Almost three years ago, a feminist activist committed what many not-so-impartial observers apparently see as an unpardonable sin: she was less than polite to a small squad of Men’s Rights activists at a demonstration in Toronto. At least one of these gentlemen caught her outburst on video, and uploaded it to YouTube.
You know the rest: the video went viral, and the activist, a red-headed woman known as Chanty Binx (or “Big Red,” to the douchebag army), found herself suddenly transformed into “The Posterchild of Everything Wrong with Feminism,” as one of her haters put it. Her face has become ubiquitous in antifeminist memes, and she’s endured nearly three years of harassment.
Earlier this month, antifeminist YouTuber Sargon of Akkad — who makes his living pandering to some of the internet’s worst lady haters — posted an animated video by another antifeminist YouTuber in which an angry Islamist and an angry feminist sing a song explaining that they pretty much believe all the same things. (For some reason, this nonsensical theory is something that a lot of antifeminists have convinced themselves is true.)
The angry Islamist in the video is a familiar racist stereotype, complete with “funny” accent. [Correction: He’s evidently supposed to be a parody of this guy, known as Dawah Man, a legitimately terrible person you wouldn’t think atheists would have to strawman in order to criticize..]
The angry feminist, meanwhile, isn’t a generic figure; she’s an especially crude caricature of Binx, spouting nonsense that neither Binx nor any other feminist actually believes: the video ends with her encouraging the Islamist to rape her, because it’s not really rape if a Muslim does it, dontchaknow.
It’s a vicious, hateful little cartoon made worse by the fact that these words are being put in the mouth of a real woman who’s been the target of a vast harassment campaign for years.
Yesterday, Richard Dawkins, apparently seeing this horrendous video as a clever takedown of some brand of feminism that he must think actually exists, shared it with his 1.3 million Twitter followers:
Dawkins, a well-respected scientist-turned-embarrassing-atheist-ideologue, has become notorious for his endless Twitter gaffes. But this is plainly worse than, say, his famously pathetic lament about airport security “dundridges” taking his jar of honey; his Tweet contributed to the demonization of a real woman who’s already the target of harassment and threats.
The awesome Lindy West pointed this out to him in a series of Tweets and linked to one of my posts cataloging some of the abuse Binx got after the video of her went viral.
In a series of eloquent and angry Tweets, she made clear to Dawkins how and why he was misusing his huge platform and contributing to an atmosphere of hate online. Dawkins, alternately indignant and defensive, ultimately took down the offending Tweet, but not before making other Tweets that were nearly as bad. Dawkins can’t even do the right thing without being a dick about it.
Let’s watch Lindy at work:
After what was apparently an unsatisfactory response from Dawkins — I couldn’t find his Tweet, if there was one — West repeated and expanded upon her basic points. [EDIT: The unsastisfactory respose, West tells me, was that Dawkins posted a link to one of the videos of Chanty Binx at the Toronto demonstration.]
Well, that got his attention:
So there you have it: when informed that a tweet of his will almost certainly worsen the vicious harassment faced by a young woman whose only “crime” was being rude to a couple of MRAs in public, Richard Dawkins, a one-time winner of the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award, replies by saying that “she deserves nothing more than ridicule.”
West replied:
Dawkins then decided to suggest that perhaps Binx was, you know, crazy:
Dawkins ultimately agreed to take down his Tweet linking to the execrable video. But he offered no apology. And he went on to suggest that just maybe Binx had … threatened herself.
We’ve seen this, er, argument before.
Does Dawkins have any conception of just how much abuse women like Chanty Binx get? If she were sending herself all the threatening and harassing messages she gets, she wouldn’t have time to eat or sleep.
And I wonder if Dawkins thinks she drew the caricature of herself that was used in the video he retweeted.
Thoughtful as ever, Dawkins made sure to remind his 1.3 million followers that Binx still deserved all the mockery they could deliver. Just not the death threats please!
And he begged his readers to think about the real victims here — those people, like him, who might have to curtail their mockery somewhat because their terrible, terrible fans might be inspired to hurt someone.
RIP, Richard Dawkins’ comedy career.
Is Dawkins actually unaware that by punching down at a woman who’s already been the target of a three year harassment campaign he almost certainly is contributing to the threats he claims to deplore? It’s hard for me to believe that he could be so naive. But the alternative explanation — that he knows full well that he’s encouraging the harassers — is even more disquieting.
One good thing has come out of this ugly episode today: The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has un-invited Dawkins from its event this year. A post on the group’s website today explains:
The Northeast Conference on Science & Skepticism has withdrawn its invitation to Richard Dawkins to participate at NECSS 2016. We have taken this action in response to Dr. Dawkins’ approving re-tweet of a highly offensive video.
