Richard Dawkins opens mouth, inserts foot, mumbles something about “mild pedophilia” again
A young Richard Dawkins contemplates the beauty of the universe.
Apparently Richard Dawkins was worried that people might have forgotten what an asshat he is. So, helpful fellow that he is, he decided to give us all a demonstration of why he’s one of the atheist movement’s biggest liabilities, a “humanist” who has trouble remembering to act human.
Earlier today Dawkins decided, for some reason, that he needed to remind the people of the world of a fairly basic point of logic, and so he took to Twitter and thumbed out this little thought:
However petulantly phrased this is, the basic logic is sound: If I say that Hitler was worse than Stalin, I’m not endorsing either Hitler or Stalin. Unless I add “and Stalin was totally awesome and I endorse him” at the end.
The trouble is that Dawkins didn’t stop with this one tweet. He decided to illustrate his point with some examples. Some really terrible examples.
Yep, that’s right. He decided to do what comedians call a “callback” to some terrible comments he made last year about what he perversely described as “mild pedophilia.” And then he added asshattery to asshattery by suggesting a similar distinction between “date rape” and “stranger rape.”
Anyone seeing these comments as insensitive twaddle designed to minimize both “mild” pedophilia and date rape has good reason to do so. As you may recall, in the earlier controversy about so-called “mild” pedophilia, Dawkins told an interviewer for the Times magazine that
I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild pedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.
He went on to tell the interviewer that when he was a child one of his school masters had “pulled me on his knee and put his hand inside my shorts.” But, he added, he didn’t think that this sort of “mild touching up” had done him, or any of the classmates also victimized by the teacher, any “lasting harm.”
Huh. If Dawkins says that a teacher groping him was no big deal, I guess this kind of “mild” abuse shouldn’t be a big deal for anyone else, either, huh?
I’m pretty sure there’s some sort of logical fallacy here.
Given his history of minimizing these “mild” sexual crimes, it’s not a surprise that his crass tweets today inspired a bit of a twitterstorm.
Dawkins has responded with his typical petulance, and has stubbornly defended his comments as an exercise in pure logic that his critics are too irrational to understand.
If you take a few moments to go through his timeline you’ll find many more tweets and retweets reiterating this “argument.” Dawkins is not the sort of person to admit to mistakes. Indeed, he so regularly puts his foot in his mouth it’s hard not to conclude that he must like the taste of shoe leather.
But these recurring controversies can’t be doing much for his reputation. Indeed, they seem to cause more and more people to wonder why anyone takes Dawkins seriously on any subject other than biology. Even his critics on Twitter are growing a bit weary.
Seems like it. I’m beginning to wonder why any atheists — at least those who are not also asshats — continue to think of Dawkins as an ally of any kind.
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Posted on July 29, 2014, in atheism minus, patronizing as heck, pedophiles oh sorry ephebophiles, playing the victim, richard dawkins and tagged pedophilia, rape, richard dawkins, twitter. Bookmark the permalink. 938 Comments.
thebewilderness – yup, it’s MansplainLogic, anything a man says about things he knows nothing about must be true, because penis.
The Pharyngula thread on this is interesting, to say the least.
pallygirl, YES to all you said just then. Never mind if you’re hit on when you’ve just spent time explaining you don’t want to be hit on; never mind if it’s when you’ve just this minute said you’re tired and going to bed; never mind if dude does it in an enclosed space he can very easily stop you escaping if you try, and a situation where women have been raped – oh no, you haven’t had pieces of your body cut out, so what are you complaining about?
Dawkins gets just about everything wrong he can, and don’t the douchebros love him for it.
And these guys claim to be objectively better than religious people? Cause uh I don’t necessarily *agree* with various religions, but at least most of their followers have some degree (in a great deal of cases a huge degree) of empathy and basic human fucking decency.
I haven’t seen that from Dawkins and his fanboys.
