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.
Why does Woody insist in clinging to The Woody Delusion, which is that people here want to talk to him and are interested in what he has to say?
pallygirl, I reckon if anyone thinks they’re ableist, they’ll let you know, and you’ve already apologised in case of it. I don’t think David would okay mods post-editing people’s comments here. I only zap trolls’ stuff because the editor status in WordPress doesn’t allow me to just put the troll in moderation. Said it before, sait it again: Stoopud WordPress!
cassandra, I’d probably read The Woody Delusion if it was a choice between that and The God Delusion. Both written by assholes, but TWD is much shorter: “I love Paul Elam and you should all listen to me say so over and over again! The End.”
Sait? I can’t even blame autocorrect for that one. :P
MichiganPerson: More importantly, though, I don’t think it’s valuable to tell me to fuck off.
Well, no, you wouldn’t. So, tell us, why are you special? What makes it so that your giving offense ought not merit being told to fuck off?
What else have you brought to the table? Nada. You’ve not earned any slack.
. 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,
It’s not worth the paper it’s printed on. If you are a nice guy, you will take the fuck off as read; a response to being aggressively wrong, when you are an otherwise unknown.
IF you are so feminist as all that, you will understand that Dawkin’s misogyny means those who enter feminist spaces and defend him are gonna get some pushback.
we would probably agree a lot and learn from each other if we had a more calm interaction.
Are you accusing me of not being calm?
What have you got to teach me? It ain’t gonna be how Dawkin’s was misunderstood, because I don’t think he was, and I can’t see how you are in any place to make it seem so; for all the reasons I’ve detailed.
. In atheism, there are those who would tell religious apologists to fuck off, which I think is bad for atheism.
I don’t think it is. The people who drag, “and religious people are all deluded morons who don’t accept they are the root of all evil” out and introduce it into places were it’s not relevant, those I think hurt the rhetorical space, and the ability to persuade, but telling theists who are being apologist in offensive ways to fuck off… perfectly merited.
(nb, I do think there can be reasonable, and justified apologia, most of which has to do with putting religious ideas, teachings, doctrine, dogma, and history, into perspective)
there are a lot of people who believe in gender equality who don’t want to be called feminists because of people like @pallygirl.
Bullshit. The people who don’t want to be called feminist are that way because of people like Dawkins, and Elam, and TAA, and JB, who go around talking about straw-feminists. When the public idea of feminist is ball-busting, man-hating, sex-hating, baby-killing monsters… and to call oneself a feminist is to get things like, Dear Muslima witten about you… people refrain from self-identifying.
I will point out that Bar Ilan is the sort of place I would expect such a sentiment to be expressed. It’s a reactionary (even by “right wing Israeli” standards) place.
And as Mme Pecunium said, ‘sometimes there aren’t enough shovels ready to hand when you want to hit someone on the head.
http://www.keepcalmstudio.com/gallery/poster/1qMwSfT
pallygirl, perfect! :D
kitteh: @pecunium, want me to see if I can unbold that last comment for you
Yes, please. I was trying to bold the name alone, as a way to offset it from the prologue.
Totoro: @ magnesium : like many others, you totally miss the point. Logic is not about « anecdotes and evidence-free opinions » ; logic is the science of valid and formal reasoning. That something the persons who attack Dawkins don’t understand. The irony is that those persons pretend to give him logic lessons…
Care to back that up with yanno, some “valid and formal reasoning” as well as a bit of evidence.
I, for one, am not “pretending” to give Dawkin’s lessons in logic. I am willing to grant that he understands it. It is, in fact, precisely because I am willig to grant that argument that his failures in applying logical argument are so offensive.
BTW, Dawkins didn’t make a logical case, he made a declarative statement, and called anyone who disagreed with it illogical.
Way to almost ruin feminism for this guy by saying something or other in a comment @pallygirl. Lucky for us it sounds like Michiganperson will tough it out and stay a feminist despite the super rude things @pallygirl hurled at him. Good thing @pallygirl wasn’t a suffragette back in the day or women would have never got the vote after @pallygirl told off some pretty nice guy in a waistcoat and curled mustache.
