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Latest News On The Witch's Wit Beer Label Controversy: Julie Landweber of Montclair State, who originally alerted us to this issue, writes (via H-Women): "The latest from the brouhaha over the Witches' Wit beer label is that Vince from Lost Abbey emailed me, telling me that they made an ignorant mistake, and are happy to correct it. They're thinking of having a contest with people submitting ideas for an alternative label, and are working to get in touch with the right folks in the pagan and/or feminist communities that could help them do just that. Everybody won! The greatest part about this is that there's a decent chance that with Halloween coming up, they and we can get local press interested in the controversy and give us an opportunity to educate the general public about the misogynistic nature of the European witch burnings." In case you are having the same idea I am, although it is tempting to do so, it would also be mysogynistic to send in a picture of Delaware Senate candidate Christine O' Donnell.
But my other thought is that, as Landweber implies, this is a great outcome, in part because of the graciousness of the brewer in the face of a feminist critique. Something offensive that draws polite criticism (and no, in the end it doesn't really matter whether it was 100,000 women or 40,000 women because it is the same crime and they didn't stop because it was sexist and wrong, but because it was politically destabilizing) should then be followed by an apology and a correction based on inclusive consultation. How refreshing.
Check Out the new CLGBTH website: All those letters stand for the Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History, an American Historical Association affiliate. Under the direction of Harvard University's Ian Lekus (known to his friends as the Great Leader), we have a gorgeous new virtual community. Check it out. Membership is still a smokin' hot deal, with a lifetime membership priced at $150.00 (about a tenth of what it costs to belong to the OAH for the rest of your life. Full professors, pony up!
While We're On The Web: The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians has completed a beautiful re-launch of its website. This was a priority for current president Kathleen Brown of the University of Pennsylvania (round of applause here), who wanted to make it a go-to site for everything women's history. It's really set up to do that, and is the easiest to navigate and the most up-to-date we have yet had as an organization. You know what else it makes it easy to do? Join! It will also make it easy for you to register for our triennial conference, to be held this summer at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, June 9-12. Be there or be square, is my view.
And Since You Have Your Credit Card Out: Consider subscribing to the Journal of Women's History, which has recently moved to SUNY-Binghamton, under the capable editorial leadership of Leigh Ann Wheeler and Jean Quataert. Feeling pinched? OK, well then, just reserve your copy of the upcoming winter issue so that you will be the first in your department to read the round table on feminist blogging featuring yours truly, Ann Little of Historiann and Colorado State University, Marilee Lindemann of Roxie's World and the University of Maryland (today you can follow the write-in gubernatorial campaign recently launched by one of its co-authors which may be a platform for the emergence of the grassroots Kibble Party), Rachel Leow of A Historian's Craft and Cambridge University, Jennifer Ho of the University of North Carolina, and May Friedman of York University.
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19 comments:
It is indeed refreshing. (as one hopes the beer is)
"and no, in the end it doesn't really matter whether it was 100,000 women or 40,000 women because it is the same crime"
Yeah it matters. I firmly believe that facts actually do matter. Just by way of analogy, the Shoah was the Shoah at one victim and at six million -- but when we talk about the Shoah, we say six million, because that's the consensus of historians using responsible, appropriate, most-likely-to-be accurate methods.
I don't mean to be reductive to the Shoah. I could just as well argue that about the number of women murdered by family members in "honor killings" or in Western-style relationship violence, if it works better. A crime is a crime regardless of the number of victims, yes -- but the number of victims is an empirically discoverable fact, and deserves to be treated as such.
TR, are you sure you want to go on record as saying, in effect, that if you're doing history the facts don't matter?
JackDanielsBlack
Oh pleze. I never said facts don't matter: they have varying relevance in varying contexts, and as methods for counting things change, so do the "facts." My point was that the original critic using a number from an outdated source doesn't undermine her point: that preponderantly, it was women who were tortured and killed as witches, and that gender had a lot to do with it. That "only" 40,000 women were killed for witchcraft (slightly fewer than 20 x the number of innocent people killed on 9/11) doesn't undermine the point that using a lewd picture of a sexist crime to sell beer is a sexist act.