A few things 1) I’m gonna have to stand by the claim that he’s useful to Atheism because of his knowledge of evolution. He’s an expert in biology. Evolution isn’t simple and easy to understand. It’s actually quite complicated. But of course that doesn’t make him above criticism. He is by no means a god any more than some popular figure in the feminst movement is a god to feminists. And definitely Athiests can differ on whether or not they think he is a valuable voice or a liability.
2) Saying rape by a stranger at knifepoint is worse than date rape is not saying that date rape isn’t bad. It’s definitely clumsy, though. Just like saying having two parents die is worse than having one parent die. A person who said that would not be discounting lived experiences, though. Or telling people how to react. They would be making a generalization that, no doubt, has exceptions, but I think most would agree is true most of the time. I chose the parents dying thing because it was clumsy and didn’t require saying. A logically similar statement, without the offensiveness, might be “Heart attacks are worse than broken legs.” You’re not saying, “Don’t complain about your broken leg because heart attacks are worse.” You’re just ranking heart attacks as generally worse.
3) The level of rhetoric here is pretty intense. I offered a pretty tepid defense of Dawkins as a person and got a pretty heavy dose of “Fuck you. You’re a horrible person.” I think that feminism gets criticized (wrongly in my opinion) for having divisive rhetoric much like atheism does. As a feminist and an atheist, I tend to think its counter-productive in both cases.
wewereemergencies, yup.
Also worth pointing out as atheism seems to be getting called into question. I don’t have data on this, but I would be willing to bet my house to get $5 that atheists are more likely to be feminists than religious people.
If you’re read some of his work, it’s clear that Dawkins is no ally of ours.
LMAO. “Mild murder.”
I’m trying to figure out if there’s a non-weight-shaming “too big to fail” joke to be made here.
I refer you to the aphorism about heat and kitchens.
I know, right? Smelling salts, fainting couches, etc. But it’s worse than that: He already was a pastor at the time, and he was 31 years old. This wasn’t his angry college-kid days or anything; he was already “in ministry!”
Why wouldn’t you want to be divided from misogynists, racists, homophobes and the like? What’s to be gained from accommodating people like that? Are you trying to do the Big Tent nonsense?
Just what do you think non-atheists who actually give a damn about social justice issues are going to think about movement atheism’s attachment to its white-dude leaders who, when they aren’t actually harassing or assaulting women themselves, are minimising everything that happens to not-white-dudes? You think that’s a movement anyone with a conscience really wants to be associated with? There’s your division: including the abusers and their apologists and not caring if it drives away the people they victimise or dismiss. Who are, y’know, the same people feminism is supposed to care about.
Dawkins has a decades-long history of misogyny and racism, at the very least. Why should he get any sort of pass for being an evolutionary biologist? Is he the only one? Or the only one who should be listened to? What makes him so special even in that field?
If he’s half as smart as he tells us he is, he knows full well what he’s doing every time he talks about any sort of sexual abuse. There’s no excuse for his behaviour. He’s been called out often enough, and doubles down every fucking time.
@MichiganPerson
You aren’t getting it. The problem with Dawkin’s statements is that he is trying to judge the severity of other victim’s experiences on some “objective” basis. He is deciding for victims how traumatized they deserve to feel. Moreover, he is disingenuously saying that this is all a mater of “logic”, yet his statements are often used as derails to minimize the trauma of other victims and shame them for speaking their mind.
Gee, I wonder why!
Shut up, Woody.
And Dicky’s having a baw about the “Tsunami of hate,” poor fellow. He has his army of sycophants to shore him up though – including the lovely Janet Bloomfield who has taken the opportunity to compare Women Against Feminism to “logical thinking”.
No, atheism isn’t getting called into question. Just Dawkins.
Here we go again.
Atheism is not being called into question. It’s the fuckshites who are the big names in movement atheism, the ones who shape the public perception of it, who are being talked about here. There are plenty of atheists, theists and everything in between on this board, all feminists, and nobody has a problem with that. It’s smug misogynist gobshites like Dawkins who are the problem.
If having her defend you doesn’t tell you you’re Doin It Rong, nothing will!
