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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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PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

Geez, I only have one creepy guy story-once when I was sitting a bus stop with a friend this guy in a pick up drives up (shirtless) and asked us if we wanted to go have sex with him. I just kind of laughed and said no. We were 15 and cell phones had not become common or I would have called the cops on his ass because he was rather obviously masturbating when he stopped.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

“Like I said, and you ignored, I’m not against common courtesy. But if some easily-offended nutcase with emotional issues decides that I somehow made them feel uncomfortable, I’m not the one with the problem. And I’m not alone in this. Tuck your dick between your legs and slink through life apologizing for your Y-chromosome, mangina.”

Shorter Ion: “You can’t tell me what to do! I’m a MAN!” *beats chest*

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

OK, I don’t have any specific plot details for the next story, but I do know it’s going to be treading Michael Bay territory, only hopefully not as stupid.

kirbywarp
kirbywarp
13 years ago

Everybody needs to go back a page and read what FedUpVT posted. I can wait.

… Done?

There is a big problem in the atheist/skeptical movement about the lack of women, and its been handled rather poorly. You get guys on a panel talking about how to attract more women (no woman on the panel), etc. A lot of it is more on the low key side, you don’t see a lot of “women are simply inferior” or “women are children” or whatever, but you do see the kind of stuff Watson mentioned. As she said, she’s in a foreign country, in an elevator at 4am, alone with a guy, and he asks her to go back to his room. She says no, he complies. Done.

This behavior is the kind of mild-yet-irritating behavior of male skeptics/atheists that may be preventing more women from being active members of these organizations. All it requires is some subtle changes in behavior, some better awareness, and the ability to actually listen to the people who say you are being creepy to avoid being creepy.

The real scandal here is the reaction to Watson’s comments, not necessarily the situation she commented about. Dawkins flies in and says she shouldn’t be complaining about so trivial a matter, because oooh look how other women have it (I believe he’s since understood that this is a bad argument, from his comments on Pharyngula). But what happened in this thread, especially on Ion’s side, is what the problem exactly is; that whenever women suggest a way for the skeptic/atheist movement to improve things for women, suddenly it turns into “rape accusations” here and “all men are creepy” there. Chill the fuck out. Let the people who you are trying to include tell you why they feel excluded/uneasy, and fucking listen to them (PZ wrote something similar, though a bit more bombastic, here).

tl;dr: A suggestion by a woman on how men in the atheist/skeptic movement could make the movement more inclusive turns into a big tempest of bull-headedness and misogyny. Instead of taking everything personally, let the excluded group tell you why they are feeling excluded, and listen.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

So… giant robots?

Giant *trans spider* robots? 😀

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

Ion wrote, “She then chose to make an issue out of it by mentioning this ‘creep’ on her blog. People took offense to the description, again based on the facts. That’s it. Like you said, I don’t know what’s so complicated.”

Ion’s first comment on this thread: “My guess – the guy wasn’t attractive. If he had been, she would’ve been recounting it the next day as an exotic adventure.”

Why you gotta make it so complicated, Ion?

erm, what’s your point? Those two things are not mutually exclusive. And it’s not complicated.

Magical Laura
13 years ago

I used to think Brad Pitt was totally hot (bit old for me now, but in Seven etc. he looked great), but I just find him less and less attractive the more MRAs tell me I find him the ultimate symbol of masculinity.

Molly Ren: I loooove Greg Grunberg 😀 I think there’s a lot of projection in MRAs who talk about ‘alphas’ and the ridiculous physical characteristics men are held to (if they fail they are abused and spit on). Like, an ‘omega’ guy who insults an ‘omega’ girl and holds ‘beta’ girls to ridiculous standards, yet lives in constant feaI fear of women treating him the way he treats them.

I feel like guys who are dicks about women’s appearence are kinda bizarre. I fancy fat guys and skinny guys and all the rest, I can’t imagine restricting my imagination to just Brad Pitt and his ilk!

Molly Ren
13 years ago

“Those two things are not mutually exclusive.”

Ion, they are. Really. Being hot does not automatically mean you get everything in the world.

kirbywarp
kirbywarp
13 years ago

hmm… my strong tags seem to have failed. The bold should have stoped at “commented about.” and begun again at “who you are trying”. My bad.

Holly Pervocracy
13 years ago

I think it’s important to reiterate, for the zillionth time, that all SkepChick did was say how she felt. She didn’t say “this is how I felt, therefore men are evil” or “this is how I felt, therefore this guy should be in jail.” There wasn’t any “therefore” at all.

