I first heard of Rebecca Watson in her role as the lone female host on the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, on which she appears as one of a quartet of co-hosts led by Dr. Steven Novella , but she first gained notice within the skeptic community because of her work with the collaborative blog she founded, Skepchick.org . Skepchick advocates for the interrelationship between critical thinking, science, secularism, and feminism. One of the most passionate, articulate, and fearless secularists in the public eye, Rebecca divides her time between Skepchick, the SGU podcast, and frequent speaking engagements at atheist and skeptic-oriented conferences and conventions. In 2009 Skepchick started its own convention, SkepchickCon, which occurs annually as part of the larger CONvergence at the end of June in Minneapolis. We spoke recently about Skepchick, the Religious Rights war against women in the United States, and the difficulties women face even within the secular community.In the last six months youve been from Norway to California to New York. Next week youre going to Ireland. How often do you wake up and not know where the fuck you are?Every day. I have this weird sleep thing. I talk in my sleep a lot. So I get really confused. If I wake up in the middle of the night it can take me ten minutes to figure out where I am, and so when Im traveling its just a mess. I like it, though. Its fun.Have you been able to, recently, make a living doing nothing but the blogging and the talk circuit?Yeah! Thats been my job. Im also supposed to be writing articles for CFI [Center for Inquiry] and stuff, but I havent even had time. I gave them one article like three months ago. [Laughs] So yeah, its been really great because this is what I want to do with my life. Ive just been traveling around giving talks. Im selling skeptical [and] atheist merch online at skepticalrobot.com . Plug. [Laughs] So yeah, thats how I make my money. Im not going to be rich, but Im going to be happy, dammit.I saw on Twitter that you got to visit the set oflast week. How was that?. Adam Savage is one of the nicest people Ive ever met. We met a couple of years ago at The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. Hes just been really awesome. So, when he heard that I was coming to San Francisco he first asked if we could go to dinner, and I was like, Yeah! Definitely! Ito go to the set but I wasnt sure how Kosher it was to just. Then at the last minute he was like, Oh yeah, were filming all week, so if you want to you can come out. So I did. I cant talk about what I saw, though. Yknow,. I can tell you that it was big [Laughs] and it involved smashing things.I love Adam and Kari and all of those guys too, and Ive watched every episode of the show, but sometimes I find it a little disappointing. I dont know if its just the limits of TV, or...Youre questioning their scientific rigour?[Sheepishly]I dont really know the others so I cant really speak to their thought process, and I really shouldnt even be speaking to Adams [Laughs] but I will anyway. The reason why I love him is hes one of the most curious people Ive ever seen. He has this genuine interest in learning new things, and in getting to know people whointeresting things. If you tell him that something he did on the show was wrong, I can tell you with a pretty solid degree of certainty that he will either already have known that and will haveto do it the correct way but was somehow rebuffed by the network, or yeah, just the limitations of filming what they wanted to do,youve said something new to him and hell be really, really excited and want to do a follow-up episode on it. [Laughs] So, yeah, they may not always get things right but they do have an honest openness to learning about the science involved and staying as true to the science as possible.He seems like the kind of person who might be exhausting to be around because hes alwaysYou know, in a way he really is always on, but hes not always bouncing off the walls like he is on the show, although on the set both he and Jamie were running around the set between takes kicking things and throwing bouncy balls all over the place. So there was aof energy on the set, and if youve ever been on a TV set youll understand is quite remarkable considering it takesto get anything done on a TV set. But they kept up this great energy level throughout. It was really cool to see.What was the inspiration for starting Skepchick?I was involved in the skeptical community, which I hadnt known existed until a few years ago. I got involved through James Randis website. Randi, of course, offers a million dollar prize if you can prove you have paranormal abilities. I noticed that there werent very many womens voices at the forefront. The people I was reading online and in books were people like James Randi, Michael Shermer, or Carl Sagan. They were older white men. So we came up with this idea to raise money to send more women to the conferences, because