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Two atheists get in an elevator

So here’s a hilarious atheist joke for you all:

Two atheists at a conference get into an elevator at 4 AM. The dude atheist, apropos of nothing, invites the chick atheist to go to his room with him. The chick atheist, who’s never even spoken to the dude before, is creeped out by this. (She says no.) She mentions the incident in a YouTube video. A shitstorm erupts in the atheist-o-sphere because, like, how could she possibly call an atheist dude a creep and aren’t women treated worse in Islamist Theocracies?

Then Richard Dawkins says,

Dear Muslima

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

In a followup comment, Dawkins tops that bit of hilarity with this:

Rebecca’s feeling that the man’s proposition was ‘creepy’ was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.

Damn. That joke didn’t turn out to be really very hilarious at all. Maybe I told it wrong?

In any case, as you might already know (or have gathered), this whole thing actually happened over the past weekend. The atheist chick in question is Rebecca Watson, a popular blogger who calls herself Skepchick. The conference in question was the Center for Inquiry’s Student Leadership Conference. The part of Richard Dawkins was played by, well, Richard Dawkins. (You can find both of his comments quoted here.)

The incident has been hashed and rehashed endlessly in the atheist-o-sphere (and even out of it), but I think it deserves a tiny bit more re-rehashing.  Mainly because it illustrates that some really creepy, backwards attitudes can lurk deep in the hearts of dudes who think of themselves as enlightened, rational dudes fighting the evils of superstition and, yes, religious misogyny.

The strangest thing about the whole incident is how supremely mild Watson’s comments on the creepy elevator dude were.  Here is literally all she said about him, in passing, in her video (transcribed here):

So I walk to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me and said, ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?’

Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and–don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. You would think that most guys would be well aware that accosting a woman you’ve never met before in an elevator at 4 AM is, you know, kind of a no-no. But, no, Watson’s comments suddenly became an attack on male sexuality and men in general. One critic put up a video lambasting Watson, ending it with the question:

What effect do you think it has on men to be constantly told how sexist and destructive they are?

Never mind that she didn’t, you know, actually do that at all. Nor did she even remotely suggest, despite Dawkins’ weird screed, that creepy dudes on elevators were somehow equivalent to genital mutilation or the general denial of women’s rights in Islamist theocracies.  She merely suggested that guys might want to think twice before hitting on women who are alone with them in an elevator at four in the morning.  Pointing out the creepy behavior of one particular dude is not the same as calling all men creepy.

Now, the atheist movement tends to be a bit of a sausagefest, pervaded by some fairly backwards notions about women. (Prominent atheist  pontificator Christopher Hitchens, you may recall, seems to sincerely believe that women just aren’t funny. Not that he’s exactly a barrel of monkeys himself.) But some of the most vociferous critics of Watson have been other atheist women – including the one I quoted above.

Watson responded to this in the first of several posts she wrote about the whole weird controversy:

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?”

In a followup post, she noted:

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.

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.

Watson began hearing from other women in the skeptic/atheist community who’d met far too many of that second sort of male atheist.

They told me about how they were hit on constantly and it drove them away. I didn’t fully get it at the time, because I didn’t mind getting hit on. But I acknowledged their right to feel that way and I started suggesting to the men that maybe they relax a little and not try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door.

And then, as her blog garnered more attention, she faced a virtual invasion of creepy dudes being creepy:

I’ve had more and more messages from men who tell me what they’d like to do to me, sexually. More and more men touching me without permission at conferences. More and more threats of rape from those who don’t agree with me, even from those who consider themselves skeptics and atheists. More and more people telling me to shut up and go back to talking about Bigfoot and other topics that really matter.

She didn’t shut up.

So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. 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. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.

Go read the rest of her post. Despite the creepy dudes and the misogyny and Richard Fucking Dawkins’ patronizing little screed – which led Watson to a moment of despair much like that of virtually every movie hero(ine) at the end of act two in the story arc — Watson ends it fairly hopeful. It’s kind of inspiring, really.