We believe strongly in freedom of speech and freedom to express unpopular, and even offensive, views. However, unnecessarily divisive, counterproductive, and even hateful speech runs contrary to our mission and the environment we wish to foster at NECSS. The sentiments expressed in the video do not represent the values of NECSS or its sponsoring organizations.
We will issue a full refund to any NECSS attendee who wishes to cancel their registration due to this announcement.
The NECSS Team
Good for them. The atheist movement needs to stand up to the haters and harassers in its midst, including those like Dawkins, who may not directly harass or threaten but who use their huge platforms to amplify and embolden this hatred and harassment.
It would be nice if Dawkins were to actually learn something — a little humanity, a little humility? — from this incident, but when it comes to the subject of feminism Dawkins seems incapable of taking in new information, much less learning anything from it.
EDITED TO ADD: And now, as if to prov what I just said in that previous paragraph, Dawkins is now second-guessing his decision to take down his tweet linking to the video, because GamerGaters are telling him that Chanty and I made up the evidence of the abuse she got.
NOTE: Lindy West has a book coming out soon. Pre-order it below!
CORRECTION: I added a bit noting that the Islamist in the cartoon video is supposed to be a parody of a real person.
EDIT: I added a line about Dawkins tweeting a link to a video of Chanty Binx at the Toronto demonstration.
@Scildfreja
I think the problem with the atheist movement right now is that there’s too many boys and men in it and not enough girls. Not to mention almost ALL of these guys are sexists. It’s an unfortunate thing that just sort of happened…
“you at least avoided the amazing atheist, right?
… Why are there SO MANY prominent atheist misogynists?”
He is HORRIBLE. >.< All he does is bash Anita Sarkeesian, he doesn't even talk about religion or atheism anymore. I really have no idea why so many atheists are like this.
“He’s been retweeting misogynists for literally years. Stop being stupid.”
I’m not stupid, I’m just thinking about this from another perspective. I also don’t appreciate the personal insults.
I know! ElevatorGate was just a misunderstanding. It’s been explained to him time and again yet he refuses to see how hostile he is toward women.
Ugh, now Dan Perrins has joined the Twitter shitstorm. All of Dawkins’ defenders are making this about Chanty Binx and (a) her credibility re death threats she received and (b) what she said at the Toronto rally as though she might have deserved the threats. Never mind about Dawkins’ persistent Islamophobia and the other problematic elements of the video. Pesky details, amiright?
D:
Dawkins’ feed is a total train wreck at the moment.
Also, he’s retweeted a couple of people with the surname Yiannopoulos.
Hmm. What a coinky-dink.
(But he’s not a misogynist, no siree)
If feminists were as crazy as they claim to their followers, something bad would already have happened to some of them.
Kirbywarp, no, you are so right. Telling them how to be more harmfull to those they want to harm is the way to stop them from doing just that. Even easier, tell them to stop being racist.
The law of unintended consequences is just a story to scare small children and can thus be safely ignored.
@LinkxZeldaFan
Bigotry is ignorance. These are not different things. He assumes himself to be inherently rational and impartial and thus assumes all his preconceptions are accurate reflections of reality. He uncritically believes anything that affirms his preconceptions. He doubts everything that fails to comport with his preconceptions. This bias (i.e. bigotry) results in him being ignorant of how the world actually works. You are drawing a distinction without a difference here.
The lame thing is that most misogynists are going to use this incident to fuel their anti-feminist agenda.
“Dawkins’ feed is a total train wreck at the moment.
Also, he’s retweeted a couple of people with the surname Yiannopoulos.
Hmm. What a coinky-dink.”
‘Aight, he may be turning a misogynist.
@LinkxZeldaFan,
Atheism has always been sexist, as far as I can tell, and it seems like it’s positively selecting for sexism. Men are rewarded for being contrarian and standing up for positions, however unsavoury. Women are punished for doing the same. To change the balance, change the beliefs.
Misogyny is sugar for atheism. It’s an unpopular opinion (in their minds, at least), it makes them feel like martyrs and underdogs going up against society-wide injustice, and (most importantly) it lets them feel superior. Absolute honey-trap for people with a bit of smarts and enough privilege in life that they need to invent bad guys to go after.
Linkx, Dawkins wrote Dear Muslima in 2011. His tone hasn’t changed since – if anything he’s doubled down.
I know it’s hard to do, but it’s vital to do so – see him for who he is and not what you want to see him as. I hated doing it too, but shedding those blinders is important in so many ways. There is a preponderance of evidence that he holds misogynistic beliefs. As has been said earlier, kill your darlings.
http://blogs.psychcentral.com/couples/files/2014/07/tumblr_n1zi5rWB2V1r7b6cio1_500.gif
I’m more disappointed with Dawkins than anything else. I do like his work and even beyond his usual topics he can be an engaging speaker.
But this is a guy who evangelises about making decisions based on evidence.
