The rest of that video. It’s not as bad as the first 15 minutes, in fact some of it is ok, like the part about the Civil Rights movement and the fact that atheists and socialists were told to sit down and shut up because the movement had to appeal to the mainstream, because strategy is complicated; the result is that they’ve been written out of the history, as have women.
But the part from 14:30 to 15:34 is still on the Dear Muslima, and it’s kack.
What is faced by women and men under Islamicist [sic] is far greater than the discomfort of some inappropriate sexist remark. We have to recognize different adversities. Recognizing these differences does not mean, let me repeat, this does not mean we give up educating the public on what can make women uncomfortable. Fighting for pay equality, fighting for the full representation in government, encouraging more women to go into the sciences, all of these things are worth fighting for, but we need to recognize the differences in the adversities that we all face. By recognizing these differences, I think it provides us more strength. The examples of bravery that have been mentioned, of men and women in Islamic regimes, can help those who face difficulties that do not include a fatwa or honor killings. It allows us to rise up and fight for our rights, it gives us that strength to say, if they can do it, what’s stopping me. We should gain strength from these women.
That’s condescending horseshit. People living with repression in Islamist regimes aren’t there to inspire us, they have their own lives to live; they don’t need us gaping at their courage, they need solidarity and whatever practical help we can give. It’s not about us, it’s about them. How absurd to have to point that out to the party of Dear Muslima – but not really absurd, because we knew all along it wasn’t about Dear Muslima, it was about stomping on us.
So, until the bits of the world where Islamism holds sway become more free and egalitarian than we are, don’t expect anything to change here.
Except that when we do, people “Dear Muslima” us.
Well, what’s trying to stop us is people saying “shut up, they have it worse in other countries”.
This:
“… we need to recognize the differences in the adversities that we all face…”
is addressing a non-existent problem. Drawing attention to the sexism in our society doesn’t automatically mean you;re saying it’s just like what someone else is facing in another place. Might as well say “at least you’re not being forced to wear a Burqa so shut up…”
When I was suffering from severe depression (to the point of attempted suicide), the nurses were always pointing out “someone who had it worse”. That never helped. That didn’t solve my problems, nor did it solve theirs. It just pushed us both aside, so they didn’t have to do anything but medicate us and tell us to shut up. Because I have no doubt that my problems (which weren’t minor, in spite of the someone else is worse nonsense) were being used to shut up someone else…maybe even the person I was having pointed out to me as being worse than me…it’s all relative, after all.
I hate that argument It’s meant to be a conversation stopper. It just makes me say more.
When I was growing up, we were destitute because my mom wasn’t being paid half what men with similar responsibilities in the organization were paid, and dad had a severe mental illness and couldn’t hold down a job. But I guess we shouldn’t complain, because Muslima. And those starving kids somewhere. Grrr.
I wonder if the word “multitasking” means anything to her.
You know the funny thing about that – the lesson I took out of how atheists shut up and sat down with regards to the civil rights movement kind of plays into how I see the “Dear Muslima” type stuff from anti-feminists.
Basically it all rounds down to “There are bigger concerns than your ones” – and it always seems to be highly destructive in the long term.
We tend to forget that secularism means more than “don’t treat people badly because they belong to another religion or none” – it is more about how policy and law are formulated.
When the civil rights movement told the atheists to sit down and shut up it ended up implicitly accepting the idea that rights should be contingent upon the religious opinions of the majority of society.
That in turn has proved to be a major issue in each subsequent rights battle – such as with that Arizona law that allowed people to discriminate against gay people, or with regards to issues like abortion.
Martin Luther King Jnr argued against discrimination, now his victories in the civil rights movement are used by others to boost their moral authority to discriminate.
So I look at these atheists going on about how we shouldn’t deal with social justice within the movement and I think “But hang on one minute – haven’t we already been dissatisfied by the results of this sort of thinking?”
The whole argument seems to me to amount to the idea that we should somehow make secularism contingent upon what amounts to Western cultural conservatism when really we should be looking at our own history and recognising how this just makes things harder down the line.
People like Dawkins and Cornwell want social justice advocates to shut up because social justice issues make D & C uncomfortable for some reason. They’re not even the moderates who Martin Luther King complained about. They’re reactionaries who don’t want their atheism and/or secularism sullied by inconsequential things like treating women as human beings.
