Dawkins: At War With The Feminists?

[Animavore]

Yeah even the OP article said she was 'propositioned' but her on version of events in her video make the intentions vague. If she tried prove it in a court of law and he said he just wanted to discuss her views she'd have a hard time.

[Atheist-Lite]

I don't think Dawkins putting his foot in this kind of issue is either sensitve or productive even if it is the right foot?

[Geoff]

There's a pretty good analysis (longish) by Barbara A. Drescher. Excerpt:

On Sexual Freedom

If I were an anthropologist studying our culture today, I might get the idea that “sexual freedom” is about incorporating sex into every aspect of life or the that it is the freedom to express one’s self sexually without regard to other people’s feelings. It’s not. Sexual freedom means YOU get to choose what happens to your body. You get to choose when and with whom to have sex. That’s all it means. In order to have that kind of freedom, we have to take responsibility. Culturally, it must be as okay to say “no” as it is to say “yes”. This cannot happen if women are primarily viewed as sexual objects when they do not choose to be.

With all freedom comes responsibility. In the Watson vs. elevator guy example, there were responsibilities on both sides. Watson’s responsibility was to refrain from expressing an interest in sex if she didn’t want it. She did more than that. She clearly expressed a desire to do something else: to sleep. Alone. The man in the elevator had a responsibility to consider the situation and put a little bit of thought into how she might feel about being propositioned at that time in that setting.

On a side note, calling women “prudes” because they do not choose to have sex with multiple partners, do not like it when men stare at their boobs (instead of listening), or do not enjoy a constant barrage of dick jokes, is the opposite of sexual freedom. Think of it as freedom of religion, which includes freedom from religion.

I really dig+love her comparison: Sexual freedom includes freedom from sex - religious freedom includes freedom from religion. That is so spot on!

More here: http://icbseverywhere.com/blog/2011/07/ ... a-new-era/

Well yeah, and I'd equate the elevator guy's approach to a JW offering her a pamphlet. Say "no thanks", and forget it. Not even "end of story", but "no story".

[charlou]

Well yeah, and I'd equate the elevator guy's approach to a JW offering her a pamphlet. Say "no thanks", and forget it. Not even "end of story", but "no story".

Except in her mind pamphet = penis.

[Atheist-Lite]

Well yeah, and I'd equate the elevator guy's approach to a JW offering her a pamphlet. Say "no thanks", and forget it. Not even "end of story", but "no story".

Except in her mind pamphet = penis.

Makes you think doesn't it?

[MiM]

But she assumed sex, or more specifically as she put it, sexualisation, was on the table, yet didn't give any evidence of that in her complaint. The only indicator she had was he was male and she is female.

Barbara A Drescher (along with many others I've read) seem to assume Rebecca's charge of sexualisation is proven, simply because Rebecca read the situation that way.

Where's the need for proof here? In the given context, her assumption is certainly reasonable, and as she is not dragging him to court (@Ani) or anything that is quite enough.

[Audley Strange]

So in summary, man makes women in lift feel uncomfortable, woman points out she felt uncomfortable, second man sneers at her discomfort and devalues it to make about about serious abuse of women.

It's like complaining my car battery is flat and someone mocking me saying I shouldn't complain because 30000 people a year are run over by drunk drivers.

[devogue]

I consider myself sane and mostly rational and I think Dawkins was wrong and Rebecca Watson did nothing outrageous or deserving of his ridicule.

It has been a fact, in my lifetime and in Richard's, that women in the western world suffered violence at the hands of men--their partners and fathers--and had no legal recourse. Similar in extent to what some women still suffer in some non-western cultures. It hasn't been that long, for those of you who have no experience of that. And it hasn't been that long--because it still happens today--that women are blamed for the violence they experience at the hands of men, even though they do have legal recourse now. So attitudes are not that changed yet.

And for a person who has survived a sexual assault, the attitudes of some of the people they encounter after, even when good intentioned, reinforces the emotional trauma. So pardon us for being sensitive, OK?

All of what you say is true and I really, honestly, completely agree with you.

But it is completely removed from this woman's rather trivial experience! She did not suffer violence, she did not have to find legal recourse, she did not suffer in any meaningful way, she wasn't blamed for violence she experienced because she didn't experience any violence, and she wasn't sexually assaulted.