I suppose it’s too optimistic to hope that the comparison went “These two things have no similarities at all.”
Waaaay too optimistic, katz! :D
Oh good, you’ve come back and doubled down.
If you can’t explain a topic in plain English to an audience who is of average intelligence and just not qualified in that topic, you don’t understand the topic. Countering bible-based arguments against evolution do not require advanced biology degrees because it’s not necessary to get into that level of detail for debunking. There’s lots of scientifically credited information on the internet now that can be used to debunk anti-evolution claims. My key point: Dawkins is not necessary. If you really think that the main reason we have problems with some elements of religions is their continuing disbelief in evolution, you really don’t understand the fucking fundamental problems that these religious elements are causing. Hint: their lack of belief in evolution is really not the driver behind the social justice issues they cause.
Oh that’s right, Dawkins’ comment occurred in a complete social and cultural vacuum where society treats all rape, let alone date rape, as objectively as it treats car theft, burglary, and Ponzi schemes. Oh wait, no it doesn’t. Females who say they have been date raped are treated as though they have “buyer’s remorse”. The only really real rapes are the ones committed by strangers where the female has experienced physical trauma to areas other than her genitals.
The use of this particular analogy by Dawkins shows he has no fucking clue when it comes to culture. The way that society has situated date rape, the analogy in many people’s minds can be reinterpreted as:
“Rape by a stranger at knifepoint is worse than a female who falsely accuses a guy of rape because she changed her mind after the fact.”
That is the actual structure of the analog as people will read it. Conversely, nobody disbelieves people who say they have broken their leg. Failed analogy fails.
The question is: Is Dawkins so idiotic that he doesn’t know about this strong cultural interpretation of date rape, or did he fucking actually mean it that way? There is a world of difference between how people act towards physical problems (a la your heart attacks and broken legs statement) and how people act towards psychological problems/rape. Also, your physical example fails because you assume that the heart attack is always more severe than a leg fracture, which is not always the case. So even with this supposedly simple example, your attempt to use a comparison scale fails. This is because you don’t understand what you’re talking about.
I’m not using rhetoric. I have used logic.
And again I’ll say fuck you, you’re a horrible person for continuing to act like this is all our fault for not understanding the Truth that Dawkins states. You fail at logic and you fail at being a sympathetic human being.
He doesn’t get a pass for being an evolutionary biologist. He just remains a good evolutionary biologist. Not the only one, but he does seem to be at the forefront of his field. More importantly, though, I don’t think it’s valuable to tell me to fuck off. Worst case scenario for me, I have defended someone who said something offensive and I’m totally wrong. But I’m not a horrible person. I’m a pretty nice guy, and a feminist for what it’s worth, and we would probably agree a lot and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction. In atheism, there are those who would tell religious apologists to fuck off, which I think is bad for atheism. I wonder if the same thing happens in feminism and might be occurring as we type.
@pallygirl
But it’s not important that all heart attacks be worse than all broken legs in order for that statement to be generally true. Nobody restricts themselves to only making statements if they don’t have any exceptions. I think your point about society’s treatment of date rape victims is a very good one, and I totally agree, and if I were friends with Dawkins that’s what I would say. Please don’t hate me.
Hey dude, you just jumped in and possibly triggered a bunch of rape survivors here with your comments. But heck we won’t worry about that because the worst case scenario is that you might be wrong.
You’re not a nice guy (why do the Nice Guys(tm) always explicity say that they’re nice guys?) and you’re not coming across as particularly feminist either.
Don’t come here, throw in emotional handgrenades, and then whine about how we didn’t have a calm interaction.
Probably because most people are nice people.
Oh, goody, another person who’s going to be driven away from feminism because we’re soooooooooo mean here.
“(A)gree and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction.”
Go fuck yourself with a cactus.
And what the fuck do you think you have to teach about feminism?