OK, I’m probably enjoying Michiganperson’s hurt feels a wee bit too much.
I also killed off several dozen brain cells watching the Today clip covering #signs against feminism. My patience with complaints about how feminists are doing a poor job selling feminism to the nice young ladies on the internet has officially died. Believe it or not it I don’t consider it a personal failure that young women don’t find feminism so mild, painless, simple and instantly palatable a concept that they embrace it without a second thought. I don’t wring my hands because it gets bad press, because it always has and anti-feminists always eat it up.
Screw it. Pretty ladies of Poland, feminism is about growing out your body hair until it drags on the floor, hating all things that seem even sort of feminine and opening jars by smashing them against men’s heads. Run for your lives!
Yesss! Fixed the bolding.
FEAR ME, HTML
Why can’t feminists stop ruining feminism for condescending dudebros? Think of the dudebros, people.
OT: damn, now I really wish I could comment on Pharyngula. PZ’s talking about visiting the Oxford Botanical Garden and nobody’s told him how dangerous it is (see: Lewis, The Soul of Genius). Oxford’s not as bad as Midsumma but it’s close.
Useful and why I consider Dawkins to be a misogynist. Hint, he has a history of being a misogynist. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck…
http://freethoughtblogs.com/godlessness/2014/07/30/the-dawkins-cycle-an-infographic/
What Dawkins should understand – and I’m not convinced he’s done much formal philosphy training – is that the results of logical analysis can often result in entirely ludicrous conclusions if the premises were wrongly chosen or badly framed. In this case, he’s not done any logical scrutiny of the premises he based this whole fustercluck on that I can see.
He could have chosen entirely different subject matter for the logical issue he claims to be considering. Even if he decided that rape, assault, molestation, harassment were the right topics for comparison and ranking, he could have chosen different events or different words to describe those events. And I don’t buy any of the excuses proffered that his word choices were merely unfortunate.
He’s been here before and he knows the terrain with all its problems and pitfalls. He’s also an experienced, competent writer. He knows that words have meanings. He knows that concepts have cultural background and some of them have nasty cultural baggage. He also owns a thesaurus or two, any number of dictionaries, along with access to academic journals of any and every possibly relevant discipline.
He made his own choices. They were all bad. They were illogical. They obscured rather than clarified the issue he claims to be considering. All the pushback is due entirely to his own inadequate writing and his choice, nobody else’s, his choice to put his words out in twitter format.
Logic? Fail.
Yes, it is the critics of Dawkins who have been avoiding logic and reason by using those tools to attack this comments and not-pology. Dawkins and his defenders have been using logic and reason by using ad hominem attacks on the critics instead of rationally and calmly pointing out where they think the holes in the criticisms are.
Dawkins and his defenders: re logic. You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Wait, wut?
What, “logical thinker” and “has a penis” aren’t basically the same things? You just think that because you’re not a logical thinker.
Dawkins’s premise for this or anything else he bloviates about is that he knows all there is to know about everything, alpha and omega, ego without end.
I just thought of a possible way to shut him up: ask him what his star sign is. Andrew Denton wound him up by popping that in at the end of an interview once. Only time I’ve seen His Assholiness wordless.
If I ever interviewed him I’d do my best to bait him into a frothing sexist rage. Tell him my star sign, twirl my hair around my finger, the works.
I would ask him what his academic qualifications are, and when he graduated with each one. I would then ask him which of those academic qualifications makes him an expert in sexism, racism, sexual assault, anthropology, psychology, sociology, gender studies, cultural studies, logic etc. If he mentions that he knows females, or anything along those lines I would point out that the fact my body contains genes clearly gives me the qualifications to pontificate about evolution and molecular biology. Also, as a female I have testosterone (and the basic body type in humans is female – e.g. males have nipples), so that makes me clearly more qualified to pontificate about male experiences compared to cis males, who don’t actually produce oestrogen.
