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.