Now that Zombie Pharyngula has been raised from the dead and is sort of walking mindlessly over at ScienceBlogs, I have another complaint, and it’s aimed at National Geographic. Years ago, when they took over, one of the things they decided to do was to port over all the old content to WordPress.
They botched it. They botched it bad.
They got all the articles converted, as near as I can tell, but the comments…huge numbers of comments were lost. I’m talking hundreds of thousands of comments. I told them this, they didn’t care, and that was one of my first presentiments that this whole deal was not going to go well. It didn’t. They did a half-assed job and then neglected the whole thing, until it fell apart.
For instance, take a look at this short post from July of 2011. I remember it because the comments section turned into a huge firestorm of fury and outrage, to the point where people were linking to the comments directly, not my article, all over the place. Look now, and it’s empty, not a single comment survived.
That’s a shame, too, because it was a critical moment in the history of the atheist movement. This was one of the trivial events that led to the disintegration of what had been a growing community, and clued in a lot of us to the rot underneath it all. It was the moment when Richard Dawkins shat the bed.
I at least saved the text of those critical comments, that I also verified were directly from Dawkins himself, so I’ll put them here.
This is “Dear Muslima”.
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
How can you forget “Zero Bad”?
Many people seem to think it obvious that my post was wrong and I should apologise. Very few people have bothered to explain exactly why. The nearest approach I have heard goes something like this.
I sarcastically compared Rebecca’s plight with that of women in Muslim countries or families dominated by Muslim men. Somebody made the worthwhile point (reiterated here by PZ) that it is no defence of something slightly bad to point to something worse. We should fight all bad things, the slightly bad as well as the very bad. Fair enough. But my point is that the ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.
But not everybody sees it as end of story. OK, let’s ask why not? The main reason seems to be that an elevator is a confined space from which there is no escape. This point has been made again and again in this thread, and the other one.No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided. The elevator will obligingly stop at a floor, the door will open and you will no longer be in a confined space but in a well-lit corridor in a crowded hotel in the centre of Dublin.
No, I obviously don’t get it. I will gladly apologise if somebody will calmly and politely, without using the word fuck in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.
Richard
The Internet doesn’t forget, but it does tend to make those memories fragmented and inconvenient to access.
We could put Richard in an elevator with big bubba blocking the door and see how quickly he escapes. Does this guy have no imagination/empathy?
You know you’ve got a killer argument when you have to fabricate a big ole strawman to express it. It’s like the people who try to say that poverty in the US really isn’t so bad, since poverty in other countries is so much worse. It’s almost like he’d prefer if you ignored problems in his own country, since they really aren’t so bad compared to other places anyway amirite?
What a clown.
Heh, I had forgotten most of the original content of “Dear Muslima”.
Even if you think RW encountered “zero bad”, even if you assume that complaining about patriarchy in Western countries distracts from the plight of Muslim women under Sharia Law, even if you assume talking about every day sexism is just “nit picking”, the following sentence is still a giant load of straw:
Because, no one ever, EVER has said or suggested that women under Sharia law should grow a thicker skin. NO ONE.
That thread was a defining moment in my life even if I didn’t recognise it at the time. I remember desperately wanting “Richard” to be anyone other than Dawkins himself. I remember how gobsmacked I was when it was confirmed to be him. And I remember how I still bristled at all the comments pointing out how this side of Dawkins had been obvious for some time.
Cognitive meet dissonance. It’s an interesting sensation in the same way that a bad drug experience is an interesting sensation.
That experience was my first inkling that I harbour authoritarian tendencies. I *want* at some level to be told what to think. I’ve been working to fix this ever since.
So on a personal level, a tiny good came out of it all. But damn was it hard to watch the curtain hiding the bigotry in the atheist movement be ripped down.
For such a prominent public figure who based his whole shtick on associating himself with rigorous rational thought, Dawkins argumentation here is incredibly poor, and hasn’t been improved by a patina of age. Saying that sexism and misogyny in Western cultures doesn’t matter because more extreme sexism exists elsewhere is akin to telling a stabbing victim to ‘stop whining’ because people are getting shot somewhere in the world. His argument essentially amounts to responding to overhearing a person describe their experience of being stabbed by barging into the conversation and declaring.
“Why are you making such a fuss? You are whining about a little light stabbing, while people are getting shot out there in the real world you know! Shot with rapid firing weapons that don’t just cut or poke the odd hole in you, but shred entire sections of your body to bloody pulp! And what about people run over by vehicles! How dare you complain about your laceration when there are people out there who get hit by articulated trucks and wind up thinly smeared across a couple of hundred feet of road surface! You say you have suffered blood loss? Maybe a little, but there is such a thing as Ebola! When you are bleeding uncontrollably from your every orifice, then we can talk about real blood loss…
Stabbing victims – what a bunch of drama queens…”
The totally insensitive self righteousness on display showed me at the time that this was a titan with moral feet of clay, and nothing I have seen from Dawkins since has caused me to reassess that judgement, instead only reconfirming it with depressing regularity.
That’s a rhetorical question, right?
But did the cracker threads survive? Please tell me the cracker threads survived.
That was a sad moment.
Not as bad as when I discovered that Voltaire profited off the slave trade.
But in spite of its comparative insignificance to me, it still matters.
Are disclaimer stickers about evolution inside high school biology textbooks really such a big deal considering Bengladeshi atheists get hacked to death in broad daylight?
As someone who has admired Dawkins for a long time, these comments disturbed me a great deal. It was hard (and still is hard) for me to believe that Dawkins is a sexist or misogynist. I think Dawkins problem is that if something does not strike him as being an issue, he cannot understand why someone else would consider it to be. I’m sure there are many women who would have shrugged off the elevator encounter and thought no more about it. However it did seem to disturb Rebecca and she talked about it – in a pretty measured way. Seriously, saying “guys, don’t do that” isn’t some kind of hysterical overreaction.
Dawkins did the same thing in his comments about paedophilia. As a young boy, he had an older teacher get a little too “touchy” with him and it didn’t leave any lasting scars. So he thinks that this is not as bad as priests frightening children with stories of hell. Of course, some people will see it his way but others might be completely traumatized by even the mildest sexual encounter with an adult and find tales of eternal torment in hell to be extremely silly.
Time and again he has demonstrated an inability to put himself in the shoes of someone who thinks very differently from him.
– RM
I super appreciate this. A few months ago, I was helping someone do historical research on elevatorgate, and I could identify the original link but the comment thread was gone. Having a sense of history is very important for a community.
To see other comments in the thread, there were several quoted in a contemporary article in The Atlantic.
One funny thing, looking back, is that there was also a controversy over Rebecca Watson naming, in a public talk, a specific person who criticized her elevator comment. Nobody seems to care about that anymore. Probably because it was an irrelevant distraction.
The archived version of the post has the comments: link
I don’t see why Dawkins is complaining some much about how Western society treats atheists. After all, they’re attacking non-believers in with machetes in Indonesia.
Pft…I mean, “First World Problems,” amiright?
EDIT @ 14:
“…complaining so much…”
But his LITTLE JAR OF HONEY. Now that was important, right? Much more critical than some insignificant whining about sexism or whatever.
@13: Thanks for the link. I just started scrolling through the comments there, then realized that It would be a more constructive use of my time to watch a replay of the last quarter-hour of Japan vs Poland. In slow motion. Twice.
If he was more tech savvy he would have obviously used the #FirstWorldProblems tag.
For me this was the point after which I could not read his books anymore. That awfully stupid argument and the way he kept digging his hole stuck in my mind and it put me off his writings completely.
For completeness’ sake I think he backpedalled a bit recently, I seem to recall. I remember Watson saying she accepted his comment as being as close to an apology as she was likely to get. So that’s worth mentioning.
That event seemed such a watershed to me. After that the exact same schisms started appearing in video gaming, film, politics, youtube at large. Arguably things that had always been there in every case, But after this it just seemed that angry shitlords were everywhere, flipping over tables at the very hint of feminism.
It’s almost certainly wrong to say elevatorgate was the trigger, but it sure felt like it. Still does to some extent.
RG 10
“Time and again he has demonstrated an inability to put himself in the shoes of someone who thinks very differently from him.”
And this has probably beneficial for him in several instances. There are many debates where I suspect that his debating style would have been quite different, no hard, witty comeback or vicious final argument making the opponent lose the point or the entire debate. He was using his usual gameplan, and this time it backfired spectacularly because he had not judged the audience correctly.
I don’t know the context and don’t know the elevator story, maybe that’s why I don’t really get why RD is so bad here……
obviously in any sphere of life we see situations where relatively small things grow out of proportions and shade much more important and larger issues. Completely out of context the “Dear Muslima” post is still valid, there are some people who are publicly ready to deny the difference between missed (yet polite) flirt and brutal rape or few impolite words and hacking people with machettes.
It is absolute fringe for the people like PZ readers who are immersed, but for mainstream, who just don’t care about feminist issues, social justice and all that (not that they oppose, they are just indifferent to the fight) such fringe opinions may reach as lolcontent and be seen as mainstream inside feminist movement.
About the elevator incident – I have no idea how it looked like I can imagine a scenario (although it is unlikely) that the guy was honest and polite and never thought of causing any harm, they were stopping at different floors, so he tried his luck while going out of the elevator, but woman was not interested in him and just wanted a pretext to call all men pigs – or the situation where guy was a sleazy, blocked the exit (and buttons) and asked a girl for a coffee with specific intonation, assholish grin and stupid wink…
The first imppression I had in my mind when I read “a guy asked a girl in a hotel for a coffee in his room” was completely harmless and polite, only after few iterations and comments read I imagined less nice scenarios.
Maciej, #22
Here it is in her words:
She didn’t make any comments about what the man was trying to do or what kind of man he was. She just said a stranger man asking a woman to your hotel room in that time of day and in that setting is a bad idea.
@22 & 23
Key context missing here, she’d also just been talking about how being sexualized in that sort of manner makes her supremely uncomfortable. So, not only was it an off putting situation, it’s a situation she’d basically explicitly said beforehand that she would not welcome. Here’s the rest of the quote Saad started:
Also in the video Watson mentioned that she gave a speech about how she personally doesn’t like to get hit on in these conferences. The elevator man attended that speech but was clearly not listening. Either way it was a nothing event, where Watson herself didn’t even make it a big deal but misogynistic men who cant take the fact that a woman told them they cant do something got their hate on.
I remember this as the start of the anti-feminist sentiment online. Either this or Anita Sarkesian. Cant remember what came first. Associating elevatorgate with rape, as Dawkins is suggesting came more from the commenters talking about how scary it is to be in an enclosed space with someone who clearly doesn’t respect boundaries, but not from Watson herself. Of course setting the story and concerns straight involves actually listening to women who share these concerns, and we cant have that cant we Dawkins?
Does anyone remember the “date rape is not as bad as stranger rape” comments of his?
This is the original video. The relevant bit starts around 4:20. Decide for yourself if what she said was really so unreasonable.
Matrim # 24, logicalcat, #25
Oops, yeah I left that important context out.
@25, logicalcat
The Watson incident definitely was what really brought this all out in the open in the atheist community as far as I’m concerned. I won’t say it started it, because obviously all the misogyny was there the whole time, it just turned over the rock to reveal all the pale squirming “rational” larva.
Riffing on Gregory Greenwood @5:
<abuser>
Why are you complaining that I hit you? It’s only a bruise, you’re not dying!
</abuser>
After a while, it’s all the same gaslighting bullshittery.
I actually never liked Dawkins, but I did attempt to give him a chance. I heard “The God Delusion” was such an excellent book, so I gave it a shot. I think I made it fifteen pages into the introduction before I read that religion caused 9/11 and that being an atheist today is like being a homosexual was in the 1950’s. I put the book down. What a tool.
25- logicalcat
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/494012678432894976
“Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
which comes right after: “Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.”
And when told: “I honestly don’t know what I would do if I were pregnant with a kid with Down Syndrome. Real ethical dilemma.”
