, develop[ed]a rash in Merca district, Somalia. The World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention consider this date the anniversary of the eradication of smallpox, the most spectacular success of vaccination.” And indeed it is. Maalin survived and became a vaccination activist, but died of malaria in 2013.
On this day in 1999, Britain’s House of Lords voted to end the right of hereditary peers to vote in that chamber, and it sure took long enough! Finally, exactly one year ago today, Jacinda Arden, only 37 years old, was sworn in as Prime Minister of New Zealand. She’s the youngest prime minister in that country’s history. So far reviews of her performance are positive but mixed. Sadly, her “First Cat”, Paddles, was killed by a car shortly after she took office. It was ineffably heartbreaking as Paddles, a polydactylous atheist cat, had a hilarious Twitter feed.
Hi, I'm Paddles and I am the First Cat of New Zealand. I have opposable thumbs, I'm purrty special. pic.twitter.com/MPkxdhWCRu
Notables born on this day include Abby Aldrich Rockefeller (1874), Beryl Markham (1902), Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1919), biologist Robert Hinde (1923; among other things, Hinde described blue tits in Britain learning to pry the caps off milk bottles and drinking the cream on top, one of the earliest examples of cultural evolution in animals, since the behavior spread rapidly. Sadly, there are few videos on the Internet showing this cool behavior, but you can see one on the BBC Archives page here). Others born on this day are Pat Conroy (1945), Jaclyn Smith (1945), Hillary Clinton (1947) and Julian Schnabel (1951).
Those who expired on October 26 include Hattie McDaniel (1952), Igor Sikorsky (1972), and Park Chung-hee (1979).
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is off hunting again:
A: Where are you going?
Hili: To a place I will be returning from.
In Polish:
Ja: Dokąd idziesz?
Hili: Do miejsca, z którego będę wracać.
Reader Al Lee sent this illusion, which is explained here. There are TWELVE black dots in this figure. Can you see them all at once? If not, why not?
A “meme” via reader Su:
A tweet sent by reader Dom. Be sure to watch till the end:
From reader Nilou; I wonder if these pictures are real. I suspect they are, but jebus, the hair!
BEAUTY TIP: Tape this pic of the Trump family to each of your mirrors, and, trust me: You’ll always feel like you’re having a #GreatHairDaypic.twitter.com/JOGACa65ur
Tweets from Matthew. The first shows is stunning: a huge aggregation of female octopuses brooding eggs near “fluid seeps” in the deep sea. Why are they doing this?
🐙CEPHALOPOD ALERT🐙We observed 1000+ deep sea octopus (Muusoctopus robustus) exploring #DavidsonSeamount@MBNMS. Never before seen in such massive aggregations, females were brooding eggs near shimmering fluid seeps–previously unknown to occur in this region! #NautilusinMBNMSpic.twitter.com/AQbMxrRUMV
Here’s a list of the 100 best English words in the world (not in order). No point arguing; me, @Corbo_, @MelbourneBitter, @Greg_Roughan and others worked it out very democratically about a decade ago. You’re welcome https://t.co/NBeBGemVV9
Yeah, if this was me, that would make me become a poltergeist. Poor Anglo-Saxon woman was just minding her own business, being dead, not bothering anyone, when they put a power cable through her. I'd be haunting the entire village if that happened to me. pic.twitter.com/ZZrdZ1NShi
Most donkeys make noises that would rouse the demons of Hell, but this Irish specimen, Harriet the Singing Donkey, has a sonorous and mellifluous voice. As BoingBoing reports:
She became an internet sensation when Martin Stanton, who lives not far away and has visited Harriet the donkey regularly for more than a year, posted a video of her singing on Facebook last week.
“She lives about 20 minutes away from me in Toureen, Connemara,” he told ABC News. “I know the family who own her and I bring carrots, bread and ginger nut biscuits. She never hew-haws like other donkeys.”
“I try to visit whenever I can because she is adorable, so friendly and gentle,” he said. “I found the video funny so I just posted it. I didn’t think it would go viral.”
