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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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Molly Ren
13 years ago

Elephant = bad, hippo = good

*wags tiny hippo tail*

zombie rotten mcdonald
13 years ago

I don’t hate snowcones.

Vampires, on the other hand….Alpha undead assholes, every one of them.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

And a pony.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

I’ve gotta confess… I do hate snowcones. Maybe if they were made with quality syrup, like those Torani syrups, but they always seem to come in flavors limited to “sticky sweet blue” and “sticky sweet red” and I hate that.

Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

Cap’n B, that’s missnowconerey.

You obviously have reading comprehension issues.

Yeah, like I even care. I have a life, after all.

Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

I’ve gotta confess… I do hate snowcones. Maybe if they were made with quality syrup, like those Torani syrups, but they always seem to come in flavors limited to “sticky sweet blue” and “sticky sweet red” and I hate that.

So you admit that your previous claim to like snowcones was a lie! Why should we trust anything you say, now that you have outed yourself as a liar and virulent missnowconeist?

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

The shave ice in Hawaii to excellent, you can also get it with vanilla ice cream on the bottom, and the syrups aren’t just stick red and blue (which is nasty).

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

Fuck…. “is” excellent. Typing is not my thing today.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

So you admit that your previous claim to like snowcones was a lie! Why should we trust anything you say, now that you have outed yourself as a liar and virulent missnowconeist?

Oh, you’ve got me now, CB. I hate snowcones just the way I hate men.

I only couldn’t admit I hated men–I had to talk about in codewords and implications while claiming to like them–because our society is…

Wait a gol’ danged minute. If our society is misandrist, why do I have to be secretive about hating men? I ought to just say it, and get backslaps and high fives!

Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

@hellkell

Well, thanks for deigning to like snowcones that don’t offend your delicate sensibilities. Obviously, your “shaved ice in Hawaii” is the Brad Pitt of the snowcone world. If it were an ordinary snowcone, you wouldn’t give it the time of day, now would you? Typical.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

As jerky as they can be, I confess that I feel bad for MRAL and Ion after this latest spat. The main pillars supporting their arguments were still along the lines of “I act like this because no woman will ever want me otherwise” and “if a man is ugly, he’s doomed to be alone–good looking people get EVERYTHING.”

I mean, people don’t usually sink to this level of hatred, but a lot of people still spend a lot of their lives feeling ugly and unworthy. I feel like we need to start an “It Gets Better” program for chubby geeks.

Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

Wow, this is really easy. No wonder these guys like being MRAs…you don’t even have to think.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

The length of a comment thread, and the speed with which it grows, is directly proportional to the number of trolls commenting in that thread.

Xt = Acx/h

where Xt is the number of trolls commenting, cx/m is the number of comments posted per hour, and A is a proportionality constant.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

You’re right, CB, I guess I owe the beta snowcones of the world a big fat apology followed by some hot tongue action. I’ve just been too busy riding the alpha snowcone carousel!

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

Molly Ren – I don’t mean to self-promote (yes I do), but here’s my personal “It Gets Better” story for chubby geeks:

http://pervocracy.blogspot.com/2011/03/growing-up-ugly.html

I was, from about the time that appearance mattered (about middle school) up until I got into the kink scene, an ugly kid. Not three-eyes-ugly, but there were some things going against me: I’ve been fat since I was a baby, I had no idea how to dress myself, I have really weird hair, I hit puberty relatively late, and I’d skipped so many grades I was three years younger than everyone in my class. So when I got to high school, everyone else was in hot pink belly shirts and long blond ponytails and had breasts, and I was in an XXL denim shirt with hair like a tumbleweed and two years away from even a trainer bra.
[…]
This isn’t the Ugly Duckling story. I have a little bit more style and social skills now, but I’m no swan. I never did grow nice tits. I never did lose the weight. I didn’t even get my hair under control. But nonetheless I grew up. And although I don’t think I got pretty, I got to feeling pretty. I became first unafraid to wear normal clothes (i.e., the correct size instead of XXL, colors and designs other than “please don’t notice me”), then unafraid to be naked when the situation called for it. I stopped trying to hide my belly during sex. I stopped apologizing for my appearance. I started expecting people to treat me decently.

For the longest time, I had this fantasy that I’d be beautiful someday. That I was just in my “awkward stage” and then one of these years I’d really get my shit together and lose 80 pounds and my hair would be straight and long and blonde and my face would be all lips and eyelashes and cheekbones. I was just a weirdo right now, but around 25 I’d have lots of friends and be married and own a house and maybe be pregnant and I’d have a good job as vice-president of something.

Well… I have lots of friends. Besides that, no, not so much. No conventionality, no perfect fitting in, not much conventional “success,” and definitely no rapid settling-down into suburban placidity. I didn’t get the life I wanted.