Dawkins responds: “Abort it and try again. It would be immoral to bring it into the world if you have the choice.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/502106262088466432
And: https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/693773352582959104
“Living in a university it’s easy to forget the mean IQ of the population at large is 100, & 50% of them are in the bottom half.”
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/365473573768400896
“All the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College, Cambridge. They did great things in the Middle Ages, though.”
I should have seen this coming when he said religious indoctrination in children is worse than molesting them in the God delusion. What a dumb ass.
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/316101862199791616
“Of course you can have an opinion about Islam without having read Qur’an. You don’t have to read Mein Kampf to have an opinion about nazism.”
Infamous clock boy tirades recounted:
https://www-m.cnn.com/2015/11/25/europe/uk-richard-dawkins-clock-boy-ahmed-mohamed/
https://mobile.twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/531151906329362432
“Oh NO. Just checked my privilege. Turns out I’m a white heterosexual male. (link: http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=6041) campusreform.org/?ID=6041 How can I atone? Hair shirt? Flagellation?”
The horse is dead.
All the more reason to keep flogging.
That’s how metaphors work.
WMDKitty — Survivor @ 29;
It certainly seems to fit the sadly familiar pattern.
I feel the need to thank you.
It helped me remind my loving partner that we are all human, including Richard Dawkins.
Often RD is revered in deity like awe.
It makes me ill.
Not only did the table conversation at the bar in the hours just before the fateful elevator ride include conversation about how she didn’t want to be hit on at that conference, not only did she specifically say she was done talking for the night and wanted to go to bed (read: sleep), and not only did her Freuding keynote speech include statements that she did not want to be hit on at conferences, but she was discussing how she didn’t want to be hit on at conferences – both at the conference and in that video – specifically because men had asked her to speak about what parts of women’s experiences with atheist/skeptic conferences might be preventing women from attending those conferences in similar numbers to men.
Her tip about “guys don’t do that” was not only a statement about how a specific guy had refused to listen to her when she said “no” forty times before at the same conference, but it was in response to specific and repeated questions from men about what they could do to get more women to attend those men-dominated conferences.
People focus a lot on the elevator – to the point that the name of the whole dustup is “Elevatorgate”. But although this heightens the problems with the situation, the foundation of the problem is that a woman set a boundary and a guy refused to listen and then violated that boundary. If the guy is going to violate that very mild and easy to follow boundary, set in a way that there was nothing personal involved at all, how will the same guy react when he’s told “No” again, this time in a setting where it is necessarily personal? The elevator and being in a foreign country are highly relevant because the guy has already proved he won’t always take no for an answer, and that makes one wonder if he’s going to accept this “no”. If he doesn’t, then you’re trapped in an elevator with him, family and friends thousands of miles away.
Yes the elevator is relevant. No, the elevator is not the most relevant fact here. It’s that he proved himself willing to violate Watson’s boundaries just by the asking.
But then, what is Watson supposed to do, remain silent? Well, sure, she could have done, but guys kept Freuding asking her what to do to get more women to show up. So now not only has she had her boundaries overrun in the elevator in a scary (but ultimately probably not harmful) way, but if she cares about her community, and if the men in that community are asking her how to change the culture in ways that create more gender-egalitarian conferences in the future, she has to speak up.
And what happens when she answers the question that the guys asked her? She gets pilloried by the guys for bringing up such a trivial “zero harm” event.
It’s amazing how so many guys’ anti-Watson comments included something along the lines of “it’s just words, just answer the question and go about your business” while at the same time treating Watson as if she had done something wrong towards men by honestly answering the question men had been asking.
Elevator guy put her in a scary situation by refusing to respect Watson’s boundaries, and choosing to violate them in a situation where he had arranged circumstances so he could do so while she was alone with him in a place with no instant exit. But the entire community put her in a scary situation by demanding answers to a question that she can’t possibly fully answer (she can’t say what keeps every individual woman away from those conferences), and then when she provides the only answer she can, qualifying it as coming from her perspective, they slam her for daring to speak up.
Both situations were created by men, for the benefit of men, at the expense of Watson.
Me personally, when these conversations crop up referencing Elevatorgate, I’d like to hear a lot less about the physical environment of the elevator and a lot more about the fucked up behavior of the men who violated boundaries or who slammed a woman for speaking up when her speech was only an answer to a question men had asked.
CD
But it was the wrong answer. She should have gone with the obvious correct answer, which is pink fluffy ladybrainz.
More seriously, I agree with your entire comment @39.
During the long conference and discussions and the time in the bar, RW made eye-contact with EG at least twice and spoke to him at least once.
Therefore when RW left the hotel bar to go to her room, that was a specific invitation for EG to follow her.
Right?
I think the overwhelming point that many of Watsons critics were pointing out at the time was the fact the man said.. “Don’t take this the wrong way”, and then that was exactly what she seemed to do. It is a criticism of inferring things that were not implied, of painting the worst motivations behind every action. I have done this semi seriously when living in the south and having someone talk about southern men having manners like holding the door for women, and I would say, “of course, it gives them a chance to look at your ass as you walk through”. While it is probably often true, it is not a fair generalization to make every time a man offers to hold a door, and telling men to not hold the door because you are assuming they are doing it to look at your ass is announcing your prejudice. Instead of saying, “don’t do that”, instead say hey this can appear as this for me and other women, try to be more aware of how things can appear to someone who may be sensitive for some reason. Bet that would not have caused an ‘elevatorgate’. But I guess as they say in showbiz, “theres no such thing as bad publiciity”.
@paxoll
Or if someone tells you not to do something you can not fucking do it because that’s not how they want to be treated.
Where the fuck was the rest of what you posted in Watson’s video?
Funny, I thought that’s exactly what Watson had been talking about all evening and night. What, was the one-on-one treatment finally going to get through to him? If he had to preface his question with “don’t take this the wrong way”, he knew damn well what he was saying and how it would be perceived but did not care enough to not do it.
@#42 “paxoll”
Women are used to being blamed in all sorts of ways for men’s bad behavior.
Stop doing it, please.
@42, paxoll
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m totes going to ignore that thing you said multiple times and do that thing you specifically asked people not to do in an environment where you are isolated in an enclosed space.”
Seriously, she took it the best way she could in the circumstances. And, on top of that, her criticism was about as mild as humanly possible. She didn’t get mad, she didn’t heap scorn upon him or men in general, she didn’t name or shame; basically all she said was “please don’t do this, it makes me feel uncomfortable and unsafe.”
So basically exactly what paxoll said she should have done. Funny, why didn’t it work?
@rq
The world may never know
I’m pretty sure I’ve never had to use the phrase “please don’t take this the wrong way” in my entire quark infested life.
When would it ever be helpful?
For people unfamiliar with paxoll’s views on women:
Here is paxoll blaming a girl for being fed up with harassment from a white dude who went on to murder her and nine other people at school.
Continue reading that thread at your own peril.
Yeah, I can maybe see a very very mild discussion of decorum coming out of this incident at most. Maybe a thread of about 20 replies (tiny for the old Pharyngula in those days). Even then I think that’s fringe, outlier type material in terms of the amount of attention warranted.
Actually the initial ruckus seemed to be about whether or not RW herself should be talking about other bloggers who had commented on this matter by name in her subsequent talks. That’s a discussion that could be had. There’s a few angles on that issue. But that’s not how it proliferated into the world. There all anyone really seemed to care about was the elevator incident and that she had brought it up at all. Never mind reacted to it negatively, in the mildest possible aside. No, it went viral because how fucking dare she have an opinion on that. The implication that she felt other than completely comfortable is an insult to all men too btw.
The bafflement, the outrage, the insanity that ensued has no rationale, not justification at all. The whole incident puts the lie to the idea that it’s the ‘Angry Feminist PC outrage machine’ that’s the cause of all this male identity backlash. You’ve got to look very blood hard and with the most prejudiced and fragile eye to find the hateful feminist in that video. Yet they found it, in their thousands. Yeah that video. Not “Kill all men!” on twitter, even as a joke. Not “All sex is rape”. That video. That’s all. What a pathetic lot.
(please click the links with caution some of the details of the stalking case could be upsetting)
Somewhat on topic, the Capital Gazette shooter was apparently angry that the paper had done a story several years ago about his stalking conviction, he stalked and harassed a woman he knew in high school and when she became concerned with his behavior and she did not respond the way he wanted her to, he contacted her employer and used personal information about her to get her fired. She contacted police but he continued to harass her.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/annapolis-shooting-suspect-jarrod-ramos-blamed-capital-gazette-for-reporting-on-his-stalking-conviction
https://casetext.com/case/ramos-v-hartley This as from the dismissal of his defimation case against the newspaper. The judge in the stalking case suspended his 90 day jail sentence and sent him to court mandated therapy. Because you would want to ruin the poor boys life, never mind he did his best to ruin his victims life.
Oh goody. paxoll is here to relitigate the whole clusterfuck, and to kindly tell those involved how they *should* have behaved.
*spits*
chigau being prescient in the link provided by LykeX @13:
All the popcorn ever made would not have been enough for this clusterfuck.
Paxoll’s advice about what shoulda been done made me think about what I shoulda done. Paxoll shoulda been banned a long time ago.
He is now!
Yay!
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his
salaryerection depends on his not understanding it.”Also, I looked over the archive of comments mentioned in #13, and was appalled. So many slymers-to-be and sealions galumphing away in that 1200 comment thread — getting rid of all of those assholes was the best decision ever. Ruthless culling of the commentariat: It’s a good thing.
Good fucking riddance.
Thank you PZ.
Paxoll felt the wrath of the mighty Ban Hammer. ‘Twas a righteous smiting. Just be careful not to get any troll fragments stuck to your shoes…
Paxoll’s usefulness as a concrete example of rape culture had reached terminal diminishing returns. Good riddance.
I’m surprised they lasted as long as they did.
As a hobby Elevatorgate-historian, I once dug up the comments. You can find the original incident at archive.is/xraw7. Richard Dawkin’s comments are at #75, and (omitted here) #104.
It’s overall a difficult subject because of its non-linear, nested Arabian Nights-like, structure which will always invite interpretation and emerging, competing narratives. But there are ways to be less wrong about it.
The important events are:
(1) Women in Atheism, panel in Dublin. Rebecca Watson was not invited to this one, but comments on it from later panel, sitting next to Richard Dawkins, and disagrees strongly with Paula Kirby, British and a friend of him. That might have played a role. You can’t completely ignore this.
(2) Rebecca Watson’s behaviour was criticized by many. However, the lift incident happens one night at that conference, which according to everyone then, vindicated her point. She tells the story in her video, where she also says the famous phrase “guys don’t do that”, to little attention (at first).
(3) Nobody cares. This is what is written in agreement on most blogs, including sites sympathetic to her. It’s discussed by her subscribers on YouTube, with the video reply method that was then popular. The notable replies came again from women (her fans), Stef McGraw was one, and active in the student side of the movement. This leads to a back and forth between the two.
(4) Rebecca Watson gives her CFI Talk in 2011. She introduces with the lift incident, accuses Stef McGraw of misogyny, who was in the audience, and most central, says this on atheism:
(5) The video of this talk was not online at first, which is highly important, because this introduces massive distortions. Over what she said, and how she said it erupted a massive flame war, also because both Watson and McGraw were part of the actual conference-going movement. But the problem was, that the highly visible and referable parts, the “Guys don’t do that” and the altercation with McGraw were the least important. The punch was in the accusation of literal rape culture she makes to the atheist movement, which we know now has a completely different background than coffees and lifts (see Silverman, Shermer and Krauss).
(6) Because of this, and because of the community structure then, PZ Myers discusses the viewpoint of yet another woman named Abbie Smith, then a sort-of-sister community, who also comments on some side-issue, to which Myers’ thread refers to (Abbie didn’t like bringing online drama to a conference, and Myers argues that one should “always name names”). That’s the thread to which Dawkins then replies and writes his now infamous “Dear Muslima” comment, and a follow-up a few minutes later. So, while the literal rape culture is in the background, the main participants are *then* oblivious to it, and it’s rarely mentioned now, though it is the reason why everything blew up.