Even if he was genuinely ignorant of the true situation (by which I mean both the instant case and the prevalence of misogyny generally) he’s been presented with the facts now.
It’s the mark of a true rationalist that when the facts demonstrate your previous assumptions were false you accept that and modify your position accordingly.
It’s somewhat disheartening that he refuses to do that.
I went to the same school as Dawkins (although many years later), so I feel a vague sense of responsibility. I have to say, the English public school system is brilliant at two things: reinforcing the idea that women are weird and “other”, even when they go co-ed, and instilling a strong sense of intellectual arrogance in its finished product.
I was certainly an arsehole (in the way I carried out my academic pursuits) by the time I left that school, and it took some time to become a halfway decent person afterwards – as always, work in progress.
But yeah, Dawkins needs to go stick his head in a pig.
A better person would know she doesn’t deserve even ridicule. She lost her temper. So did those mras in the videos and I don’t lie awake at night thinking about them. It’s just a vid of an altercation. I’d save my riducle for the manboobz that David writes about here. That’s constructive cathartic ridicule that actually acheives something more than just making one person feel like shit for your own amusement.
This article chronicles a few of Dawkins’s past statements of note, in case people don’t know about them.
@Scildfreja
There was a time when I believed that if religion was gone, all sexism, racism, and everything else would be gone. But it was being in the atheist movement that taught me that sexism is not a religiously-exclusive thing, that most of our species is unfortunately programmed to prey on the weaker (women being, in general, physically weaker than men) and that hatred of women has always been a thing. Religion was just used to justify it. Humans haven’t finished evolving.
“This article chronicles a few of Dawkins’s past statements of note, in case people don’t know about them.”
Thanks, Kirby. ^_^ XD
Dawkins is certainly ignorant, but it’s deliberate and consciously maintained ignorance intended to uphold his preexisting beliefs. It’s not as though he simply hasn’t had feminism explained to him.
Notice how when West provides him with a series of well-documented articles demonstrating harassment, he hems and haws and pretends he didn’t see it, but when some rando tweets that she made up the harassment, he accepts it at face value. That’s a deliberate choice.
What I’ve never been able to figure out about these logic-dudes is that they wear their emotions on their sleeves all the damn time. Irritation, anger, scorn, dejection (when girls won’t fuck them), disappointment, pride, and even exultation, wonder and delight (when the thing they’re working on finally works) are all emotions.
It’s more embarrassing for them, though, that they’re not even aware they have and exhibit emotions. A friend of mine told me a while back she was chatting in a group that included an elderly well-respected engineer who sounds a lot like one of these logic-dudes…she happened to say something slighting about a topic that is important to him, and she said for a split second all she saw in his face was a consuming rage. I’m sure he wasn’t even aware of it.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I think my first moment of “maybe this guy’s not so awesome” was during The Root of all Evil, when he wouldn’t even find a middle ground with the Church of England member who laid out that they agreed with evolution and the Big Bang, but thought that maybe their God kicked off the process. Dawkins basically equated a relatively reasonable position, with that of the American crazies he’d been arguing with earlier in the show.
And then Elevatorgate happened, and his Muslima post just disgusted me. And then I saw more and more people talking about the misogyny that was rampant in atheist circles, and it boiled my blood.
Just a week or two ago, Adam Savage had Rebecca Watson on his podcast, and the comments below it on Youtube were full of people going on and on about how Savage should vett his guests more carefully and she was a horrible, horrible person. And all because she didn’t want to be cornered in a lift by a guy who creeped on her (whether he was creepy or just socially awkward is immaterial at this point). Dawkins doesbn’t understand how shitty his attitude towards women is, and how much of a signal boost his ill-advised public persona is for truly awful people.
@Songthe
Well, the thing that struck me as troll-y wasn’t your professed admiration for Chanty Binx; it was this part:
That sounds pretty bait-y to me. As you know, anti-feminists come to this blog (and other feminist-oriented spaces), pose as feminists, and then make contentious statements as a way to goad feminists into agreeing with potentially inflammatory or offensive positions; it’s a sort of ‘gotcha’-style tactic to discredit feminism in general (and to be fair, it’s not just an anti-feminist thing: posing as one’s ideological opponent in order to expose some dark, hidden element of their worldview is something that well predates the internet).
So, it’d be very easy for someone to interpret your statement as ‘I think it’s important for feminists to be anonymously, intentionally nasty to men on the internet’ – exactly the sort of behavior that anti-feminists perpetually accuse feminists of engaging in. Following from that, if anyone agreed with you, it would then be easy to use those assenting posts as ‘proof’ that feminists routinely do this sort of thing.
So, if you weren’t trying to troll and were just expressing an earnest belief, well, in that case I do apologize. But, that said, I would like to know what you mean exactly when you say “It’s not only okay if men dislike feminism, it’s imperative.”
