A priest and a rabbi go into an elevator and…
Where were we. Rebecca Watson said about elevator guy, a student said about Watson about elevator guy, Watson said about the student at her CFI talk, lots of people said about Watson saying about the student at her talk, while, meanwhile, Dawkins said about Watson about elevator guy. Dawkins said something sarcastic the point of which was that women living under Islamic laws have things worse than Watson. This did not go down well. Lots of people pointed out, with some heat, that the fact that X is bad is not a reason to be quiet about less-bad Y, and that Dawkins was being clueless about Y, and that he shouldn’t do that because he was never going to be subject to Y.
Still with me?
There was some doubt that it was actually Dawkins who had said that, but then PZ got home from wherever all the atheists were this weekend and confirmed that it was Dawkins, and then Dawkins said.
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.
End of story, yes. End of discussion, no. Should be end of discussion, no. Zero bad, no, which is why should be end of discussion, no.
It’s too boring and wearying to go into, why not, and 7 million people have already done so anyway. I’ll just give the tiniest flick at why not, and move on. Because it wasn’t really “for coffee,” for a start – why the fuck would she want some coffee at 4 a.m. when she had said she was tired and she was on her way to crash and there was coffee at the bar they had both just left anyway? “For coffee” was just a euphemism for sex. He asked her back to his room for sex. That’s not zero bad. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not zero bad, either. It sounds like more of a treat to at least some men than it does to most women, but surely Richard is not completely unaware of that. Would he think it ok to go up to a stranger in Waitrose and say “want to come back to my house and have sex?” I doubt it. If I’m wrong, then this part of my case falls apart, but if I’m right…he should be able to see that it’s not zero bad, especially not at 4 a.m. in an elevator.
And because of all that, it’s a way of treating women as if they’re fundamentally there to be sexual prey. That’s not zero bad.
There was one last bit that as many people have pointed out is quite funny and quite ironic for multiple reasons:
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.
Tone troll! Hahahahahahahahaha.
So anyway, they’ll all be at TAM in a few days so they’ll either work it out or make it worse. The Atheist Movement sways back and forth in the wind – will it totter, will it crumble, will it fall?
I dunno. I have all I can do not to get into fistfights with the neighbors.
Thank you for saying this. Lucky for Dawkins, I’m all fucked out from lecturing sexist idiots over this incident. But yeah, Dawkins tone trolling? Unbelievable.
My view is that this episode is utterly ridiculous.
Not sure if you remember but I made a disparaging comment last week about lack of content and raging. I want to apologise (I was too harsh) and thank Ophelia for her recent posts (and dare I say… the tone).
Yeah, what a schmuck for asking that people have a discussion instead of a rant.
:- )
Thanks wiz – I’m a ray of sunshine. Heehee.
People were discussing this, Tim. Not five minutes after Dawkins posted his original comments several people had quite thoroughly pointed out the problem to him in firm but not “vulgar” words. Then, 2,000 posts or so later, Dawkins decides to use the acrimonious debate among understandably frustrated people as an excuse to neglect the fact that others had, in fact, explained this to him calmly.
Josh: Then I stand corrected! If people had explained it to Dawkins calmly, then he had nothing to complain about (well, maybe a low signal to noise ratio, but that is a different complaint.)
I just remembered that Dawkins did the tone troll routine during the RDF forum kerfuffle, too. Anyway, why does he think he can demand respect for his hurt ears/eyes but not grant the same to Rebecca Watson and other women who would like atheists to be aware enough about male privilege that women like Watson can attend conferences without being hassled by clueless men?
I was presuming the “tone troll” comment was a joke, followed as it was by “hahahahaha”, and all.
Because I didn’t think the “tone” thing was merely about swearing versus not swearing.
I think Watson was right. Right in her reaction, and right to point it out in the way she did, in the context she did.
But you see what’s happened. Now it’s out of context. So you get people (like Dawkins) saying, “right, but that was no biggie, was it?” Well, it mattered to Watson, enough to mention it in a video. She didn’t say, “this is worse than throwing acid in a woman’s face”, or even “this is as bad…” She merely said, “guys, think about what you’re doing”. Which is fair enough, and proportionate.
For me, if not for Watson (I don’t know), the “biggie” here is the subsequent storm. If the original incident could be put down to a breach of etiquette, then a proportion of the reaction certainly cannot be. The original incident may not prove there to be a misgynist and/or anti-feminist streak in whatever our community is, but the subsequent storm has smoked it out good and proper.
Dan
First off… Ophelia, may I suggest a rather wide range of offensive and defensive weapons that are lightweight and easily carried on walks around your neighborhood? If you get in a fistfight you’re likely to break some bones in your hands even if you win the fight. A nice pointy piece of wood jabbed in someone’s throat tends to turn their attention directly away from aggressive behavior, and a lightweight keychain model can be had for just a few dollars. Odin knows, I always feel better knowing that I’m only inches and a half-inch move of my thumb away from a razor-sharp blade to deal with life’s little “inconveniences.” (I’m mostly kidding… mostly. *grins*)
I’m going to go into the issue in a different way here compared to how I’ve commented elsewhere, because I like you regulars and I trust that you aren’t complete morons.
Rebecca Watson is not available. She’s stated that she’s not available. She’s married. She’s apparently getting divorced. Her whole life is out there on the Internet. She’s REALLY not available. One of the biggest themes of what she’s had to say for the last little while is that she is not available, and she’s sick to death of people assuming that she’s available because she’s a woman at a conference, or at an after-party at a conference. Anyone who knows anything about Rebecca Watson knows that she is not looking to hook up with anyone, ever. This is a fact of life that is just a few steps below gravity and evolution.
So… here’s a guy who apparently knows who Rebecca is. He was in the bar for several hours but never approached her. She gave a speech a few hours before mentioning that she hates guys trying to pick her up for sex at conventions. At 4AM she declares that she’s going to bed because she’s exhausted. It is early morning, she’s a long way from home, she has made a long and detailed point that she’s not available and hates guys trying to pick her up… and along comes Elevator Guy. He claims to find Rebecca interesting… but he’s ignored 99% of what she’s told the world about herself. It is 4AM, she’s declared that she’s tired and going to bed… and he invites her to his hotel room to “talk.”
It is just as lame and not nearly as interesting as inviting a woman to your room to look at your etchings. At least when I was young and dumb and looking to score, I had a guitar and a couple of sweet tunes to play… and at 4AM towards Rebecca I would have been a complete creep to play that card. She said “no” over and over again in public for everyone to hear. Any man worth getting to know better would have heard that and paid attention and left her the hell alone. Even a man who felt a connection to her would have known enough to know she wasn’t looking for that and would have backed off.
If I were a single guy and thought I had a shot, I would have played it completely differently. I’d have engaged her all night, and listened to here and conversed with her and watched for every sign and signal that she was interested, not interested, or neutral and not looking at me that way. At the end of the night, when she begged off for bed and sleep, I’d have stopped her inside the bar and handed her a business card. I’d have expressed interest in talking to her again, and then let her leave unmolested. The worst thing that happens is that nothing happens. The best I could hope for would be that I made a friend with a cool and smart woman. Anything else would be icing.
The guys who are defending what actually happened are a bunch of assholes. Richard Dawkins has made a fool of himself for going on the attack the way he did. The whole mess is proof-positive that there’s a whole lot of work to be done on male attitudes before the atheist “movement” can be a solid and cohesive entity.
@Dan (#9)
Damned right. She just said “hey guys, don’t be that guy” and the whole goddamned Internet world exploded. Pisses me off too, since it was a lot easier to hate the creep “radical feminist” jackasses before I read a few hundred posts from their “men’s rights” counterparts.
Thank you Joe for your succinct summary. It seems that for men and women alike, she was supposed to be gratified that this guy was interested in her, if not for her sake then for other women looking to hook up. And I’m going to agree with Dan that the most disturbing thing is shitstorm.
