Kimberly Winston had a conversation with Richard Dawkins the other day. She notes that he declined to be interviewed about his Down syndrome and comparative rape remarks last summer, but now on a Bay Area tour to promote his memoir he agreed to talk to her.
Bottom line: He stands by everything he has said — including comments that one form of rape or pedophilia is “worse” than another, and that a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate.
Of course he does.
“I don’t take back anything that I’ve said,” Dawkins said from a shady spot in the leafy backyard of one of his Bay Area supporters. “I would not say it again, however, because I am now accustomed to being misunderstood and so I will … ”
He trailed off momentarily, gazing at his hands resting on a patio table.
“I feel muzzled, and a lot of other people do as well,” he continued. “There is a climate of bullying, a climate of intransigent thought police which is highly influential in the sense that it suppresses people like me.”
One, no it doesn’t. He’s still cranking out the shitty remarks. Just the other day he called a bunch of his colleagues “pompous idiots” for objecting to a titty shirt worn on a global tv interview about a glorious success in technology and science.
Of course, he could be cranking out even more shitty remarks, and/or even shittier ones. Maybe this climate of intransigent thought police has suppressed him in that sense and to that degree. If so, hooray for the climate of intransigent thought police.
But let’s think about this underlying idea – that it’s suppressive and thought policey to say there are some things that influential people shouldn’t say in public. In a sense, of course, it is. Saying “you shouldn’t” is inevitably suppressive to some extent, because that’s the point of it. Saying “you shouldn’t shoot people you don’t know just because they turn into your driveway” is suppressive. Laws against murder are suppressive. There are things we’re forbidden to do, and things we’re urged not to do. That’s suppressive, in a sense. But it’s also essential to the ability to live together. Dawkins can’t be unaware of this fact. So the issue is really the kind of thing he’s being urged not to say.
Imagine if he kept tweeting that the Jews should be rounded up and killed. Who would object if other atheists and secularists and scientists and fans of science urged him to stop saying that? He would, no doubt, but who else would? Neo-Nazis, and pretty much no one else.
But he’s not saying women should be rounded up and killed – he’s just saying it’s their fault if they’re raped while drunk.
Yes, there are differences of degree. But that doesn’t make it a slam-dunk that people should not be urging him to stop saying things like that. It’s not a slam dunk that saying a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate is a trivial thing, or is such an important part of the debate that he should be blatting it out on Twitter.
And then there’s the “climate of bullying” thing. Horseshit. This is a guy with 1.2 million followers on Twitter. This is a guy adored by countless misogynist bullies who feel validated by him. This is a guy who is using his fame and influence to do his best to trash feminism (while claiming to be a “true feminist” himself). He is not being bullied.
Recent criticism of Dawkins has come from women, many of them within the atheist movement, which has long drawn more men to its ranks. His online remarks, some women say, contribute to a climate they see as unwelcoming to female atheists.
Yup. We do say that. They do. His online remarks contribute to a climate unwelcoming to female atheists. You bet they do.
Kimberley quotes Amanda Marcotte and Adam Lee on the subject.
Dawkins, however, disagrees. He is, he said, not a misogynist, as some critics have called him, but “a passionate feminist.” The greatest threats to women, in his view, are Islamism and jihadism — and his concern over that sometimes leads him to speak off-the-cuff.
No, Richard. You are not a passionate feminist. You may think you are, but you’re not. Feminists don’t constantly quote Christina Hoff Sommers approvingly. It’s only anti-feminists who do that.
“I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial,” he said.
Boom! So much for the very belated apology for Dear Muslima last summer. He just took it back. Fucking hell. He thinks he’s a “passionate feminist” and he also thinks he gets to decide what “American women” get to “complain of.” He thinks it’s up to him to compare and measure and decide and rebuke. He even thinks it’s only “American women” who object to sexual harassment.
“And so I occasionally wax a little sarcastic, and I when I have done that, I then have subsequently discovered some truly horrific things, which is that some of the women who were the butt of my sarcasm then became the butt of really horrible or serious threats, which is totally disgusting and I know how horrible that is and that, of course, I absolutely abominate and absolutely repudiate and abhor.”