I got something way better.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

Note: Xt should actually be X sub t, but I don’t know the HTML to do the subscript thingie.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

“I hate my snowcones the way I hate my men: sticky and blue.”

Molly Ren
13 years ago

Holly: I remember that post! It rocked my socks.

I’ve never really commented on stuff like body type and self worth much on here, even when it’s been sorta relevant. But after reading the kinds of stories people post on fat acceptance blogs–about how they’ve felt miserable their whole lives–I’m wondering how much your experience is the exception rather than the norm. The life experiences that build you up still sometimes seem to be largely a matter of luck. (For example, it wasn’t until I was *through* with college that I finally found someplace where I didn’t feel like a perpetual outsider.)

I guess it’s their undertone of hatred that really curdles my urge to reach out to these guys, even though some of the demons they’re battling about self-worth and sexual attractiveness look damn familiar.

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

I don’t need any more help I don’t think. I’m going to be the best, mother fucker.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

Molly – I’d like to think that most people, by trial-and-error if nothing else, aren’t miserable their whole lives. This may be Pollyannish of me.

I was also through with college before I found a place (the kink community) where I really fit in. But by “through with college” I mean “still having 75% or more of my life ahead of me.” That counts as It Getting Better in my book.

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

Oh, hey, this is still going?

I’d just like to chime in to say, as someone who has both asked people out and been asked out, I prefer the former. Not that I think being asked is a horrible burden or an imposition or anything (really it’s not – people can do it in clueless or creepy ways but the vast majority of them are cool about it, at least in my experience). But I do like being the one doing the asking; even if it sometimes makes me nervous or scared it also makes me feel powerful and in control. Even when they say no.

But if I actually thought I HAD to sit back and bat my eyelashes and wait for a guy to figure out I was into him before getting any action? Yeah, that would suck. And would most certainly NOT count as “privilege”. Thus I’m really glad that’s not the case.

Bee
Bee
13 years ago

Mr. Al: “It was pretty stupid, I mean, she had just basically said she didn’t want to be hit on. It’s pretty funny, actually. Did the guy have Asperger’s? It wouldn’t surprise me. But the point is that he has a moral right to approach her, even if it’s at a really weird time. She has the right to say no. They both exercised their rights. But people are bitching and moaning at him for no reason.”

OK, two things. First, she didn’t “basically” say she didn’t want to be hit on, she gave a panel presentation explicitly saying that she didn’t want to be hit on and then, it sounds like, spent an evening expanding on the clear idea that she did not want to be hit on.

Second, she has a right to say no. But she also — really, truly! — has a right to make an off-handed remark in kind of a funny way about the interaction on her vlog. I know! It seems unfair. “She should have said ‘no’ and thought no more about it,” says Mr. Al. Honestly, I think the fact that she spoke up about it is what’s getting a lot of people to take up against her. It’s one thing to say no. It’s another thing to EXPRESS AN OPINION! It’s a parallel between the guy who hit on her listening to her speak expansively about not wanting to be hit on and then hitting on her: Women can speak, but only under certain circumstances. And then they must not be listened to or taken seriously.

Seriously, Mr. Al? “She should have thought no more about it.” I hate to be this guy, but: Says the guy who — months after the event — complains that a female acquaintance said hi to him on the elevator but wasn’t as warm as she could have been, obsessively mulling over what he would like to do to her, to teach her not to spit on him with her unfriendly hellos!

Jesus fuck, dude. Get some fucking perspective. People talk about shit that happened to them.

Kave
Kave
13 years ago

This is the strangest post I’ve ever read here by far.

I’ll recap for myself: Woman talks about an experience she had in an elevator where a guy asks her to his room at 5 am, she says it was creepy behavior.

I’d assume at this point any sane individual would realize that she’s initialed to hold that opinion no matter what their “political” strips are. She didn’t name him, she didn’t call him a creep.. nothing. About a benign a comment as I could imagine. I’ve never been a blogger but it seems to me both male and female bloggers comment on their experiences and emotions around them.

Besides all the other craziness on page three or so of this thread one of our mra’s questioned why she’d be in a elevator at 5 in the morning. Saying she was at a bar flirting like a five dollar whore.

Crazy… just downright crazy. Talk about much ado about nothing.

Kave
Kave
13 years ago

As a side note MRAL: You seem to be a bit healthier, congratulations and here’s hoping for more improvement. Perhaps slave could take a page from your book, once you’re in a better place you may be someone who can do a lot to help others that are going through what you are.

KristinMH
13 years ago

I hate snocones too! I hate chewing on ice, and snocones are just ice soaked in a melted popsicle. Yuck.

BTW, I stayed out of this thread because i thought it would turn into a total WTF-fest like the threads at Pharyngula and Pandagon. Turns out I missed all the fun! *pout*

Also NWO noticed me! Just offhand back on page 2, but he noticed me! I’ve arrived!

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