I deliberately did not bring up the Shoah, since that has a tendency to inflame people, but reputable scholars admit that there are no accurate numbers for Jews who dies in the Holocaust, and although 6 million is the iconic figure (first cited by Eichman at Nurmeberg), Raul HIlberg estmated 5.1 million; Wolfgang Benz estimates that the figure could be as low as 5.2 m and as high as 6.2; Lucy Dawidowicz comes in at 65,000 fewer than 6 million; and Yad Vashem has "only" 4 million names in its database. That these "facts" differ does not undermine any essential historical or moral truth about the Holocaust.
So I would go on record as the historian that thinks "facts" are often highly debatable among reasonable people.
Hey, thanks for the shout-out on the write-in campaign to make Moose governor of Maryland, TR! Her platform of legalizing dope and getting the state out of the marriage business is gaining traction. We've nailed down, um, 6 actual votes so far and have a really impressive group of Out-of-State Straight Guys for Moose springing up on Facebook. I'm thinking politics is more broken than even the most hysterical pundit imagines . . . . Oh, and thanks, too, for plugging JWH. Renew those subscriptions now, folks!
"and no, in the end it doesn't really matter"
Oh, I see, I just got confused because I thought you meant what you said. My bad.
JackDanielsBlack
Something offensive that draws polite criticism...should then be followed by an apology and a correction based on inclusive consultation.
Even if the criticism is extremely impolite, it should still be followed by an apology and a correction.
"and no, in the end it doesn't really matter"
Oh, I see, I just got confused because I thought you meant what you said. My bad.
Dude, you've got a serious reading comprehension problem. If you would learn to read with an eye towards context, you'd understand--as pretty much everyone else did--that what this means is that it doesn't really matter to the particular issue at hand, which is whether the fucken beer lable is misogynist or not.
Tell you what, Comrade, I'll learn to read if you learn to spell. I believe the word you're looking for is "label", not "lable". Deal?
And I'm afraid it does matter--if you state a number as fact and someone points out that you are wrong, you should correct yourself. No matter how irrelevant you may think they are, facts is facts -- even if you're a physicist, but especially if you're a historian. Capiche?
JackDanielsBlack
How refreshing that the brewery was open to change on this front and, yes, I need to get on board with a subscription to the JWH (just as soon as I get reimbursed for the whackload of travel and books I've bought these past months).
JDB, just so's you know, the difference between 100,000 and 40,000 is not a difference of fact since we cannot count how many were executed for the crime of witchcraft (men, women and children). These numbers are estimates or "best guesses", not facts, since so many records were destroyed and so many deaths were not recorded.
Sad to say, you've not caught out any historian here in saying that "facts don't matter". Whether forty thousand or a hundred thousand died in the witchcraze, it remains a horrific episode in European gender, cultural and religious history. That's what matters to the argument, here.
Sad to say, you've not caught out any historian here in saying that "facts don't matter".
What's pathetic is that the dude's entire purpose for reading this blogge appears to be trolling for opportunities to "catch out" the blogger at some kind of perceived error. The existence of a subset of delusional right-wing loons who troll reality-based blogges like this is interesting from a psychological and sociological standpoint. Why do some people persist in expressing their opinions in contexts wherein they have been provided more than ample evidence that their opinions are (1) wrong, (2) worthless, and (3) not even interesting?
Janice, by your reasoning, very few things that are measured are facts, because measurements are always imprecise. The "fact" is that the consensus of knowledgeable people does not support TRs original figure. When this was pointed out to her, instead of acknowledging this "fact" she chose to put forth a red herring by saying, in effect, it doesn't really matter, it was awful in any case, the same way you are doing. I submit to you that this is fundamentally dishonest. If you can't see this, there's not much I can do to convince you in this postmodern age in academe. However, think about this -- if the numbers are unimportant, then why did TR use the 100000 number in the first place? Saying, "Well, we will never know the exact number anyway" does not excuse the basic indifference to the truth that is on exhibit here. Intellectually honest people acknowledge it when it is pointed out tothem that they have made a mistake, and move on.