Oh really? He does? Where, when, in what words? That’s literally the first time I’ve ever seen him say that. I wish he had put it that way in the joint statement. I wrote the joint statement and I carefully worded it as minimally as I could, lest I put him off the whole idea. If that’s how he feels I wish he’d said so last July.
On the other hand it’s not only threats that are the problem. It’s a lot more than that.
Todd Stiefel says it’s great that we have anti-feminists like Dawkins in the atheist movement, because that way we get to forgive him. (Doesn’t that sound a little Christian? Or is that just me.)
Todd Stiefel, president of the Stiefel Freethought Foundation, has worked with Dawkins on numerous projects, most recently teaming up to launch Openly Secular, an anti-discrimination campaign. He says that despite the controversies, Dawkins continues to be a worthy spokesman for atheism.
But Stiefel knows not everyone feels the same — and that is an asset to atheism. Dawkins, he said, is just one voice within atheism — and the more different voices the movement includes, the stronger it will be.
“It is wonderful that we have such a brilliant asset with a keen, logical mind and passion for integrity,” Stiefel said in a phone interview. “But he is not perfect. He has flaws and weakness, just like we all do. I forgive Richard his faults and try to care for him as a human being, just like I would any other person. I think it is OK to admire Richard for his strengths and forgive him his weakness.”
Easy for him, isn’t it. It’s not his rights that Dawkins is constantly pissing on. It’s not his class of human that Dawkins is constantly showing his contempt for. He’s not an American woman complaining of something Dawkins thinks unimportant.
Hemant Mehta helps too, in his friendly way.
“What we’re seeing is a bad combination of a celebrity who speaks his mind about issues he’s not necessarily an expert on and a horde of well-intentioned people ready to vilify him instead of educate him,” Mehta said.
Right. No one has ever tried to talk to him. Thanks, Hemant – that’s very “well-intentioned” of you.
When a man says something sexist, pointing it out isn’t educating him. It’s vilifying him.
His own bad actions do not make him a villain.
Telling him his actions are bad, on the other hand, is actively trying to paint him as a villain.
Does Hemant explain how it is possible to educate someone when you are not allowed to tell them they are wrong in the first place?
Also, has Hemant ever told Dawkins or any other anti-feminists to educate instead of vilify feminists?
Think you’ve got some blockquote issues – the response to Dawkins’ first quote (presumably yours) is formatted as if it came from Kimberly Winston.
I was just looking at Dawkins’s twitter feed, and I noticed that he’s doing a lot of retweeting. If you include retweets in your reckoning, he’s on an anti-feminist rampage.
Pardon my French, but Hemant never met an ass he couldn’t kiss.
Sorry about all the formatting issues. There’s something weird about RD that injects a lot of extraneous formatting and messes everything up. It took me about 95 tries to fix everything. I even deleted a vital quoted passage at one point. Blargh, apologies.
@ 4 – Oh I count the retweets all right! And yes about the rampage.
Dawkins is a feminist like Milo “It Was Video Games Not Misogyny That Made Elliot Rodger Into a Crazed Murderer” Yiannopolous is a gamer. They’re only in it for the telling of women to shut up.
Sexists feel extremely put out and oppressed when their best “dumb blonde” jokes are met with disapproving frowns. Why should their wonderful humor not be fully appreciated as it is due, just because SOME PEOPLE have some sort of stick up their butts? Same with racists and their stupid unfunny jokes about black people. Whatever happened to Polack jokes, anyhow? Why is it that people can’t just appreciate humor any more? Why can’t we all regard certain groups of people as walking jokes waiting to be laughed at, anyhow?
WHY should anyone face disapproval or even censure – ever? For anything?
So long as someone wants to say something, that means everyone else must be indulgent and either laugh delightedly or agree, depending on the context. Anyone reacting differently is being a rude, PC, nitipicky meaniepants.