I am a feminist. I believe in gender equality and a lot of the issues that matter a lot to me as a voter are women’s issues. I just happen to believe we should be careful about throwing people under the bus when they put their foot in their mouth. There are a lot of people who don’t believe in god who don’t want to be called atheists because of people like Richard Dawkins, and there are a lot of people who believe in gender equality who don’t want to be called feminists because of people like @pallygirl.
o_O O RLY?
Yeah, your a nice guy putting up a half-assed defense of an asshole. Your a nice guy who truly appears to believe that you and Dawkins can objectively rank other people’s experiences of rape and abuse on some kind of scale. Your a nice guy who’s talking over the heads of rape and abuse survivors by telling them who should feel worse than who, because that is what this attempt at ranking is really doing.
As has been pointed out, no one here is criticizing atheism. We’re criticizing Dawkins. Unless you believe Dawkins is atheism.
Foot in mouth? More like their heads are so far up their asses that they’re sucking on their tonsils.
MichiganPerson: It’s generally considered to fall under the label of “asshole” to say anger-inducing things and then to condescendingly tut-tut the people who get angry as a result, as if their close-mindedness is the problem and not the shit you said.
When a feminist says hateful things in the name of feminism, it’s appropriate to attribute that to that individual being an asshole and not to the ideology. The same goes for atheists; the same goes for anything. Atheism is orthogonal to assholeness, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a particular kind of asshole who seems drawn to neo-atheism movement skeptic whatever. Dawkins’s cult of personality probably isn’t unrelated to that. And the very fact that this cheesehead saying horrible things on his twitter apparently causes you such immense cognitive dissonance kind of implies that he… or his hateful views… really are part and parcel to how you see the ideology.
@MichiganPerson
Summary: I am a feminist. Sexist dogwhistle.
Dude, if you really want to be an ally to feminists, then you should actually pay attention when they point out that you’re doing something shitty. Also, pallygirl is awesome, and the fact that you don’t like her for calling you out says a lot about you.
Also Emmierae: You are right about Lundy Bancroft and intimate partner rape; several studies show that survivors of partner rape experience longer lasting trauma than survivors of stranger rape due to trust issues etc; also partner rape tends to involve the highest levels of physical violence. As well, battered women experiencing rape are more than seven times more likely to be murdered than women experiencing battery only.
Having had more than two decades supporting survivors of rape in every context imaginable, it is often thought that knifepoint would be worst. However, that’s not always so for the survivor; the worst part might be something the rapist said to her.
The research of Thornhill and Palmer has been acknowledged for years to be highly problematic.
Richard Dawkins is an ivory-tower ignorant ass
And there are a lot of women – like me – who are inclined to say that men shouldn’t adopt the label “feminist” for themselves because of men like you.
If you aren’t ready to face backlash for saying something hurtful to a community comprised mostly of women, then you aren’t ready to be an ally of women, either.
@Ally /blush we could have a mutual admiration society going if you like. :)
I am finding it hard to believe that anyone calling themselves a feminist would back Dawkins on his misogynistic BS. And call out feminist responses as being emotive and therefore we’re not doing logic right.
There aren’t any bridges to be built with Dawkins, he is not a feminist ally.
Wow. Even Woody, our resident Elam cheerleader, is distancing himself from Dawkins. That oughtta tell you something right there.
The people getting thrown under the bus here are rape and abuse survivors. The person doing the throwing is Dawkins. And yourself, at this point. Which would make you the asshole, not pallygirl.
Holy cats, Mark Driscoll is forty-five years old? For some reason I had him pegged around my age (mid-thirties), probably because he reminds me so very much of the Christian patriarchy dudebro I dated in college.
That does explain why his trolling so closely mirrors some of his sermons, though. Sigh. I feel badly for his congregants.
Are we seriously seeing the argument here of ‘This guy says awful things but he’s useful to the movement, so you people he’s disparaging have to shut up and take it for the good of the movement’?
He’s wrong on the logic too. Stranger rape is terrible, but everyone already knew that there were terrible people in the world. What date rape teaches someone is that they can’t trust even the people who they thought they could, and that people who seem decent at first glance can also be terrible, and that you won’t necessarily be able to tell the difference until the person does something terrible to you, and that’s terrifying. That’s something that can eat away at a person’s ability to trust anyone and leave them feeling like they’ll never be safe again.