Your own experience sounds truly horrifying, I can sympathise completely with the mistrust you have felt since - someone tried to utterly destroy you.

That someone else can use powerful language like "destructive", "mysoginist" and "objectifying" after being asked to share a cup of coffee demeans the genuine, traumatic experiences of women like you, IMVHO. That's why I think Dawkins was absolutely right to ridicule her.

Her response to Dawkins is interesting:

Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn’t bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man!

He didn't say or, even imply, that she should "be a good girl" (a provocative, clearly sexist remark). He didn't say she should shut up about being "sexually objectified", he indirectly said she should "stop whining" about such a ridiculously trivial incident when the world is full of real horror.

And what has the fact that Dawkins is not poor, young, gay, black and female got to do with anything?

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.

There you go - she's disgusted and appalled when someone asks her for a coffee, but she would like to freely joke about rape in the presence of rape victims.

As I said, fucking nuts - and that's being charitable.

And then I would make a comment about how there could really be more women in the community, and the responses from my fellow skeptics and atheists ranged from “No, they’re not logical like us,” to “Yes, so we can fuck them!” That seemed weird.

Wow. By that we can conclude that all her "fellow skeptics and atheists" are rampant misogynists. I suppose this place and Ratskep are absolutely crawling with women-haters.

She's full of SHIT.

Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier.

Delicately!? Misogyny ... objectification ...sexist ... damaging ... for asking her to consent to sharing a coffee?

So I am the "problem", and I'm "much worse than she thought".

And she's getting angrier....

[charlou]

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.

There you go - she's disgusted and appalled when someone asks her for a coffee, but she would like to freely joke about rape in the presence of rape victims.

Aye, I did read that earlier .. then breezed by it ... but yes, it's a good point to highlight.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.

There you go - she's disgusted and appalled when someone asks her for a coffee, but she would like to freely joke about rape in the presence of rape victims.

Aye, I did read that earlier .. then breezed by it ... but yes, it's a good point to highlight.

What is? That she used to think that rape jokes were OK? Isn't it obvious that she is castigating herself for being wrong about that in the quote?

And she was NOT "disgusted and appalled". Watch the video! She was relating an anecdote about a guy that had watched her lecture on the sexualisation of women and had then come on to her in a hotel lift at 4am. It was meant to be somewhat amusing yet illustrative of how insensitive we penised folk can be at times.

If she is guilty of overreaction anywhere in this drama, it is in her response to Dawkins' clodhopping pisstake of her anecdote.

There is a lot of emotive language being used in this thread. Rebecca Watson is being painted as a ranting misandrist when that really is not the case. Watch the video and tell me where she claims to have been violated, outraged, objectified, demeaned, or any of the other words that keep flying about? She doesn't - she just says, "Please don't do stuff like this, guys?" Wow! What a misandrist bitch she is!

[JimC]

Standard hominid communication protocols + blogging/forums/fast & faceless electronic communication = dramaz spiralling exponentially...

[devogue]

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.

There you go - she's disgusted and appalled when someone asks her for a coffee, but she would like to freely joke about rape in the presence of rape victims.

Aye, I did read that earlier .. then breezed by it ... but yes, it's a good point to highlight.

What is? That she used to think that rape jokes were OK? Isn't it obvious that she is castigating herself for being wrong about that in the quote?

And she was NOT "disgusted and appalled". Watch the video! She was relating an anecdote about a guy that had watched her lecture on the sexualisation of women and had then come on to her in a hotel lift at 4am. It was meant to be somewhat amusing yet illustrative of how insensitive we penised folk can be at times.

If she is guilty of overreaction anywhere in this drama, it is in her response to Dawkins' clodhopping pisstake of her anecdote.

There is a lot of emotive language being used in this thread. Rebecca Watson is being painted as a ranting misandrist when that really is not the case. Watch the video and tell me where she claims to have been violated, outraged, objectified, demeaned, or any of the other words that keep flying about? She doesn't - she just says, "Please don't do stuff like this, guys?" Wow! What a misandrist bitch she is!

Read this:

http://skepchick.org/2011/06/on-naming- ... onference/

Last weekend I gave a talk at CFI’s Student Leadership Conference. They asked if I’d talk about the Religious Right’s War on Women, and I was only too happy to oblige because it’s an important issue that I enjoy discussing. The night before I spoke, though, I became aware of what I think is a pretty serious problem with anti-feminist thinking amongst the very people I was meant to be addressing.