I’m gobsmacked, as I hadn’t been aware of this case. This comes from the Andelou Agency, a Turkish website, so it’s not gonna be critical of this decision.
The text:
Strasbourg: Defaming the Prophet Muhammed “goes beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate” and “could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace” and thus exceeds the permissible limits of freedom of expression, ruled the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) on Thursday, upholding a lower court decision.
The decision by a seven-judge panel came after an Austrian national identified as Mrs. S. held two seminars in 2009, entitled “Basic Information on Islam,” in which she defamed the Prophet Muhammad’s marriage.
According to a statement released by the court on Thursday, the Vienna Regional Criminal Court found that these statements implied that Muhammad had pedophilic tendencies, and in February 2011 convicted Mrs. S. for disparaging religious doctrines.
She was fined €480 (aprox. $547) and the costs of the proceedings.
“Mrs. S. appealed but the Vienna Court of Appeal upheld the decision in December 2011, confirming, in essence, the lower court’s findings. A request for the renewal of the proceedings was dismissed by the Supreme Court on 11 December 2013,” it said.
“Relying on Article 10 (freedom of expression), Mrs. S. complained that the domestic courts failed to address the substance of the impugned statements in the light of her right to freedom of expression.”
On today’s ruling, the ECHR said it “found in particular that the domestic courts comprehensively assessed the wider context of the applicant’s statements and carefully balanced her right to freedom of expression with the right of others to have their religious feelings protected, and served the legitimate aim of preserving religious peace in Austria.”
The court held “that by considering the impugned statements as going beyond the permissible limits of an objective debate and classifying them as an abusive attack on the Prophet of Islam, which could stir up prejudice and put at risk religious peace, the domestic courts put forward relevant and sufficient reasons.”
The statement also added that there had been no violation of Article 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights, covering freedom of expression.
I suspect that Mrs. S. defamed Muhammed’s marriage to his wife Aisha, whom he married at six or seven and “deflowered” (i.e., raped) at nine. And why, exactly, shouldn’t that be defamed? It happens to be true, so the Austrian woman was simply fined for telling the truth. And that truth is construed as potentially offending Muslims.
But really, look at the bit I’ve put in bold. It’s a blasphemy law they’re enforcing! Muslims “need to have their religious feelings protected” in Austria. This is unconscionable. A democratic country protects a religious minority from having its feelings hurt? Does that go for Christians, too? You’re not allowed to defame Jesus, who might not have even existed? But of course we know that among all faiths these days, it’s Islam who are using the “hurt feelings” excuse to protect their religion from criticism.
This isn’t even Islamophobia: it’s criticism of religion, and most likely criticism of an Islamic practice of marrying and raping young girls. Shame on Austria, and on the European Court of Human Rights. There is no reason for the modern Western democracies to have blasphemy laws. Let’s face it, in Austraia there is no real “freedom of expression”—not if you can’t criticize religion.
A while back I wrote about my visit to the Croatia Natural History Museum, where curator Dr. Davorka Radovčić kindly gave three of us a several-hour look at Neanderthal bones from the nearby location of Krapina, one of the most fruitful Neanderthal sites known. At the time I mentioned there was evidence that most Neanderthals were right-handed, but I didn’t really explain why. Now Davorka has sent me two papers (references and links below) that show how we know this. I’m going to write mostly about the Lozano et al. paper (free with the legal UnPaywall app), which tells the tale up to the present. If you can’t get either or both of these papers, email me and I’ll send them.
It is in fact true that about 90% of Neanderthals were right-handed, and that’s the same as present-day H. sapiens sapiens, even though Neanderthals aren’t really the ancestors of modern humans (we do, however, carry some of their genes). That probably means that the common ancestors of our two subspecies—I consider Neanderthals as H. sapiens neanderthalensis, a subspecies of H. sapiens—were also right handed. And indeed, chimpanzees (though not bonobos) are 49% right-handed and 29% left-handed, with 22% of individuals “ambiguous”.
But new data also shows that our ancient ancestors—before the split between modern H. sapiens and Neanderthals, were also right-handed. How did they do this?