CPP, as I have told you before on many occasions, insult is not the same as argument. Calling people names does not substitute for reason. Most folks learn this in kindergarten.
Anonymous 7:20 -- Read the post. It wasn't my "fact" -- it was contained in someone else's message, and said number was then corrected by numerous experts in the field who themselves did not think the analytical perspective was altered one bit. Get over it and move on to something else, like whether it is a "fact" that Christine O'Donnell "is" a witch because she once said she was.
"and no, in the end it doesn't really matter whether it was 100,000 women or 40,000 women because it is the same crime and they didn't stop because it was sexist and wrong, but because it was politically destabilizing"
TR, if you didn't say that, forgive me. And if you didn't quote the 100,000 figure originally, forgive me again. At least you're (albeit implicitly rather than explicitly) admitting now that the number is wrong, which is all I asked -- not for other folks to point it out, but for you to admit it.
As for whether Christine O'Donnell is/was a witch, who cares? Nothing wrong with being a witch, right? In any case, I expect the November election results to cast an evil spell on Obama and all his works and pomps.
JackDanielsBlack
CPP, as I have told you before on many occasions, insult is not the same as argument. Calling people names does not substitute for reason. Most folks learn this in kindergarten.
Dude, you continue to abjectly fail to calibrate your reading comprehension to the context in which things are being said. Your obtuse approach to text and your assumption that everyone operates in the same hypersimplistic mode that you are apparently locked into leads you over and over to misunderstand what is being said, how it is being said, and why it is being said.
As far as this latest gaffe, since I'm such a helpful person, let me give you a hint. There are important purposes for saying things besides "arguing" or "reasoning". Your assumption that everyone who engages with your text here is "arguing" or "reasoning" with you is faulty.
Most people learn to handle this kind of subtlety in kindergarten. Although right-wing Internet loons seem to have disproportionately failed to do so.
Hey, CPP, congratulations, you got through a whole post without ranting or cursing or calling anybody a bitch or a moron. And you even got your spelling right. Still quite a bit of namecalling and argumentum ad hominem, but an improvement nonetheless.
It is true, as you say, that there are important reasons for saying things besides arguing or reasoning. In your case, Gilles de la Tourette syndrome comes to mind.
Cheers
JackDanielsBlack
JackDanielsBlack
Since the magic comments number seems to be 18, I'll cap this one off -- there is a basic disagreement here about what it means to read something in context, and what it means to isolate something. I lean to CPP, not because I am defending myself, but because I think the emphasis on picking out one inaccurate fact (and can we also say that while we have disagreement here, neither JDB or I have gone to do the new and independent research to validate any claim whatsoever?) does not render a topic of discussion undiscussable.
As an aside, no one would blog if it meant fact checking everything that came over one's desk: one tries not to spread rumors and lies that are damaging to another's reputation. Sometimes one fails, either through hubris or carelessness, but I don't think that this is one of those cases.
I do think my Holocaust example is an instructive one, and a good example of how different "facts" are generated by scholars of equal reputation and good will (or, in the case of Eichmann, was a horrible person who was exclusively devoted to getting the facts right to the complete exclusion of moral context or even curiosity --which is, of course, Hannah Arendt's central point about the banality of evil). We *all* cite the 6 million # (at least all reputable historians who aren't shilling an anti-Semitic agenda), but that # is absolutely certain not only to be wrong, but dramatically so. No one actually knows whether it is an under-count or an over-count. Yet, does that very soft "fact" change historical consensus that this was a human tragedy and moral crime of epic proportion? No.
BTW: If O'Donnell wins on Tuesday, it will be a disaster for Delaware. Witch or no witch, the woman is plum stupid. If she were a witch, she surely could conjure up smarter answers. Cross your fingers and think good thoughts for our little state and her opponent.
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