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luke123
luke123
13 years ago

““No woman should ever be subjected to non-asexual attention if she does not want to be. “

It looks like what feminists are looking for is this. Quite effective against the ‘male gaze’ they cry about all the time.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Burqa_Afghanistan_01.jpg

I hear it’s quite a hit in Afghanistan.

caseymordred
caseymordred
13 years ago

Ion, you want to accuse me of trolling, when you’re the one who either does not grasp basic sense, or you’re just pretending not to for whatever reason.

It would be kinder to assume the latter, at this point.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

@MRAL wrote, “I no longer have a massive inferiority complex. And so I will not stand for this SHIT any more. I am going to start calling out people in real life, not just on Manboobz.”

Um, dude? Rome wasn’t built in a day. I’m glad you feel better and all, but being a jerk to people IRL too might have the opposite effect.

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

@Ion Also, please keep in mind that not only is she being offered coffee at 4am, but that before heading out of the room, she said “I’m tired and I want to go to bed”.”

Coffee in the morning, fine. Coffee in the afternoon, probably fine. Coffee after dinner with desert, also probably fine. Coffee at 4am in his room after she said she wants to go to bed?

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

And MRAL, since you were being such a hardass in insisting on an answer from caseymordred, I’m going to insist on an answer from you.

How would you live your life?

mediumdave
mediumdave
13 years ago

Hmm. Maybe David could issue a proclamation along the lines of “commenters on Manboobz are hereby exempted from responding to specious nonsense, if they are so inclined”.

Ion, I have yet to see an explanation of why we should give the elevator guy the benefit of the doubt. If you have one, go for it. He violated a very well-known social rule; people who do that rarely get the benefit of others assuming that they did so innocently.

Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
13 years ago

Oh. I assumed she sat and made fun of him, by name, for a while. Like the standard female “creepy guy” gossip that goes on constantly in women’s restrooms and stuff. If she’s just using it as an anecdote to prove her point, I don’t really have a problem with that.

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

@luke Oh, hey, you’re back. I had a question for you (though I may not respond immediately as I have to go to work soon. If so my apologies): Dawkins is also seeing significant blowback for his words, both from commenters and other atheist bloggers. Doesn’t that mean he made the same mistake Rebecca did, i.e. “doing it wrong”? You said the sign she did it wrong is she’s seeing blowback.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

If you don’t want to scroll back up, here’s the scenario:

Suppose that half the people around you were bigger and stronger than you, that most of them looked upon you as a potential sex partner, that many of them had no compunctions about making crude sexual remarks in your hearing, or groping you, and that a small but significant minority of them felt entitled to have sex with you, whether you wanted to or not, and would force you to have sex if they got the chance.

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

@MRAL you should watch the video. It is explicitly a side note, and she says it in the context of “Most people got what I was saying at the talk. This guy here is an example of not getting the point of my talk.”

Bee
Bee
13 years ago

Mr. Al: “but ALL men ARE compelled to approach women. This situation is women’s collective fault, and it sucks for men a hell of a lot more than it sucks for women.”

Leaving aside any logical or factual errors contained in the above statement, I just have to point out that, no matter how you look at it, all men are not compelled to approach all women all the time. If, after a day of talking about how you don’t like to be hit on, someone who has been within earshot of said discussion decides to hit on you, this is unarguably NOT women’s collective fault.

Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
13 years ago

How would you live your life?

No differently. Since I’d be privileged, my life would be objectively easier, though.

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

Nobby – thanks for the link. Here’s the part that I found interesting, the first paragraph:

Sexual violence may occur in any type of relationship, but most perpetrators of sexual assault are known to their victims. Among victims ages 18 to 29, two-thirds had a prior relationship with the offender. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports that 6 in 10 rape or sexual assault victims said that they were assaulted by an intimate partner, relative, friend or acquaintance. A study of sexual victimization of college women showed that 9 out of 10 victims knew the person who sexually victimized them.