It doesn’t come from looking at arm robustness in fossils, for that doesn’t work, nor does it come from looking at brains (as seen in crania), as that doesn’t work, either. It comes from looking at incision marks on the teeth made when a hominin is holding something in its mouth and cutting it—cutting it with the dominant hand. It looks like this (figures from the Lozano et al. paper:
Figure 1 [All captions from figures] Demonstration of how marks were likely made on the incisors and canines. A right‐hander pulls down with a stone tool, cutting through the object held between the anterior teeth. Occasionally, when the tool accidentally strikes the tooth’s surface, it leaves a permanent striation on the labial tooth face. Repetitive marking of the labial face allows for the assessment of which hand was used in this bimanual taskSometimes you’ll hit your teeth with the cutting tool, and the striations (scratches) that this leaves on your teeth—in particular the incisors and canines, but especially the upper incisors—tell you what hand is doing the cutting. Try it! Imagine you’re holding a piece of meat, or a skin, in your teeth and cutting it with your right hand (if you’re right handed, that’s what you’ll be doing). If you hit your teeth with the cutter (a sharpened stone), it will make a scratch from lower right to upper left, because the tool will be oriented that way (hold a piece of paper in your mouth and pretend you’re cutting it). If you’re using your left hand, the cuts will be from lower left to upper right. And since you know where in the jaw the teeth are, you can determine handedness if there’s a consistent direction to the scratch marks.
Sometimes the marks will be horizontal or vertical, and sometimes they’ll be made not by humans but by taphonomic (preservation) forces, like sand scratches. You can deal with the latter by using marks only on the front edge, comparing them to those on the rear of the tooth, which should be subject to the same taphonomic modification. Also, you want not he percentage of teeth that show handedness, you want the percentage of individuals that show handedness. To deal with the first and last problem, the authors used these methods:
Thus, striations were separated into four orientation categories: horizontal (H: 0°–22.5°, 157.5°–180°), vertical (V: 67.5°–112.5°), right oblique (RO: >22.5°–<67.5°), and left oblique (LO: >112.5°–<157.5°). This underestimates the number of right or left handers; for example, an oblique mark of 21° would be classified as horizontal, so if the intervals were expanded the tooth being examined would have come from a right‐hander. However, since most studies have not published the raw data and have used the Bermúdez de Castro et al. intervals, we also used them.
Many of the teeth are isolated, especially in the Krapina sample. For this site we used Wolpoff’s reassembled tooth sets, each of which he labeled as a Krapina Dental Person (KDP). His tooth associations were based on similar morphology, occlusal wear, and interlocking interproximal facets, not on the presence of labial scratches. It is unlikely that any of the KDPs in our sample can be grouped together into a smaller number of individuals.
They also tested the “direction” hypothesis by making mouth guards that could be scratched, but also by looking at mouth guards with embedded teeth, as well looking at present day hunter-gatherers and Inuits. These showed directional striations consistent with observed handedness.
Finally, the authors analyzed several samples of hominin teeth: the total sample included five different types of humans (Homo habilis [OH 65, 1.8 million years old], Homo antecessor [from Gran Dolina, 860‐936 kya] the Sima de los Huesos fossils [430,000 years old probably ancestors of Neanderthals], European Neandertals, and modern Homo sapiens).
Here’s the earliest one, the OH-65 Homo habilis, 1.8 million years old. The graph below gives the directions of the scratches, and the predominance of the red bar (right oblique) over the blue bar (left oblique) shows that this individual was probably right handed:
OH‐65 shows a concentration of striations on the labial faces of the anterior teeth. These are visible to the naked eye. Microscopically, they conform to the striations found in much later hominids. The striations are mainly confined to the left and right I1s, the right I2, and right C1. Right oblique scratches predominate, leading to the identification of OH‐65 as a right‐hander. (n = number of striations per category) [Color figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]The Gran Dolina H. antecessor individual didn’t have enough scratches to be identified but here’s the tooth of a right-hander from about 400,000 years ago (the Sima de los Huesos site):
Here are three Neanderthal teeth with the striations emphasized: the first is a left-hander and the other two right-handers based on the numerical predominance of directionally oblique scratches:
Here’s the final table that tabulates handedness. The earliest hominin was right handed, as were all 15 of the Sima de los Huesos individuals, suggested that by at least half a million years ago, right-handedness predominanted in hominins. The Neanderthals are the ones from Krapina down, and they show a 90% frequency of right-handedness, similar to humans today.