Seems to me Dawkins is being passive aggressive in this instance;)
@Cass_m,
Seems to me that more than a few people, including Richard Dawkins, were assuming that she should be grateful that she wasn’t raped, like that’s some sort of effing prize.
So if I hit on a women and she rejects me, I’m a disgusting pig?
I haven’t waded through everything. Did he continue to press her or touch her?
Can I tell a dirty joke or is that “more than zero bad”.
This is kinda ridiculous.
@Improbable_Joe
Don’t be absurd. We need to stop pretending this blog posts are in a vacuum. People post exaggerated absurd comments which prompts response from the other side which then snowballs. By the end I don’t think Dawkins was even addressing Watson’s original talk.
PZ said “These are far more serious problems than most American women face.” While he’s being very reasonable, especially in his response to Dawkins, simply because not all women are in peril does not mean we’re AOK here in the US.
Women are legally inferior (remember the ERA, recently resuscitated?) and a visit to any women’s shelter in the US or review of criminal statistics should give pause to anyone saying violence against women is not a very real issue in the US. Taken in sheer numbers, worse than some of the Islamic states because of their small populations.
It’s ironic that we’re seeing Slut Walks expanding while we have Dawkins belittling the very real issues women face. http://my.firedoglake.com/somethingthedogsaid/2011/07/04/first-annual-denver-slut-walk/
I wouldn’t give ground to anyone belittling the fact of the 2nd class status of women in the US – especially to someone like Dawkins, who should know better or STFU if he’s going to speak erroneously about the US.
BTW, I was SHOCKED to learn that you’re old and ugly and don’t get along with your male neighbors. SHOCKED to the point I almost had to give up your blog. Why else would a straight male follow a female blogger, if not for looks? One of these days I’ll have to take the time to do a search for a picture of you. (You probably have one on your blog somewhere, but I almost always read you through a reader – and haven’t seen one.)
I never understood why Watson’s experience in an elevator is supposed to be indicative of some rampant problem in the “atheist community,” whatever that is. I guess it just means the people who go to these conventions, which is minuscule relative to the atheist population.
Sorry, I find it difficult to not be cynical. Not everyone is oh-so-impressed with everything Watson does. http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2011/07/bad_form_rebecca_watson.php
I sooo want to keep out of this, but my own experience combined with the description of what happened suggests to me that this was someone with Asperger’s syndrome and poor social skills who really did want coffee rather than sex. I’ve perceived it that way from the start. I’m emboldened in revealing this thought by the fact that one of my Facebook friends who does have Aspergers made the same suggestion yesterday, based on his experience. But who knows (unless, perhaps, Elevator Guy comes forward)? It was still creepy, of course.
@Adam
Wow… you’re not really following, are you? If you “hit on” a woman who has declared that she’s not interested, you’re a creep. What part of “no” are you too stupid to understand?
@Russell Blackford:
You should notice that Watson’s entire response to Elevator Guy was “not cool, don’t do it again.” She didn’t name names or chase after him excessively. And most of us responding to that issue have separated what was in his head from what impression he gave. He didn’t have to have sex on his mind to have made a social faux pas. The point was that if he’d been a little more empathetic, he’d have noticed that he was giving a bad impression no matter what his intent was.
I admit to being amazed by this whole incident.
Of course there was nothing wrong with what Dawkins said. The problem is that he said it at the wrong place and the wrong time. Perhaps he completely missed the point that Rebecca Watson was making. It seems that many commenters on the issue have completely missed the point. And that was the whole issue that Rebecca was making, that too many people (mostly male) are missing the point.
It is all about respect. There are things that you don’t ask of somebody you barely know. Males seem to understand this quite well when the person that they barely know is also a male.
I’m reminded of a time some years ago, when a colleague remarked that he saw the department secretary as “an extension of the typewriter.” It’s a different situation, but the same complete lack of respect.
Hey, guys – women are sensitive thinking humans, too.
This is only the latest (and lowest) expression of “Can we talk about what *I* deem important, which does not include the vaporings of hysterical females?” from Dawkins. His concern for Muslim women comes up at strategic moments as convenient, colorful window dressing to his agenda, as was the case with Afghan women for Bush et al. And, of course, explanations don’t count unless delivered by a white male Anglosaxon with the correct class accent.
On what might feel like an unrelated note, but is exactly the point when you think about it?
Hey there you, Ophelia Benson! I want to buy you a couple of weapons. No, really… I do! I think it would be cool if you were a little bit better protected, and it would feed my ego if I were the one to provide the means. On the other hand, I know instinctively that there’s no way in hell you would feel safe giving me your address. So I think… hey, I might could send it to a friend of yours, or a PO box, or to some neutral address. Why? Because I don’t want to be creepy, and if I want to send you a present I don’t want to do it in a way that makes it seem like I’m fishing for your address.
That’s the point, right? If you’re a guy, you should know that it is better to avoid being creepy, and better to avoid things that make you look like you’re trying to pull some sort of dirty scam.
@29: no, but she accused him of “objectifying” her. I’m very doubtful that that was the case. She would have done well to leave that bit out. My educated guess is that this wasn’t about objectification but something different.
Even if he wanted sex, contrary to the picture I’m getting from Watson of how it went down, I doubt that this was a good example of objectification, which has a fairly – or perhaps very – specific meaning. It means treating someone as a mere object without regard to their interests or feelings. Elevator Guy may have been clumsy, insensitive, and creepy, but I see no evidence that he was objectifying her. On the contrary, he appears to have made some gormless efforts to be considerate.
On another subject, I’ve seen various comments around the internet that Watson’s marital status had something to do with it. I find this very odd. In the circles I’ve moved in over the years, open marriages are more the norm than the exception. For all I know, Elevator Guy may move in similar circles. More generally, the fact that someone is married may lower the probability that he or she will agree to a sexual proposition, but it is not a barrier to sexual propositions. For Zeus’s sake this is the 21st century, not the 19th. Let’s leave traditional sexual mores out of it.
Whoops, I meant @23, not at @29.
Russell,
That’s kinda how I see him, too. At the very least, he’s someone without a lot of experience taking what was probably the only chance he had to talk to her without others being right there and not realizing what he was asking or the context. I’ve found that a lot of shy men have the same problem and would likely act the same way.
Improbable Joe,
Since most Autistic Spectrum Disorders — and Asperger’s is an ASD — are noted for glaring deficiencies in empathy, what you said there is essentially the equivalent of “If that visually impaired person would only LOOK for an instant … “. ASD cases are one of the main reasons that I argue against empathy-based morality, since at a minimum it would leave them deficient in morality in a way that we don’t actually think they are currently.
Neil,
I don’t think that that lack of respect you’re citing really is different when some of those people are dealing with men or women.
“You should notice that Watson’s entire response to Elevator Guy was “not cool, don’t do it again.” ”
Not exactly. She didn’t address her complaint to the man that creeped her out but to men in general – “Guys, don’t do that”
As far as I can make out the vast majority of men don’t need to be lectured about this – it’s fairly obviously the wrong thing to do and it is not surprising that she felt creeped out about it.
The main argument about this issue has not been about whether Rebecca was justified to make a video about the incident (she was), the argument has been about her subsequent behavior in using her public speaking platform to compare stephs blog post about Rebeccas video to people calling for Rebecca to be raped.
A lot of people who agreed with Rebeccas video felt that her subsequent action was rather nasty and unprofessional behavior.
I think Dawkins unfortunate intervention switched the debate away from the substantive points regarding power relationships and ethical behavior in the skeptical community, to one about the original incident that was pretty much settled (as in “We agree, don’t do it, it is likely to creep out most people”)
Joe,
You are the idiot. I watched her sermon.
At no point did he press after “No”.
I’m married and I’ve had women “sexualize” me.