So no, Richie, you fail at both logic and empathy. Now go away and try to learn how to be a decent human being.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, I have decided to renounce feminism because of Pallygirl.
Remind me what she did?
Save the tone trolling, Michigan Dude. We’ve heard it all before.
You don’t get to fucking tell women, including many rape survivors, how to react or speak to you, or about Dawkins.
Your comparisons suck. First, pallygirl, awesome as she is, doesn’t have a massive public profile, wealth and platform. Dawkins does. He is one of the faces of movement atheism, and one of the reasons that Atheism+ was started, because of all the misogynists and racists who swarmed out at the very idea that women get to say “Guys, don’t do that.” I very much doubt people are saying “Dawkins is a shit, I’m not gonna call myself an atheist!” or, much less, “I’m not gonna be an atheist!”
Because that’s what you’re implying. It’s the same shit we’ve seen from any number of dudes who claim they’re feminists – right up until the time they get called out, or ::clutches pearls:: sworn at by a woman. That’s not about calling yourselves feminists, it’s the old “I want to be an ally but you’re so meeean and don’t give sufficient deference to my manly manness!”
If you’re a conditional ally, you’re no ally at all. If rape victims being angry at Dawkins yet again dismissing their experiences is enough to upset you, because they’re not being Nice, you’re not even the sort of ally we’d want.
::puts moderator hat on::
GO AWAY.
::takes moderator hat off::
@Flying Mouse:
Erm, some of the rest of us are even older than that.
Back in my day…/shakes walking stick
Get off my lawn!
Michigan dude, meanwhile, just fails at everything. He should go fall down a well.
Lest we forget that this is the same Dawkins who, in The God Delusion, openly mocks victims of clergy abuse and suggests that they instigate legal action for money: “Plenty of money to be made from them thar fumblings in the vestry” is very close to how it goes; I’m too lazy to go and get the book.
Never mind the victims who have had their lives ruined or suicided. Crapweasle.
Oh, also, pallygirl, ILU! Trolly McSplainRape, not so much.
Man, the phrase ‘Kill your Gods’ has never been so ironic, or so necessary.
Oh shit, katz, it was the fucking swearing that did it, wasn’t it? Crap.
@ kittehs
Yeah, it’s almost like there’s a theme here of Dawkins thinking that rape and sexual abuse are no big deal. Hmm, I wonder why so many people don’t like him?
Steampunked: When you put it that way, the obvious conclusion seems to be “therefore I can say whatever terrible things I want as long as I’ve made myself indispensable.”
She didn’t make a fox cape for you, just for herself, the selfish feminist!
Hey, we could have a walking stick fight!
Shit, I’m sorry, that came out wrong. I didn’t mean to say that 45+=OMGANCIENT. I was more shocked that Mark Driscoll has been knocking around the planet for almost a half century, and despite all that life experience still acts like…well, Mark Driscoll.
Please accept my humble apologies for my Dawkins-esque foot in mouth moment, plus an assortment of (virtual) baked goods of your choice. :)
Yep. Even my fuzzy ladybrain can see it through all the emoting.
LOL kitteh and Flying Mouse
Flying Mouse: I didn’t find it insulting, more funny that you still think that – at least in that context – 45 is old. It reminds me of when I was 15 and thought the teachers who were in their 20s were positively ancient.
Driscoll comes across as being tragically stuck in his frat boy phase forever. He’s the boy who doesn’t want to grow up.
@pallygirl – With luck, I’ll be there in eleven years myself. We’ll hope I’m a little more self-aware then :D
Katz: I keep wondering about that, but more and more, I just think it’s a total lack of empathy, and a prioritisation of ‘approved’ forms of emotional behaviour. Approved of, lauded, and considered to be ‘logical’.