I should add that they also found directional scratches over old directional scratches (the enamel partly heals itself), so the directionality continued throughout the life of an individual, and they find directionality in teeth estimated to be from 10-year-old children as well. Since they didn’t have knives, I suspect much of this involved cutting meat, but also animal skins.
It looks as if since the hominin lineage branched from the lineage leading to chimps and bonobos, we’ve been largely right-handed: about 90%. It would be nice to have earlier fossil data, but this is pretty damn good. I think the methodology, with its controls and observations of modern humans, is sound. The authors conclude:
We contend that the handedness data reviewed here shows that right‐handedness extends deep into the past of our species. The modern right‐handedness frequencies in earlier European human fossils from Sima de les Huesos and new specimens from the Early Pleistocene of China and Africa suggest that handedness stretches back well before the appearance of Homo sapiens. European Neandertals represent the biggest samples and continue this pattern, showing a right‐to‐left hand ratio identical to that among living Homo sapiens. In our view, the unique 9:1 ratio of right to left handers appears well before the emergence of modern Homo sapiens and is typical of our genus wherever and whenever it is found.
One question remains:
Why does there have to be a dominant hand? Why can’t humans (or those animals that show handedness) be equally dextrous with both hands?
This may be a byproduct of our brain structure (the authors posit that it’s a result of brain lateralization for language or other reasons), or there may be some other reason we don’t understand why one hand must predominate (and it can’t be random because most of us are righties, and there’s a genetic component to that). Who knows? But we do know that most of our ancestors were right-handed—at least according to these data and the data from the Fiore et al. paper.
In the last few years a genre has arisen that doesn’t just call for social justice—those calls that have been around for a while—but in which a person (usually a man) flagellates himself for sexism, racism, or other sins, excoriating his behavior in an attempt to purge himself—and by extension the entire class to which he belongs. Yes, here we have an article by George Yancy, a black professor of philosophy at Emory University, who’s penned a long diatribe for the New York Times’s “The Stone” philosophy column. You can see it below, but if you have a Y chromosome, realize that you’re going to be indicted for sexism, no matter how much of a feminist you are.
Click on the screenshot to read the article:
Like a Cultural Revolution victim wearing a dunce cap and a sign, here Yancy confesses to numerous sexist crimes, including asking his wife to take his last name when he married her (she refused). While I wouldn’t do that, and many men don’t care about that either, he uses that example to put the first wound in his back. He argues that this, as well as his expectation that he be thanked for doing the household tasks that he should do (again, many many wouldn’t act this way) constituted not sexual assault, but something close to it: misogyny, and even “acts of violence”. Note the hyperbolic rhetoric (“act of violence”) and the familiar words of the woke, like “toxic masculinity”:
It is hard to admit we are sexist. I, for instance, would like to think that I possess genuine feminist bona fides, but who am I kidding? I am a failed and broken feminist. More pointedly, I am sexist. There are times when I fear for the “loss” of my own “entitlement” as a male. Toxic masculinity takes many forms. All forms continue to hurt and to violate women.