in addition to there being very few women onstage, there were very few women attendants.We started selling pin-up calendars: very tongue-in-cheek, very mild, very PG-13. We thought we would just sell a couple of them andget enough money to sendwoman to The Amazing Meeting in Las Vegas. It ended up being this huge success! We sold like a thousand of them or something. More than that, the traffic we were getting to Skepchick , which I set up specifically just to sell the calendars, and the emails, were just overwhelming. They were saying, Wow. Its so great to see women standing up and declaring their skepticism and trying to get more women involved. There was a lot of support from both men and women. I thought it would be wrong to waste that kind of traffic, so I turned Skepchick into a monthly e-zine, back when e-zines were the thing. Were we ever so young? [Laughs] That eventually turned into the blog as it exists today, which is updated several times a day by about a dozen different writers who all contribute.I liked your post today about the war against women by the Religious Right in this country. You know, normally when I interview women I dont want to make the fact that theyre female an issue. But I think itan issue today, both within the skeptical movement and with the Religious Right. Justa woman is an issue.Yeah. There is something to be said for normalizing that there happens to be a woman speaking. When I first started speaking at conferences I would talk about just general skeptical topics, just whatever happened to catch my fancy. But I realized there were all these issues that affected me as a woman that werent being addressed by other people because they were all older white males. They didnt have any perspective on these issues. I realized that thats the whole point of having a more diverse movement: getting more women involved, getting more African Americans involved, more asians, hispanics. We need all of these people, in part because were missing a lot of secular, skeptical topics that need to be addressed that arent being addressed. Instead were focusing on Bigfoot and aliens while the Republicans are taking away womens health. Theyre directly affecting womens health.So Ive started doing more talks about feminism. [Im] trying to teach a new audience what feminism is, why its important, how it can strengthen skepticism, and how skepticism can strengthen feminism. These two groups can get along and help another out. My most recent talk that I was giving in the past few days in California is this one specifically on the Religious Right, because these were specifically atheist conferences that I was going to. I generally find atheist conferences to be a little dull [Laughs] because theyre all talking about things that we all agree with.A circle-jerk?[Laughs] Yeah. No God! Lets all go to the pub. Whats the point? But some do discuss particular activist topics that are of interest to atheists. Usually those are more general issues like separation of church and state, or the idea of keeping creationism out of our schools. Things like that. Butdo I see womens rights mentioned. This year has been a landmark one, I think, for the Religious Rights backlash against women. I dont know if maybe I just wasnt noticing it before but this seems like an all-time high level of ridiculousness on the part of the Religious Right. I mention in my talk, and in the article you just mentioned, that in the first quarter of 2011State legislatures introduced 916 bills that restricted womens rights [and] womens reproductive health.The only reason why it wasnt 50 states is not because theres one good state out there -- its because Louisiana didnt meet until April, and once they did they promptly started introducing the same bills. They all copy-cat one another. What happens is that the Religious Right introduces a bill at the federal level that they know is never going to pass, for instance defunding Planned Parenthood. They nearly shut down the whole government over this despite the fact that 65% of the American public in a number of surveys specifically said they hadinterest in defunding Planned Parenthood. However, theres this huge, powerful Religious Right lobby that convinced politicians that this was worth doing. So they tried to defund Planned Parenthood at the federal level. Luckily, it was defeated. Barely.Now were seeing dozens of states introducing copy-cat bills attempting to do the same thing: defunding Planned Parenthood. In Texas they introduced a bill and then did a study to determine how much money they would save, because thats the tact theyre taking, the Tea Party thing. No more government money for abortions! despite the fact that no federal moneygoes to abortions, and only 3% of Planned Parenthoods involve abortions. So, No money to abortions! Save your tax dollars! Well, it turns out that it would actually cost Texas something like -- I dont have the actual numbers at hand -- a hundred million dollars, because Planned