(7) Richard Dawkins, who, like PZ Myers, seems unaware of the “literal rape culture” angle, draws all the attention, but his critics also help a fair deal to push the other women who disagreed this far off the stage (did you count? There were many). They’re generally swept under the rug, like most other central aspects, in service of a more opportune “the patriarchy” style story where the big guy comes down hard on an uppity feminist who just wanted to tell everyone that they shouldn’t be jerks. As you now see, this is not at all what happened.
(8) Rebecca Watson fires back with “Privilege Delusion” which was generally interpreted as a call for a Dawkins-boycott by both the commenters and the media, but because this somewhat backfired, was later denied. If you don’t want to believe this, check the comments, or the sources of the Wikipedia article on EG, which is one of the few things that are correct.
(9) A final beat in the story is Dawkins who is overheard of de-platforming Rebecca Watson from Reason Rally. This is particularly curious. No matter how you interpret Privilege Delusion, it’s at least clear that she would avoid Dawkins anyway. There’s of course more, but let’s leave it at that.
(10) Most bizarre is the reaction to “Dear Muslima” under the lens of Intersectionality. Which is generally underappreciated, despite that many deem intersectionality to be very important. Few read Crenshaws original, and the version commonly used on blogs means something entirely different. The original is about the conflict between antiracism and feminism, as inherent in Dear Muslima, too. Crenshaw wrote: “The struggle against racism seemed to compel the subordination of certain aspects of the Black female experience in order to ensure the security of the larger Black community”, for example. In other words, when you argue feminism, you come in conflict with anti-racism (i.e. black men that are typical partners of black women, thus domestic violence in their case could feed into racist stereotypes), while when you argue antiracism, you can’t addresss “black on black” crime, such as domestic violence against women. This is why a different framework is needed, which Crenshaw sought to provide, that overcomes such problems. So, ironically, Crenshaw’s criticism is similar to the accusations against the “Regressive Left”. Now that’s a M. Night Shyamalan-style twist.
The atheist, secular, skeptic, progressive movement has many problems, and this episode, viewed from whichever angle is one of the best examples of how not to do it. I hope there’s room for improvements, now that we all face Trump and Neo-Fascists.
@the Discordant:
Your writing is unfortunately vague and uncommunicative at several important points, but seems clear enough in at least some particulars to be said to be wrong more than once. As a longtime qualified proponent/ insider-critic of intersectionality, i think you don’t really know shit about intersectionality, so that’s where I’d start. In particular, this bit:
is wrong taken literally, and taken less literally gets the examples and the point both wrong as well.
First, let’s get this out of the way: you’re obviously referring to “Mapping the Margins”, but that is not Crenshaw’s “original” statement on intersectionality. If you’re going to chastise people for not being aware of the original, you should probably know enough about the topic to figure out that you, yourself, are referring to the sequel.
Second,
Again, NOT THE FUCKING ORIGINAL, which was about
and providing a good argument for a liberal/progressive view of justice in the anti-discrimination context, with the intersection providing an important metaphor useful in explaining how and why conservative views of anti-discrimination law fail to achieve anything like justice.
But further, if you’re contending that “few people read” the article Mapping the Margins, you’re simply wrong. Tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people read that article for the first time every single year. I’ve assigned it in my own classes and workshops, requiring a huge number of people to read it by myself.
But finally and most importantly on this section, in what way is the “conflict between antiracism and feminism” inherent in Dawkins’ Dear Muslima statement? I’m interested because while your accidental obscurantism makes firm conclusions impossible, it sure looks like you’re trying to say that Dear Muslima is a Mapping the Margins-like statement advocating for examining issues of justice in their fullest context, which would be factually wrong.
Now, I’m very interested in clearing up remaining ambiguities in your ideas of how useful and relevant Mapping the Margins might be in examining Dawkins’ Dear Muslima statement, but before we reach that last bit I’m afraid we’re going to have to clear up another thing:
If Crenshaw’s criticism is similar to the accusations against the Regressive Left, then Crenshaw is similar to Tucker Freuding Carlson.
Is that really what you want to say? Perhaps you could expand this point so we know exactly what, if any, the similarities are between the content of Crenshaw’s “Mapping the Margins” and Fox News’ latest hot take. The only thing that I remember off the top of my head is the NYPD declining to release information on domestic violence arrests for Crenshaw’s proposed study into how arrest rates vary by race. You might note that despite the seemingly feminist rationale offered by the NYPD for that action, the NYPD itself is not “The Left” (regressive or otherwise) in any way, shape, or form.
Now and finally let’s use your expanded discussion of your conclusion as well as the things we’ve learned along the way in this comment to get back to your opening statement on intersectionality:
What, pray tell, is “bizarre” about “the reaction” to Dawkins’ statement? Please be specific, and yes, you will be graded on your answer.
Ack.
My #65 was, probably obviously, supposed to be addressed to “the Discordian” from #64 and not “the Discordant” (who does not appear in this thread).
My apologies.
I mean by “original” her development of the idea, which can be found in several papers, from around 1990 and which was popularized through the Critical Race Theory framework, and could have changed enough ever since to be unrecognizable to “current” intersectionalists, hence I added “original” to account for that possibility.
Her intersectionality is applicable to the “Dear Muslima” case, because of the parallels between “black women” (Crenshaw) and “Dear Muslima” (Dawkins) who are at the intersection of several oppressions from a patriarchal-sexist side, and from a xenophobic-racist side (and possibly more). I am not arguing that Dawkins picked an intersectional approach, but that adopting such a framework would have led to a different reception of his comment, and could have “softened” its reception considerably. It could have led to a different, more productive discussion, and the bizarre part is that this didn’t happen, despite that his main opponents consider themselves frequently as intersectionalists, or woke. However, curiously, none of that visible. Rather, I see the standard conflict Crenshaw already discussed in 1991.
Her paper(s) argue through the dialectic of different problems within social justice and law that reinforce each other (sometimes “paradoxically”), which are difficult to navigate and which her idea was meant helping to resolve (or at least to make visible), by switching to a different framework, namely, an intersectional one, rather than the traditional ones.
I am not expecting that you agree to every bit of my interpretation. It’s sufficient to show that one could reasonably well take that route in regards to “Dear Muslima”. Or, even weaker, that a movement filled with intersectionalists could have, at some point, looked at this from that vantage point, but apparently, nobody did. And that’s odd. Even if you have your problems, you can still as an intersectionalist walk through it, and see where and what sticks and breaks, or even weaker, make known that you considered it, but Dawkins is still wrong, and show how from that vantage point. I see nothing of the sort. Doesn’t this strike you as odd?
It’s not my part to show how an intersectional approach might look like, I will only show how, at minimum there are some paralells that might be suitable. Her take is heavily about American law. I am not even American, and certainly know little about your legal system, but even I can see similae themes. Here is one, anti-racism and feminism are not well equipped to help women at the intersection, which are literally identified by both Dawkins and Crenshaw.
In much the same way Muslimas are essentialized to be Muslims, who face racism on one end, and Muslimas essentialized to womanhood on the other side, which is why whatever they face is reduced to general feminism, with no special regard to their culture (which in Dawkins’ examples is FGM, driving the car, leaving the house etc), or generalized to “people of colour” oppression. I think he’s correct on that one. Ever since, none of this became an important point on any agenda. People could discuss the details of Barminology to death, but none of that is visible around Islam and feminism, or intersectionality. There’s lots of traditonal antiracism and feminsim, but no intersectionality in practice. I am confident that there is not even a decent discussion on any relevant context anywhere, including atheist woke blogs. Sometimes absense of evidence is evidence of absense.
The lynching and sexualized part have a direct parallel. Rape within a black community would have black men as perpetrators, but that cannot be addresed, because racism (especially historical, hence lynching) runs on stereotypes of sexually aggressive black men. Antiracists will avoid to die on that hill, because they fear of looking like bigots, getting applause from the wrong side, and adding to racist stereotypes, hence they won’t address that, or even go against it. The Islam parallel is the islamophobia charge. Feminists (again, according to Crenshaw) don’t address this, because gender roles and relations are not identical to white women, and so whatever they concoct is of little use, and doesn’t reach black women. They also typically would want to avoid to touch “black on black” crime, especially when they are white, for same antiracist reasons. In light of modern identity politics, they would be regarded as not qualified to talk about it anyway.
The same dynamics can be directly applied to Islam. The Alt-Right uses racist stereotypes of that very nature when they paint (especially Muslim) immigrants and refugees as “rape gangs”, setting off the same dynamic as mentioned above. It induces the problem that on that background, the violence muslimas endure cannot be addressed (or are addressed differently), because the racist “rape gang” narrative is a dangerous backdrop social justice minded people of both antiracism and feminism would want to avoid. in other words, they are overlooked as a result, because “social justice” inclinded people don’t want to look like bigots or get applause from the wrong side.
Now, most Dawkins critics belong to the nameless, shapeless “American Left” movement that is occasionally described as “woke” and “intersectional”. But when that is the case, why is there no intersectional approach to Dawkins, or other New Atheists, for that matter, but more frequently a “islamophobia” take? The “the primary beneficiaries” of this approach are Muslim men, who see their practices protected, and the “primary beneficiaries of policies supported by feminists and others concerned about rape tend to be white women”, which harkens back to coffee and conference rules, which is the ultimate outcome of this very disproportional treatment of Dawkins’ comments (after all, he wrote a few comments, and it’s somewhat extreme that it still matters years later).
In conclusion, “Dear Muslima” would have been an excellent opportunity to try out intersectionality, or some ideas as discussed by Crenshaw. I only slapped together a few approaches to illustrate how. I am not myself an intersectionalist (but sympathetic to what she tries to achieve), but I think that if people really meant it, we would be at a better place. Since I see no traces of this, I can assume that nobody read anything by her, and that intersectionality is merely a tribal identifier. Or I can assume that there is another version out there, contra to her “original”, so that people mean something else: one candidate that often comes through is a kind of “minorities unite against oppression” idea, where, women, trans, people of colour, muslims etc. are supposed to band together. But that makes the problems she discusses greater, not smaller, and could potentially be viewed as anti-intersectional as long as the transformative aspect is missing. In the end it is astonishing that intersectionalists would throw away the best opportunity that literally embodies the intersections of atheism and feminism, and recast feminist concerns (such as empowerment and body automony of women) as anti-feminist. You tell me why this is not bizarre.
John 11:35
@the Discordian:
First, you’ve proved yourself fairly versed in intersectionality models, so my previous impression that you don’t know shit about intersectionality is refuted as a misimpression, and I’m happy to state that up front so we need not deal with that in the future.
Nonetheless, I think quite a lot is fundamentally misguided, though perhaps your apparent point differs from what you were actually trying to say because of something as innocent and understandable as the imprecision in writing one frequently finds in a blog comment.
I still see no justification for saying what you said about how Crenshaw’s criticisms are similar to the “regressive left” epithet that’s been thrown around by Dinesh D’Souza, Tucker Carlson, and others of that ilk, but whatever.
But let’s move on and examine some other things:
First, her model is applicable to the case of Bill Clinton’s persecution by white men republicans during his presidency. It is frequently missed by those who don’t understand the model that it is applicable to every single study of human social behavior. Even if you’re only examining the behavior of white debutantes of the US south, it is possible to examine the way that class, language, culture, gender, and other factors come together (“intersect”) to form the peculiar institution of the debutante ball.
Everything is intersectional. Dear Muslima isn’t somehow special for that. Applying intersectionality only when the interests & well-being of women of color or foreign women are implicated is a fundamental misunderstanding of how intersectionality is intended to be used. It would be to continue to exist that women of color are somehow a “special case” and not as normal and central to society as everyone else.