But I guess women are fragile and men are strong. That’s why I couldn’t care less about innocent flirting.
I wasn’t there. It’s possible he was intimidating. She didn’t say that.
I cant tell if people here are offended because he was tone deaf and cheesy or whether he was supposed to go through of those consent scripts that you see at Wesleyan.
Russell, you’re really missing an important point here.
Rebecca Watson has been giving speeches for a little while now that have included the point that she is personally off-limits to sexual propositions. She gave a speech on the day of the elevator incident that included the explicit point that she was personally and specifically not open to sexual propositions. She was in a bar for hours talking to people about her speech, including the bit about her not being open to sexual propositions. She then said “I’m tired and going to sleep now.”
She’s already said an emphatic “NO!” to sexual advances over and over again. She’s declared her intent to go to sleep. At that point, anyone who would approach her with a sexual proposition would have had to have ignored a huge chunk of what she’s said over the previous chuck of hours, and over the several weeks and months before this event. I’ve never met Rebecca Watson, but I have known for a LONG time that she things it is uncool for people to approach her with sex on the brain. She’s made it part of her public persona!
So, anyone who would approach her in that way has objectified her, in the sense that she has made her position very clear, and they are ignoring it.
The problem in the atheist community isn’t this one guy who made an inappropriate move. The problem is the hundreds of people piling on Rebecca Watson for daring to ask guys to not do that. It’s the dismissive attitude towards women that is a problem in the atheist community.
Tempers have risen too high in this debate with people digging in their heels on either side so maybe it’s time for a ceasefire while things calm down a bit. Richard Dawkins has waded in on one side while Jen McCreight as said she will sit Richard down at TAM and point out a few things to him. I think this is an excellent idea as so I hope something can be set up at TAM where two people with opposing views can calmly debate the issue in hand. This may even lead to a good example of how ‘differences’ can be sorted out between rational people. Either that or we could just carry on with the infighting:-(
I’ve read a lot of the posts in the various threads about this issue – even before Dawkins decided to comment.
I wonder why he did that. Why did he comment on this one issue? Especially the way he did, which was hot and bothered? I’ll never know – and I probably shouldn’t care.
His remarks were inconsiderate, and irresponsible for a person in his position, to say the least. One would expect better judgment from Dawkins.
I hope he’ll apologize, but I won’t be holding my breath.
@Adam:
Like Improbable Joe pointed out, the “No” was already explicitly stated before she left the bar. So the whole proposal was a case of pressing on.
And nobody is offended at the guy so much, but at the response Rebecca Watson is getting for a simple “don’t do that”.
Joe, I don’t know if that was a joke or not, but I really don’t want (or need) any weapons. Thanks anyway. I live in a very sedate neighborhood – Surly Guy From Hell is an outlier. (I’ve often felt faintly sorry for his neighbors when I walk past. Maybe he’s been reading my mind, in which case he’s totally right to be mad at me.)
We don’t know that. We don’t know what he did – that wasn’t part of the story. I’m not saying or hinting he did, I’m just saying that puts it way too strongly – as if we knew all about what happened at each “point.”
I am curious what people’s opinions on the Paula Kirby disagreement? I’ve seen Rebecca’s rebuttal on youtube but not Paula Kirby’s, was it as bad as people are making out?
@D. in #32: Many skeptics – even prominent ones – appear to have a skeptical blind spot. For some it’s religion, for others libertarianism, or global warming denialism, or alt med. I’m sure you can think of examples for each. I’ve long had lingering suspicions that Dawkins’ blind spot is the sexism inherent in our own society. It just doesn’t seem to fit his worldview somehow.
This is just all a bit disappointing. But clearly a discussion that needs to be had.
Not having been there in the elevator, I can only react to what I’ve heard people say about what they’ve heard.
I have two primary reactions:
(1) the guy was at best unwise, and at worst a dick, to ask the question in an elevator. That could be intimidating, regardless of the gender of each of the individuals, and he should have known that.
and, the supremely ironic part of this entire incident:
(2) the skeptical community is coming off as a bunch of prudes. There seems to be anger over the fact that some guy asked a woman to have sex (which, like everyone else, I assume is what he really meant). I have no problem with that. Why would anyone else? Ms. Watson said, “No”, and he accepted that (by all accounts). Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work?
OF COURSE women are subjected to more harrassment than men. Of course men are more likely to ask this kind of question. But the situation does not translate into “women are sexual prey”. Predators don’t ask once and then go away when rejected.
What ever happened to the “Don’t be a Dick” motto?
Is anyone actually trying to get the other side to empathize with their points?
Dawkins should’ve said that the online reaction has become increasingly disproportionate to the weight of the incident being discussed. Instead, he had to be dick about it.
Then, the reaction to his dick move was to call him a ignorant stereotype making stupid arguments because of his “fucking privilege”. Nice. I’m sure that’s NOT going cause any cognitive dissonance. So let’s go ahead and call people trolls too.
The same thing happened with the Krauss incident; instead of calmly pointing out that he was falling prey to cognitive dissonance due to his friendship and self-rationalizing it using what he knows best–science–he was called an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. Does anyone think a person is going to reconsider their position after being called an embarrassment to scientists everywhere?
Does anyone see what’s happening? Sure, people are saying stupid crap that makes you want to yell at their stupid faces until they realize what effing idiots they’re being. And the fact that these are heroes of ours makes it hurt even more. But what is the goal? When we call someone a old rich white stereotypical fucking privileged troll what result are we trying to get?
Skeptics of all people should know that you don’t make people change their minds by being aggressive–even if it’s warranted. You’re just going to push them into more solid conviction. If we’re only going to remember the Don’t be a Dick rule when it’s easy and convenient then we’re missing the point. None of this bullshit is beneficial.
Ok. I think I’m coming into this many times removed. I guess the debate over Dawkins get mixed up with how creepy the guy is or whether he’s autistic. I’m lost so I will watch now :-)
When parents in a First World country say “Do unplesant X, there are starving children in Africa!” almost invariably they couldn’t care less about starving children in Africa. “Arguments” of this type are useful clubs for bludgeoning dissenters (or personal enemies) or for trivializing concerns perceived as distractions from the truly important stuff — as determined by the alphas.
Most of the responses to Rebecca Watson fall along this spectrum, from “Look at Saudi women and count your blessings, you spoiled whiners!” to “Well, if she didn’t feel it necessary to call the police it’s bullshit fit for the fainting couch.”
As for the reason why Dawkins chose to comment at the time and in the manner that he did: like many people in his particular circumstances, I suspect he gets annoyed when furniture pieces (especially tschoschkes) become unruly.
A stranger, out of nowhere? Apparently he was in the bar with everyone else the whole time but on the edge of things; they hadn’t talked (I forget where I saw that, but I saw it several times…maybe from James, who was there?). It was very little distance away from being asked to have sex by a stranger on the street.
I don’t think it’s being a prude to think it’s more than a little obnoxious for a man to ask a woman he doesn’t know for sex, unless she’s a sex-worker.
Am I weird in this? Is this just because I’m a clueless nerd who doesn’t get out much? I don’t think so.
[…] don’t have to go very far to source any future material on the question as to whether ‘atheism and rationalism go hand-in-hand‘. I have this particular video from the Big Think website which looks rather good and the […]
Wait. You don’t?
Dammit, OB, I thought you were cool.
Aaaand not at all more seriously…
And my own extremely poor judgement and complete lack of taste tempt me to make some awful joke here about how damn, that keeps happening to me, too, and umm… Thanks… That was fun… But are you now saying you don’t even want any coffee?
I mean… Umm… That’s cool. Fine. I’ll just have one myself, now, then, if you don’t mind…
You’re sure, right? I mean, I make pretty good coffee…
(Aaaawkward…)
Seriously, that’s the first I even thought of that. I have to say I find it… unlikely. But it actually might make a pretty funny recurring SNL bit, anyway…
Y’know…as those things go: ‘The guy who, yes, actually just wants a coffee when he asks that’.