Parenthood does so much more than abortions. They do cancer screenings, they do general womens health, and they do them for poor women -- poor women who will have to rely on Medicaid, which will then have to be paid for by Texas. So it would end up costing the taxpayers money [to defund Planned Parenthood]. Its not going to stop them, because the Bible tells us that women should be having babies and dont deserve to have control over their own bodies.Based on these Biblical principles the Religious Right will continue to wage this war against women until we as secularists stand up with the feminists and say, No more. [We need to] start contacting our representatives, especially if you have a Democrat representative... theyre not doing enough. Theyre letting the Religious Right get away with this stuff. Theyre not making abortion an issue. It needs to be an issue. They need to stand up for womens right to choose and theyre not doing it. Thats basically the soapbox that Ive been on of late: to urge secularists to get organized and help women.Do you think the reluctance of secularists, skeptics, scientists, to get involved in that sort of issue is cowardice, or is it just, Well its not ascientific question so Im not going to get involved.?Yeah. I got an angry email a couple of weeks ago accusing me of politicizing skepticism because on my podcast, The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, I was talking about Osama Bin Laden conspiracy theories, and I mentioned that the two groups who are doing the bulk of the conspiracy theories are the Tea Party and the 9/11 Truthers. Well, there are a lot of libertarians in my audience, and there are a lot of libertarians in the Tea Party, and these overlap. So I had someone write in and say that I was damaging skepticism by politicizing it. My response is,Itsa political issue. Its already become politicized. Politics are important. We cant just shy away from them because you cant have science and politics. Bullshit! Youhave evidence-based political activism. Youfight people who are anti-science. Youfight the Religious Right who are using Biblical imperative to try and get that [anti-science] into the government. You can fight them! Itsimportant that we do that.So, yeah, I think it is cowardice. I think its also the fact that too large a percentage of the skeptical community, the secular community, are made up of angry, rich libertarians, capital-L Libertarians, who consider themselves pro-life. Theyre anti-choice. They believe that Global Warming is a conspiracy theory. Thats why these issues become really difficult for us to tackle, because every time we do they say, Stop getting political. Again, Bullshit! You guys are the ones who made it political. Global Warminga scientific topic [until] the Right made it a political topic, and now its almost impossible for us to attack without getting aof emails from libertarians and conservatives saying that were being too political.Aside from being necessary, I think [politics are] a lot more interesting. I mean, we all know ghosts and homeopathy are bullshit. What else is there to discuss about that?Yeah! I got involved in skepticism in the first place because I was really always interested in scams and hoaxes. Its fun to think about the Bigfoot stuff, the aliens and whatever. But, at the end of the day... We realized this on Skepchick a couple of years ago... We were talking about how other skeptics would sometimes get us down. Other skeptics would sometimes attack Skepchick for being too liberal, for being too feminist. We were getting a bit depressed about it. We made a decision as a group to ignore the haters, [Laughs] first of all, and second of all to choose some specific topics that we could have an impact on -- some specific ways that we could make a positive difference in the world. And yknow, Bigfoot was not at the top of the list.Well still talk about it when its funny, but other than that I dont really care if Loren Coleman thinks Bigfoot exists. Go have fun searching for Bigfoot. I dont care.What Icare about is there are a growing number of people around the world who believe that vaccinations will cause autism when theres no scientific evidence to suggest that this is so. We decided as a group of Skepchicks that we would make [vaccination] one of our number one issues. Because of this, one of my writers, Elyse Anders , started the Women Thinking Freely organization that focuses on getting easy-to-understand scientifically-accurate information into the hands of parents and pediatricians. They are working with another Skepchick, organize vaccination clinics at various events. We already set one up at Dragon*Con last year. We vaccinated something like 200 people for Pertussis. Pertussis, also known as Whooping Cough, should not exist anymore. We should be completely rid of it. But because people arent getting vaccinated its continuing to harm people, to kill infants, for instance, who havent been vaccinated yet.These are ways