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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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Nobby
13 years ago

Also, @Kirby, i agree. Why bother? All the answers to his questions are available right there on the video itself, and he’s thrown in some lies for good measure.

kirbywarp
kirbywarp
13 years ago

@ithiliana:

My family has had at least three separate basement floods from burst pipes in the past. Luckily I was young enough not to have to worry about it. Unluckily the basement is where we store a lot of junk…. Luckily we have a new set of pipes down there.

Magpie
Magpie
13 years ago

I heart Faramir.

caseymordred
caseymordred
13 years ago

As a straight man, I’d rather be Viggo.

ithiliana
13 years ago

Just realizing I haven’t commented directly to the OP!

Derailing, a feature not a bug.

I first saw references to Watson’s vlog on feminist blogs — it is a very familiar trope where a woman, active in some particularly male dominated group, suddenly has her *click* moment and realizes she’s a feminist (the process can be long, but there’s usually a moment of realization). And like Russ said in one of her novels, “we wuz pushed.” Feminists aren’t born, they’re made–by the kyriarchial system we’re born into.

I wonder if there are any feminist atheist groups out there….*goes to google*

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

Why does NWO act like he can’t actually just go to her vlog? xD He acts like he’s a detective!

Also the feminist comm didn’t make any noise about it… it’s the ppl who got upset about her vlog who did, and made rly ridic statements (like Dawkins xD ) and then various feminist sites responded to THOSE… xD

but what’s nuance for NWO? xD

Pecunium
13 years ago

Who knows if Marc is secretly upset that the women he thinks are pretty have always rejected him? It’s possible he’s not being honest with himself about this; and so he projects this onto other people? We can only theorise, based on the evidence before us.

Wow, that was easy, and completely content free. Of course we’ll never know because he’s promised he’s not reading responses; unless of course he’s not being completely honest.

ithiliana
13 years ago

Magpie: So do I! (Movie!Faramir more than book Faramir). I actually write a lot of threesomes with Bean/Mortensen/Wenham, though my fps is more B/A and Frodo/Faramir.

Pecunium
13 years ago

MRAL: You were the one who said women were “spitting on me,” because you didn’t think they were being effusive enough when they responded to your social advances, so I think that, “Yeah, see, the thing is, this supposed pervasive attitude that all women must be nice and sweet does not exist. ,” isn’t really something you, of all people, would have to admit exists.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Crap… is something you, of all people, would have to admit exists.

ithiliana
13 years ago

Kirbywarp: We don’t have basements in this part of Texas–clay soil–so what happened here is the water spread all over the concrete slab, and then it took WEEKS to dry out enough to do the installation (AFTER they finished drying the house the first time, it rained like crazy).

I cannot recall our family ever having a flood from a burst pipe, but there was the time we went on vacation, and our cats managed to knock the sink stopper into the sink and plug it and then turn the faucet handles on and flood the kitchen.

Our poor cat sitter who was also our babysitter and her family cleaned it up for us.

Floods DEFINITELY not fun.

caseymordred
caseymordred
13 years ago

@ithiliana: that reminds me, maybe our trolls should be made to read this before posting:

http://www.derailingfordummies.com/

Magpie
Magpie
13 years ago

Ithiliana, did you ever see the TV series “Sea Change”? David Wenham and Sigrid Thornton, both very yummy.

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

Me and Zhinxy were involved in the creation of that! 😀

Pecunium
13 years ago

Marc:

1. concern troll
January 27, 2011 Urban Word of the Day
A person who posts on a blog thread, in the guise of “concern,” to disrupt dialogue or undermine morale by pointing out that posters and/or the site may be getting themselves in trouble, usually with an authority or power. They point out problems that don’t really exist. The intent is to derail, stifle, control, the dialogue. It is viewed as insincere and condescending.

A concern troll on a progressive blog might write, “I don’t think it’s wise to say things like that because you might get in trouble with the government.” Or, “This controversy is making your side look disorganized.”

So when you said that this wasn’t the time for someone to complain about this sort of behavior, and that doing so would lead to pushback, you were concern trolling.

Just when you said you were never going to read anyone’s comments you were lying.

Ami Angelwings
13 years ago

Also when he was saying that he just wanted to help Skepchick w/ her appearance and self esteeem problems xD

mralieutenant
13 years ago

Pecunium, I’ve made rhetorical mistakes, I can now admit that. The “spitting” thing was overdone, it was largely something I was imagining (though not entirely). I was very angry, at the tail end of the shittiest year of my life. I can admit to excessive anger, some fault there.

But I maintain that it wasn’t an expectation of women (however bizarrely intense) it was an expectation I had of everyone, and I believed at the time that it was only women who weren’t coming through there.

Elevator shoes came today. I’m now 5’10.5. I can work with that.

Pecunium
13 years ago

NWO: Women [sic] used her tongue, or keyboard in this case to slander an unknown man.

No, she didn’t, because one can’t slander an unknown person.

slander [ˈslɑːndə]
n
1. (Law) 1. Law Oral communication of false statements injurious to a person’s reputation.
a. defamation in some transient form, as by spoken words, gestures, etc.
b. a slanderous statement, etc.
2. any false or defamatory words spoken about a person; calumny

First, There is no injury to anyone’s reputation, as no one knows; from her statements, who this person is.

Second, the statements have to be untrue. They are not untrue, unless; in fact, there was no invitation to his room when she shared an elevator with him. Assuming, arguendo, that the conversation took place her further reports were all about how she reacted to his invitation. Prima facie (unless you are trying to say she’s lying) they are true.

Moreover, unless she recants them, they are true, as only she can say how she feels.

Pecunium
13 years ago

Nobby: I’ve not had to call out anyone for using slippery slope/parade of horrors: It’s a bit to subtle for most of the sort who come here. They’d have to admit that something wasn’t happening. Since most of the arguments are about how horrible it is now they can’t really say that changes which might be seen as for the better would make the evil and unlivable hell that is the present any worse.

I mean look at NWO: he lives in a world where any woman, any time, can walk into any police station and have any man locked up for the rest of his life; or at least ruin any chance he has of being able to live normally in society.

What can he suggest to make it worse?

Plymouth
Plymouth
13 years ago

Oh, hey, is MRAL still around?? I wanted to report that I ACTUALLY got spit on yesterday! For reals! Well, ok, I think mostly the guy was just spitting into the wind and I happened to be walking by, but some of it blew over and hit me. And at first I was grossed out but then I thought of you and I laughed. (ok, it was still kinda gross).

Nobby
13 years ago

@Ithiliana I don’t know about feminist atheists groups (though there should be some), but please tell me you know who Greta Christina is.

And for those that don’t, if you’re interested in a Sex-positive feminist atheist (three great tastes that taste great together?), she’s here: http://gretachristina.typepad.com/greta_christinas_weblog/

@MRAL hey, now. You better knock off being reasonable or people are going to start liking you around here.

Nobby
13 years ago

@Pecunium really? I feel like I’ve seen it come up. Oh, well, my bad. Still, you aren’t going to use a slippery slope argument on anyone else.

Captain Bathrobe
Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

@Marc,

Again, please make up your mind.

I am trolling, you say… so one should just laugh at me…

I have made up my mind: weak and obvious, like I said.

And, believe me, I am laughing at you.

I can’t speak for anyone else here, though.

Captain Bathrobe
Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

Or, Marc, to quote the inimitable Bender: Oh, your serious? Let me laugh harder!

Captain Bathrobe
Captain Bathrobe
13 years ago

Dammit, “you’re” not “your!”

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