So this analysis of when intersectionality is applicable is misguided to the extent of running counter to intersectionality.
Dismissing Dawkins’ “Dear Muslima” was appropriate from an intersectional standpoint and from other standpoints. I think the feminist approach which you are most closely resembling is that of Dorothy Roberts, author of Killing The Black Body, and other books. In KTBB she extensively discusses how white feminist discourse on reproductive rights fundamentally obscured black women’s struggles.
But the lessons of KTBB don’t apply to every case of feminist action or advocacy. White women were actively advocating for access to surgical sterilization as a method of birth control. In doing so, they were responding not merely to sexism, but also to racist over-valuation of white babies and devaluation of white women in roles other than that of mother to white children. In so doing, they attempted to destigmatize childlessness generally and sterilization specifically. Yet, at the same time that white women were struggling for access to fuller control of their bodies through increasing the availability and frequency of surgical sterilization, black women were struggling against surgical sterilization inflicted on them without their consent. Apparently it was not an uncommon thing in certain areas of the US for black women receiving c-sections to have their ob-gyns surgically sterilize them without consent while they were under anesthetic.
In this case, convincing doctors that being deprived of the opportunity to have future children was no big deal (as some of white women’s rhetoric sought to do) went directly against the efforts of Black women to convince authorities that non-consensual sterilization was absolutely a big fucking deal.
However, though intersectionality does anticipate that in some cases certain groups of people presumed to be united (say, white people) will have sub-populations with fundamentally opposed interests on certain issues (say, when divided by gender), that’s not at all what intersectional thought would assume will happen in most cases.
So the most serious question, then, is whether or not the existence of the unique experiences of oppression endured by muslim women are in any way in opposition to Watson writing and saying what she did. The follow up is whether Dawkins’ identification of some of those experiences had direct bearing on the morality or advisability of Watson’s statements.
It is in no way against the interests of muslim women being subjected to FGM that some other woman in some other far-away location responds, when atheist men ask her, “How can we get more women to come to our conferences?” with “Well, guys, don’t hit on a woman in an elevator after she’s said repeatedly that she doesn’t want to be hit on and then tells you she’s done talking and is going up to bed.” There simply isn’t anything antithetical to the interests of muslim women in Watson’s statement, a la analogs of the conflict spelled out in Dorothy Roberts’ KTBB.
So what about other reasons Watson’s statement might be inadvisable or unethical?
Well, that’s where we get to what Dawkins was clearly arguing: Watson was not enduring harm on the scale of FGM, therefore Watson should not be speaking up. To give Dawkins the most favorable interpretation possible, he might have been saying that Watson should be working exclusively on issues of genocide until that’s solved, then murders, then lesser crimes and oppressions until one reaches the point where it becomes reasonable to address such lesser insults to women’s autonomy as ignoring women’s general statements of non-/consent, with each man instead considering himself a special case entitled to ask for and receive a statement of non-/consent specific to him.
But Dawkins himself works on issues other than anti-genocide work. He works against lesser harms than murder. So in what way could he possibly be authentically advocating for Watson to shut up about smaller harms until the greater harms are solved?
The answer, of course, is that he couldn’t. His argument was terribly, terribly dishonest. And people called him out for his dishonesty.
Given the facts we know about Dawkins’ statements and how he couldn’t possibly have been honestly arguing for the position his statement takes up on its face, the intersectional approach would be to note that Dawkins was co-opting the experience of muslim women to aid men in shutting down criticisms of white, atheist sexism.
And guess what? He did get criticized for exactly that.
If Dawkins had an argument about how Watson’s critique affected muslim women, he certainly didn’t make it. The entirety of his statement is a sarcastic rant about how harm to muslim women exists while Watson is complaining about something else, something that constitutes “zero harm” in Dawkins’ view. The harms don’t connect to anything in Dawkins’ comment. Neither are the harms unknown to anyone who reads a paper. In fact, the power of Dawkins’ argument lies in the fact that these harms and their magnitude are supposed to be well known and thus provide obvious, incontrovertible evidence that violating women’s general non-/consent and insisting on individualized non-/consent is trivial in comparison.
Dawkins argued that a woman should shut up when she answers a question that men asked about making their conferences more welcoming to women as soon as that woman said something that some guys didn’t want to hear. Literally. That was what he argued: don’t talk about this, there are more important issues.
In what way could it possibly be in the interest of muslim women to show deference to an assertion that women should shut up about their issues if more important issues exist?
No, intersectionality demands – and produced – critiques that Dawkins’ was engaged in appropriation of others’ experiences in order to aid men in avoiding accountability for sexism. Feminism generally advocates for speaking from one’s own experience and knowledge, so when the people involved in the conversation aren’t particularly knowledgeable about the experience of muslim women who have been subjected to FGM, we back off that topic and instead contribute where we do have expertise. And we saw that.
Intersectionality was at play there. Good feminism was at play there. And neither demanded a sympathetic reception of the idea that women should shut up until the world has solved all the issues more important than theirs.
A “softened” response is hardly justified by intersectionality.
Why on earth would I or anyone else waste the brainpower doing an intense intersectional analysis to a letter that boils down to an old white guy getting mad at women for not wanting to be harassed by creepy dudes. It’s legitimately not that deep, it’s just Dawkins making a “not as bad as” argument.
Porivil Sorrens@71,
Well, it’s vitally important to find some way to blame Dawkins’ critics for what ensued. The Dsicordian’s approach at least has the merit of being a new way to do that, AFAIK.
I’m not familiar with “Killing The Black Body” and the example looks too narrow. In that case, if I understood correctly, the same argument in one case is helping one group of women, but harming another one. It might be difficult to solve in practice, but in theory it’s a simple problem. In this case, the shift is towards options (having the option), with consent (being able to take that option on your own decision). There will be devils in the details, and Intersectionality might help with that, but I doubt that any of this reaches where rubber hits the road. In the end, you want women making decision for themselves.
The quotations I showed are one step above in abstraction, where antiracism meets feminism, where e.g. patriarchal structures within a minority community cannot be addressed, because antiracism doesn’t want to fuel stereotypes, but that way, cannot freely talk about the conditions of women in such communities. On the other side, feminism also don’t concern themselves with particular problems of women in such communities, because they either don’t have the experiences, or don’t want to insert themselves into such issues when belonging to a different identity group. On a high level, the outcome is the common perception that feminism excludes minority women. None of the highly public talking points, such as representation in upper management of companies and politics, or closing the pay gap, addressing sexual assault at universities etc. concern minority women in particular, and are typically far away from their situations. Their problems, also intersectionality, are the worst in poor and precarious situations, far away from pay checks, board rooms and universities.
That’s where “Regressive Left” element comes into play, which is not as simple as you make it. Let’s break down what it can mean:
(A) It can mean “hypocrite”. If (lack of) privileges intersect and interact, then some groups have it worse than others, and consequently, their concern should rise to the top, on average. When someone argues that way, but is appearing to downplay and ignoring those worse conditions at the bottom, they are hypocritical.
(B) It can mean “reactionary, but left wing”. It has a similar thrust as A, but the difference is that the person is not deemed hypocritical, but operating with ideas that somehow excuse conditions in other groups or cultures, maybe even condoning them. “Culturalism” is one example where this is the case, which can be broken down into a majority “culturalism” on the Right (“US is a Christian Nation”), that would lead to the “reactionary” direction, and “multiculturalism” version on the Left (“it looks horrible to us, but it’s their culture!”), which would lead to the “regressive” direction. The comparison to reactionary Right Wingers is apt, because the exact same problems arise, of dog-whistling code words etc. This is why A and B closely resemble one another, but are qualitatively different.
(C) There is also an element of the Ray Comfort Condition, where you never know if someone is a scheming hypocrite, or a genuine idiot. In this case, the Regressive might be a simple idiot, who neither has a coherent reactionary-but-left ideology, nor is acting hypocritical. They really don’t know or see the problems and difficulties to navigate. I hazard the guess that Hanlon’s Razor applies.
(D) It can also be an opportunistic insult levelled against people who identify as progressive left wing, and where the accuser thinks it stings to call them regressive (in opposite to progressive). Here the Ray Comfort problem affects the accuser: they may not know anything about the complexities, and simply picked it up as a good insult. Or it can be the more sinister FOX News variety, who have no business of co-opting the term, since they are themselves deeply reactionary and should be high fiving the regressive person as a kindred spirit.
My intuition about Americans and the Left was formulated by George Lakoff, himself a progressive.
The “regressive” charge fixes one hole, but alas, like all other such phrases in American politics, can be co-opted, distorted, used wrongly, and then loses its meaning. Especially new terms that become fashionable are vulnerable, since they can be sidetracked before they are firmly established. The additional problem is that this is an accusation, i.e. not a self-identification.
It tackles with the problem that especially Woke Americans don’t realize they are Woke Americans, not “Left Wing Default International”. They just don’t see it. There is, for example, still no Woke Atheism, even though different groups of people would qualify as different from New Atheism, and similar to each other to bear a common title, to make it possible to address that mindset. The problem of this is also a cognitive one, coming from the asymmetry of labels: someone is described (if accurately) as such-and-such much faster than their self-identification can catch up. This is why opponents were quick to recognize “A-plussers” through their American Clinton-Democrat, “woke”, (I think wannabe) intersectional ideas, while such people who are exactly that were hesitant to accept the label, and used a much narrower definition, pertaining to a specific forum.
In the end, intersectionality, as that self-professed idea of many American critics of Dawkins could have helped to induce some nuance that simply doesn’t exist, no matter how you look at it (and there are several other ways, I am not going into). As a matter of fact, most people don’t know the context and mistake coffee for the background discussion on “rape culture” Rebecca Watson brought up at the CFI conference, and which kicked everything into gear.
There is typically not even an admission that things got a wee bit confusing, and it’s not clear at all to what exactly Dawkins responds to. You say it’s simple, but it really isn’t.
If you are totally literal and narrow, the problem as formulated by Rebecca Watson at the time was this: “don’t do double entendres in confined spaces, don’t do that, guys, thxbye!”, but that clearly did not cause the firestorm. Because of this, it is utterly silly to take Dawkins comments on that particular situation apart. Nobody turns into an anti-feminist just because they say you can walk away from an awkward situation. Maybe arguable, disagreeable, tone deaf, maybe wrong, but it’s hardly something that warrants to revoke someone’s membership card. Clearly, something else is going on.
But something else was quietly dropped, and not even mentioned on Wikipedia and elsewhere, even though that should be the discussion starter. It’s the statements Rebecca Watson made on the atheist movement, and people in the audience at the time, which we might summarize as “literal rape culture” where men feel they have the right to sexual objectify (includes sexual assault). Where was that discussion, and I mean specifically:
Do you even pay attention what she says there? How on earth can you be concerned with coffee double entendres after hearing this? And this time, there is no handwave available.
So, you can adapt the “Dear Muslima” charge again another time. “oh woke feminist, why do you complain about a coffee invite when women in atheism are apparently raped and sexually assaulted which you stated yourself earlier, how on earth are you concerned with double entendrés in light of this”
And this, makes the “Dear Muslima” essentially true. The “grenade post” comes two years later, and doesn’t connect to Rebecca Watson’s talk either, which was long forgotten, while everyone and their dad knows the coffee or Dear Muslima story. This time you have the same person who reports on rape, and then on an awkward coffee invite, and your take is to ignore the former and run away with the latter!
It’s an incontrovertible matter of fact that everyone ran away with the coffee story, while the far more serious talk by Rebecca Watson was quietly dropped and ignored! That’s a fact. We know have years of history and it simply never came up in any important fashion and is obscure trivia by now. It’s not even deemed important enough for Wikipedia!Now all of your defences and rationalisations fall apart, because now not Muslimas are pitted against feminists, it’s sexual assault, even rape victims being laughed down on one side, and frigging coffee invitation on the other. You can also not construe this as “against Rebecca Watson” because both points were made by her.