that we can make a measurable difference in the world, and I think that focusing on feminism, focusing on womens rights, is another one. I think thats proved by the response I got after my talk. The response wasnt what I think what the larger organizations feared. The larger organizations fear that if we talk about this stuff all were going to get is this angry backlash from their conservative donors, but no, the response waspositive: people thanking me for speaking up about it and being inspired to go out and blog about it, to podcast about it, to contact their representatives, to spread the word that were not going to sit down and shut up about this issue.The right-wing PR machine has so successfully poisoned the well on feminism and abortion that not only have they framed the entire debate, you cant even say thefeminism.Exactly. Someone just commented on my blog post today, I support womens rights, but I dont call myself a feminist because I dont overreact at every little thing. Im like, Can you even hear yourself? Youre playing right into their hands. We need to reclaim the word feminist, and we need to go out and be positive examples of feminists so that people understand what it means: its the radical idea that men and women are equal. Thats. I feel the same way about the words skeptic and atheist. These are words that have been put in a negative light by our opposition, and in the past weve tried to change our name to brights.[Laughs]Really? We thoughtwould work? No! Even if we came up with aname, which brights isnt, thenword would be cast in a negative light by our opposition. We need to reclaim these words. Youre right. We need to frame the debate in a proper way. Im really excited to see more people speaking up about that. For instance, I was at the OC Freethought Alliances conference the week prior to being in San Francisco, and Sadie Crabtree was there. Shes the Director of Communications for the JREF [James Randi Educational Foundation]. She doesnt come from the world of skepticism. She comes from the world of LGBT activism. She got up and she talked about the words we use, about the framing, and about how before we even engage with the other side we need to reframe what were talking about.I try to speak a little to that as well in my talk. For instance, I mention that these people are not pro-life. Studies show that when you ban abortion, abortions dont decrease; women still have abortions in exactly the same numbers. All that happens is more women. So you cant call yourself pro-life and then support bans on abortion. You are, in fact, pro-death. [Laughs] By definition. I try to teach the audience that this is why we dont go by their vocabulary. We dont accept their vocabulary because it gives them an advantage straight out of the gate. So they are anti-choice. That is what we call them. Its little things like that that I think our community can benefit from. Theres always been a little bit of an emphasis on this idea that, Well, the science is on our side, therefore we will win. If that were true, we wouldnt be here having this discussion. Superstition would have died out long ago.History is littered with the corpses of very right losers.[Laughs] Exactly. What we need our communities to learn is how to launch a movement, how to be persuasive. So Im really excited that there are more people who are doing that. Greta Christina is another person who spoke at the conference I was just at in Oakland. Shesbecause shes passionate, shes angry, and shes not afraid to speak out about whats going on. Shes another person like me who directly addresses womens rights and associates it with the secular movement. I think we need more of that.Is this issue [of womens representation within the secular movement] why you wanted to start your own convention? This year will be, what, the third SkepchickCon?Yeah, SkepchickCon! It is the third one. It sort of is [the issue]. We always just wanted our own excuse to get together and hang out anyway. But yeah, we spent a lot of our time encouraging other organizations to put more women on their stages. We pester them. We publicly point out when they dont have enough women on the stage, and we give them lists and lists and lists of women who would be more than happy to get up on stage. And its working, you know. This year at The Amazing Meeting theres going to be more women on stage. I think its even 50/50 this year, amazingly. But that [pestering] does get tiring. At some point were like, Maybe it would be cool to set a good example. So our conference, SkepchickCon, happens every year at another conference called CONvergence , which is a big nerd-fest in Minneapolis. Its always 4th of July weekend-ish -- whenever they would have the fireworks. Its June 30th to July 3rd this year. Basically, we have our own track of panels and we stock them with awesome women. We have a bunch of the Skepchicks coming, including Bug Girl , whos a scientist, a biologist...She rules.Shes. I think Elyse Anders