There are two different sorts of means of social control: Laws and peer pressure. Peer pressure is by far the most used; it’s how we all work together to guide everyone’s behavior in a socially acceptable direction. It takes a village. Those who object to this process simply don’t want to acknowledge that blonde women and African Americans are fully human, and think it’s everyone else’s problem – the people around them have somehow taken a collective vow to embrace a humorless, priggish, permanently-offended attitude and it’s ruining social life and social intercourse. Poor ol’ Richard Dawkins clearly is now reduced to deliberately censoring himself – not because there’s anything wrong with what he wants to say, but because he wants to avoid the social repercussions for behaving in a way that society disapproves of. His supporters likewise want the freedom to be as offensive and bigoted as they wish, and rail, in a petulant yet self-righteous wail, against those who seek to remove all the color and individuality from discourse, whose only goal is to drab us all down to shades of uniform grayness.
“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” For someone of Dawkins’ vintage, there may well be no better hope than to simply pressure him into controlling himself in public. He’ll still think his noxious thoughts and regale like-minded misanthropes with them in private, of course. But the fact that such commentary is removed from the public forum, like the “n” word, means that future generations will grow up without thinking there’s something at least okay, if not special, upscale, particularly witty and signifying a certain privileged status, in talking about other people in those terms. The ones who stridently defend indefensible usage are the ones in thrall to the delusion that there IS a certain privileged status to be enjoyed among the special club that expresses such perspectives in such ways – they want the benefits that they believe accrue to those with that privileged status, hence their emotional, petulant, childish reactions. It’s the reaction to taking candy from a baby – baby cries :'(
So, ” a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate”, responsible for her fate??. Bizarre attitude for an anti-Islamist. Perhaps women should wear black tents in public and stay sober.
The Prof has painted himself into a corner and apparently he’s determined to stay there.
“Oh really? He does? Where, when, in what words? That’s literally the first time I’ve ever seen him say that. I wish he had put it that way in the joint statement.”
It seems such words are included in the joint statement, in the last paragraph and the one before that.
He’s planted his flag there and expects everybody else to crowd into that corner with him, dammit.
So… he sees that some of the women who were the “butts of his sarcasm” have as a result become targets of threats and abuse…
…but still, nothing he has said has contributed to an atmosphere hostile to women. No way, no how. And criticizing him for saying those things that led to others sending threats, … why – that’s BULLYING.
Dawkins is a really shitty liar.
@11 Krishna, your comment might be taken more seriously if you’d taken the half a second it might’ve taken to post the words in question, instead of just posting the equivalent of “Nuh-UH!!!”
Of course, for all *I* know, you may be correct. But you certainly didn’t give me any information so that I could see for myself, which is inexplicable, since you claim it exists in a very specific place (easy for you to get to). So, on general principle, it appears that you are just saying stuff in order to try and generally shut Ophelia up, by gaslighting her and suggesting that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. It’s a commonplace tactics among Christians who want justified criticism of their religion and their behavior to just disappear – that’s where I’ve seen this sort of thing before.
Well, with so many people demanding rights these days on race,gender,sexuality,disability etc or you know, just general respect.That’s a lot of sorting out to do. Who gets what , when do they get it, are they even allowed to complain about something until someone worse off has been helped.
That’s a lot of organising and who better than a straight white privileged male like Richard Dawkins to decide the order of the queue.
Ok, sarcasm off.
Listen Richard. Rights don’t grow on rare trees that only fruit every 5 years and take ages to ripen. When Women have been given a few rights it doesn’t mean they should have to wait a few more years for more because gay people are expecting some when the next lot ripens.Or miss the next harvest because those rights are getting shipped abroad to women who have it worst.
And if you’re so concerned about women in the middle east surely the worst off need to be helped first. I mean Saudi Arabia and Iran are not great places to be a woman but you obviously think Iranian women should just shut the hell up until Saudi becomes a feminist utopia.
Richard Dawkins- please kindly grow up or shut up.
Poor logical Dawkins doesn’t understand the distinction between ‘if you say something I object to, then I will tell you I object.’ And ‘if you say something I object to, I will silence you.’