Maybe, just maybe, something went wrong somewhere?
What the fuck is happening….
A woman advised men not to make stranger women feel uncomfortable in elevators late at night. A privileged white guy tried to find fault with that using laughably poor reasoning.
End of.
@the Discordian:
You are ignoring the actual original statement that you made. You’re insisting that an intersectional analysis of Dawkins’ Dear Muslims leads to a different response.
I’ve attempted to show how that isn’t true. You come back without even once quoting Dawkins’ words or providing examples of how intersectionality provides a different interpretation of his words.
Dear Muslima was a factual statement? What was that factual statement that can be determined to be true or not true? How does intersectionality help us reach that truth?
You don’t even know, or at least, you can’t keep a single topic in your head long enough to remember your original challenged assertion and defend it.
To everyone else, Dear Muslima looked not like a factual statement, but an argument asserting that Watson or Women or all the people taking Watson’s side or just anyone in the universe (hard to tell, the argument is equally applicable to any of these groups) should fucking shut up about any problem that isn’t the largest known problem.
It’s quite revealing that you would call this “true”. But it also shows the incoherent hypocrisy of your participation in this thread: women are still being subjected to rape and oppression, female bodies are still being mutilated, murder still occurs, wars are still being fought, genocide still takes place.
So let’s examine what’s true here:
Sound true to you? Then why haven’t you shut up yet?
With all due respect, Richard Dawkins was always an asshole, but many atheists willfully ignored that fact for years because he was their asshole. As long as his assholiness was directed at non-atheists they were happy to cheer him on, and if ever a maverick atheist who was not besotted with Dawkins dared criticize him, his faithful acolytes were quick to spring to his defense. Recall, if you will, the way atheists were up in arms back when conservative Christian wingnuts claimed that Harry Potter might lead children to embrace witchcraft. While I enjoyed mocking the Christian Right for this myself, I could not help but be reminded of the fact that a few years prior, Dawkins had proclaimed that The X-Files was a potential threat to atheism because it encouraged people to believe in the supernatural. But that, of course, was completely different because, um, well… it just was.
I’m not across the finer points of whether or not a thing is properly intersectional, so I may be missing the point entirely here. I also do appreciate the history being laid out and luckily my memory of the timeline wasn’t that far off. But I do find the idea quite baffling that Dawkins remarks can be read as anything but redirecting the conversation. A change from being at least half concerning how the elevator incident was talked about to being -entirely- a condemnation for talking about it at all.
That’s the only aspect he was addressing at least. There’s no reference to the moral/ethical nuances at play in the community discussion within that post of his. It’s more as though he was only listening to that aspect aspect while most others were trying to nest it within disagreements on the politics of convention speaking. And like a cranky old man barely paying attention, he blurted.
Let’s suppose I take things at face value. Rebecca Watson talks only about the elevator and the double entendré. She ends with “guys don’t do that”, and many saw this as a light-hearted request. It’s mentioned on a blog, and Richard Dawkins then responds with the “Dear Muslima” letter in a comment at #75. He didn’t exactly call in a press conference. My impression would be: “Okay, so what”. It’s hardly a big deal; certainly not news-worthy, and especially not something that is worth a flame-war spanning over years. Clearly, something is missing.
Now there is a second context, which is key. It radiates from the background. It has zero to do with coffee or some awkward encounter in a lift, but is about “literal rape culture” at atheist conferences, where people have been raped, and sexually assaulted, according to Rebecca Watson (CFI talk, see above).
The first thing I noticed: people, purposefully or ignorantly, wire things cross-wise. They take Richard Dawkins comment on the coffee situation and take it as commentary on the literal rape culture, women in atheism, or feminism at large. That’s an explosive mixture. And you also see the opposite cross-wire: how the “anti-feminists” organized a huge backlash against Rebecca Watson’s mild “guys don’t do that” request. That’s also an explosive mix. None of this is accurate.
Coffee Shaped Rorschach Nuke
I offer a parsimonious explanation, with some informed guess and speculation: We know there was a whisper network. I think it’s American, where the main conference scene took place, where it would be most useful and plausible (people frequently meet each other etc). Rebecca Watson and some others could know about sexual assault and rape through that network (at least). However, this wasn’t public knowledge.
Paula Kirby, Grania Spingies etc. are Europeans. The “women in atheism” panel was international. It makes sense they weren’t connected to the whisper network, and also didn’t make certain experiences. This informed their outlook, and which irked Rebecca Watson, but she couldn’t blurt out her knowledge.
The coffee and lift incident is completely unimportant in the scheme of things. It was a way to convey that not everything is fine at conferences. Anyway, nobody cared about this, and only her direct YouTube audience respond to her. These are, again, women. Wildwood Claire and Stef McGraw etc.
This becomes a feud between McGraw and Watson, which becomes an issue when Rebecca brings it to the CFI stage. Here she conflates McGraw’s possibly uninformed views with the serious matters that are on her mind. I can sympathize, in hindsight, but it was still not a good move. This proves to be an explosive mixture. It’s not merely the coffee story, or the “Bad Form” aspect, or the feud between two activists. There is now also the serious literal rape culture accusation in the room, that also goes directly against people in the audience and atheist movement at large. For good measure, she also levels accusations at the YouTube scene for writing death threats. Meanwhile, Richard Dawkins was perhaps drinking his tea, or was sniffing at flowers in his garden.
This explosion engulfs the online atheist-skeptics corner, and the mushroom cloud looked like a giant Rorschach test. Only a handful of people knew the whole picture, and PZ Myers or Richard Dawkins were not among them. Most saw some parts only, and to each some other element was relevant. Also the blame game and name-calling began very quickly, which created many side-feuds that have little to do with anything. Basically, the beginning of a religious war where some people saw the rabbit in the cloud, and others saw the duck.
Richard Dawkins opened his notebook that day, and a shockwave of heat singed his grey hair. The atheist-skeptics community lost their minds over what seems to be a completely trivial issue, whether you can make a double entendre in a lift in a well-populated hotel. He typed up a response, reminding everyone that there are bigger fish to fry and thought about getting on with gardening. Maybe he didn’t like Rebecca Watson after their encounter (I don’t know), the awkward panel, her going against his friend Paula Kirby. Who knows, it can explain some acidness.
The situation was explosive already, before he stepped into it. Dawkins responded to it, because it was apparently such a big deal. The problem was, he is Richard Dawkins. Big name. Blog networks quickly made sausage of his comment, he got all the attention and it then looked like as if his “Dear Muslima” letter was responsible for the outrage. It’s like a couple fights over the shatters of their marriage, and the grumpy neighbour is annoyed by their noise. He knocks and tells them to stop it already. But this is the internet. Story and drama took over, cultivated in information silos, and now suddenly the grumpy neighbour is blamed that their marriage failed.
Everyone quitely forgot about that literal Rape Culture thing for a few years, showing right there, how something trivial can take over — just as he complains about in the letter. Turn it as you want, it’s true. Coffee truly is more important than rape culture, and more important than FGM and the other things. It’s that way, QED.
His letter can be picked apart as well. First, it’s not even about or towards Rebecca Watson. It is posted in response to “Always Name Names” on PZ’s blog. Second, Dawkins invents a fictitious “privileged feminist” as the writer, who tells “Dear Muslima” to shut up. It’s not saying that the feminist, i.e. Rebecca Watson should shut up. And third, the context of the letter is that the Muslima must have previously complained about having suffered genital mutilation “with a razor blade”, isn’t allowed to drive, is beaten by her husband and so on, which is dismissed by the fictitious “privileged feminist”. The letter is a response to this (also fictitious) situation. Some people, no doubt, saw this as an unfavourable portrayal of feminists in general. Others as attacking Rebecca Watson and so on. In other words, Outrage Rorschach.
Communication models aren’t very useful, because Dawkins doesn’t address Watson, and to be exact, nobody in particular. The next best guess is to read the appeal function to urge the reader to care about “Dear Muslima” and not dismiss her concerns. If the empowerment of Muslim women is part of feminism then his letter cannot possibly be anti-feminist, or anti-women. That’s ludicrous. You can read it just as well as that atheism and feminism could team up, take her concerns seriously.
The elephant in the room is woke culture that is not as intersectional as they always claim. They are much more a classic antiracist movement and by far more driven by this mindset. I believe they are a form of vulgar critical race theory, where the intersectional element is basically gutted and only used to “connect” different oppressed groups. This leads, together with the radical feminist elements in Critical Race Theory to a vulgar cricial race theory plus critical gender theory hybrid, which resembles what’s sometimes dubbed 4th Wave Feminism. This goes probably far too deep into the matter, but the gist is that “wokeness” is antiracist and (multi) culturalistic, which is also visible in safe spaces and cultural segregationist ideas. Non-woke people, especially leftists consider this “regressive”, see above. Also for good reason, since Critical Race Theory is opposed to Enlightenment liberalism (another of these pesky points that was never really discussed anywhere).
But in the conflict Dawkins describes are the elements that are open to actual intersectionality, and which I have shown above in which way. Namely, the whole part about dismissing of circumstances in minority cultures because of a clash between traditional white feminist concerns and antiracism. It can be applied to the discussion around it, too, where the same situation happened ever since, namely that the “woke” are now famous for downplaying the concerns of minority women, e.g. Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour who told Ayaan Hirsi Ali, victim of FGM, that she wished she “could their vaginas away”. I guess you don’t like Hirsi Ali, and this justifies what Sarour tweeted. How about Sarah Haider, who said “as consequence an audience on the Left now frightens me nearly as much as an audience of Islamists does.” ( Islam and the Necessity of Liberal Critique, American Humanist Association, 2015).
So, the full picture is that, in reality, the American atheist audiences and critics of Dawkins are mostly woke (wannabe) intersectionalists. The antiracist concerns are much more pronounced and important across the pond than they are in Europe. You have your slavery and race thing still going strong. But since American progressives suffer from the “massive hypocognition”, they are unable to see their own cultural context. If they were intersectional in the Crenshaw sense, which I showed you with many quotations across her paper, they could have find a way to navigate this better. They didn’t, which is why I come to this conclusion.
@77. Discordian.
Personally, I have had enough of powerful (read: white men) telling people how they should or should not react.
Part of the “woke” environment is learning more about what to be woke about.
It takes time, it takes patience and it takes encouragement to grow within our own selves.
I have read your screeds and feel like you are trying to beat up on those of us screaming that we have had enough of the permissive rape culture we are saturated in, we have all lived our lives waiting it out in hopes that men finally get it.
Obviously you think we are not “woke enough” to pass your piss test.
Charity, Mr. Discordian, charity.
Perhaps one day the rest of us will reach your very subjective standards.
Or, conversely, perhaps one day you will get off your precious lily white high horse and get real.
You’re just making shit up. Dawkins writes the letter, references the feminist in the 3rd person, not the first, and fucking signs it with his own name.
Dawkins was quite up front with his message that Rebecca (at least) should shut up. It was the clear message of Dear Muslima, but for those who don’t want to see the obvious, there was also the zero bad clarification:
[emphasis added]
This is Dawkins himself.
He didn’t say, “I was critiquing a fictional privileged feminist”. He said he was sarcastically dismissive of Rebecca Watson personally.
He didn’t say, “My point is that over the last few weeks a disproportionately small amount of attention was paid to the issues of muslim women right at the moment when X was being considered and, if it came to pass, would have helped muslim women. By spending our energies on this, we’ve lost an important opportunity to do good for muslim women.”
He said what his point was, and it’s perfectly consistent with the interpretation of everyone whom you believe judged him too harshly: Dawkins thought Watson should shut up about her experience.
You are making shit up that is inconsistent with both the obvious meaning of Dear Muslima and Dawkins’ direct statements clarifying Dear Muslima.
If you weren’t so self-professedly informed about this whole situation, I might think you were honestly deluded.
Someone throw the Discordian a nice piece of fish – they’ve certainly earned it!