For example, before I got married, I insisted that my wife take my last name. After all, she was to become my wife. So, why not take my name, and become part of me? She refused. She wanted to keep her own last name, arguing that a woman taking her husband’s name was a patriarchal practice. I was not happy, especially as she had her father’s last name, which I argued contradicted her position against patriarchy. But as she argued, “This is my name and it is part of my identity.” I became stubborn and interpreted her decision as evidence of a lack of full commitment to me. Well, she brilliantly proposed that we both change our last names and take on a new name together showing our commitment to each other
Despite the charity, challenge and reasonableness of the offer, I dropped the ball. That day I learned something about me. I didn’t respect her autonomy, her legal standing and personhood. As pathetic as this may sound, I saw her as my property, to be defined by my name and according to my legal standing. (She kept her name.) While this was not sexual assault, my insistence was a violation of her independence. I had inherited a subtle, yet still violent, form of toxic masculinity. It still raises its ugly head — I should be thanked when I clean the house, cook, sacrifice my time. These are deep and troubling expectations that are shaped by male privilege, male power and toxic masculinity.
If you are a woman reading this, I have failed you. Through my silence and an uninterrogated collective misogyny, I have failed you. I have helped and continue to help perpetuate sexism. I know about how we hold onto forms of power that dehumanize you only to elevate our sense of masculinity. I recognize my silence as an act of violence. For this, I sincerely apologize.
Fine; he’s apologized. But he insists that the rest of us apologize, too, for we are all mini-Weinsteins, complicit in the Patriarchy and toxic masculinity. Indeed, we are all guilty of “soul murder” (his words), even for looking at a women’s bum! Sadly, the man knows nothing about evolution and sexuality.
To this end he quotes the uncapitalized feminist bell hooks, another sign of wokeness:
It’s true that many of us, including me, have not committed vile acts of rape, sexual assault and sexual abuse the likes of which Harvey Weinstein has been accused of. We have not, like Charlie Rose, been accused of sexual harassment by dozens of women who worked for us; and we are not, like Bill Cosby, being sent to prison for drugging and sexually assaulting a woman, in this case, Andrea Constand. Yet I argue that we are collectively complicit with a sexist mind-set and a poisonous masculinity rooted in the same toxic male culture from which these men emerged.
I’m issuing a clarion call against our claims of sexist “innocence.” I’m calling our “innocence” what it is — bullshit. As bell hooks writes in “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love,” men unconsciously “engage in patriarchal thinking, which condones rape even though they may never enact it. This is a patriarchal truism that most people in our society want to deny.” When women speak out about male violence, hooks writes, “folks are eager to stand up and make the point that most men are not violent. They refuse to acknowledge that masses of boys and men have been programmed from birth on to believe that at some point they must be violent, whether psychologically or physically, to prove that they are men.” We have learned it. In the language of Simone de Beauvoir, “One is not born, but rather becomes” masculine.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Differences in sexual behavior, in which men pursue and stare at women (the “soul murder” he mentions) are partly evolved: the result of differential mating strategies that were adaptive in our ancestors. It’s not all culture. But as I’ve said many times before, any evolved differences that now act to degrade modern society, demean women, or given women fewer opportunities or less freedom, need to be ditched. Biology, as we all know, is not destiny.
Yancy goes on to describe some of these degrading acts, like rubbing up against girls in school, citing Luce Irigaray (what does this add except to show off?) that this shows a “dominant phallic economy. He then segues into the Brett Kavanaugh/Christine Ford affair, which I’ve written about before. While I believed that Kavanaugh was unfit for a position on the Supreme Court—based on his behavior at the hearings as well as other reasons—Yancy is absolutely sure she was innocent, something that I can’t go so far as to say. All we have is our take on the hearings and a tentative judgment.
Yancy goes on to assert that “one in five women are raped at some point in their lives,” which of course is a statistic subject to contention. I hasten to add that all rape is reprehensible, and even one rape in 500 is too many, but he’s really playing fast and loose with the statistics here, all in an attempt to not only claim we live in a “rape culture,” but to add that all men are complicit in this.
We all recently lived through the public spectacle of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings. What is at stake transcends but also includes Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were both in high school during the 1980s. The history of toxic and violent masculinity should have been enough for us to give full weight to the reasonableness and believability of Ford’s testimony. But we did not.
Full weight? We should have believed Ford not on the basis of the evidence but because of “the history of toxic and violent masculinity”? I don’t think so, for that’s past history, not evidence. And if you take that tactic, then “believe the female accuser” becomes all one needs for conviction.