He’s like a right-wing shock-jock squealing on his nationally syndicated show how he’s being silenced because not all people agree with his bloviating.
You’d think at some point these supposed free thinkers would realize that if you have to make shit up about the people you oppose, then maybe you don’t have a good reason to oppose them. On top of that, you’d think at some point these free thinkers would realize that if you recognize someone is speaking their mind on issues they’re not an expert on, and recognize that they’re wrong and need to be educated on the issues, and recognize that the person does it ALL THE DAMN TIME, that maybe instead of insulting the “horde of well-intentioned people” he’s pissing off you should tell HIM that he needs to either educate himself or shut his damn pie hole.
I’m happy that Dawkins is giving us precisely what we need to make appropriately strong statements about him. You really can’t get much better than this. That he is being misunderstood is an assertion of fact with no evidence provided. That he refuses to discuss the situations where he believes he has been misunderstood means we can tell him to fuck off.
He was not misunderstood. He flatly refused and refuses to acknowledge his critics and explain why they are wrong. All he provides are hyperbolic characterizations which are just opinions. More assertions of fact so that’s two points where he can fuck off.
That’s alright you poor thing. I know that it’s hard to take that critical posture, what with the estrogen vibe everywhere and all. It’s just so terrible that we have gained the power to change your neural networks and control them, and to make you totally mute too!
/sarcasm
At some point hyperbole is lying. I assert that as dishonest people gain public rank and visibility the chances of their hyperbole being outright lying approaches 1. I assume this is true regardless of the group of primates in question.
@11 Krishna, is it only Ophelia’s writings where you display this gift for seeing words on the page that you just know were totally meant to be there all along even though nobody else can see them and the author notes how they were very deliberately not used?
Apparently Dawkins has the MRA mentality about free speech. He can say anything he wants but if someone objects to what Dawkins says or rebuts his arguments then his free speech is threatened. The idea that the objector is using their free speech is something he’s never considered. The marketplace of ideas is another concept foreign to him.
Nah, it’s not foreign to him. He’s just used to having the market cornered.
This interview at least seems honest. He thinks that women in non-islamic developed nations have it pretty darned good, and need to stop whinging about getting groped by the water cooler (seriously, Dawkins? that was the example you chose to show a ‘no big deal’ complaint? workplace sexual harassment?),
Blanche Quizno, tigtog,
Here is the link to the joint statement:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/butterfliesandwheels/2014/07/joint-statement-by-ophelia-benson-and-richard-dawkins/
Please note that my comment begins with “it seems”. I was not and am not saying that such words are definitely there. I may be mistaken. I may be reading too much between the lines.
Please correct me if I am wrong.
Dawkins is a really shitty liar.
He’s a shitty alot of things.
The people he claim feel “muzzled” are not getting the death threats. They are not being called slurs. They are issuing them.
They are issuing them because one women said “Guys don’t do that” and others came forward about assault, rape, harassment and fucking threats to their careers for speaking up about the things that have been done to them.
He’s a misogynist to the bone. He’s a fool even deeper if he thinks he looks like anything else.
That is just the perfect Jack Handy deep thought:
“I feel muzzled,” he said to the reporter interviewing him about his soon to be published book.
Kind of hard to see Dawkins as being silenced in any way when he’s whining so loudly that he’s drowning out other people. He reminds me of Ann Coulter going on a national book tour and being interviewed for radio, television, newspapers, magazines, etc. to promote a book claiming that people like her are being silenced. FFS, dude is being INTERVIEWED and says that he’s being “muzzled” while reasserting all previous things he’s said, saying MORE horrible things, and selling books all the while.
Dude is the loudest muzzled asshole this side of Fox “News” hosts.
Well when he says “muzzled” he means…um…that some American women* disagree with him.
*No one else of course. No other women, no decently male Americans. There’s something uniquely and horribly wrong about American women.
Ophelia @27, I take him at his word about experiencing that feeling.
There may be remarks which he didn’t crank out, but which he might have prior to his recent experiences.