Discordian, you do realise that assuming women at conferences are there for sex rather than the business of the conference is part of rape culture, right? It’s not a distraction from the issue because it’s part of the same issue.
Using Muslim women’s concerns as part of a sarcastic dismissal of the issue at hand is a distraction, however. Dawkins was not genuinely directing people to other issues, and has not done any significant work on the problems he posed as being oh-so-concerned about. He was using Muslim women, appropriating their genuine concerns in order to dismiss Rebecca Watson, while not particularly caring about them except as a rhetorical tool. That is the opposite of intersectionality.
Wow, we are having the exact same discussion again?
Nothing has changed.
Why can’t we be concerned with both?
Thanks for the retelling Discordian. I think I did get it the first couple of times thought, but we’ll see. I might be fallaciously rounding it down but it does sound mainly like one of the more sophisticated versions of the basic defense of Dawkins we’ve heard since 2011 – he’s right, we shouldn’t be talking about this- Only the sheltered (American) Left cares about this stuff instead of real issues.
There’s a couple of problems with this; one is that constant charge that has been levelled against every feminist issue for a decade now and that’s that white western women in particular had better not complain about things unless it’s helping poor women across the world etc. There’s two prongs to that part – People basically everywhere spend a lot of time discussing the minutiae of rules that are very tangible and immediate to themselves. That’s just civics. We should not be expecting “The Left” to somehow be different. And secondly it carries that implication that the volume of concern has certain limits so if too much is spent on one thing then it cannot be meaningfully spent on other things that may be deemed more important.
No one should ever credit this argument. It is wholly specious and certainly not skeptical to presume you know how people are spending their time, effort, money or what the more effective strategy would be. Perhaps the existence of the most welcoming convention environment would bring more women connected to the muslim community and perhaps the lobbying of government regarding international relations and human rights is best left to those who know that area. Who is to say? (and that itself is often indicative of another schism, with some people being more concerned over subtle social forces and others over grand gestures. And that’s a debate that will go on maybe forever)
The other aspect is in the context as you have drawn it, which I find to be incomplete. Perhaps the biggest irony is that this initial argument was over how Watson addressed McGraw; namely in a talk from the podium. The debate centred on the elevator incident and “guys don’t do that” because that is what Stef highlighted herself and Watson took issue with that. McGraw doesn’t think the incident warrants such attention or is an example of the problem Watson identifies at conventions. Watson replies that not only is that an example of the overall spirit of casual misogyny (which is a hand grenade of a word seen very differently by different people and I think probably didn’t help the discussion) but McGraw’s need to pick out something so small as not worth comment is part of apologising for this bad situation.
In this regard the debate sprang from the elevator incident and circled around it from the very start. It’s true to say that there was another dimension initially and that was whether or not Watson should address someone from the podium like that. The argument there is that she is too high in standing to be shooting down at a comparative nobody. What we see here is that one broad grouping saw the skeptic movement as full of implicit hierarchies and respect structures and the others saw it more casually as people talking about stuff (it even seems as though the people labelled generally as ‘left’ thought of it more as a conversational level playing field and those seemingly more ‘right’ were very worried about misbehaviour of those higher on the implicit food chain. I don’t know what Marx would make of this. I’ve got a rough idea what that author of The Authoritarians would make of it). As such many people seemed much more engaged thanks to someone at the top of the food chain, the leader and king of Atheism stepping in to lay out what was most important.
It’s impossible to say for sure, but I doubt that thread would have been so long and fractious had he not commented. The issue truly went viral after that. People jumped in at the point and to find out “what’s this all about?” they get the short precis “Oh this Rebecca Watson character complained about a guy asking her out for coffee in a elevator”. At which point they find a discussion about why women are unnerved at all in some situations (a true revelation to some people apparently), the explanation includes a general fear of rape and assault. That itself then gets rounded to “Rebecca Watson compared being asked out for coffee to rape” (look around. You will find this)
The other implication put forward is that ‘literal rape culture’ was forgotten by the community because of this hue and cry (and therefore Dawkins was also right). That’s not my recollection at all. The subject of sexual harassment and assault at conventions was pretty regular and always came with very public “whispers” of so-and-so doing the thing. People were circumspect about throwing accusations in public. If anything the long running elevatorgate/slymepit feud kept the matter at least simmering on scienceblogs and freethoughtblogs. Then about a year later you have Thunderf00t joining freethoughblogs, as probably the biggest atheist youtuber at the time, and then falling out with the network very loudly over this exact issue: – personal conduct rules at skeptic and atheist conventions. These rules were put in place as instruments for recourse over sexual harassment allegations. He was dismissed from the network for his behaviour and angrily went on an anti-feminist video crusade of legendary proportions (I would speculate that a decent amount of his audience went on to take issue with Anita Saarkeesian’s kickstarter shortly thereafter. And on and on it goes).
The subject of “Literal Rape Culture” was never forgotten or even diminished in this time. If anything elevatorgate and what it sprang from ensured it got more attention.
@Jefrir:
Consider your entire comment #81 to be quoted by me for truth.
Apologies, I cannot address everyone at once.
We have now the luxury of hindsight, and we can actually go check. Let’s do that right now, and see: on Wikipedia: Elevatorgate goes as follows. Rebecca Watson makes her “guys don’t do that video” following the Dublin conference. This sparked an outrage, to which Richard Dawkins responds with his letter. Notice something? The key event vanished without a trace, along with the “literal rape culture” subject Rebecca Watson has brought up. It’s just not there. See above for full context, here’s some aspect:
Okay, let’s check Know Your Meme, the site that keeps track of internet history. Same story, with a bit more detail. Watson said her “guys don’t do that” thing, everyone freaked out. Dawkins added fuel to the fire, a civil war ensues. That’s it. Nothing of rape culture.
I can add plenty of personal experience – anecdotes yes – but they tell the exact same story. Everyone and their pet knows the coffee-proposal. The “Dear Muslima” letter and “guys don’t do that” are practically a meme. A few recognize the name McGraw, which they sorted away as some cat-fight between Watson and her, and remember the “Bad Form” aspect (i.e. whether and how online feuds should be brought to a stage). Virtually nobody is aware that Rebecca Watson brought up rape and sexual assault at atheist conferences there and then. It vanished. Keep denying it, it’s a fact. This is why a certain grenade exploded a few years later. And it took some more years until anything resembling an investigation begun. The cases only surfaced later, piecemeal.
Still not convinced? Let’s look at what Amanda Marcotte had to say about the matter just recently. As a journalist and supporter of Rebecca Watson who reported about the case also at the time, it should count what she has to say. Elevatorgate according to her:
You’ll recognize that this is basically the same narrative as on Wikipedia, and Know Your Meme. So, we’re down to “gentle request” now? That article is both about Elevatorgate as well as one of the recent high profile case, and of course will no doubt fuel the citogenesis further. You could think that Rebecca Watson’s CFI talk never happened.
Yes, American atheist, feminist and skeptics worked themselves up over some comment by Richard Dawkins, and meanwhile downplayed, overlooked, forgot about something serious. Which is, in spirit, what Dear Muslima was about. Dismissing the serious in favour of something trivial. And no, double entendre with asking for consent is not the same as rape and sexual assault. I completely agree with Rebecca Watson about her “guys don’t …” sentiment. The proposal there and then was a jerk move. Don’t do it. But I am also capable to see that the guy used a polite double entendre (i.e. veiled advance), took a “no” for an answer and that was it. Once you place that next to the massive outrage on one side, and to serious matters like rape and sexual assault that apparently happened, and which she brought up there and then, then this particular coffee incident is indeed approaching zero bad.
If you have 100% bandwidth, and you have to decide what goes on your agenda and how much width it takes way, and you can choose between some awkward coffee proposal, rape, sexual assault, female genital mutilation, domestic violence, and so forth, and you really spent most with the coffee, then perhaps Richard Dawkins was right. The serious stuff is dismissed in favour of trivial nonsense (in comparison).
Of course, you can be concerned about everything, but as I have shown you above, from Wikipedia, Know Your Meme, and to Marcotte, evidently, there was no concern for everything.
the Discordian
Do you know how to provided links to your sources?
@Mr. Discordian…
You do not seem to understand that sexual assault of any degree can result in debilitating effects on a human’s life and psyche. You minimize what RD said in his response as if it was not assaultive on all of us.
On ALL of us, men AND women.
Why give him a pass if the assault’s effects continue to be alive?
In other comments, he minimizes date rape as if knowing and trusting your assailant does not do as much damage as stranger rape.
Really.
I don’t know that providing links to Discordians retelling of the incident while wearing misogyny blinders is going to help their case. Indeed, it is abundantly apparent that Discordians are all about disinformation.
This pile of feces deserves a porcupine. We clearly have not forgotten the serious “something”, considering that this incident occured in 2011 and we are STILL discussing it with random sexist tools from the wilds of the internet. Richard and his toadies are such pompous liars that they accuse women of somehow being the ones who are downplaying the culture of misogyny that we navigate on a daily basis. Mansplaining at length to the experts on the subject is merely another entited dude behavior, right up there with acting like a douche who ignores every statement made by RW because he thinks his stupid penis trumps all.
The initial thread (with 1000’s of comments) spawned two more threads in the process of confirming that yes, it really was Richard who felt the need to mansplain and condescendingly pen “Dear Muslima” while telling western women that they weren’t experiencing sexism because FGM exists. (such logic!) It was such an honor to be gifted with a classic fallacy of “zero bad” from an old white man who is soaking in misogyny and privilege.
PZ’s final comment on the third thread. *lolsob*
@the Discordian:
You’ve already lied about Dear Muslima. Now you’re making this allegation?
Yes, if you’d like to use one of the more disparaging characterizations, some people “worked themselves up”.
However, in order to make the case that the same people “downplayed, overlooked, [or] forgot about something serious” you’d have to make the case that people actually downplayed something. You can’t, because that thread is full of people sticking up for the right of feminists to criticize bad acts and bad actors, something absolutely necessary to the fight against those very evils Dawkins used to argue for feminists to be silenced.
The actual fact is that you are now and Dawkins was then arguing that women shouldn’t speak up about small violations of consent because larger violations of consent and other rights exist. If this argument is allowed to stand, the same muslim bugbears which you use to justify shutting up atheist women will use Dawkins’ then-validated argument to silence the women standing up to those greater violations. Standing against Dear Muslima and your tortured “intersectionality proves Dawkins right” rationalizations is part of what we do to stand up for marginalized people anywhere and everywhere, of whatever gender, oppressed by whatever power.
Your arguments are repugnant in content, and in combination with your willingness to brazenly lie about easily verifiable sources, you can contribute nothing more of worth to this thread.
Now’s when you shut down your computer, toss your death sticks in the trash and tell yourself, “I need to go home and rethink my life.”
It’s hard to let go of one’s narrative and beliefs, especially when they are important myths. See the sources above. How about another one, that would be the fourth, for good measure. Buzzfeed, this year on Krauss:
Same story, as above. Now we have Wikipedia, Know Your Meme, Salon/Marcotte, and Buzzfeed, and I think I can come up with some more. You’re wrong. The central piece, the CFI talk with the “literal rape culture” is missing. It’s reduced to guys don’t do that, the letter, the flamewar, and sometimes a few other flourishes or details, but that’s the outline. Which is total bollocks.
Beside, this “official” version is not written by misogynists and anti-feminists who have purposefully omitted some part. That’s Amanda Marcotte, Wikipedia and many such sources, even in articles exposing someone. Aside of this, what Elevatorgate is to you personally is irrlevant. It’s a Rorschach test for everyone, anyway. Some knew (and know) more, others know less. The more you know, the less clear the whole thing becomes.
///////////////////////////////////
I can walk you through it, when you have trouble. The letter is written to a fictional Dear Muslima. She might be living in England, or anywhere else but America. Dear Muslima has previously complained about her hardships to the author of the letter, and this letter is the response to her. In it, the author dismisses her by pointing to her metaphorical “poor American sisters” (which includes Rebecca) and argues that their hardships are greater. The author defends the skepchicks. That’s the literal version.