She just said this made her uncomfortable. So if you don’t want to make women uncomfortable, maybe don’t do this.

If you don’t care how women feel, then… well, you can continue to accost them in elevators to your heart’s content. There’s no penalty. It’s a free country. Go nuts.

But what these guys are asking isn’t to accost women in elevators. What they’re really asking is to accost women in elevators and have us like it. (Or, if we do feel bad, deliberately hide that feeling.) That, I’m afraid, is never going to happen.

PosterformerlyknownasElizabeth

You are totally right Ion-I know a prosecutor who has a useless left arm because he asked a guy to please leave him alone and the guy whipped out a knife and nearly cut this prosecutor’s arm off when he was in college.

It was obviously the prosecutor’s fault since he should have known how bad the guy would feel to be told to leave him alone and should have let the guy bother him.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

@Kirby & @Holly Yeah, we’ve pretty much missed the point for this whole thread. : / But what can ya do?

(Psst, this is maybe why we need a forum. We could stay on topic? o.O)

Magical Laura
13 years ago

“HOT MEN ARE CAPABLE OF BEING CREEPY/ASSHOLES AND SHOULDN’T GET PASSES FOR IT”

Seriously. I mean, Ted Bundy was pretty cute *shudder*.

kirbywarp
kirbywarp
13 years ago

@Molly:

I actually don’t blame you guys, I blame Ion. 😛 I know how tempting it is to follow the derail, and Ion threw a screwball from nearly the very first post that no one could resist. I did see a couple posts that were clearly reading more into the situation than was there… but still, when someone starts throwing around “creepy=rapist” its impossible not to take the bait…

zombie rotten mcdonald
13 years ago

trials and tribulations of Omega Man?!?!

Well, to be fair those zombies really were pretty violent toward Heston…

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

She responded to the incident with a mild “uh, dudes, don’t hit on women when you’re alone with them in an elevator at 4 AM.” You responded to her mild comments by claiming she’d “all but accused” the guy of rape.

Mild? I guess, except for the ‘creepy and sexualizing’ parts, which you conveniently forgot, and which are the exact things I and others responded to. I also quite specifically said the commenters did the accusing, another thing you’ve overlooked.

You also got on her case for being in an elevator at 4 AM.

Haven’t I already responded to Molly about this? The thing about taking one sentence out of context and ignoring the rest? Where I said they were both in the elevator because they’d just left the bar?

And you weren’t the only one with this outsized reaction to her comments. That’s why it turned into a big deal, and that’s why we’re here discussing it. Not her comments, but the outsized, sometimes vaguely hysterical, reaction to her comments.

Whereas the people on her side were all perfectly calm and reasonable, I suppose. Come on, man. When astronauts look down at Earth, they see two things – the Great Wall of China, and your bias.

Johnny Pez
13 years ago

I’m pretty certain that Plymouth the Inventor has a number of giant spider robots in her arsenal. The trans part may be tricky.

Molly Ren
13 years ago

So do you still think the guy’s treatment still entirely hinges on his hotness, Ion?

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

Seriously. I mean, Ted Bundy was pretty cute *shudder*.

Wasn’t he also getting love letters from women while he was in prison?

sarahejones
13 years ago

The ignorance shown by some members of the atheist community over this incident is really disappointing. Watson did not “demonize” anyone. I too would be creeped out if a complete stranger asked me back to his room–alone–for coffee. There is such social pressure placed on women to avoid becoming the victims of sexual assault. Don’t wear short skirts, don’t go to bars, don’t stay in hotels by yourself, don’t travel alone…the list goes on. And I’m appalled by that social pressure because it is so damn prevalent. Say she had said yes, and she’d gone back to his room, and he’d assaulted her? I guarantee you these same assholes would be criticizing her for being so “careless.”

Even the request itself reeks of privilege. Of course it didn’t occur to him that she might be concerned for her personal safety alone, at 4 am–his actions make it clear he’s never had to worry about that once in his life. As for Dawkins’ screed, I find it disturbing on a couple levels, but I’m disgusted that he’s employed such gruesome stereotypes about Muslim women to make a point. Or try to. I’d say he failed in that endeavor.

Ion
Ion
13 years ago

So do you still think the guy’s treatment still entirely hinges on his hotness, Ion?

Not entirely, but I think it was a factor, yes.

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

Wasn’t he also getting love letters from women while he was in prison?

Hah! Yeah, he was. Jesus, really says something about the power of looks, doesn’t it?

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