I feel like I’ve already written comments about this on several other blogs, saying the same thing. Basically, I think Rebecca Watson’s response (in the video) was appropriate, given the situation. The guy wasn’t horrible, but he did make an error in judgement/venue, and she was rather calm in the video and made a point about saying how many other people at the event were perfectly nice. I didn’t like the way people over-reacted to her response and basically dismissed what she was saying automatically.
Also, I disagree with Dawkins, because it seemed to me that he was accusing Rebecca of trivializing the problems faced by other women, and I don’t think she does that. She didn’t make any kind of comparison between this incident and the obviously way more horrible things that happen to other women. I watched (online) a talk that Watson did about feminism at Skepticon, and she did mention problems that women face in other countries and in Islam, so she’s not one of the people who makes excuses for the bad treatment of women in religion or uses the “it’s their culture” argument.
I love the point about tone trolling; it’s hilarious. There was also a similarly funny comment somewhere on a Pharyngula thread pointing out to Dawkins that people not accepting evolution isn’t as horrible as the way women are treated in Islam, either.
Ophelia, my offer of weapons was/wasn’t a joke(I like to buy presents for people that I would like people to buy for me!), but it was more to illustrate the point that I would be careful in an offer to buy you a gift to NOT coerce an address or phone number from you. It is great that I know that I’m not a rapist or a stalker or a crazy person… but that doesn’t give you any reason to believe that I’m not a rapist or a stalker or a crazy person. As a decent human being, it is incumbent on me to not make you scared because I’m acting badly. It is my job to make sure that my behavior is on the right side of “the line.”
That’s sort of the point, right? Men shouldn’t put women in the position where they might possibly need to be afraid?
@Ophelia Benson (#43):
“Am I weird in this?”
Maybe I’m weird, too, because I agree. If they’d been at least talking beforehand, then it would at least make some sort of sense, though in an elevator at 4am would still be an odd location.
… dialogue excerpt: ‘What… you don’t prefer to drink your coffee at four in the morning in the hotel room of a complete stranger of the opposite sex? Weird.’
Come to think of it, I guess I can write the 4am/coffee elements from experience. The rest, no, not so much.
Or, wait:
BARISTA: So how do you take it?
THE GUY WHO REALLY WANTS COFFEE: Four in the morning. In my room. With someone I’ve just met.
BARISTA: Umm… Are you propositioning me?
THE GUY ETC.: What? Why does everyone always assume that?!
(/Yes, it would get repetitive. I’ve sorta always assumed that’s part of the formula with these things.)
I know, I love the tone trolling thing. Fall on floor funny.
Speaking as someone who might have been ‘that guy’ twenty years ago, I want to say a few words on his behalf.
I’m assuming that he was young, not particularly attractive, didn’t have much experience with women, and didn’t have a partner — or he would have had better things to do than attend a Sceptics conference. He’s read in the media about conferences and how much promiscuous sex goes on there, and he’s read lots of media stories about how women hook up with the most unsuitable men in the most unlikely circumstances, because these are the kind of events that get written about. He knows he is supposed to ‘flirt’ but it makes him feel stupid and look even more awkward and anxious around women than he really is. Besides, men at the conference outnumber women ten to one, and he’s not yet been able to get close enough to an attractive woman to even try his primitive flirting skills: other men, who all seem far more attractive and more confident than he is, have beaten him to it. And he doesn’t want to make a proposition in public because he knows from experience he will almost certainly get a humiliating rejection.
So after a long, long wait he finally manages to get into a private space with an attractive woman for a few seconds, and he makes the most mild and inoffensive suggestion he can possibly think of, gets the negative response he was expecting, and goes off to his lonely bed. So far, that’s just life and another learning experience about how shitty it all is.
Then the next day he finds himself called out and publicly humiliated. I’m assuming that the people at the conference know who he is: even if they don’t it wouldn’t be hard for them to find out. And his personal burden of being awkward and unattractive is suddenly everyone else’s business.
Is he going to come to another conference? Like hell he is! Is being turned into a laughing-stock going to help his issues with low confidence and poor self-esteem? Nope. He’s been objectified into a stock character of feminist mythology, the creepy male, and used to make a point. Nobody seems to know or care anything about what he may have been thinking or feeling: he’s just the red shirt, the B-movie heavy used to illustrate the hard, hard life that the heroine has to lead. Cue violins.
We’ve heard a lot about unwritten rules of propositioning, but there is one unwritten rule that hasn’t been called up: you don’t go public with your rejections. If you don’t fancy someone, tell them so, but don’t humiliate them by making your disdain a point in a subsequent well-attended lecture. It’s unkind, it’s unnecessary, and it may be counter-productive — because next time That Guy who you have humiliated so thoroughly in public may be angry enough about it to do something far worse, and not necessarily to you.
And having read hundreds of posts, I still don’t understand: why is it only permissible for a man to proposition a woman at a time when acceptance would be maximally embarrassing for her, and rejection would be maximally embarrassing for him?
This is all I’m saying! And I think it’s all that anyone who thinks it was a creep-move is saying. I did say exactly that in the earlier post. If they’d been talking, then it’s at least a different kind of thing. But just some guy at the far end of the table that she hadn’t talked to? Uh, no.
The hypocrisy regarding tone has been noticed by many and, to Sara in particular, I hope that everyone will attend the Sunday talks at TAM9. A former student of mine is scheduled to talk about applying Rogerian communication techniques to conversations & debates with believers. I haven’t seen the talk, but he’s an amazing, intelligent, and compassionate person that I’m sure will deliver. I’m not much for following a set of rules for basic communication, but we can all learn from the framework, which is likely to reduce cognitive dissonance and increase empathy, even if we don’t use it strictly.
That said, I am sad that so little of the conversation has been about the original issue.
I don’t think this issue brings out the best in all of us. For one thing, little harm is not zero harm, but it’s arguably very little harm. Second, I would not welcome being sat down and having things pointed out to me. I would want to listen to arguments and examples, but it occurs to me that the presumption that I’m the person whose opinion needs correcting is not the way to start. My personal reaction is that there’s nothing wrong with concluding that the guy in the elevator behaved creepily. Had I been there I would probably think so (my not being there is part of what is wrong with what the guy did. Basically, he cornered her, even if he didn’t consciously try to).
No, you’re in all likelihood right, that is a fictitious reasonable person endowed with invisibility would have the same reaction. Now having established that we get to the hard part, about how tolerant to be of this behavior, and what constitutes the correct view to take over the outrage at men generally over what this guy did, and how men of good will need to be brought into line about their attitudes, not for approving of what the guy did, but for thinking the incident unimportant or not disapproving hard enough.
I expect this to happen among any group which finds itself (perhaps unwittingly) micromanaging the morality of its members. We all have our own idealizations of what it means to be a secular humanist, or a Gnu Atheist, or what have you. It can really hurt to see that ideal violated, and the heat of this argument comes from that. It bugs me that atheists aren’t way better people than others at the level of understanding each others flaws, but that would be too much to expect.
“Am I weird in this?”
Of course not. Sexual freedom isn’t about sleeping with everyone you meet. At least I hope not otherwise that’s another horrible thing I’m trying to export to less liberal people.
Sigh.
At 4 a.m., in an elevator, when she’s said she’s tired and is going to bed, and has also apparently said (I didn’t know this before) that she’s not available, period. He ignores all that and does what works for him.
Plus of course you don’t know any of that – how lonely unattractive inept etc he is.
Yeah no sorry I’m not going to have more sympathy for him. His access to a woman to fuck isn’t some kind of human right.
@Jon Jeremey:
I think we tend to call those circumstances “being drunk”. We also have names for people who take advantage of said circumstances.
No he wasn’t, he was mildly rebuked, and if he takes the advice, maybe next time he’ll have more luck.