I come back to my question re morals/ethics. What hard science basis is there to make a moral or ethical call on something. What makes an outcome or behaviour bad, on purely hard science grounds? Answer: hard science doesn’t address these questions.
The reason that society punishes some behaviours and not others is because society has made a judgement call that some behaviours should be punished, and punished harder, than others. In historical times that was on the basis of property rights. Tell me hard science dudebros, what exactly about biology or physics or chemistry fucking explains property rights? Then we started changing sentences (e.g. removing the death penalty, removing hard labour sentences combined with incarceration) because the sentences were deemed to be inhumane and out of proportion to the crime. What bit of biology or chemistry or physics was the basis for that logic? Oh that’s right, none. The introduction of these crimes/punishments and their amendments was on the basis of the fact that the crimes were behaviours that were deemed bad – a moral/ethics decision, not a scientific one. Are laws and sentences suddenly an irrational idea now?
The entire history of law and punishment is deeply embedded in morals/ethics because law and punishment arise out of philosophical theories. Using legal terms necessarily brings those philosophical understandings with them – words have fucking meanings. So Dawkins and his supporters have a complete lack of epistemological understanding as well.
To tell us that we don’t know what we’re talking about, by saying that emotion has no place, is to completely ignore the discourses in which Dawkins tweets occurred. Dawkins comes across as Humpty Dumpty. This is not a compliment.
“I don’t know what you mean by ‘glory,’ ” Alice said.
Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t—till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’ ”
“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
Alice was too much puzzled to say anything, so after a minute Humpty Dumpty began again. “They’ve a temper, some of them—particularly verbs, they’re the proudest—adjectives you can do anything with, but not verbs—however, I can manage the whole lot! Impenetrability! That’s what I say!”
Humpty Numpty
Humpty Dumpty from Through the Looking Glass. That reference is just perfection, pallygirl.
I should reread the Alice books. I’d probably get a lot more out of them now than I did when I was eleven.
Or they’re already rape survivors.
I think there’s really a gendered component ot his behavior. He and his fanboys treated elevatorgate as some kind of collective feminine overreraction, and his decision to use rape for his comparison this time around strikes me as trying to deliberately upset women so he can once again prove that we’re irrational, emotion-driven, possibly even hysterical creatures.
He’s so boring, I literally just can’t be bothered. But I’ll defer to the will of the community.
Well there aren’t many people above him, and punching laterally might require an uncomfortable amount of self-examination.
@Pallygirl, if it makes you feel better, “out of touch with reality” is often suggested as an alternative to the ableist words around here. I use it all the time.
Which religious people? Because there are some Pagan trads, like Reclaiming and Dianic Wicca, that are explicitly feminist. And feminist theology is a thing, as is thealogy.
Woody is like the spider that’s so small and obviously harmless that even arachnaphobes can’t be bothered to do anything about it.
Wait, so men will stop oppressing women if we’re just nice to them? Why hasn’t anyone tried this before?!?!
I would pay actual money to make this happen.
Both Dawkins and people who defend him on science- and logic- related grounds demonstrate with painful clarity that they don’t even remotely understand logic or reasoning and insert those terms into their discourse as gratuitous and meaningless “bons mots”.
For example, Dawkins’ claim that stranger rape is worse than date rape isn’t an example of logic. It’s a value judgment — and one that doesn’t even take all relevant factors into account (such as the element of betrayal or reflexive victim-blaming that’s much more strongly associated with date rape than stranger rape). This claim isn’t based on science; it’s based on Dawkins’ personal, subjective perception that a penis belonging to someone you were willing to go on a date with is less repugnant than the penis belonging to someone you have never met before. This is a baseless assumption and an arbitrarily chosen criterion. And also, too, the fact that Dawkins isn’t personally affected by rape or the threat of rape doesn’t make him objective.
To borrow Dawkins’ own language, if you can’t distinguish between a logical conclusion and a subjective value judgment, you should STFU about logic for a while and go learn how to think or something.