is going to be there; she can speak to what her organizations been doing. Maria Walters will be there; shes teaming up with Desiree Schell who does a radio show called Skeptically Speaking in Canada. Desiree and Maria will be running a whole grassroots activism workshop on exactly the things that weve been discussing: how to get involved and actually make a difference in the world. Weve got Sadie Crabtree from the JREF coming. We have Ashley Paramore from the Secular Student Alliance coming. Hopefully Debbie Goddard from Center for Inquiry is coming. Also a few token men, of course. We have P.Z. Myers , whos a long-time supporter of Skepchick and an avowed feminist, as well as Greg Laden who is also on Scienceblogs and is also a feminist. Stephanie Zvan is another one. Its always a great lineup of panels that cover not just feminism but science and skepticism, yknow, geekery. Its always a really good time and I encourage people to come on out. You can attend just by getting tickets for CONvergence. You can find out more about the Skepchick track at skepchick.org Last week on his radio show Glenn Beck pretended to vomit while making fun of Meghan McCain. Obviously, hes an asshole, but is that something that women who publicly advocate for their beliefs often have to deal with? That your attractiveness becomes the issue instead of what youre saying?Yeah! It happens all the time, to the point where people say, Oh, thats just what happens. Boys will be boys. It doesnt happen to men. Men are allowed to be in public without the world wondering where they got their suit, how much cleavage theyre showing, how much they spent on their hairstyle -- unless youre John Kerry. For the most part, yeah, if youre a woman in the public sphere, and not just politics but everywhere, then your appearance immediately becomes part of yourThat happened at the conference I was just at. The man who was speaking before me was talking about Youtube Atheists, and he showed a picture of one female Youtube atheist. He specifically said something like, Oh, it really helps if theyre hot, or good-looking or blonde or whatever. And he was called out on it! Normally that sort of comment happens all the time at these sort of conferences --the time -- and it passes without mention. But at this conference there just so happened to be me, and Greta Christina, and Jen McCreight from Blag Hag . During Q&A Jen called him on it and he offered a sort-of half-hearted apology, saying, Of course these people are talented in other ways and that was just assumed. I was like, No. Its not assumed. If youre picking one trait to focus on, and its their looks, we cant assume anything about what you think about their other skills.I think a lot of people hear that and think, Well, hes probably not sexist. Well, he probably isnt. Im sure hes a really nice guy who believes in womens rights and blah blah blah. It just goes to show you that the culture we live in is this inherently sexist thing, and these sexist thoughts tumble out of peoples mouths all the time. Im really proud that we have more women now who are standing up and pointing it out when it happens so that the few women who are in the audience dont just sit there in silence feeling uncomfortable and isolated. Instead, and this is the first time Ive seen this happen, there was this immediate wave of, What the fuck? that went through the audience. [Laughs] You could see the relief on the faces of other women who werent sure at first, like, Is it just me that suddenly feels less-than? Like a non-entity. Instead it was like, No, there are other women here and were pissed off too, and no, were not going to shut up about it.I think a lot of people would say I have a lot of room to talk considering who I work for.Yeah. The idea of whether or not pornography can be empowering and whether its helpful or hurtful is a huge can of worms, I think, among feminists. I know some really great, intelligent feminists who can disagree on those points eloquently. Im sure you get a lot of shit for it.Where do you come down on that question?Well, Im a bit torn. I think that women in the sex industry can be empowered and often are. I know one reader of Skepchick who comments often and attends TAM and things is a sex worker who works for herself, and if anybody wants to tell her that shes not empowered I would wear a cup first. [Laughs] I think thats definitely possible. I think that right now the majority of the industry is sexist, though, [and] is damaging to women.So are you still needing donations for SkepchickCon?Yes. People can donate at events.skepchick.org , and that will help us continue to fly in awesome female speakers. I didnt mention earlier that our Guest of Honor this year is Amanda Marcotte of Pandagon shes a fantastic skeptic and feminist and just perfect for it. To help pay for things like that we rely on donations.If you liked this interview, you might also enjoy our highly active Skepticism and Truth and atheist discussion groups.