You may recall that last week I posted this video, in which I describe an unpleasant encounter I had with a fellow atheist that I thought might serve as a good example of what men in our community should strive to avoid – basically, in an elevator in Dublin at 4AM I was invited back to the hotel room of a man I had never spoken to before and who was present to hear me say that I was exhausted and wanted to go to bed.

The night prior to my talk, I happened across a video rebuttal from a woman who I was told would be at the CFI conference. I was pretty frustrated, seeing a young woman who I’m sure is intelligent be so incredibly dismissive of my experience and that of other women in this community, and so uneducated about the fundamentals of feminist thought. She ends the video by asking, “What effect do you think it has on men to be constantly told how sexist and destructive they are?”

I made the mistake of replying to the uploader (stclairose) and some of the hateful commenters at 2 AM – never a good idea. My response to her question at the time was that I never called all men sexist and destructive, nor did I do it constantly. In fact, in my video I specifically said that most of the conference attendees – men and women – were awesome. What I should have added is this: for the men (and women) who are behaving in sexist and destructive ways, I hope that pointing it out to them has the effect of making them consider their actions and stop being sexist and damaging.

When I was discussing the video with friends the next day, I was blown away to be told that there were other student leaders who had expressed similar dismissive attitudes recently on Facebook and on other blogs. An hour or so prior to my talk, someone sent me this link to a post by Stef McGraw on the UNI Freethinkers site. I added a paragraph of that response to a slide for the intro to my talk, in which I hoped to call out the anti-woman rhetoric my audience was engaging in.

This is the paragraph I ended up quoting:

My concern is that she takes issue with a man showing interest in her. What’s wrong with that? How on earth does that justify him as creepy? Are we not sexual beings? Let’s review, it’s not as if he touched her or made an unsolicited sexual comment; he merely asked if she’d like to come back to his room. She easily could have said (and I’m assuming did say), “No thanks, I’m tired and would like to go to my room to sleep.”

I pointed out that she posted a transcript of my video but conveniently left off the fact that I had already expressed my desire to go to sleep. I also pointed out that approaching a single woman in an elevator to invite her back to your hotel room is the definition of “unsolicited sexual comment.” But those are unimportant details in comparison to the first quoted sentence, which demonstrates an ignorance of Feminism 101 – in this case, the difference between sexual attraction and sexual objectification. The former is great – be attracted to people! Flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat. But the latter involves dismissing a person’s feelings, desires, and identity, with a complete disinterest in how one’s actions will affect the “object” in question. That’s what we shouldn’t be doing. No, we feminists are not outlawing sexuality.

I hear a lot of misogyny from skeptics and atheists, but when ancient anti-woman rhetoric like the above is repeated verbatim by a young woman online, it validates that misogyny in a way that goes above and beyond the validation those men get from one another. It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?”

After my talk, I met a ton of amazing young men and women who came to talk to me about their own experiences. Some were considering not attending the conference due to the anti-woman sentiments they were reading. Some told me that the previous year, they watched in horror as Heidi Anderson was shouted down while on the stage discussing feminist issues. I think that the intelligent, thoughtful, caring people I met at the conference were very much in the majority, but are often out-shouted by an angry minority. Over the next two days I would see that kind of angry bile dominating the #CFICON Twitter hashtag, demanding I retract my statements and apologize. The Tweets emanated from only three or four Twitter accounts, none of whom appeared to be McGraw or stclairose. Those that weren’t anonymous were men (EDIT: @ramenneedles has informed me that one was @DoctorHoenikker, who is a woman).