So here is where I and most of Dawkins’ detractors part ways. I would not even concede that he’s being logical, because he clearly isn’t. I don’t understand why anyone else would acknowledge his “logic”, either. I don’t know, maybe he’s good at evolutionary biology, but outside of that field, he is an irrational, sloppy and undisciplined thinker.
This makes me so mad. Who the fuck are you, Dawkins, to decide which rapes are worse than others? How about instead of judging different types of rape on your imaginary scale of “badness” or going on about “mild pedophilia”, you stay out of the whole thing and let the survivors determine how they feel about their own situation?
Oops, wait a minute. I guess I’m just emoting here instead of being rational and debating. Because the badness of rape survivor experiences is something that should be debated and measured. Silly me.
ding ding we have a winner here
100% of the people who I’ve seen bring up up Mao or Stalin to compare with Hitler were trying to downplay the Holocaust as no big deal or make some sweeping straw-statement about socialism.
100% of the people who I’ve seen trying to scale the relative badness of rape were trying to make an argument for some types of rape being minimally or “zero bad”, and therefore excusable.
What makes anyone think that Dawkins is different?
I’m not sure if dick is playing dumb (“I’m so surprised by this “tsunami”, I just wanted to give a formal logic lesson. I didn’t think it would upset anyone.”) or if he really is dumb.
It looks like other people start to wonder too.
I think there’s really a gendered component ot his behavior. He and his fanboys treated elevatorgate as some kind of collective feminine overreraction, and his decision to use rape for his comparison this time around strikes me as trying to deliberately upset women so he can once again prove that we’re irrational, emotion-driven, possibly even hysterical creatures.
This seems like a good explanation to me, emilygoddess. I don’t see much point in insisting that I’m correct on topics about which I’ve done no research and in which I have no experience. That wouldn’t be especially logical.
Sometimes I feel like a large part of the atheist community doesn’t really want us lady folks… well outside of maybe for props or for numbers. We’re props in that the men can all go “See, secularism allows for women to be educated and not wear hijabs and heck, we even sometimes let them talk… Islam on the other hand, is horrible to its women. Women that are religious are sooo stupid.”
Oh, I forgot, we’re also potential suitable mates as we’re marginally less irrational than our religious counterparts… well at least when we aren’t ruining atheism with our feminism or “emoting” while telling Dawkin to stop being such an apathetic asshole… or talking about video game stereotypes or about some guy being a cad on an elevator… or saying “don’t be that guy”…
“I think there’s really a gendered component ot his behavior. He and his fanboys treated elevatorgate as some kind of collective feminine overreraction, and his decision to use rape for his comparison this time around strikes me as trying to deliberately upset women so he can once again prove that we’re irrational, emotion-driven, possibly even hysterical creatures.”
Riight, because rape is inherently about women. It’s not like once you take into account rapes that happen in prison and forms of rape that include coerced penile envelopment that men get raped in any significant numbers now, is it???
Less sarcastically, look at his statement more closely:
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at *knifepoint* [emphasis added] is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
If you look up date rape on say Wikipedia you can find something like this “Date rape occurs when a perpetrator uses physical or psychological intimidation to force a victim to have sex with him against their will, or when the perpetrator has sex with a victim who is incapable of giving consent because they have been incapacitated by drugs or alcohol.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_rape
So, plenty of situations fall under the notion of date rape which do not entail a direct, clear, and real threat on a person’s *life*. For instance, if two people are dating, and a woman pushes her finger into a man’s butthole half an inch for a split second without his consent, then she raped him according to the F. B. I.’s definition of rape ““The penetration, *no matter how slight* [emphasis added], of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.” http://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/attorney-general-eric-holder-announces-revisions-to-the-uniform-crime-reports-definition-of-rape
Now consider a woman holding a knife up to a man’s neck and then forcing him to have sex with her.
In the first case, the man’s life is not in jeopardy. In the second case, the man’s life is in jeopardy. There does exist real reason for the man to fear for his life in the second case. In the first case, the man’s life isn’t in danger. He gets violated, yes, and of course such a rape is wrong. But, the knifepoint rape is worse, because not only is personhood getting violated by such an action, but his life itself stands in a perilous situation.