I also find it rich that you criticize others for “humiliating” and “objectifying” him, but you are the first one I’ve seen to suggest that maybe the guy might turn into a killer next.
Because for women, it’s not about embarrassment, it’s about safety.
Why is it everytime I hear some formerly pimple ridden socially inept person defend this guy I want to punch them in the face?
As a currently pimple ridden socially inept male, I politely ask all of you to stop substituting EG for yourselves and Ms Watson for whoever it was that rejected you.
Surely it’s life, liberty, and the *pursuit* of a woman to fuck that we are all entitled to.
And happy 4th of July to you too Christopher! :- )
Jon Jermey,
Your basic premise is stupidly wrong. Rebecca Watson is a public figure who has made a giant huge deal about not wanting to be approached in a sexual manner. He’s not supposed to flirt with her, or proposition her, or make advances towards her in any way, because she’s at that conference in part to tell people that she’s uncomfortable being propositioned at conferences.
She’s given multiple public announcements that she’s off-limits. She makes a declaration that she’s tired and going to sleep. These aren’t subtle clues that need interpretation, these are explicit declarations of intent. Elevator Guy ignored those giant neon signs, and made his clumsy sexual proposition anyway.
“Why is it everytime I hear some formerly pimple ridden socially inept person defend this guy I want to punch them in the face?”
Because you are not very good at making a reasoned argument to counter their points and think a threat of violence is a suitable substitute?
I give up.
You tell us.
Russell Blackford and Verbose Stoic,
Thank you for speaking up. My impression was also that this chap might be impaired by some autistic spectrum disorder. Even an individual with mild Asperger’s can appear dreadfully inappropriate, especially when it comes to romantic overtures. If that is the case, all this talk of privilege, while of course of immense importance in terms of censuring the objectification of women, is somewhat ironic. Do any of us to whom this faux pas seems so howling know what it’s like to go through life not being able to empathize or employ basic social skills? Perhaps in some situations – like this whole aftermath for instance – it can be more traumatic and frightening than being an intelligent, assertive, and articulate woman.
@51: While I can relate to aspects of what you’re saying there. Awkwardness around women is the lot of some (myself, once upon a time) and it’s certainly possible that the reason there had been no previous conversation was because he was sitting nervously in a corner watching all the cool kids talk, what Rebecca W has said still stands. And what you’ve said, and what I’ve just said is still speculative, maybe plausible, psychoanalytical guesstimation.
I am hopeful that elevator guy is just, as Russell described him above, a bit gormless, but I still think, from what I’ve read, that Rebecca was on the money.
I dunno, I do hope that Jen Mc has a constructive discussion with Richard at TAM and I do hope that some cool heads previal.
I found all of this to be a very helpful learning experience, especially the set of links posted by Caine. I was aware, of course, that women are frequently harassed and have to be more careful than men about personal safety, but I did not fully grasp how it feels to have this as an incessant background in your life. (I probably still don’t, but at least I am much more aware of it now.)
I am disappointed, however, that Richard Dawkins seems to have no interest (thus far) in listening to others and finding out whether there might be something new for him to learn here. I thought he was more open-minded than that.
Atheist Cartoons has weighed in on this, and boy is it ever funny! http://www.atheistcartoons.com/?p=4508
I hope everyone will attend the Sunday talk too, ’cause that’s when I’m speaking! :)
@Sigmund
Meh
No threats of violence. If you saw one chuck it up to my inability to take social cues.
Aratina, thanks for that cartoon. Yes, it is good.
I’d even wager that Dawkins would find it funny.
1) We don’t know that he heard any of these public noes, or her comment about going to bed either, but no one seems to have any trouble just assuming he heard those.
2) No one is claiming he has a right to have a women to fuck, the most forward claim is that he has a right to proposition a women to fuck. I don’t think that’s out of line.
3) Ophelia, it’s not just you who thinks it’s wrong to proposition a stranger to fuck. Lots of people think that. Of course, lots of people think gay sex is wrong, and lots of people think sex before marriage is wrong. The opening up of sexual practice is an ongoing process, and while many people are opposed to sex with strangers, many people are not, and asking a stranger is only viewed askance by society because of an ongoing influence by the purity police.
The thing were a sexual proposition to another in a semi private location is somehow sexist is crazy talk. Ideally, the doors to the elevator would be open, but that’s not required, and probably would have made no change in what Watson had to say.
If he knew that she did not want to have sex, yeah, he’s dumb, because that was pointless and thoughtless.
But at no point does this become a sexism/predation issue, until people decided to make it that by declaring a harmless action that everyone, male or female, has a right to take, a sign of the evil vile male badness of our sexism.
“No threats of violence. If you saw one chuck it up to my inability to take social cues.”
Thread won.
Thank you, Sigmund.
Ophelia,
Kinda absurd to assume this guy believes women are there to be fucked, willing or no.
This elevator becomes more isolated and sinister with every post.
We are 10 posts from Dworkin, which is fine but it’s not “in fighting” to me as this blog is about atheism.
Waaaaaaaaaaait a second – back up – Sara E.M. –
What?????
Adam – I wasn’t talking about what the guy believed, I was addressing what Jon Jermey had suggested might have been going on with him.
Haaaaaaa that cartoon.
I am intrigued by this furore and have been discussing it at my local Atheist Meetup last night. One woman I spoke to commented on how this sort of thing happens all the time. Surely men know that. Myself and most women I know can tell you of the many inappropriate and intimidating situations that they have found themselves in with men they don’t know.
I have read so many comments by men who are trying to figure out exactly how they feel about every detail of the elevator incident. But if you haven’t been in that situation as a women I’m not sure if you can figure it out. I’m not saying that to alienate you, it is heartening that you want to understand. So what you need to do is start just accepting that this is how it is for women. It just is.
A situation where a man might feel flattered and excited may well be intimidating and worrying for a woman.
If some men who do ‘get it’ have to put up with the odd rebuke by someone like Rebecca Watson that’s not so bad is it? If it helps make women safer I think you can deal with it. We are all suffering the after effects of thousands of years of religious patriarchy. I think we are on track but there is still work to do. If all you nice guys start straightening out the creepy guys I think the positive effects for women would be enormous. I can see from these blogs that the creepy guys ain’t gonna listen to women!
@Petria: I’d say, if men mind what Rebecca said, they don’t actually “get” it yet.
@70: Some worthwhile points, I reckon.
I’m not sure how this would have become public, but hypothetically, what would this discussion look like if Rebecca had taken up elevator guy’s proposition?
Some of the commentary is reminiscent of Freud…One of his early “patients” was a girl of 14 who was molested by a (male) friend of her parents’. Freud called her (displeased reaction to this hysterical, because to a healthy girl of 14 an opportunity for sex should be welcome.
Empathy! Imagination! Having a clue!
Dear god.
No. No no no no no. That is so wrong-headed….
No, I’m sorry, everyone does not. (A legal right, possibly, but that’s not the issue.) No, everyone does not have the right to ask a stranger for sex. (I remember a month in Paris when I had just turned 18. There were a lot of men around who were thoroughly convinced that they had a right to ask me for sex, and it made my life hell.)
No, Ophelia your view that being approached for a sexual encounter by a perfect stranger, even in broad daylight, is off-putting and not typical is Not Weird. At 4 am in an elevator? Weird times 1000. And frankly, although my read is also that EM had canoodling in mind when he invited her for coffee, even if he didn’t, even if he really truly only wanted to converse with her more and drink coffee, the invitation was still completely wrong. As some commenters seem to have forgotten, it was 4 am and it was in a goddamn elevator, a tiny enclosed space. He was a stranger and he approached a woman alone in an elevator at 4 am with a request to do what he wanted to do. It’s simple – he did the wrong thing, and, again, it’s simple, guys should not do that. At a conference, at an airport, at the zoo, in a department store. Period.
