Richard Dawkins is mad as hell and he's not going to take it anymore.
What's made him so mad? Petty American Feminists who get angry over nothing.
In a recent interview, he found time to remind us that he is a True Feminist:
"I concentrate my attention on that menace [of Islamism and Jihadism's threat to women] and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial."
You and me both, Richard. I know I lose a lot of sleep over people who get upset about trivialities.
"I feel muzzled, and a lot of other people do as well. There is a climate of bullying, a climate of intransigent thought police which is highly influential in the sense that it suppresses people like me."
Indeed. These days, it's hard to find reference to Dawkins anywhere. He would never, say, block atheists he disagreed with from speaking at the Reason Rally for example. That'd be muzzling.
Dawkins' frustration isn't new to most of us True Feminists. After all, we've been annoyed for decades about how feminist anger has no sense of proportion. But True Feminists know when to be angry and when not to be hysterical. We know that as long as our sisters are being murdered and threatened overseas we can't focus on trivialities about who groped whom at the water cooler, who stalked whom in an elevator, street harassment, why women don't make as much as men, fewer women in STEM fields, rape, spousal abuse, the list goes on and on.
Can't they see how hard we True Feminists are fighting the scourge of sexism overseas? Those Islamist men are so sexist they don't even know how sexist they are!
Sing with me… "And we won't come home 'til it's over over therrre…"
So while we TFs fight sexism on the beaches, fields, and streets overseas, I'm going to propose something that will help other feminists understand how to scale their anger.
In honor of our beleaguered hero, I'm going to propose the Dawkins Unit of Relative Perniciousness (DURP).
I still haven't worked out the details quite yet. (I was too busy this morning fighting for the right of Saudi women to drive.) But things that are low on the DURP scale are less worthy of our time and mental energy. Harassment, glass ceilings, etc. These are things that don't bother me too much. Other things are much higher on the DURP scale are worthy of anger. War, pestilence, famine, prayer in public schools, feminist anger…
So, my fellow True Feminists, let's work some more on this DURP scale. What is the measured equivalent of one DURP? Post your suggestions in the comments!
Meanwhile, I gotta run to a rally protesting the use of "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance. I really can't tell you how important that issue is to me.
Thanks for letting me finish,
–MM–