And in plenty of other date rape situations, the person’s life, whether man or woman, is simply not in danger. In a stranger rape *at knifepoint* a person’s life, whether man or woman, is literally in danger. His statement thus ends up emphasizing the difference in the degree of wrongness between the acts here.
So Dawkins here stands correct…
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at *knifepoint* [emphasis added] is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
Doug, you’ve made me have an epiphany. Because of you, I’ve realized something that I’d never thought about before:
That sarcasm sounds really stupid if you’re wrong.
Doug Spoonwood: So are you actually arguing that use of a weapon is what makes one rape “worse” than another? Is that exactly what your trying to say?
So, like, a rape is “less wrong” if there’s no weapon used?
I can’t even with this shit.
From the book of Furballs, chapter XLII, verse 23-26:
Doug, you’re totally ignoring all the evidence that date rape can be more traumatic than stranger rape, as evidenced by the firsthand statements to that effect AND the studies cited upthread. And you haven’t even defined by what metric we’re measuring the badness of a rape.
I knew some asshole was going to try to read me for saying rape was a gendered issue. I am aware that rape happens to men*, and I agree that the examples you mentioned are rape. BUT (1) women are far more likely to be raped than men, and our lives are circumscribed by the fear of rape in a way that men’s are not, and (2) rape is widely known to be an issue of feminist concern, so if, as I suggested, Dawkins was deliberately trolling feminists, that would make his use of it in this instance a gendered act.
I know there are male survivors here. If they object to the way I’ve framed this, I’ll reconsider my wording. But I suspect that like most MRAs, Doug is not invoking male survivors in good faith.
One thing both Doug and Dawkins don’t seem to realize is that many women do not need to treat rape as a hypothetical. It is a reality they have already experienced.
Prison rape is indeed a terrible problem, but that doesn’t appear to be the point of this little exercise.
emilygoddess comes correct as always.
*not just many women, but for many people, this is not simply hypothetical
Indeed, prison rape isn’t even included in Dawkins’ little intellectual exercise, as it’s neither date rape nor (usually) stranger rape at knifepoint. In fact, the majority of male rape survivors are raped in prison or as children, neither of which is covered in the example given.
Meanwhile, both date rape and stranger-knifepoint rape are things that our culture thinks of (correctly, afaik) as happening mainly to women.
Dawkins pretense that his subjective opinion is logical is absurd. Once more demonstrating that he is an enormous mendacious disembodied anus.
Spoonwood’s back? Fuck off, Doug.
***trigger warning for various crimes here***
So Doug,
1. Is it less bad to be strangled to death or to be knifed to death? Assume that time to death, from when the attack starts, is the same in both cases.
2. Is it less bad to be defrauded of $1000 by a family member or to be defrauded of $1000 by a financial institution?
3. Is it less bad to be burgled by an acquaintance or to be burgled by a stranger?
4. Is it less bad to be maimed by a drunk driver you know, or a drunk driver you don’t know?
Such a shame. I still think “The God Delusion” was such a great book. Dawkins could have simply stayed a great author. But then he had to and ruin everything with one stupid comment after the next. I mean, as David rightfully points out, the point Dawkins was originally trying to make was in itself correct: Just because you consider something a lesser evil does not mean you condone it. But the example he chooses is so inconsiderate and so misogynistic… and really, so flat out *stupid* – why would any sane person think this is a good idea for an example? The funny thing is, by *needlessly* invoking this example, this does in fact come off as trying to relativize date rape at least, if not entirely condone it, so Dawkins is even undermining his own point here. Oh, and of course, showing himself to be a horrible human being.
I think there’s more to it. It does come down to male entitled behaviour, of course, but I think it’s like… that kind of atheists, they pride themselves so much on being “free thinkers” and “rational”. Of course, they’re often neither, but that self-image means having extreme positions is a kind of badge of honour for them. That those extreme positions always end up favouring their social group (and since they’re just new ways to justify old attitudes aren’t really extreme, either), well, that’s the aforementioned entitlement.