About autism spectrum disorders. In the US estimates are that 3.4/1000 children have some form of one of these disorders. Let’s say (I could be wrong here, maybe some are cured in childhood, or do not survive childhood. In the US people with disabilities are of most interest during their school years, and limited adult incidence info is available) that those children grow up to be adults. Males are 3 to 4 times more likely to present with one of these disorders than females. So, if there were 1000 people at the conference, there might be at most four people there w/an autism spectrum disorder. One would likely be a woman. And three would likely be men who might make a social and communicative blunder like EM did. I don’t know what conference attendance was but the odds are pretty low that EM had an autism spectrum disorder.
I can’t think of any reasonable excuse for EM’s behavior. And I believe that is because it’s just about inexcusable, given the context. The facts that we know, few as they are, ought to be enough to indicate that EM acted badly and incorrectly.
Oh dear, that reminds me of a time in Barcelona when some wild eyes man saw me walking on a busy street and beelined for me. I started to veer away but he pushed me up against the nearest wall, kissed me on the cheek, laughed maniacally and walked off. Despite being physically shaken up no-one on that busy street asked if I was ok or acknowledged it at all. That was possibly more disturbing than the mad guys behaviour.
Thank you Claire. I thought I had gotten lost in Loonyland for a few minutes there.
@70
Yes and no. Sexual freedom is inclusive and can mean many things to many people. More sex and sex with strangers–whatever melts your butter–is gets included, too. But more importantly, or as a prerequisite to that, sexual freedom shouldn’t be gender-specific. The playing field has to be even for the “process” to work. And it’s not. Not in general and not inside an elevator.
Claire Ramsey,
Your analysis would work except for two things:
1) You’re assuming that there is no reason to think that people with ASD aren’t likely to be disproportionately represented at that conference. Autistics tend towards the exceptionally rational end in their behaviour so a skeptics conference relying pretty much on reason would be something that they’d tend to be interested in.
2) Autism isn’t the only disorder/personality trait that could result in a similar faux pas.
To everyone else:
Look, at least for me, I think it obvious that he screwed up big time and that Watson was reasonable in feeling uncomfortable. So, with that settled, my main issue here is that you can’t get from “He really screwed up” to anything about “sexualization” or about him treating her just as an object, and that’s pretty much where Watson started from. There’s no real evidence here that this really is indicative of any sexist notion, intent, or training on his part.
I don’t get Russell’s point, either (@ 24).
Surely he was, exactly, treating her as a mere object without regard to her interest in going to bed because she felt tired, along with her interest in not being propositioned because she doesn’t like it. What gormless efforts to be considerate? You mean saying “don’t take this the wrong way but”? That doesn’t count as an effort to be considerate! Boy does it ever not.
I’m getting very tired of what I think of as the “autism excuse” popping up. It’s becoming increasingly frequent at many online venues where I hang out. I’m sure that each individual who posts it doesn’t think he’s offering an excuse, and isn’t doing it out of some perverse motivation, so please don’t get angry and think I’m imputing bad motivations to you. I’m not. But be aware that it’s becoming more and more common, and yes, the frequency with which it is proferred (with a truly weird certainty that it is the explanation for the behavior) is totally out of proportion to the statistical likelihood of it being true, even allowing for more spectrum folks at these types of conferences.
Look – a lot of men behave very badly and it’s maddening to see so many scrambling for excuses. Stop it.
EXACTLY. I think that some are so stuck on protecting women’s right to be seen as sexual beings that they have forgotten to protect our right not to. To protect the choice, we need to start with the understanding that power is not balanced in many (if not most) situations.
There is no possible way anyone can say whether EG has ASD from the information given. Especially going off of what someone’s admittedly brain-fatigued recall was of what exactly happened and what was said to them at 4AM. Why even bother speculating? All we have is her impression of the situation. We can dismiss it or believe it. And we should be honest in saying which we do. But we can’t really speculate further with any hope of alighting on some previously hidden bit of truth, can we?
Oh, lord. He wasn’t treating her like an “object”. He made an awkward pass. This has nothing to do with other stories involving blatant harassment or being forcibly kissed by a stranger. I don’t see how you people are making that leap.
How many of us don’t know the guy/gal who can’t give up a relationship and continues to call unsolicited. To me, that’s “creepy” and more disturbing than this elevator incident.
I remember in college standing (holding a wine cooler!) in some girl’s room trying to chat her up. Then she said she needed to go to sleep (translation: not interested) and I left. I’m 6’3. Did I intimidate her? It was a small room. Was she “objectified” by my interest? Sexualized? Give me a break.
Maybe Dawkins thinks it’s a non-issue because it’s a complete non-issue to most people.
This is not going to win me many friends here, but I see where Dawkins comes from. Don’t get me wrong – I would not do that, partly because I have never been interested in one night stands myself, and even if I were I would also consider it inappropriate to ask somebody I have not at least made “googly-eyes” with. But such a tempest in a tea-cup over what, and there Dawkins is correct unless I am unaware of some crucial piece of info, essentially boils down to “interested?’ – “no” – “okay then”?
The thing is, when I read something like this (from the previous post):
guy joins her in the elevator (just the two of them, how romantic)
In the afternoon, fine; in the evening, well, it depends, use your judgement.
… I have to ask myself, really? You would suggest that people searching for casual sex drop the question, instead of when there is only the two of them, in front of ten other listeners instead? You would suggest that they propose during the afternoon, when for example the next symposium of the meeting is about to begin? Again, I do not have much experience with this kind of behaviour, and none of it as the one taking the initiative, but even I know that this is not how it works.
He asked her back to his room for sex. That’s not zero bad. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s not zero bad, either. It sounds like more of a treat to at least some men than it does to most women, but surely Richard is not completely unaware of that.
And considering all that, this then comes interestingly close to suggesting that this question can never be asked under any circumstances. Of course, there are people who would like the world to operate that way, but there are also men and (yes) women who go to a weekend seminar, stay up till 3 am, and then hop into bed together and probably never meet again. I’ve seen that happen. None of the two approaches is my cuppa tea, but it takes every kind of people, as they say…
gillt and Josh,
I think the point of autism examples — at least from me — is to show that there are legitimate reasons for someone to be that clueless without invoking sexism. Autism is just one of them, especially with the “not recognizing that it would be uncomfortable” part, but there are others. Leaping to comments about sexualization or objectification don’t seem to be the most reasonable explanation.
Repeating again that it was a really awkward approach and that she was reasonable to feel uncomfortable.
I think it’s the behavior Verbose, not the person. Maybe he was a sociopath or Rebecca is a chronic liar. The argument is about a behavior pattern, within the majority toward the minority, at atheists conventions and this being an example of that. Agree with it or disagree with it, but since when does playing armchair psychologist add an interesting dimension to any issue?
“Objectification” does not equal “sexual assault”. That’s why there is a different word to describe it. That kind of thinking – that anything short of assault is okay – is exactly why I’m still talking about this when I have other work to do.
But I’m tired of spinning my wheels.
Adam,
How do you assume an awkward pass is not objectifying a woman especially in Rebecca’s situation. Whenever a guy has propositioned me and I don’t know him, we have no shared experience and he knows nothing about my personal life I can only assume it’s the body he is seeing. That is objectification and it happens to women a lot! Really! If he expects me to suddenly share my body in one of the most intimate ways that humans can be together but I don’t even know his name, then I will feel sexualized. I am only speaking for myself. I don’t disparage women for making different decisions or analysis. I just don’t go for sexual encounters with strangers. Call it prudish if you must, but I will continue to conduct my most intimate of affairs in a way that I feel comfortable with.
My little story about being forcibly kissed by a stranger is relevant. My point there was that no one who was there cared that I had been put in a situation that I found scary. I can’t help but think that a large part of society thinks that these things are just what women have to live with. Then there are those who wilfully mis-understand what the situation felt like to the woman involved and unhelpfully point out hysteria and paranoia. These blogs are full of those comments following this elevator incident.
