Rebecca Watson who fancies herself a feminist-skeptic (which is basically an oxymoron), posted this video:
Lovely, is it not? Rebecca first complains about misogyny and then she relays a story about a blind man who was in an elevator with her and asked her to his hotel room for a cup of coffee. [GASP!] I know, right?! After you're done wailing and gnashing your teeth, please come back ...there's more.
Well, not everyone in the atheist community agrees with our skepti-princess. Richard Dawkins decided to reply to Rebecca in the most adapt and innovative way:
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
Absolutely brilliant, right? Well, hold on. We must remember that many atheists are far-lefties and where there are far-lefties there are whiners. It should come as no shock that some people decided to criticize Dawkins and side with our skepti-princess.
Most of the criticisms amounted to explaining she never brought up the Middle East in her video and that just because really really bad stuff happens elsewhere doesn't mean we should ignore the bad stuff that happens in the Western world. Dawkin's biggest crime? Being white, male, and privileged. [LIKE OMG! HOW DARE HE!]
So if sexism is about treating someone different based on their gender, how are their complaints about Dawkins not sexist?
Dawkins once again made a brilliant response to his critics:
"No I wasn't making that argument. Here's the argument I was making. The man in the elevator didn't physically touch her, didn't attempt to bar her way out of the elevator, didn't even use foul language at her. He spoke some words to her. Just words. She no doubt replied with words. That was that. Words. Only words, and apparently quite polite words at that.
If she felt his behaviour was creepy, that was her privilege, just as it was the Catholics' privilege to feel offended and hurt when PZ nailed the cracker. PZ didn't physically strike any Catholics. All he did was nail a wafer, and he was absolutely right to do so because the heightened value of the wafer was a fantasy in the minds of the offended Catholics. Similarly, Rebecca's feeling that the man's proposition was 'creepy' was her own interpretation of his behaviour, presumably not his. She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator. It would be different if he physically attacked me.
Muslim women suffer physically from misogyny, their lives are substantially damaged by religiously inspired misogyny. Not just words, real deeds, painful, physical deeds, physical privations, legally sanctioned demeanings. The equivalent would be if PZ had nailed not a cracker but a Catholic.
Then they'd have had good reason to complain.
RichardHe again made another response the following day:
On July 3, 2011, Richard Dawkins posted this comment on PZ Myers blog Pharyngula:
“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 f*** in every sentence, explain to me what it is that I am not getting.
RichardAs for Rebecca, one day she will be old and those compliments or invitations will be gone forever. She won't have any of that type of attention and she just may find herself in elevators begging for someone to offer her a cup of coffee.
Why are feminists perpetuating this image of woman so weak and so pathetic that they can't just say, "no" politely and be done with it? It takes less than one minute to say, "no thank you," smile and exit the elevator.Yet this trivial experience traumatized her so much she literally had to include the story in one of her vlogs? The ceaseless victim.
Worse yet she fancies herself a skeptic. Does she not understand that her world perception is causing her to view menial, benign experiences as acts of misogyny?
Oh, and by the way, I did find that 3 years later Dawkins did apologize to her on a blog apparently and she accepted saying it was better than nothing.
Was the whole thing blown up out of proportion? Of course but, it does make for lolz.
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