Eleanor Robertson, you are my idol: “Another day, another tweet from Richard Dawkins proving that if non-conscious material is given enough time, it is capable of evolving into an obstreperous crackpot who should have retired from public speech when he had the chance to bow out before embarrassing himself.”
From here: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jul/30/richard-dawkins-what-on-earth-happened-to-you?CMP=soc_567
Rape is a patriarchal tactic used to control women, Doug. No one asks what a straight cis man was wearing when he was raped or says he should not have been drinking or at a party if he didn’t want to “get himself raped”. (Gay men are often treated as “asking for it” by existing, much in the same way women are. Trans men face “corrective” rape. That’s a form of patriarchal control and an offshoot of misogyny too.) Yes, even though men are also raped, rape is a gendered issue. When I took my kids camping, I was told by a neighbor that I was going to “get myself and my kids hurt”. My husband is never told that when he takes the kids camping or camps alone. Didn’t I know a woman alone should expect to be raped. When women go out, they are to navigate their entire lives around not getting raped and with the knowledge that if we get raped we will be blamed and retraumatized over and over again. It is a punishment for being too independent or to proud and in control of our own bodies and sexuality. When one woman is raped and blamed for being raped, it serves to remind other women to keep to their place, too be women the way the patriarchy wants us to.
When my daughter was at a con and was invited to a male acquaintance’s room to see the merch he’d picked up, she declined because she knew going to a guys room was dangerous in a way a boy her age would not have to fear. Men jog nearly nude with no fear of being raped. They can walk alone at night and know that they won’t be told they should have been more careful if they are attacked by a rapist. They know they are not targeted. They know they are not considered the sex class, whereas women are. Men don’t carry pepper spray and rape whistles just to pick up groceries at night. They don;t worry that if they put a drink down at a party they may be roofied. They don’t think about parking too close to blind corners how to get from a parking lot to their front door safely so as not to be raped the way women do. Getting a college education does not increase a man’s chances of being raped. Politicians do not claim that men’s rapes are not “legitimate” rapes and there are not entire movements built around calling male rape victims liars who merely regret consensual sex or are”crazy” and out to destroy men for the “attention” and “power” coming forward about being raped supposedly brings.
Boys who are raped are not told that they developed too soon or too much, so their rapist could not help his or herself. In war women are raped to punish and demoralize women and to seek revenge against other men. Every week there is another story about a girl raped while people watch, because hey, that’s what girls are for. I don’t see stories of a sports team proudly circulating tapes of boys they rape. There is no saying “girls will be girls” used to excuse female perpetrators. This is a gendered issue.
You know all of this. Stop pretending to be ignorant of the society you live in.
“Why does Woody insist in clinging to The Woody Delusion, which is that people here want to talk to him and are interested in what he has to say?”
What makes you think I care what you think?
“Riight, because rape is inherently about women. It’s not like once you take into account rapes that happen in prison and forms of rape that include coerced penile envelopment that men get raped in any significant numbers now, is it???”
QFT
Woody, do you have a point? No.
Then shut up.
Because your entire existence is nothing but caring what other people think.
Also, shut up, Woody. Doug won’t love you any more than Paul does.
I can see how Dawkins could think violent stranger rape is worse than date-rape if he thinks that it’s the violence that’s harmful and that the rape part is not a big deal.
And just because this thread is so fucking depressing with the rape and pedophilia apologists, here is something nice:
http://newsfeed.time.com/2013/10/15/never-drink-alone-again-because-now-theres-wine-for-cats/
Um…grapes are poisonous to cats.
Ok…. public declarations time.
I am a male survivor of intimate partner rape. (I guess that counts as a trigger warning). It wasn’t violent, it was persistence. She wanted to have sex when I didn’t. The repetition of that is a large part of why we broke up. Part of it was that I was too young/inexperienced to know better (I was 18, she was 22).