I don’t think the speech is that bad. The civil rights abuses in some cultures are sometimes far worse than what westerners face in Europe and America. I think we need to acknowledge how brutal abuses in Islamic countries and just take note of it.
More than 40 years ago, I worked with an Iranian refugee and he told me how tough Iran had become for women. His girlfriend had been killed by the régime, and he had been forced to walk across Anatolia to escape.At the time I was so naive I thought he was spouting a bunch of embellished BS in order to obtain refugee status. I didn’t believe half of what he told, but in retrospect those horror stories were true. It’s just that they were so barbarous and extremely misogynistic my silly liberal mind just couldn’t warp itself around the gravity of it all
I’ve no knowledge of this ‘Dear Muslimah’ theme and I dont’e fully understand some of the animosity directed at Dawkins that is expressed here.
However, as I said on an earlier thread, human rights abuses can be battled everywhere at once; it’s not a situation where we do either ‘A’ or ‘B’ , but never both at once.
And who exactly is not doing that?
http://freethoughtblogs.com/blaghag/2011/07/richard-dawkins-your-privilege-is-showing/
http://skepchick.org/2011/07/dear-richard-dawkins/
@9: Suffice it to say that Dawkins has been a raging sexist asshole of late. He is the originator of the meme that “Muslima” needs to have her concerns addressed — ie, the sexism prevalent in Islamic countries — before sexism/misogyny can be discussed in the West.
He has gone so far as to refuse to be on panels with women who have called him out on his bullshit stance.
I, for one, lost whatever respect I used to have for the man.
So, now you have the background.
One small adjustment: it’s not even ““Muslima” needs to have her concerns addressed — ie, the sexism prevalent in Islamic countries — before sexism/misogyny can be discussed in the West” – it’s “Muslima, therefore you shut up entirely.”
We should be really clear about that. There was no point in saying Dear Muslima in that conversation other than saying shut up shut up shut up. There was no conditional, no until, no if, no when – there was nothing about “when things are better in Afghanistan then you can talk about sexual harassment in Dublin.” It was pure unabashed shut uppery.
This is a tough one for me. I’m not sure what I would have done in this situation because this gets to core issues that have to do with civil rights more broadly. If my disposition was the same in that world as it is now I would probably set aside my politicking on atheism and socialism in order to help win the fight for racial civil rights (it has to do with how I rank net gains, losses, and risks from political gambles). But there is a hypocrisy in saying “don’t try to get your civil rights because it makes it harder for me to get mine” that is hard to ignore. I wold have ignored it with civil rights for more than one reason including the fact that atheists and socialists can hide if they need to and people of different races can’t so it’s a more reasonable place to start on civil rights.
In today’s situation I’m far more harsh with potential political allies. I’m far less willing to support political parties, candidates, and organizations without confirmed support for a small list of specific issues (things like unequivocal support for whistle blowers, willingness to open investigations into torture by the US…). It makes me really unpopular with a lot of people but politics is about compromise and if I’m not getting anything out of an alliance, and both groups appear to be just as bad on my most important issues, I won’t support anyone.
I certainly won’t be supporting people willing to use other people as tools of convenience in political fights instead of actually outlining their arguments and logic. ‘Dear Muslimah’ and trying to point to mental illness for every example of people doing terrible things is lazy rhetoric and seems like a form of objectification to me (caring about people when they are useful politically, but not so much the rest of the time). A position on elevatorgate will stand on it’s own without a fallacious attempt to minimize via gross cultural comparison (either Watson had a reasonable opinion or she did not), an appeal to mental illness needs specific evidence and people making the claim without being able to discuss that evidence only want to use the mentally ill as a scapegoat.
The moment anyone tries to appeal to degree of abuse or wrongdoing in a social conflict, they have lost me (unless the degrees are rationally or logically relevant to the argument or issue). If it’s wrong, it’s to be opposed no matter what it’s like elsewhere and that person is revealed to me as someone who wants to excuse shitty behavior and use others as political tools. If they have no actual reason beyond emotions for making the comparison, they are revealed as a person who is unwilling to face how terrible people can be and are unwilling to confront people they consider allies. I have to have standards for the people I consider allies.
