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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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Ion
Ion
13 years ago

Yet apparently, clueless guys in elevators warrant the same level of kid-glove approach you think nobody else deserves.

So giving someone the benefit of the doubt instead of automatically applying the ‘creep’ label is now equal to the kid-glove approach? Do you even read what you write?

Millions of people manage this every day. They don’t make weak excuses for not doing it. They don’t say “Tough shit” and then get indignant when shit happens to them. They just gut up and do it because it’s what they’d want other people to do for them.

Do you honestly not see the irony in pounding out a spittle-laced diatribe against me and others for apparently “having our feelings hurt” (which doesn’t even make sense) when just a few minutes ago you were defending Watson’s right to feel uncomfortable and creeped out by a random guy in an elevator? I guess not. Self-awareness is not a mangina’s strong suit.

MissPrism
13 years ago

Yes, we are to some extent responsible for how other people feel about us. If I make racist remarks people will think I am a racist and I don’t get to whine if I’m later described as one.

Speaking for myself, yes I would be slightly alarmed at being propositioned by a bloke who’d never spoken to me before in a small windowless room at 4am, especially if I had just been talking about my dislike of being propositioned, meaning he might well have a casual disregard for boundaries, and if it appeared plausible that he had deliberately cornered me. It would indeed creep me out (that’s all Watson said; she didn’t call him, as a person, a creep, she used the word to describe her own feelings) and that would not be an unreasonable way to feel.

Elevator Guy might not have known how he made her feel, in which case she did him a favour by letting him know. Or he might not have cared, in which case he’s a creep. Or, less likely but possible – because there are guys like this and many women have terrible experiences of them – he might have known and relished it in which case he’s a creepy creep creepster of the clan McCreep.

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

How am I talking about myself? These are larger societal forces.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

I asked him that very thing, ZRM. I found his answer unsatisfying.

PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

Maybe he is-but what does it matter MRAL? He can go find some other female to ask out, there are, to use a well worn phrase, plenty of fish in the sea.

Also, I have a hard time believing that any woman thinks a guy is a creep for being ugly since I have never seen that in real life-just in movies/TV shows. Usually, if it is a decent movie/show, the stuck up girl learns her lesson about the guy being a good person underneath his ugly face.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

Can we find someone other than Brad Pitt, PLEASE? I seriously think the MRAs have a total bone-on for Mr. Pitt. It ain’t me, babe.

Very little is positive at 4am. Time and place, people.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

MRAL, there’s this literary device whose name escapes me at the moment where someone seems to be talking about one thing but is actually talking in a covert manner about another.

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

Yeah Poster, but TV’s fantasy. They get accurate situations (entitled woman rejects man cruelly) but fantasy solutions. In the real world, the flawed status quo simply persists.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

What’s entitled to you, MRAL?

Molly Ren
13 years ago

@MRAL

“but if a girl thinks someone is creepy (for not being a sex symbol, okay, like Johnny Depp)”

Why do you always think sex symbol = able to do no wrong? Michael Fassbender’s girlfriend had a restraining order put on him after he beat her up. And I revised my opinion of Russell Crowe after he threw that telephone.

It’s like you’re assuming that all women are incapable of learning, or never leave abusive boyfriends. Someone being hot (to me, which means having a definite tummy :P) is still important to me in a relationship, but I’m not fooling myself that that’s the only thing they need to have going for them.

tl;dr HOT MEN ARE CAPABLE OF BEING CREEPY/ASSHOLES AND SHOULDN’T GET PASSES FOR IT

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

.Men approach women. Yeah, 4 in the morning on an elevator is unusual, but it’s not that weird. If he accepted the rejection gracefully (and he did) there is absolutely NO problem and this woman is simply an arrogant, entitled person who has labeled this man for having the nerve not to look like Brad Pitt.

Yeah, pretty much what I said. Not only that, he was actually polite about it and apparently didn’t push the matter – at least it’s not mentioned. Doesn’t matter, still a creep. Men are just evil, I guess.

Tabby Lavalamp
Tabby Lavalamp
13 years ago

I haven’t read all the comments yet so this may have already been mentioned, but she just finished giving a talk on this very subject! It’s bad enough to approach her in an elevator at 4am, but when she just finished giving a talk on all of this crap? That’s not just creepy but it’s pretty damned idiotic too.

zombie rotten mcdonald
13 years ago

MRAL, there’s this literary device whose name escapes me at the moment where someone seems to be talking about one thing but is actually talking in a covert manner about another.

Damn Feminism!

Molly Ren
13 years ago

Tabby, your icon is da bomb.

PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

Again, not my experience. Then again, I do not hang out with women who are so shallow, I mean good looking, that they require a man to be as vapid, I mean as good looking, as they are.

Most of the women I know are polite enough to gently tell the guy no and only start being ruder as the guy refuses to take that no for an answer.

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

(talking about me for one second, just this once)

Pez, I actually think that with my awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome awesome AWESOME new magnification glasses I will have more success. I think if I get a prime body (today I worked out until I almost threw up, haha) I can overcome my height and not be labelled creepy all the time.

So it’s not about me. I think I can rise above that. But I empathize with those men who can’t.

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

Also, “creepy” it not a euphemism for “unattractive”. There have been guys who I was not attractive to who propositioned me in totally not creepy ways whom I am still friends with years later! They did in it a way that made me feel not pressured and not manipulated, it was polite and they took my “no” at face value and were totally cool with hanging out as just-friends afterwards, and not even because they thought they could change my mind and get into my pants eventually! Amazing, these creatures exist! Several of them even.

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

er, make that “not attractED to”. Oops.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

Your looks will have sweet fuckall to do with your success or lack thereof with the ladies, MRAL.

Simone Lovelace
13 years ago

Ion, I doubt that making overtures to women in elevators is essential to elevator dude’s identity as a person.

If someone accuses you of making them feel uncomfortable because “OMG YOU ARE A DUDE AND I AM A DWORKIN-ESQUE IMAGINARY FEMINIST WHO SPITS ON DUDES FOR BEING DUDES” then yes you have a legitimate complaint.

Watson “accused” elevator dude of making her uncomfortable because he was behaving in an inconsiderate fashion. Yes, the fact that he was male did color how she interpreted his behavior; in a society where men and women are socialized to play very different roles, that is somewhat inevitable. But the essential problem wasn’t his dude-ness. It was his behavior.

Again, not complicated.

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

We’ll see about that, hellkell.

(Protip: you’re wrong, that’s all that matters, and I bet my experience in college next year will prove it)

PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

Tabby, reminds me of this one incident with Cate Edwards giving a speech and afterwards a guy asked me for some paper to write his number to give to Ms Edwards.

I said “You know, she will not call you if you just give her your number. She has a lot of guys doing that. Why not ask her if she would mind IMing with you instead so she can get to know you a little better first?”

So what did he do? He gave her his number. *sigh*

PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

Well I will say this about MRAL-I think he will admit he is wrong when he learns that not all women are like in the movies or apparently high school.

hellkell
hellkell
13 years ago

Then don’t be surprised if you meet someone just as superficial as you who in turn reinforces all your fucked-up thoughts about how women are.

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

Hellkell –

Your looks will have sweet fuckall to do with your success or lack thereof with the ladies, MRAL.

I actually don’t think that’s true. For a lot of people looks = confidence and confidence = success.

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