I honestly would like to hear more from the men proposing some solutions.
These two propositions need to be evaluated separately: 1) What elevator man did was wrong. 2) What elevator man did was sexist. Arguing against #2 does not suggest that #1 is false as well. I think this may be some of the disconnect. Under the “autism-spectrum guy who really wants coffee” hypothesis, the event certainly cannot be interpreted in sexist terms. If the guy really had atheist-on-atheist action in mind, I think most would agree that it was wrong. The more debatable point is whether it was sexist. Wanting to have sex with a woman does not imply that the woman is seen ONLY as a sex object, right? Making a woman uncomfortable shows insensitivity, but not necessarily marginalization. Being clueless is not the same as wielding privilege and attempting to establish dominance. It would seem that the only thing this guy was privileged to do was get his ass turned down. Many seem to be saying that he WOULD have had a clue if he had ever really attempted to see women as equals, and I can see the logic in that. But would you say that there *might* be a difference between failing to understand women and thinking of women as second-class citizens? Not to mention that it isn’t really possible to understand “women,” because different women hold a variety of views, including on sexual matters. There must be SOME women who enjoy sex with strangers, however rare this may be. Consensual heterosexual sex with strangers does exist (or so I am told). I think I could go either way on this one. We should probably keep talking about it for several more weeks. : )
I find it unlikely he was autistic, I do not have Aspergers I am autistic though while i share many traits with someone with Aspergers I have other issues that put me somewhere else on the spectrum. However I have two children on the spectrum one who is like myself and another who is an Aspie. I have met LOTS of people on the spectrum when you have children with asd you kinda start meeting other people with it.
Autistic people at least the ones that I have met are usually socially awkward, but by the time we are in our 20s we know we are socially awkward. An encounter like the one in the elevator would not be left to chance by me or any autistic I’ve met. For an autistic an encounter like this is a major event, we would have thought of the context of the situation 1000 times, going over every possible detail in our heads. (For an example, before I walk into a store I practice in my head what I am going to say to the greeter at the door, I’ve had greeters say something unusual or unexpected totally ruin my day)
I could be wrong on this, my doctor tells me that me and my son are incredibly rare on the spectrum so perhaps my experience is unique but other autistic people have confirmed many of my experiences.
Maybe I am actually old fashioned as 4am coffee might not be code for hot sex. Is it really that insane to think that he’s being flirty which is different than “Let’s fuck. Now.” Maybe he’s testing the waters just like every other man ever has had to do. I don’t know why he has to be either autistic or a sex fiend. Guys can have crushes. So maybe he’s a guy who acts foolishly for a moment in the middle of the night.
Petria, I just don’t follow your objectification argument. Didn’t he hear her speak? So you don’t think he could find her personality attractive? I can’t get inside his head but he could be smitten with her or, like u suggest, could just have found her hot.
@Ophelia
“No, I’m sorry, everyone does not. (A legal right, possibly, but that’s not the issue.) No, everyone does not have the right to ask a stranger for sex. (I remember a month in Paris when I had just turned 18. There were a lot of men around who were thoroughly convinced that they had a right to ask me for sex, and it made my life hell.”
Um… yes, yes they do, that’s the point. It doesn’t matter if something “makes you life hell” if that thing is someone asking you a question. It probably makes a lot of religious people’s lives hell that atheists ask questions that upset them, but strangers are allowed to ask other strangers or sex. Some people like to have sex with strangers, and there is no way for them to do that without asking strangers for sex. The fact that some people have to go through all the torturous difficulty of saying no does not justify a complete ban on all stranger propositioning.
There are things that make a proposition not appropriate, like if someone says no, you can’t ask again, which may have been the case, if this guy did hear all the things that you are assuming he heard. This guy may have been in the wrong, but if he is, it’s because he asked after a negative was provided, not because propositioning strangers is wrong itself.
@gillt (84)
“Yes and no. Sexual freedom is inclusive and can mean many things to many people. More sex and sex with strangers–whatever melts your butter–is gets included, too. But more importantly, or as a prerequisite to that, sexual freedom shouldn’t be gender-specific. The playing field has to be even for the “process” to work. And it’s not. Not in general and not inside an elevator.”
This strikes me as some sort of weird version of the Perfect Solution Fallacy. How is the playing field not even? In what specific way is the playing field not even between a hypothetical Rebecca Watson who actually is single and wants to engage in sex with people she meets at conferences (but not this guy, so she still says no) and Elevator Guy?
Is it not even because he might be able to physically beat her up? (We don’t know, he might have been 5’1″, and super weak.) Well yeah, there is always going to be someone who can beat someone else up. Are you saying that six foot body builders can never ask women out alone because they have the ability to beat them up? How the fuck does that make sense? When I am propositioned alone by men who can physically beat me up, I do not think it wrong or unfair for that, because it’s a sexual proposition, and even if they can break me in half, I don’t treat the proposition as coming with an implied threat.
So how is the playing field actually uneven? As far as I can tell, it was uneven in her favor, in that she is attractive (no pictures, I’m just assuming, but at least attractive to him) and competent, where he is not.
What you seem to be referring to is that she feels threatened, and therefore she isn’t free to consent or not consent, because of duress. This is stupid for a number of reasons. a) She did in fact say no, so yes, she clearly wasn’t that threatened, and nothing bad happened to her. b) Just because she feels threatened (where she is now a hypothetical women, since Watson wasn’t) doesn’t actually means that he is somehow in the wrong, or not allowed to proposition. If he doesn’t act threatening, or intend rape, then he is not responsible for the fact that some women might treat every stranger as a potential rapist.
Ophelia’s position that no one should ever proposition a stranger is wrong, but at least consistent. Your position that men shouldn’t ask women out when they are alone because the women might feel threatened by non threatening actions because she acts (or has to act) under the assumption that every man is a violent rapist is not the fault of the guy asking. There is literally no action he could take that could fix the issue of women treating him like a rapist other than not ever talking to women, or at least never sexually propositioning them. On the other hand, the women can just not treat every sexual proposition as if it had a rider of rape attached. And yes, it’s not that easy, and it might result in actually getting raped, but we can fix those problems without telling men to stop asking women out alone. For example, hopefully those elevators had cameras, and if they did, and if we beat the problem of “not rape, she asked for it” that is a huge as fuck problem with islam, but not a non issue in the US and other western nations, then we could be reasonably safe in elevators, and women could be raped less, which would make it easier for them to consider sexual propositions as not having the rider threat. But notice that those are completely different things than “the playing field isn’t equal because I feel threatened, even when I’m not being threatened, so no one should ask me out.”
This is the worst thing about atheists when you put them together in one room… they are so fucking afraid of offending anyone that the smallest tiniest thing has to be agreed upon as being SO AWFUL.
So glad that Dawkins isn’t getting dragged into this bullshit. You’re all a shower of
[don’t you call me that, you creep; don’t you call anyone that here – OB]
Thank God. Now Ophelia will ban Kenny outright.
Adam,
We all have to read between the lines and not be naive about sexual (or possibly not sexual) advances. If you want to see women giving men the benefit of the doubt rather than make an assessment based on how we have experienced so many men behave then women are going to get into more hot water than they already do.
It is a shame that the creepy ones ruin it for the others but they really do! I can’t change these men’s behaviour because I am an ‘orrible feminist, but maybe you can. I want people to get the relationships they want or the sex they want but fact is that many aren’t because of bad behaviour. Seriously, I am interested in hearing solutions.
Ophelia, so many people have lined up to enter Loonyland lately, it’s not a surprise that you thought you might have accidentally gotten shoved over the line. I looked and I didn’t see you over there.
V. Stoic, my hypothesis also did not include the strong possibility that among the 3.4/1000 grown up children w/ASD would be one or a portion of one that was sufficiently disabled to be unable to attend any conference, rational or not.