I know you’re conflating ‘liberal’ with naive idealism, but this ‘victim status confers privileges’ is a conservative trope, not a liberal one. It’s George Will. It’s also Richard Dawkins. It’s a load of horseshit.
I mention this because it’s pretty central to this discussion.
Decker @ 9
So, you think we don’t?
But it’s all over this blog, for instance. The blog network – FTB – is packed with bloggers who report on it, often from personal experience of it.
The very conference at which Cornwell made a big extended emphatic hand-waving point of it featured a good deal of discussion of it, including a talk by Maryam Namazie. It was just insulting and absurd for her to pretend the people at that conference needed to be told that. By telling us that, she was
1. covertly justifying “Dear Muslima”
2. belittling and diminishing feminism for agitating about wrongs that are less severe than stoning and forced marriage.
Hyperbole. Every statement above is exaggeration. Every statement bullshit. You all evidently need a refresher course.
1) Rebecca Watson relates how man got on an elevator and very politely asked her if she would like coffee in his room to discuss her fascinating presentations. She said no and evidently said “OK”.
2) Rebecca’s own recommendation – “Guys, don’t do that.”
And then….
the on-line conversations get spirited. The hyperbole ramps up and “Guys – don’t do that” morphs into an angry discourse on what REALLY happened on that elevator was gross misogyny and that the proper analysis must need require the real possibility of rape and the true nature of why Rebecca’s life was in danger.
From ““Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”” to angry accusations of misogyny with a side dish of rape seasoned with the threat of death.
You know what? The conversation became hysterical. The new definition of misogyny now included:
“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
And you know what? The Dear Muslima letter was exactly you all needed. Because you all had lost your perspective.
And your reaction to the “Dear Muslima” letter – calls for boycotting and black-balling Dawkins ; the reaction in this very thread, saying he is “antifeminist, that he wants you to “shut up, shut up, shut up”; that he is a “raging sexist asshole”; that eastern misogyny must be cured before western misogyny can be discussed – it proves that you all have learned absolutely nothing. You are all still hysterical.
And you are securely safe in your little enclave here. But I assure you – the larger atheist community finds this whole Elevatorgate-Dear Muslima episode quite distasteful, disruptive, and even possibly counterproductive on the issue of sexism/misogyny.
Congratulations.
You’ve got to be fucking kidding.
That’s what happened.
Or are you seriously contending that Rebecca, all by her lonesome, decided to go from “Guys, don’t do that” and “morph[] into an angry discourse on what REALLY happened on that elevator was gross misogyny and that the proper analysis must need require the real possibility of rape and the true nature of why Rebecca’s life was in danger”?
Really? You’re pulling this? The lurkers support me in spirit plus militant?
Let me assure you, gingerbaker, that the even larger community of people who aren’t atheists find Richard Dawkins and the New Atheists quite distasteful, disruptive, and even possibly counterproductive on the issue of secularism.
So I guess you’d better shut up now, right?
gingerbaker why did you complain about exaggeration and hyperbole with respect to descriptions about Dawkins, and then make your explanation about people discussing elevatorgate? If the descriptions about Dawkins’s statements are exaggeration and hyperbole you explanation should be about comparisons between Dawkins’s statements, and the characterizations of those statements by others.
Explanations about the elevator conversation being distorted by others is just aclaim of exaggeration and hyperbole by a different group, not an explanation of why the statements about what Dawkins said are exaggerated and hyperbolic.
gingerbaker – your # 1 is wrong. You leave out a lot of important details – like the fact that it was 4 a.m. – and you add a “very politely” that you made up out of thin air.
I of course agree with you that the Dear Muslima episode was very disruptive and counterproductive. That’s why I blame Dawkins (or Cornwell) for making it happen, and Dawkins for never doing anything about the resulting harassment, and Cornwell for perpetuating it at Women in Secularism 2.
How do you know you speak for “the larger atheist community”? Have you done a count?
Ah well, Anthony and Brony beat me to it.
You cannot “very politely” proposition someone who has made it clear that she doesn’t want to be propositioned. It’s automatically rude to override someone’s wishes for the sake of your own gratification.