@ Katz
That’s what is so bewildering and disappointing. He’s acting like a Creationist being presented with a Tiktaalik fossil (actually, more like one meeting an actual Tiktaalik going “Hi, I’m a Tiktaalik”).
I think another problem that is inherent in every (online and offline) space that is mostly inhabited by men is that men seem to be taught by society not to trust women.
This here describes pretty good what I mean by that:
(Warning: some use of ableist language)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/damon-young/men-just-dont-trust-women_b_6714280.html
It’s clear for me that this is a major issue with men who think that they are oh so rational and have it all figured out – when women tell them about their experiences and what happens on a daily basis to them, they think to themselves “well, I have never experienced this and a lot of men say that they have never seen this happen either so those overly emotional women must have imagined it.” Add to it that it can be very uncomfortable to accept that you are privileged and have been your entire life – and yeah.
“SJW”-haters complain that twitter and other sites are trying to censor the internet, but sending death threats and harassment mobs at individual people and self-proclaimed feminists isn’t “free speech”, it’s cyberbullying.
And an entire mini-industry set up to make money off of slandering and bashing a videogame critic, such as TAA’s and Thunderfoot’s nonstop hate videos at Sarkeesian? Even if they aren’t swearing or threatening her in their videos that can still be considered harassment because of the hate mobs they are sending to her and other people.
Ohmigosh, this thing. Doods and Ladies, emotions are not separate from rationality or logics. Rationality is a thin smear of pretense overtop of a deep well of emotion.
All of those nasty womanly hormone things – the serotonins and the adrenalines and the things that make your emotions go all hysterical – guyse, those are neurotransmitters. Memory is dependent on a careful balance of adrenaline (or epinephrine or cortisol or whatever you want to call it) within the hippocampus, and dopamine is deeply intertwined with our ability to pursue truth. You can’t remove emotion from rationality. I’ll say it again, You can’t remove emotion from rationality.
Dammit Spock, you’re a trope, not a real thing!
@songthe, I have to agree with other people here that your statement that it is imperative that men dislike feminism is at least somewhat problematic. Could you elaborate or explain what you meant?
Wait, Mehta is in the atheist misogyny squad? Fuck. I thought I pretty knew who the big-name misogynists were in atheism after they uncloaked for Elevatorgate and the post-elevatorgate conflicts around Freethoughtblogs and Atheism+. I guess I missed one.
———–
Actually, it’s an odd coincidence that Dawkins turned up today, because I was already planning to bring up Elevatorgate in the thread about the Uber driver. Now it’s relevant like 3 times over. It’s relevant to Dawkins, because that’s when he really doubled down on his misogyny. It’s relevant to the side conversation EJ and I have been having about the Gaming Den. It’s a internet gaming forum we both used to frequent. During GamerGate, we learned there was a lot more misogyny there than we had thought, and EJ quit. (EJ — I wanted to ask if you remember the Elevatorgate threads on the Den, because that’s when the misogyny really popped on my radar)
————-
The original reason I was going to bring it up is that it was mass harassment action based in the same kind of status-obssessed insecurity that seems to motivate the guy who rants about the Uber driver. Men quaking in sheer terror at the thought that somewhere out there, a woman was telling them what to do.
“Ohmigosh, this thing. Doods and Ladies, emotions are not separate from rationality or logics. Rationality is a thin smear of pretense overtop of a deep well of emotion.
All of those nasty womanly hormone things – the serotonins and the adrenalines and the things that make your emotions go all hysterical – guyse, those are neurotransmitters. Memory is dependent on a careful balance of adrenaline (or epinephrine or cortisol or whatever you want to call it) within the hippocampus, and dopamine is deeply intertwined with our ability to pursue truth. You can’t remove emotion from rationality. I’ll say it again, You can’t remove emotion from rationality.”
I don’t mean to say anything bad about guys here, because of course most men I know are definitely NOT like this, but why is it that most of the criminals, tyrants, dictators and sex offenders in the world are male? There are female scumbags of course but most have been male. This is a societal problem more than a basic gender problem IMO, I’m just saying that most of these “MRA”s have no logical stance to say that women or feminism are destroying the world. 0.o Education and equality of women in the workplace has been shown to reduce poverty and increase economies etc. This BS that “feminism destroys everything” is fucking stupid. >.>
Saying that “Men should dislike feminism” implies that all men like and want to keep their privilege, and will oppose anything that reduces that privilege.
This paints men as the monsters that toxic masculinity pushes them towards, and is unfair as painting women as the wilting lillies that femininity demands. We’re all human, we’re all struggling with a society that idolizes impossible ideals. There are plenty of men who want to destroy that system, too.
This is, at least, my view of what feminism is! Please correct me if I’m misguided, or if I’ve misrepresented myself.