Jey McCreight

McCreight wearing a tank top, an article of clothing proven responsible for leveling entire cities

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Jey McCreight is an atheist and feminist activist and blogger. They are known as the instigator of two crossovers between atheism and feminism: "Boobquake" and Atheism Plus.

Their blog, Blag Hag, was originally available at blaghag.com, but they joined Freethought Blogs in September 2011. Due to their prolonged involvement with the controversy over sexism in the atheist and skeptical movements (since Elevatorgate), they are loathed by various MRAs and have become one of the focal points of anti-Freethought Blogs hate.

Boobquake

In early 2010, there came news reports that an Iranian Islamic cleric, Kazem Seddiqi, had blamed earthquakes on God's wrath because of women who dressed immodestly and advised "Many women who do not dress modestly lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which increases earthquakes" and Iranians should "adapt their lives to Islam's moral codes" to avoid being "buried under the rubble.". The day that this was reported, McCreight comically encouraged their readers (via Facebook) to dress "in your immodest clothing to represent Boobquake," which they referred to as a scientific experiment. The actual event took place on April 26, with McCreight carefully avoiding hateful, anti-Islamic, or anti-Iranian messages.

The center of the event (the "epicenter") was at Purdue University, with participants dressed in appropriate attire and carrying signs saying things like "Cleavage for Science," "Amnesty," and "God hates boobs," Unsurprisingly, there were more "spectators" than participants.

The good

An estimated 200,000 people participated in Boobquake. Some women even went topless in New York, where it was legal to do so. Official Blag Hag attire (sadly, this no longer includes Boobquake attire) can be purchased from McCreight's Zazzle store, the proceeds of which go to the Red Cross for earthquake recovery and the James Randi Educational Foundation.

True to the, um, scientific nature of the event, McCreight ran a rigorous statistical analysis of seismic activity during Boobquake and figured out that world-wide incidence of earthquakes on April 26 was actually below average. Conclusion: boobs stop earthquakes!

The bad

Imagine any event where feminists flash cleavage (e.g. SlutWalk), take a wild guess what the Slymepit would do, and your presuppositions would be right. They did exactly what we knew they would do. (This episode provides inductive support for the proposition that if We at Rational Wiki attribute X to Slymepitters, it is true that all Slymepitters are X. Hence, arguments of the form "A member of Rational Wiki criticized a member of the Slymepit on grounds P; therefore, P is probably true and the Slymepitter deserves such condemnation" are deductively valid.) Internet trolls swarmed into attack mode, and McCreight received a large amount of sex propositions from creepy simpletons who interpreted the statement "I don't appreciate having my choice of clothes blamed for natural disasters by some fanatical idiot" as meaning, "I'm a grade-A nymphomaniac and want YOU to have sex with me!" Let the universal principle be perfectly clear: They shouldn't have asked them for sex.

Feminist responses

The event received quite a bit of positive support from Iranian expatriates who are seeking to improve the condition of women in Iran, such as Mina Ahadi (of the International Committee Against Executions and Stoning) and Maryam Namazie (of Iran Solidarity), both of whom are members of the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain. They focused on how the event was a demonstration for the dignity of Muslim women.

Others however, did not agree. Golbarg Bashi, another Iranian expatriate and feminist, argued that the event objectified women and was a "post-feminist" spectacle that gave encouragement to anti-Iranian and anti-Islamic elements, and thus detracted from the Iranians' own attempts to improve women's positions in their society.

Bashi created a counter-event called "Brainquake," making a statement focusing on how the event was gaining attention because there were boobs involved, rather than because it was actually doing anything:

When an obscure Iranian cleric suggested in April 2010 that earthquakes were caused by immodestly dressed women (just as Pat Robertson has often stated here in the US), Jey McCreight ... used the opportunity to go on a false white liberal "post-feminist" high pedestal and asked women in social media to join them in showing their "cleavage" to prove that earthquakes are not caused by women's dress. Our usual boob-crazed, I mean civilized male-dominated mass media went potty over this "eye-ran" (read as Iran/Islam) related campaign, turned it into a major international story and thousands of (mostly) men joined McCreight's "Boobquake" Facebook event. It was in this context that Brainquake began as an Iranian counter feminist initiative to save the discourse on women's rights from being used as another spectacle and provide visual reference to Iranian women's own century long feminist struggles against sexism and tyranny. Nearly three years on Brainquake is still relevant as a progressive feminist platform that puts reliable gender-related news and information in its global and comparative context and tries to inspire and raise awareness about a whole range of urgent feminist causes and struggles. Meanwhile Jey McCreight's "Boobquake" remains as useful to feminism as a copy of Hugh Hefner’s magazine where fans post and ask to see new photos of women's bear^[sic] chest (it seems that an already dangerously saturated world wide web filled with images of sexualized women isn't enough to satisfy the fan base). Most noteworthy perhaps is that in an attempt to show “sympathy” with the cause of women’s rights in Iran (guessing here), McCreight complacently provides their fans with a link to none other than the notorious Islamophobe Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s “foundation” for "more information."

This sort of rhetoric was not really anything new — the feminist movement has been roiled by "identity politics" since the 1960s as women who were not white and/or middle class work to get their perspectives heard — but it did give people a way to criticize Boobquake without explicitly saying, "Those women shouldn't have flashed their cleavage." Boobquake might be defended against this criticism as follows:

• If nothing else, it drew attention to the continued mistreatment of women in Iran.
• While this was started as a response to a specific statement by a specific Muslim cleric, it is not specifically anti-Islamic as it also applies to similar comments from Christian clergy blaming natural disasters on homosexuality.

Some commentators, such as Iranian-American writer Melody Moezzi, asked "why not both?" in response to the conflict between Boobquake and Brainquake.

Elevatorgate and Atheism+

In response to the large amount of frank sexism they received from members of the atheist community (thanks, guys) they started the Atheism+ forum to be a place to discuss issues of sex, gender, race, and disability within an atheist framework. Needless to say, they caught endless amounts of hell from the usual suspects for this one too.

Attack by Roosh

In response to McCreight's criticism of Roosh V's article, The Relationship Between Femininity & Education, Roosh remarked:

This is the ugliest girl (sic) I've seen in 19 months, since I first left the USA. Just a totally ghastly she-beast. (sic) I mean, this girl (sic) is butt-ugly. You know, it's one of those falling-down-the-ugly-tree-hitting-every-branch-on-the-way-down ugly. And you know, as like a joke I posted a Twitter comment asking, "Would you date this girl? (sic) " I don't debate feminists because it's like debating a child. They won't change their mind in light of opposing facts. So I posted this comment just meant to be, meaning to be a jerk. And, uh, a lot of guys, they wrote back saying, "Absolutely not," and "She's (sic) ugly." One guy called her (sic) a troglodyte.

Well, this enraged her (sic). She (sic) made another comm-, post about it, saying, you know, "These men, they called me ugly." And then, so you would expect the comments to be, "Yeah, they are jerks." But instead, you had these comments saying, "No, you are beautiful. You are beautiful, you are amazing." And then I pinched myself to make sure I'm not in a horrible nightmare. And when I realized I was not, I had to accept that these guys were being serious, that they really think she (sic) is a beautiful person. And then she (sic) ran to Reddit, and said, "Look at this! Guys are calling, other horrible people are calling me ugly," and the same thing. There was this outpouring of comments saying, "No, you are beautiful, amazing, good-looking."

If you can't call that bitch ugly, I mean, you can't call anyone ugly. This is ugliness personified. This is the ugly standard, okay? . . . If you can't call that girl (sic) ugly and get a high-five from that, the culture has completely lost. . . . . I think the way that we can fight that is, if you see a woman (sic) trying to show, show an attitude that is above her (sic), her (sic) station, that is above her (sic) talent, her (sic) intellect, you should call her (sic) out. You should call her (sic) either fat, or ugly.

For the record, despite Roosh saying a thing fifty times to try to get his point across, Jey McCreight looks like a normal human being.

See also

• Anita Sarkeesian
• Atheism+
• New Atheism

External links

• The Jenome, Jey's blog