The demands for an apology were very interesting. None of my critics at any point offered any counterargument concerning my points on objectification or feminism . . . all their criticism was entirely about tone. At first they were angry because I had criticized a student. For instance, Trevor Boeckmann, a CFI intern, Tweeted, “It’s one thing to call out a public figure, it’s another to spend your keynote calling out a student.” (Boeckmann must have actually missed my talk, since I spoke about McGraw’s post for about two minutes out of sixty. Despite this and the fact that he did not mention my name, I saw the Tweet on the #CFICON feed and correctly guessed it was about me, anyway. See below for more on that topic. )

This struck me as extremely disrespectful to McGraw. She is not a child, and is not incompetent. She is an adult woman who is a director for a prominent campus organization and who is more than capable of defending her own words if she chooses. When I pointed out that we all should be held accountable for our words, I was told that I should have informed McGraw before my talk. I’m not sure why that’s a requirement since it would have only given her a few minutes’ additional notice, but I would have been happy to had I known who she was at the conference. I was then informed that I was in the wrong because (according to @AaronFriel) I “ridiculed” a person instead of attacking an argument when I said that McGraw’s “post was a pretty standard parrotting of misogynistic thought”. I hope I don’t need to point out to this audience that criticizing a person’s words is not the same as criticizing the person. At no point did I ridicule McGraw, and I even started that part of my talk by stating that I had no desire to embarrass anyone — only to use actual, relevant examples to show the anti-feminist thought that seems so pervasive.

With all other complaints answered, my critics fell back to one complaint: I was wrong to use McGraw’s name.

Now I must share one additional fact about me: I loathe passive aggressive behavior [ ]. Loathe it. I sincerely believe that if you are going to criticize someone’s argument, you should clearly and honestly state to whom you are referring and what exactly they have said or done that you find objectionable.

For me, this is a question of respect: I have enough respect for the person I am criticizing to not make them guess that I am talking about them or guess at what they said that needs to be defended, and I have enough respect for my audience to allow them the opportunity to double check my work. If I hide the person and the exact words that I am criticizing, how does anyone know whether or not I’m creating a strawman? How can the person in question respond?

McGraw and stclairose had enough respect for me and/or their audiences to state my name and link to my video when they criticized me, and though I vehemently disagree with their arguments, I appreciate the fact that I at least knew they were addressing me directly. And so, I did the same during my talk, using McGraw’s name and exact words as an example of what I see as a problem in this community. And I hope that when she or anyone else disagrees with what I’ve written here, they again have enough respect to say my name.

And she mentions her "sexual objectification" in her response to Dawkins

[charlou]

When I started this site, I didn’t call myself a feminist. I had a hazy idea that feminism was a good thing, but it was something that other people worried about, not me. I was living in a time and culture that had transcended the need for feminism, because in my world we were all rational atheists who had thrown off our religious indoctrination so that I could freely make rape jokes without fear of hurting someone who had been raped.

There you go - she's disgusted and appalled when someone asks her for a coffee, but she would like to freely joke about rape in the presence of rape victims.

Aye, I did read that earlier .. then breezed by it ... but yes, it's a good point to highlight.

What is? That she used to think that rape jokes were OK? Isn't it obvious that she is castigating herself for being wrong about that in the quote?

And she was NOT "disgusted and appalled". Watch the video! She was relating an anecdote about a guy that had watched her lecture on the sexualisation of women and had then come on to her in a hotel lift at 4am. It was meant to be somewhat amusing yet illustrative of how insensitive we penised folk can be at times.

If she is guilty of overreaction anywhere in this drama, it is in her response to Dawkins' clodhopping pisstake of her anecdote.

There is a lot of emotive language being used in this thread. Rebecca Watson is being painted as a ranting misandrist when that really is not the case. Watch the video and tell me where she claims to have been violated, outraged, objectified, demeaned, or any of the other words that keep flying about? She doesn't - she just says, "Please don't do stuff like this, guys?" Wow! What a misandrist bitch she is!

I did not call her a misandrist bitch.

She used the elevator incident to try to make her point about atheist women being sexualised, as if a man asking if she'd like coffee is an automatically accepted example of sexualisation. From what I can tell, it was just an invite for coffee and it's her who sexualised the incident.

I'm not surprised she did so, btw ... there's a huge cultural background to why she would .. but I don't think it's reasonable for anyone else to assume she was correct in her assumption that she was being sexualised, just because she's female and he's male.

[Atheist-Lite]

Standard hominid communication protocols + blogging/forums/fast & faceless electronic communication = dramaz spiralling exponentially...

They should have gender specific lifts and that'll settle the matter.

[JimC]

Standard hominid communication protocols + blogging/forums/fast & faceless electronic communication = dramaz spiralling exponentially...

They should have gender specific lifts and that'll settle the matter.

When the Caliphate is upon us, they certainly will...

If they still have the technology to make lifts...