It’s fine to be a complex man with many nuances that people misunderstand because they are foolish. But not to be any of those people – they’re stupid, and without nuance, especially women in atheism.
They’re emotional, I’m logical. I’m not a raging, insensitive tool, I’m Richard Dawkins. My anger is justified! AND SO LOGICAL. IT is SCIENCED.
The guy is constantly putting his foot in it over women, and constantly surrounded by people who reassure him that it isn’t so bad, and he’s just misunderstood. He has access to a tonne of empirical evidence that his views on rape are blindingly incorrect, but he chooses not to accept it because it doesn’t support his internal emotional worldview. He doesn’t want to view himself as terrible – he wants to be the Good Guy.
So all these other people must be wrong. They’re _emotional_ and they get all flustered.
Also, given that most rape victims know their rapist, reinforcing that “oh well it’s not as bad if they know each other” idea is about as clear a declaration of support for rape culture as you could possibly make.
Am I the only one who thinks Dawkins couldn’t gives fig about rape and pedophilia, and is trolling for attention like a bored child with too much free time on his hands? I have to admit that lecturing people about how to be a serious-minded logician while enjoying a twitter storm like a pig in slop is pretty rich.
Pretty much, brooked. Plus the people who do care about rape and pedophilia are likely to be feminists, and we know how icky he thinks feminists are. They don’t worship at the altar of the Great God Dawkins, so they are suitable targets.
Oh, my. I’m just now appreciating my own delicious obliviousness. I just expressed shock at a forty-five year old man’s lack of maturity. I did this on a comment thread attached to a post about a seventy-three year old’s willful jerkitude.
Thank you, everyone. I’ll be here all week.
Michigan person,
As an atheist myself, I’m of the opinion that Dawkins is in no way useful to us. In fact, he hurts atheists like me who aren’t assholes by reinforcing negative stereotypes about atheists.
Even if I did find him useful, that does not excuse his behavior. I don’t have to put up with bs from him just because he does some science. Bill Nye and Neil Degrasse Tyson make far superior public defenders of science because they are decent human beings.
Dawkins can fuck off and so can you.
LOL! I hadn’t thought of that.
Since we’re on the topic of awful people supporting rape, an Israeli academic has recently advocated raping Palestinian women as an intimidation tactic against Hamas: http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/politics/israeli-sosaciety/8314-israeli-academic-raping-palestinian-women-for-deterrence
I hate the world.
45 isn’t old at all but it’s adult enough that you can’t write his stuff off as youthful indiscretion.
Yeah, I saw that ” you know, we could just rape Palestinian women to keep Hamas in line” crap. Much like Dawkins, dude is shocked! Shocked, I tell you! That people found his statements reprehensible.
Ah, there’s the coherence I was missing! Thanks, katz.
@Ally: and I made the mistake of starting to read the comments. The relevance of Brownmiller’s Against Our Will is reinforced.
The desire to hurt women and children seems to be a fetish with these sorts of guys. I can’t get my head into the space where people even think this shit up, let alone think it’s a valid premise. Given the context, he is not “merely” advocating sexual violence, he is advocating war crimes.
I think from these statement Dawkins is not even a humanist any more. He is the human embodiment and end result of worshiping logic.From a view like his is word do make sense. Most people I think understand on some level, that logic thinking can only take you so far, Just illogical thinking can only take you so far. Much like every other human deal like politics both of the far ends of the spectrum are harmful.
No! No, no, no! Israel, stop being so awful! Please!
Most Israelis are good folks, just as most Palestinians are good folks, but no! Don’t DO that!
World news continually has me internally screaming. First Ebola, than a flight of HIV researchers, then another plane, then blasting a hospital, and now let’s rape Palestinian women to get back at Hamas, like the British gangs are doing in the UK to get back at each other!?!?
Somebody stop the planet. I want to get off.
*yes, I know it was one intellectual, but those comment boards are awful.
Urgh.
Yanno, I would take that bet. I could use a house. (Just want to point out that “religious people” number in the billions. And a lot of them exclusively worship goddesses.)