(I’m think he’s giving more consideration to what he tweets than he used to)
I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial,” he said
I just don’t get it. What does he expect these women to do? keep quiet? – Silencing , muzzling etc etc.
I would love for Dawkins to have been a normal person who has to go through the normal sexual harrasment course one has to in most professional places. I can see him complaining – What ? touching a woman inappropriately is sexual harrasment? But But But Islam – Burkhas – Jihad – IS…
Sexism (even to the point of sexual assault at work) is trivial. Molestation is mild.
But criticism of him? THAT’S a serious problem. A problem he compares unapologeticly to witch hunts, thought police and terrorism.
Those are some disturbing priorities.
John @ 28 – what do you mean? I too take him at his word that he thinks he’s being muzzled (while he does his best to muzzle women he dislikes). I just don’t take him at his word that he is being muzzled. (The fact that he isn’t being muzzled is my chief reason for that.)
Your second point – I said that.
[meta]
Ophelia @31, I guess I’m doling out faint praise in the guise of being explicit.
Also: It was all one point, but yes, you did say that.
(Me, I know I’m an asshole, and accept that I regularly censor myself to avoid repercussion — but I don’t imagine I’m being muzzled thereby)
This is a very clear pattern amongst reactionaries of all sorts – the endless claims that their some how not allowed to talk about the very thing they talk about all the damn time. The type specimen (in the UK, at least) is the claim that you’re “not allowed to talk about immigration”, despite the fact that there are certain newspapers which seem to talk about nothing else. In fact, it’s one of the single most-talked about issues in contemporary politics.
He’s transferring a concept from management of an ER to a circumstance which is in no way similar, let alone identical. It’s understandable when a nurse gets a bit testy with a person who’s presenting with a sniffle or a sprained ankle and complains about having to wait for attention. ERs are places with limited personnel and limited accommodation. If victims of a workplace or traffic accident turn up before they’ve adequately stabilised a heart attack patient, then the person with a minor health problem (from the POV of a health professional) simply has to wait even longer while more urgent cases jump to the head of the list. And that is absolutely the right way to handle those issues.
But … There. Is. No. List, There. Are. No. Limits. on the people available for dealing with rights and denial of various rights in various places. People who work to eliminate slavery on Thai fishing ships or improve working conditions in Bangladeshi sweatshops are not depriving any Canadian of the opportunity to work towards better working conditions for indigenous or immigrant communities, nor vice versa. People who aim to get the Indonesian government to relax/eliminate the laws about public servants having to declare affiliation to a particular religion are not impeding or opposing Americans working to get religious/ anti-science rubbish out of US school textbooks.
People in the US fighting to have the backlog of rape kits tested or to have contraceptive information and services more freely available are not diverting time, effort or money from those arguing for more equal pay/ parental leave/ freedom from workplace harassment in their own country, let alone any other place.
I really think that Think Global, Act Local should not be just a slogan. It’s a good way to look at most things. You can get a nice, warm glow from reading about an organisation on the other side of the world achieving something you approve of, but that won’t stop your own efforts in trying to do something similar – or working towards an entirely different objective.
The Kimberly Winston article is very strange. She says “… on a speaking tour through the San Francisco Bay Area in support of his new memoir, “An Appetite for Wonder,” he invited a reporter to sit down with him and explore the thinking behind his remarks.”
She doesn’t say she was the reporter and that she’s giving a first hand account of a conversation she had with him. Writing “a reporter” sounds like she’s talking about someone else – but if that’s the case, why no link to the actual source?
Everything Dawkins is quoted as saying sounds exactly like what he would say, so I’m not that sceptical about the content, but the presentation is very odd.
I sad it on PZ’s thread. Dawkins uses ‘Feminist’ like Chopra uses ‘Quantum’. Both use the word without having any understanding of what the word actually means.
So, only American women criticize him?
Does he not follow PZed anymore? Would he like all of us men to send him dick pics as evidence, or something?
Crimson,
That would be telling men what they can talk about and he’s not going to do that.