Of course, the author is Richard Dawkins, this defense is sarcastic, and it‘s a mere blog comment and not an actual letter to anyone. He uses a rhetorical device where he writes from the view of a fictional character, which is the narrator, and who becomes the writer of the letter. The narrator is not identical to Dawkins, but a caricature of a privileged feminist, one who has the opinion that the lift proposal is worse than what the Muslima has to endure. The effect is a sarcastic, caustic commentary on the situation. But sarcasm doesn’t mean that you can switch everything, including the roles of the characters around, who is addressee, who should grow a thicker skin etcetera. That’s your interpretation, and while possible, is more on the eccentric side.
Style, format, or publishing location of the letter have little to do with Rebecca Watson personally. She is not addressed, remember, the thing is called Dear Muslima. It‘s not posted to her blog, or below a video of hers — all of which would be easily possible to him. It‘s not a video response. She is mentioned sarcastically as that poor American sister, i.e. a different character in the implied conversation with the Muslima.
The target of the letter is the community, who seemed to prioritize an ostensible trivial matter, while atheism and feminism have more important subjects to tackle, namely Muslima’s plight. The context of that one is that Dawkins is an atheist, and writes this into a mainly atheist blog, addressing a mainly atheist community and so has looked for an area where apparently atheism and feminism have most common ground. The situation he describes, FGM, domestic violence etcetera are meant to be starkest contrast to the ostensible trivial matter. The categories are not muslims vs western women, but serious vs trivial in context of atheism and feminism.
He has that view, because like most people, the CFI talk with the serious matters, i.e. Rape Culture, were not online. People heard that something big went down at the talk, and they heard it was about McGraw/Watson, about the video she made earlier, which itself, Arabian Nights style contained the lift story. That were the salient parts, together with Bad Form and such stuff. YouTubers were more concerned with the death threat allegation, and so on. Because this other stuff was readily available, it became the material that went viral, and it’s that to which virtually everyone of the big name respond to.
For comparison, with roughly the days in between.
Guys Don’t to that video: Published on Jun 20
~~ 4 Days ~~
CFI Talk Live: June 24, 2011
~~ 1 week ~~
Bad Form Rebecca Watson, July 1
~~ a day later ~~
Always name names!, Posted on: July 2
~~ same day ~~
Dear Muslima, July 2
~~ 3 days later ~~
Privilege Delusion, Jul 5, 2011
~~ 3 weeks later !!! ~~
CFI Talk Upload: Published on Jul 27. Everyone could see the “literal rape culture” talk, and by that time the narrative was set, and as I demonstrated above, this crucial part was quitely dropped.
So, there was a massive asychonricity of information. Essentially, for some people, this was already about rape culture (CFI talk), while to others this was merely about coffee in a lift (guys don’t do that). And this, I put to you, is how the sausage was made. Go ahead, check it.
the Discordian:
<snicker>
I was here during the whole thing; you can’t snow me.
(Also, as the OP notes, “How can you forget “Zero Bad”?”)
And yours is more of a bullshitty eisegesis.
PS
“There should be no rivalry in victimhood, and I’m sorry I once said something similar to American women complaining of harassment, inviting them to contemplate the suffering of Muslim women by comparison.”
by Richard Dawkins Aug 6, 2014
As if being an utter asshole to a woman in a lift is somehow separate from “literal rape culture”. No, no cried the willfully blind troll, these are merely trees! We could not possibly be inside a literal forest. Literal forests have sharia tigers, and headscarf pythons!
fish cookies for the spot-on marine mammal performance
@the Discordian
No. You’re just lying. The faux-letter starts with “Dear Muslima” and it ends with the signature “Richard”.
One doesn’t normally sign blog comments. The signature was part of the faux-letter created by Dawkins, not separate from it. If the letter was meant to be written by a privileged feminist, he would have had it signed by a privileged feminist.
But no. It was signed “Richard”.
Now, obviously the letter was sarcastic, and we aren’t meant to take it to mean that Richard Dawkins actually believes that muslim women’s concerns should be ignored, but there’s no doubt that it was signed “Richard”. It wasn’t a privileged feminist talking – it was a sarcastic Dawkins. You have made up the “privileged feminist” character out of whole cloth. Poof! No evidence, and yet you insist it is there.
And guess what? That thing you don’t want us to think – that Dawkins was actually dismissing FGM as a real issue worthy of concern? Literally nobody thought that.
Also bullshit, since you’re ignoring Dawkins’ subsequent comments at the time which included the “zero bad” comment that specified his point was both about Watson and directed in part toward Watson.
For someone who pretends to care about history, you’re really willing to write a lot of fiction into your history.
And thus,
1. Those of us who rejected and repudiated Dear Muslima as an argument to shut up about things that the powerful & famous don’t think are important enough got it right at the time. Dawkins did nothing to raise awareness of FGM and advocated no alternative activity to which the community might turn its energies that might benefit those at risk of or already victimized by FGM. Dawkins entire point – which he clarified at the time – was that Watson should shut up because what she experienced was “zero bad”.
2. Your insistence that intersectional approaches were not used and would, if used, have led to a different response are exposed as ridiculous. If you know that this isn’t about the experiences of muslim women vs atheist women or muslim women vs english speaking feminists or “western feminists”, then the intersectional analysis isn’t the most salient. Since what we have is some guy telling women that at least one of their issues is unimportant, the most salient issue is whether women will allow men to tell them to shut up about issues that affect women if and when some man thinks the issue isn’t important enough relative to some other really bad issue. Since you agree the issues are “serious vs trivial” and the derivative issues that implies (esp. shutting up or not), then either you really, really don’t know shit about intersectionality or you were making your original argument dishonestly.
Either way, you have shredded your credibility while validating the perspective of those who criticized Dawkins for characterizing the issues raised by Watson as trivial and a waste of time to discuss.
That’s some severely incompetent argumentation, cupcake.
I don’t know what separate means, but yes, there are many important differences between rape and that lift situation. You have to go several level of abstraction upwards until you find some way to bring these things together. One general theme is “feeling of safety” that is undermined (or destroyed) by bad experiences like these, and it’s one of the dozens of facets. But then you’re trivializing sexual assault and rape, and the rape victims she mentions etc. You go from “the roof is on fire” to “policy about which exits must be unobstructed at all times”.
@Morales
And? Nothing you say is controversial. He was challenged and then explains how he views the lift situation. Let’s make it really simple for you. Let’s grant he was completey wrong with his assessment. Then you have Richard Dawkins commenting on a blog that he personally finds the double entendre zero bad, and then we agree here that be totally wrong about that. Fine. Granted. And now what? In case you don’t realize, this shows very little. Because the outrage must be justified, many rationalize a connection that wasn’t there at the time. Because they mistake the origin of the outrage for his Dear Muslima letter, when in reality, it was the CFI talk (which evidently contained serious “literal rape culture” stuff, but which, as I’ve demonstrated with numerous sources, didn’t make it into the official lore, hence we see the rationalisation and narratives to patch it up).
Also, a reminder, you are free to explain what I am missing and bring some evidence.
the Discordian #92
That explains alot.
Literal rape culture is apparently the notion that whatever some douchebag does in order to get laid is perfectly lovely as long as its not rape? I’m sure discordian will splain the difference between their “literal rape culture” and plain ol’ regular rape culture that all women are familiar with.
No. Outrage needs no justification. People feel what they feel. No justification is needed for human beings. Perhaps on Vulcan things are different, but the rest of us don’t live there.
And you are just off your rocker. No one is pissed because of the origin of Dawkins’ outrage. Plenty of people are pissed that Dawkins is telling women and feminists to shut up, and why he’s telling women to shut up is a marginal issue at best.
And guess what, he really was telling people to shut up! So that thing that people are mad about? The people who are mad actually got it right. Whatever you’re on about is lying, bullshit, & wankery.
Well, that’s easy. Some people can afford conceit. You aren’t one of them.
1) I did not deny that he has a signature underneath. He was also logged in as “Richard Dawkins”. It’s not controversial that he really wrote that comment: Yes, he did. Since I did not claim otherwise, I obvioisly did not lie. I only interpret his text as portraying a fictional exchange between a stereotypical white feminist writing a letter to a Muslima. It’s also clear that it was sarcastic and caustic.
Let’s see. Other comment by him.
There. You’re wrong.
How clueless do you have to be to think that the only things that could possibly be part of “rape culture” are actual instances of rape?
Why are these trolls always so bad at logic!?! No fool, just because you can find an example of Richard signing a blog comment, does not make Crip Dyke wrong when she said that people do not normally sign blog comments. Dear Muslima was signed “Richard”, and your attempts to recast it as feminist satire failed miserably. Old white dudes really need to learn how to shut their mouths about things they can’t even begin to notice IRL.
the Discordian #101
Perhaps you are just deluded.
the Discordian:
Why? This is about a matter of opinion about the propriety of certain social interactions.
(From his privileged white old famous rich man position, it’s the obvious assessment, from which he has not resiled.)
But sure, from a social progressive point of view, it is wrong.
Granted.
No. That was not the main point he intended; the main point he intended (and subsequently acknowledged explicitly via his apology) is that the reaction was inappropriate because other women had it worse.
You’re the one granting he is wrong, not me. You tell me.
I already have. Did you not see my hyperlinked citation and quotation where he apologised?
[OT]
chigau, http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2010/04/alot-is-better-than-you-at-everything.html
John Morales
I have hardly ever used “a lot” since I first read that.
The whole point about the signature is completely irrelevant since nobody denies that he wrote the letter. Cryp Dyke, who is reluctant with evidence, invented the talking point to accuse me of lying. The other point that people don’t “normally” add a signature is even less important for anything, and her point was (irrelevant, but still) that the signature was meant as part of this letter, i.e. Dawkins “as himself” signs the letter, rather than portraying a fictional exchange. Cryp Dyke wrote exactly: “The signature was part of the faux-letter created by Dawkins, not separate from it.”
But Dawkins posted his signature also under another comment, written straight-forward. Therefore the signature has no relevance for the letter. To be precise, the signature is non-diegetic. It’s just his habit of adding it under his blog post.
I also did not “recast it as feminist satire”. The “privileged feminist” is the target of the mockery! The narrator of the letter, who thinks that double entendres are worse than FGM is meant to look ridiculous.
FailTrombone.wmv
Ah, Discordian didn’t make up feminist satire from whole cloth, just the entire straw feminist/privileged feminist rationalization for the everyday sexism created by RD by writing Dear Muslima in the first place. . So logic, so win.
tD:
Dawkins’ target was himself? <snicker>
Your claim is patently ludicrous, and I find your ostensible obtuseness is indistinguishable from trolling.
That “letter” clearly and unambigously mocks the concept of making a fuss about such a nothing thing, and there is no doubt that it is Dawkins doing the mocking.
This was all thoroughly discussed in the original thread, back then.
Extremely thoroughly.
(And the “zero bad” was an attempt to justify the mockery after he noted the general reception to his claim, which is of course not to say that it’s not also that of some fictional stereotypical white feminist writing a letter to a Muslima)
I was just a lurker during the Muslima discussion, but eventually delurked in about a week after the hatetroll brigades just kept slithering in to esplain and justify the blatant sexism. nearly 3000 comments in the original three threads covered the feminism and rape culture aspects in great detail. I don’t recall if we also discussed how racist it was of RD to use a Muslima as his shield against the feminists.
You’ve quite clearly agreed with us that it’s at least sarcasm, if not exactly satire. So I find it most likely that you’re resisting not the idea that this could be satire, but that it could be feminist.
And yet you think that this anti-feminist satire would receive a more favorable reading if intersectional feminists took their models more seriously?
You truly are incoherent.
@Tethys:
It was mentioned. I can’t remember how often, but it’s there.
I havent caught up with the recent stuff yet but…
@the Discordian
No. Just no. There’s no intersectional with “Dear Muslima”.