What this seems to say is that the majority of women are assaulted by people they know and have been in relationships with. In other words, assault by strangers is actually a fairly uncommon occurrence…

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

Also, @MRAL congrats on the inferiority complex thing and the glasses (Which I wasn’t around for you saying before). They sound quite clever.

Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
Men's Rights Activist Lieutenant
13 years ago

Okay, well, this Watson woman didn’t really do anything wrong. But the general attitude towards “creepiness” remains. It’s a bullying slur used by people (both men and women) to bully and silence men who either don’t fit in or who aren’t the perfect ideal to a given woman.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

Good answer, MRAL. Very revealing.

Here’s a modest suggestion: share my scenario with your therapist, and your answer. See what happens.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

MRAL, how do you imagine your life would be if you were a woman? I’m genuinely interested.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

Like the standard female “creepy guy” gossip that goes on constantly in women’s restrooms and stuff.

Uh… no it doesn’t. I know you haven’t probably been in very many women’s restrooms, but we mostly just pee. Or when we do talk, very often we’re passing the Bechdel Test and not talking about men at all.

The only times I’ve shared “creepy guy” gossip has been as a safety warning. Not for amusement, but “watch out, this guy’s creepy, he’s groped before so he might try to grope you without consent.” Or “watch out, this guy’s creepy, he ignores boundaries in public so if you go home with him he might still ignore boundaries.” It’s not about keeping the guy down–we don’t care about that one way or the other–it’s about keeping our friends from going into what we perceive as a dangerous situation.

Amnesia
Amnesia
13 years ago

@luke123

Actually, there have been studies done that show women in burqas face more sexual harassment, not less. Women are harassed in sweatpants and hoodies as well as mini-skirts and low-cut tops.

Bee
Bee
13 years ago

Ion: “Probably in the same world where asking someone to have a cup of coffee = creepy stalker.”

You mean the world where a guy has listened to a woman speak at length about how she doesn’t like to bet hit on, and then, at 4 a.m., in a hotel, after she separated herself from the group and announces that she’s going to bed, that guy enters the elevator she’s on, gives her an insincere compliment, and asks her to continue the conversation he apparently wasn’t paying attention to in the first place in his room over coffee?

Facts. They matter.

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

@Ion actually, it does not say “in a relationship”. It says “known”. This guy, being at the conference and at a discussion group with her and at the bar with her until 4 am, would count as “known”.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

What this seems to say is that the majority of women are assaulted by people they know and have been in relationships with. In other words, assault by strangers is actually a fairly uncommon occurrence…
This is true. And sad, and important.

But:

1) Women are frequently told out to watch out for strangers, and it sinks in. We’re not all students of the statistics.

2) If Skepchick had gone to elevator guy’s room, she couldn’t claim he was still a stranger to her–if he raped her, it would be counted as an “acquaintance.” This is a reason women can be rather offputtingly cautious about who we acquaint ourselves to.

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

Hmm. Maybe David could issue a proclamation along the lines of “commenters on Manboobz are hereby exempted from responding to specious nonsense, if they are so inclined”.

I’m all for that. It’d make things a lot easier.

Ion, I have yet to see an explanation of why we should give the elevator guy the benefit of the doubt. If you have one, go for it. He violated a very well-known social rule; people who do that rarely get the benefit of others assuming that they did so innocently.

If it’s such a well-known social rule, why was there such a backlash against Watson? I mean, if everyone had agreed the guy was wrong, things would have ended then and there. However, the sides seem pretty evenly split to me. It seems a lot of people don’t recognize this “well-known social rule”. And if so many people don’t recognize it, how do you know that those who do are right?

Nobby
Nobby
13 years ago

Specifically, “6 in 10 rape or sexual assault victims said that they were assaulted by an intimate partner, relative, friend or acquaintance

Molly Ren
13 years ago

Ion wrote, “It seems a lot of people don’t recognize this “well-known social rule”. And if so many people don’t recognize it, how do you know that those who do are right?”

Weren’t you the dude who said that if someone wanted to talk to you in an elevator at 4am, you’d be afraid they were out to steal your kidney?

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