It has, for going on the past 30 years, affected my romantic life (as opposed to my sex life). I have some pretty strong ideas about consent (I’m all for it), and things which feel, to me, that they press against my boundaries– put me right out of the mood.
Which means (TMI) some of my partners are afraid to initiate sex, because they worry it will be seen as an encroachment/pressure. That sort of fucks up spontaneity. Was it, “bad”? On an abstract level, no. I don’t feel scarred from it. I don’t have obvious trauma from it, but the after effects of that, “benign” abuse (what Herr Dawkins would call, “not as bad” are still with me.
So when one makes the comparative claim, with it’s trivalising of those who think all rape is really fucking bad (i.e. not “mild), (be it sui generis or as the lickspittle fanboy of some more visible asshole (yes, Woody, I’m counting you in the category of people who need to wipe off their chins, as well as their noses), they sure as hell deserve the “fuck-off” responses they get.
Because nothing exists in a vaccuum, and Dawkins may be able to present his argument in the form of Symbolic Logic and show it to be valid, that doesn’t make it true.
@katz, shit that’s my learning for the day. I knew about chocolate (theobromine).
In compensation:
Now that is adorable. Smart mouse!
I put bells on the door for the cats. Big loud bells. A whole string of them. Oh my dear paws and whiskers I took the bells off the door and put in a cat door. Criminy!
@pecunium: not sure if you need or want a response to your post. Sexual assault and its consequences are not something I would wish on anyone. I wish people wouldn’t experience it – I can’t stop it, but I can:
– ensure I don’t do it myself,
– support people who wish to be supported,
– speak out against this behaviour and any attempts to minimise it,
– provide financial support to organisations that assist survivors.
pecunium,
I’m sorry someone did that to you and I’m sorry people like Dawkins minimize your rape just because your rapist was known to you.
Because if you didn’t you’d go the fuck away. And shut up.
I just had a hilarious image of him punching himself in the nose! :D
The fun thing to do with his star sign would be tell him how exactly he fits the pattern of whichever one it is.
I’ve emailed David asking him to put Troll Spoonwood on moderation. Anyone want me to wipe out his comments in the meantime?
I just feel icky with his way too much levels of detail in his sexual assault examples.
For people who feel that feminists are too emotional, they really do enjoy going into way TMI when typing out “hypotheticals”. The hypotheticals often contain way more detail than people’s lived experiences.
Kittehs: I’d leave them up. If he gets malleted, enh, but what he said has responses, and they would seem strange if they weren’t connected to the parent comment.
It’s almost like they’re trotting out their fantasies, isn’t it? Nah, that couldn’t possibly be the reason. /s
It alarms me how much time they’ve put into thinking through their (very explicit) scenarios. Like, why would anyone do that, given it’s a hypothetical and none of us are in philosophy class.
Thanks for reading my comment right, I should have ended with “way more detail than how people in this blog tend to talk about their lived experiences.” Of course, lived experiences themselves contain oodles of detail.
It’s a bit like my dad’s friend making his hypotheticals increasingly more complex as I add complications to his scenario. “So, what if it was a jaguar, and it was holding a shotgun, also the floor is laced with barbed wire… exploding barbed wire!”
Fear not, you were perfectly clear, pallygirl.
Even in the philosophy classes His Assholiness was talking about, it sounded like those lecturers were deliberately choosing topics to distress women – things that overwhelmingly harm us, and members of the classes might well have already suffered. The whole thing sounds less like “let’s look at the ethical implications of this hypothetical” than “let’s see how much of a boner I can get causing distress and disgust in people I have power over”. The trolls are trying the same thing here, without that degree of power.
I’ve always hated hypotheticals anyway. They never seen to be anything but a tool for men who like doing this fucking straw-Vulcan thing and showing how superior they are to anyone who actually cares about others.
Speaking as a moderator, I wish we had a virtual gun-wielding, exploding-barbed-wire hurling jaguar to deal with the trolls.
Laser eyes wouldn’t be bad either.