“Dear Muslima” was a fallacious* attempt to try to get women in Richard Dawkins’s social proximity to stop complaining about social problems that directly affect them, by mockingly asserting that their concerns were unimportant compared to other social problems perceived as worse. I don’t actually believe that Dawkins’s cared about those other social problems when he made that statement, he simply wanted to use the experiences of Muslim women to make women in his social proximity stop complaining about harassment and other things.
When one is trying to shove a set of social problems over another through such means one is being exclusionary. A similar example would be how Ayaan Hirsi Ali was dismissive of homophobia in the west.
http://queereka.com/2015/04/10/we-have-more-to-worry-about-than-not-getting-cake-ayaan-hirsi-ali/
You don’t try to get help with one set of social problems by downplaying, mocking or dismissing social problems someone else is experiencing. Unless I missed something intersectionality is about the interconnections between social categorizations and not about the dismissal of the experiences of one category with the experiences of another.
There’s no fixing that shit. As far as I am concerned Dawkins used Muslim women as a tool, a means to his end and not as real people. The role-modeling provided by metoo and related campaigns will be far more valuable to women around the world than any shaming of one’s local women. Dawkins’s was simply a misogynist being a misogynist with fallacious reasoning.
*Argument from relative privation
It’s legitimately not that deep.
White guy got mad that a woman had the temerity to criticize men for being creepy fucks and made a dishonest attempt at silencing them with a “not as bad” fallacy.
Porivil Sorrens,
No, no. How can a woman be in the right and a rich white atheist bro be wrong???
@Brony, Social Justice Cenobite
The facts tell you something different. The topic was called “Always Name Names” (archive.is/xraw7) and was on the controversy that erupted over the CFI talk. Watson herself characterizes this part as “[n]one of my critics at any point offered any counterargument concerning my points on objectification or feminism … all their criticism was entirely about tone”.
What are these points, you ask? That would be: “A women’s reasonable expectation to feel safe from sexual objectification and assault at a skeptic and atheist events is outweighed by a man’s right to sexually objectify her” and “[t]hey’re tired of being objectified and some of them actually have been raped. quite a number have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted. And situations like the one I was in, in an elevator, would have triggered a panic attack.”
Let’s spell it out. Nobody cared about the content of what she said, even though she references rape and sexual assault. It became about tone. The lift incident was merely introduction, and the starting point of the discussion with McGraw. There actual points were much severe, potentially with “whispers” in the background. Here’s one clue: in this very segment, Rebecca Watson thanks Melody Hensley for her enthusiastic applause. This year, Buzzfeed publishes Hensley’s history with Lawrence Krauss. Go figure.
This makes it such severe for insiders. But to the casual reader, maybe across the pond, it’s an unremarkable episode, who think it’s about some coffee proposal, and a astonishingly disproportionate outrage. The bulk of her argument didn’t make the cut. This is a fact. The video of the talk, so that you can see for yourself came online a month later. Too late. By that time, the train left the station. Consequently, it was dropped from the timeline altogether. This is also a fact. We know this from the “official” lore, and I brought four big examples above (Wikipedia, Know Your Meme, Buzzfeed, Salon/Marcotte).
So, what happened instead, people heard something big was going on at the CFI conference, misinformed, where McGraw/Watson “tone” was salient to them, which lead them onto the online paper trail that goes back to the video with “guys don’t do that”. This was available, and went viral.
This leads to two different impressions. One “strong form” known to insiders (who attended the talk, know the whispers etc) and which contains sexual assault and rape. And a separate but connected “weak form” which is the friendly request of “guy’s don’t do that” and an inappropriate, but consensual encounter (he asked, she said no). The take-away is that everyone overlooked the severe part. It’s for this reason that the CFI incident is therefore completely gone from official lore.
Dawkins commented, evidently, on the controversy. When asked on the alleged central topic (the coffee incident), he elaborates that he thinks this encounter was zero bad. There is no silencing or any of this rubbish. The greater topic, women in atheism at the 2011 World Atheist Convention; a conference he attended (the panel itself featured women), and apparently did not try to shut up. Also, Watson herself says that the discussion became about tone already. And we also know, for a fact, that her actual talk at CFI was later quietly dropped and is not part of the official lore! You can delude yourself as much as you want, but the facts tell a different story.
The two things he could go by were (A) people are very upset over something, where all sorts of things were conflated from tone, naming names, to women feeling unwelcoming, to whatever. (B) But the central aspect was, somehow a double entendre where nothing happened. This is why he says that the lift encounter does not warrant this outrage when there are more important things atheist-feminist could worry about, namely Muslimas. He could not know about the other important topics or the reasoning of Rebecca Watson, when obviously nobody made it a subject, but instead focussed on the lift thing and tone!
Then there is the Europe/US Divide. Muslims in the USA make up about one percent (Pew, Fact Tank, January 6, 2016). But in the UK, the percent are four to five times as high, with over 10% concentrated in London. Christianity in the UK is Anglican, which is mostly deistic Cafeteria Christianity. The most relevant religious-conservative and patriarchal religion is not Evangelicalism (as in the USA), but Islam. This is also a completly different situation. You cannot pompously declare that your social justice concerns travel easily elsewhere, too, along with the latest fashion in woke culture.
In the US, Muslims have been adopted as a minority group. Crenshaw discusses the dynamics at play between, among other things, antiracism and feminism, which cause vulnerable people at the “intersection” fall through the cracks. People like Dear Muslima. Rather than being addressed, the neo intersectional movement has completely subsumed the point, and fell back to old habits.
I cited relevant remarks from Crenshaw above for comparison. Namely, Muslims are essentialized to be just Muslims on one side, and women are essentialized to their womanhood to the other side. “Dear Muslima”, at the intersection of both, falls through the cracks. One the antiracist side, people don’t want to really address patriarchal structures in Islam, as to avoid adding to stereotype and prejudice, and getting applause from the wrong people. On the other side, feminists, and a majority of them being white, have other concerns. Atheist-feminist, especially those who claim they are intersectional, would have been in an excellent position to deal with that problem, and they didn’t.
It’s a conspiracy.
Men should not ask stranger women they run into in an elevator to come to their hotel room.
@ the Discordian #117
None of what you posted was relevant to what I brought up. If you are incapable of seriously addressing a counter explanation (with a relevant second example) you are not here for a reasonable discussion. Especially when your explanation amounts to a novel challenge to the existing accepted explanation around here. You can’t just expect people to accept your idea that intersectionality can be applied to “Dear Muslima” if you don’t also deal with the existing explanation and why yours fits better relative to the existing explanation.
For reference I’ll quote the entirety of “Dear Muslima” .
1)Any potential other way of Dawkins expressing the content of “Dear Muslima” must have his goals in mind. It’s your job to propose an intersectional framework that also meets Dawkins’s goals Discordian. Without that this is all you thinking that there are intersectional issues to think about independantly of “Dear Muslima” and Dawkins.
What are those goals? I argue that his goals are that the set of women* he is mocking** stop complaining, that is to say he wants them to be silent. This is contempt for what women in his social proximity are expressing with Watson given as an example of a set.
This is social shaming. Serious question for you Discordian do you agree that the purpose of social shaming is to stop something that someone else is doing? If you do you have to provide an intersectional approach that results in the “American sisters” no longer complaining about what they experience since that is Dawkins’s goal.
If you can’t address the whole reason that Dawkins did this there is simply no need for your intersectional approach to the content of “Dear Muslima” because this reduces to you wanting to point out problems relating to intersectionality which you would need to do independently of “Dear Muslima”.
*”…poor American sisters…”
**The mockery is in the pretending that women in his social proximity are being contemptuous through sarcastic role-playing of a fake “American sister”, irony.
2) “Dear Muslima” is an example of an argument from relative privation.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Not_as_bad_as
The whole condescending, mocking approach is a belittlement of what the “American sisters” are complaining about. There is no respect for what anyone including Watson are concerned with in evidence (due to the ironic mockery), and the experiences of women outside of the atheist/skeptic community were not actually part of the issue (there were no Muslim women being told to be quiet by “American sisters, Dawkins totally made that up out of whole cloth and international support is separate from dealing with local issues) so I’m happy with asserting that 3 is implied, Dawkins wanted the “American sisters” to be quiet, and ignored by reducing their complaints being unimportant of any social attention.
The long-winded troll “the Discordian” has been banned.
His intimate familiarity with ancient, discredited slymer-style arguments tells me that he’s not new to this subject, and that he’s just here to regurgitate the same old garbage.
discordian
Cool story bro. I didn’t quote any of the falderal about “American sisters” but if you are truly interested in facts, here are a few that blow giant holes in your strange theories.
1. Dawkins commented at Pharangula, by writing “Dear Muslima”. He was not asked about it.
2. Zero bad was a defensive follow-up comment, that merely doubled down on the side of chauvinistic asshat.
3. Both comments were directed quite specifically at American feminists, and in particular the Skepchicks and Rebecca Watson.
The central topic of all of these facts is the background radiation that is rapeculture. Since we have now included even more of the serial sexual predators in the discussion, it is worth noting that Richard Dawkins has also put much time and energy into defending his rapist buddy Shermer. Rape culture is not limited to the skeptic sphere, and is a fact no matter how many old white men of privilege screech about it being zero bad, or try to deflect approbium onto brown-skinned religious groups when they get called out for broadcasting a total crap example of social behavior.
annd as usual I miss the typos on preview. Pharygula.
@Brony:
As further evidence, there’s also the quote provided by John Morales upthread:
Dawkins is clearly stating here that his Dear Muslima comment was advocating a rivalry in victimhood – one which muslim women were supposed to “win” and Watson and her feminist allies were supposed to “lose”, given Dawkins’ clear statement that what happened was “zero bad” (i.e. not worthy of critique).
Intersectionality stands in opposition to the entire notion of “Oppression Olympics”. Telling Dawkins to fuck off was, intersectionally speaking, the right thing to do.
@the Discordian:
Your attempt to assert that our analysis of Dear Muslima fails due to the lack of appreciation of Watson’s critique of rape culture is ridiculous. You yourself admit that Dear Muslima wasn’t addressing Watson’s broader critique of rape culture, and so it’s perfectly appropriate for critiques of Dear Muslima to focus on what messages that sarcastic letter contained and to thus slap it down for attacking, as it actually did, “guys don’t do that” much more harshly, directly, and frequently than it was slapped down for any other effects it might have had (such as contributing to a conversation shift that was already underway).
You’re wrong, your arguments are incoherent, and any valid claim to knowledge of specific facts about intersectionality you might have is rendered irrelevant by your arrogant ignorance about the vast majority of intersectional analysis, when it applies, how it is used, and for what outcomes it might be used to advocate in relation to Dear Muslima.
lol here is the missing n. I’m going to go clean my glasses.
Whoops. Not trying to have the last word, just had an open, half-written comment that got abandoned for a half hour while catching up with a friend.
@Tethys:
LOL
I thought you’d left the n out of Pharyngula on purpose, as ironic self-deprecation in the context of a comment on your previous typos. What actually happened was even funnier.
all hail tpyos! ;D
Belatedly and probably to no one at all : I just want to highlight again that Discordian’s analysis method for the influence of elevatorgate was to check wikipedia and pop culture primers as a historical record to see if its “message” was getting through. Finding that the popular account does not clearly record adjustments to the situation at conferences and subsequent other things, it is therefore a failure and a distraction (making Dawkins correct)
But… the record of any social media conflagration famously talks about the conflict itself and not the situation ‘on the ground’ properly. It’s one of the things this era is known for. It’s almost as if the social media sphere fights over one aspect of a thing and ‘real life’ carries on in a more pragmatic fashion.
I mean, I guess it would be better if the matter’s viral status was all about sexism at cons and not elevator decorum. But the core issue didn’t directly concern enough people for that aspect to travel to that extent. That’s why it’s more generic and abstract things people argue over.
Anyway; such an odd methodology.