Don’t get me wrong here: women have always gotten, and still largely get, a raw deal. They are harassed, catcalled, subject to biases, and diminished. I’ve seen it in my own classes, in which male graduate students talk over women, or take credit for their ideas. But don’t call me complicit in that, for I do the best I can to ensure that women students not only get the same respect (and opportunities) as men, but also to share their views as much as men. After constantly examining my own behavior vis-à-vis women, I don’t recognize in myself the kind of toxic misogynist that Yancy sees in himself. He and others may say I’m fooling myself, of course, but I’ve never asked any woman to change her name, rubbed up or groped any woman, or, I think, been guilty of the species of “toxic and violent masculinity” that Yancy sees in all men. And I’m not just exculpating myself: many of my friends wouldn’t recognize themselves in Yancy’s caricature, either. Realize that when someone who is reflective hears an accusation like Yancy’s, he immediately (and correctly) thinks that Yancy is a self-serving extremist.
In the end, Yancy abases himself by apologizing to all women for his behavior. Fine, but, as I note below, what does he accomplish except flaunt his virtue? He ends by assuring all women he’s an Ally:
I know that if you are a woman, you don’t really need me as a man saying to you that you are not paranoid when it comes to male violence, sexual and otherwise. I speak not for you but with you. In my view, and in the view of many others, Kavanaugh failed himself, and you. And we have all played our part in that failure. I don’t want to fail women anymore.
Since the world is watching, we, as men, need to join in the dialogue in ways that we have failed to in the past. We need to admit our roles in the larger problem of male violence against women. We need to tell the truth about ourselves.
Well, I’m sorry, but the truth I see about myself is that I’m not Yancy, much less Harvey Weinstein. And the truth I see about Yancy is that he talks a good game, but his mea culpas do nothing to cure the problem of sexism.
As Grania pointed out when I discussed this article with her, Yancy’s behavior comes very close to the behavior of some religionists, who think that because they’ve been bad—in their case the Original Sin comes from Adam and Eve, in Yancy’s it comes from his Y chromosome—and because of that they need to humiliate themselves and punish themselves so they can be purified. Indeed, what we see in this Times article is, pure and simple, a humiliating attempt of moral purification.
Grania added that she, brought up Catholic but now a nonbeliever, can fully understand this mindset, but it would be harder for me, raised as a largely secular Jew, to comprehend the attitude that Hitchens characterized as “We are born sick and commanded to be well”. And it’s not just Catholicism or even Christianity. Here are the religious equivalents of what Yancy is doing (avert your eyes if you can’t stand the sight of blood):
And the ultimate humiliation and ritual of purification:
But these rituals of people making a show of their wokeness, humiliating and abasing themselves to confess their sins, has never done anything to improve themselves, humanity, or the world. It doesn’t lessen the amount of suffering on our planet. For the people who are causing problems for women in our society are not those who examine themselves and then confess their sins: they are the people who don’t have the introspection to examine themselves and then to change their behavior. They are the entitled people, the Harvey Weinsteins and Bill Cosbys, as well as the men who grope women or make their lives miserable.
As Grania observed, “Instead of espousing conduct that is akin to a quasi-religious mea culpa that helps no-one and accomplishes nothing and is the #MeToo version of ‘Thoughts and prayers’, Yancy might consider coming up with practical suggestions for tackling / defusing actual misogynistic behaviour in the workplace, or indeed in broader society.”
Nothing less will do in today’s woke culture than for all men to grovel and confess in this way, and for all whites to admit that they are racists. And, to be sure, there is a point to examining your behavior with respect to other groups. Maybe some of us have behaved badly, or been guilty of sexism or racism. The unexamined life, as they say, is not worth living, but it’s also not good for society.
But, in the end, there’s something craven about Yancy’s show of contrition as well as his false indictment that all men must scour themselves and confess misogyny. It’s not impossible, in fact, that this kind of palaver heartens the Right by making the Left look ridiculous. For it surely does. It makes us look like the Soviet show trials of the Thirties, or the horrible degradations of China’s Cultural Revolution.