Josh haha do u post on skeptchick. You remind me of them.
Why its not OK to ask women whom you have never spoken to for sex in an elevator at 4 am in a hotel. (never mind all the other details)
1 in 6 women will be the victim of sexual assault by a man. (I thought 1 in 4 but was mistaken)
Most rapes do not occur in back alleys at night behind dumpsters. They happen in hotels, airports, Walmarts, parking lots and anywhere else you can think of. Believe it or not hotel elevators are actually one of the more common locations for it. (a simple google search will confirm this.) I find it hard to believe most of you don’t already know this.
I’m bad at analogies but i’m gonna try one Dawkins made a point that if he got into an elevator and was propositioned as RW was he would say no and its no big deal. For his example to fit we would need a 3rd gender of human, one who was on average 50% stronger and larger than males and had a proclivity for raping men to the point that 1 in 6 would be raped in their life.
People avoid going out in thunderstorms because lightening is scary and can kill you, a woman is much more likely to be killed by a man than by a lightening bolt and yet they mostly still fear lightening more.
Did your invitation get lost in the post?
A kind soul has tried making an analogy for Dawkypoo.
#99
Where did I say that?
I was responding to a particular point about sexual freedom. There’s more to it than women having the freedom to say no and being listened to. Woman in general should feel safe in any situation before we can start saying what an important priority sexual freedom is. A resounding number of women don’t and that point is going right over your head.
And where did Rebecca blame and shame Elevator Guy? You’ve failed in comprehending what she said.
David,
Thankyou, I knew blokes like you were out there. Don’t ever keep quiet about it. I firmly believe men like you with a grasp on reality are the solution. I think that women can highlight the problem but can’t affect the men perpetrating it.
Online Dating. Seriously, if figuring out what is and isn’t a proper context to proposition someone is so damn difficult then it’s probably best to stick to a context wholly designed for just that sort of thing. This goes for people looking for something more long term just as well as those looking for a hookup. Given the fact that there are roughly one-jillion dating sites out there, the whole “if I can’t hit on women whenever and wherever I want then I’ll never find love/get laid!” whine that’s come up in various forms throughout this discussion makes no sense, and garners no sympathy, at least not from me. Not that it would have been a much better “argument” were the situation otherwise, but it’s just absolutely silly now.
@David
“For his example to fit we would need a 3rd gender of human, one who was on average 50% stronger and larger than males and had a proclivity for raping men to the point that 1 in 6 would be raped in their life.
People avoid going out in thunderstorms because lightening is scary and can kill you, a woman is much more likely to be killed by a man than by a lightening bolt and yet they mostly still fear lightening more.”
They have those, they are called Gay men, they work out more, and I am short. But I am still not threatened by them, because the problem is not size. Size =/= rape. Rape = Rape. And there is nothing that Elevator Guy can do about rapists (except for example, promote cameras in elevators).
@gillt
“Where did I say that?
I was responding to a particular point about sexual freedom. There’s more to it than women having the freedom to say no and being listened to. Woman in general should feel safe in any situation before we can start saying what an important priority sexual freedom is. A resounding number of women don’t and that point is going right over your head.
And where did Rebecca blame and shame Elevator Guy? You’ve failed in comprehending what she said.”
1) That is the perfect solution fallacy, this is literally the exact same thing that Dawkins is being shamed for. You are saying that men do not have the ability to make sexual propositions until rape no longer exists. That’s a perfect solution fallacy. Men continue to have the freedom to make sexual propositions, because it has nothing to do with how actually safe women are, and if you want to fix the problem, advocate things that actually have any bearing at all on the safety of women.
I am well aware that many women do not feel safe. That is why I advocate making changes that actually make them safe. Note that a blanket ban on sexual propositions is not one of them. And then, once we have made it safer for women, those women who currently treat every sex proposition as a threat of rape will have even less of an excuse.
2) I did not say that Watson blamed or shamed Elevator guy, I did not say either blame or shame at all, but you and Ophelia are personally advocating that men should not be allowed to ask out strangers, and that’s not helpful, and it’s incorrect.
@K
“Online Dating. Seriously, if figuring out what is and isn’t a proper context to proposition someone is so damn difficult then it’s probably best to stick to a context wholly designed for just that sort of thing. This goes for people looking for something more long term just as well as those looking for a hookup. Given the fact that there are roughly one-jillion dating sites out there, the whole “if I can’t hit on women whenever and wherever I want then I’ll never find love/get laid!” whine that’s come up in various forms throughout this discussion makes no sense, and garners no sympathy, at least not from me. Not that it would have been a much better “argument” were the situation otherwise, but it’s just absolutely silly now.”
That is not the issue. Many of us are capable of telling the proper context. I mostly do it at sex conferences, where it is not technically always the proper context, but is much more accepted. The issue is not telling the proper context, it is that many people are advocating that propositioning strangers is never acceptable. No matter how proper the context, Ophelia would object to any proposition at all. Rebecca would object as well. But the thing is, I can’t tell if the person I’m propositioning is for or against sex with strangers without asking. The only way you can be against propositioning strangers is if you don’t believe that sex with someone who you just met is ever acceptable. In which case, I’m going to write you off as a Constable of the Sex Police, and move on in my life, but if you believe that sex with strangers is acceptable, what part of the following totally hypothetical situation makes it not the proper context:
A person you find attractive is going up to her room at the same time as you. You ask her in the elevator (which has a camera in it) if she wants to go back to your room for a socially acceptable euphemistic phrase for sex.
Um, no. Gay MEN. Not a third GENDER. And we are human just like straight people. FFS!
… My point was that because I am tiny, every man is on average 50% larger than me, and can rape me any time they want. I am aware that gay men are also men, and not a third gender. I have had sex with them, so their gender is something I am relatively aware of.
No one is shaming Dawkins. I’ll go a step further and say no one on this side is shaming anyone. Pointing out what’s wrong with someone’s analogies or reasoning is not shaming.
I don’t think anyone has said this. Pointing out when it’s inappropriate to do something is not the same as telling you you can’t do it. In fact I’ve seen a lot of posts of over at pharyngula (and I think Ms. Benson and a few others here) explained how easily he could have propositioned Ms Watson in an entirely none threatening away. I believe one of your boys complained that this would have opened him up to a more public rejection.
The horror.
Correct me if I’m wrong but what’s being advised against is asking random strangers to join you for a quick rump which, considering just how intimate sex is for so many people and the inherit power inbalance in most situations, seems pretty good advice to me.
You are welcome to have sex with whomever you please if they consent. Strangers, people engaged in other relationships, the pope, what have ye. No one is stopping you. The only thing you are being told is to keep context in mind. For example. A teacher propositiong the parent of a student is a major no-no. As is a police officer propisitioning someone they are writing a ticket to.
The right after she’s made it clear she doesn’t appreciate those come ons, they make her uncomfortable and that she’s very tired and eager to go to bed at 4 in the morning, in an empty elevator after seemingly following her group around and not saying a word to her part.
@ Kaelik
That we are alone in a confined space, and the camera you are so enamored of is a very small comfort in light of the absence of actual other people to turn to? Not exactly the best of situations to attempt a non-creepy approach.
Even leaving aside the possibility of the other party intending you some sort of harm, they have at the very least left you stuck in an elevator for the duration of the ride with someone you’ve just rejected, which depending on how they take said rejection is going to be some degree of uncomfortable. Pretty inconsiderate if you ask me.
Josh beat me to it. Another infuriating aspect is that it so rarely seems to be invoked for women.
There’s supposedly this large population of conference-attending men who are incapable of grasping “That’s intimidating and disrespectful. Don’t do it.” Bullshit. It’s ridiculous. That’s intimidating and disrespectful. Don’t do it.
Petria,
I never advocated that women give men the benefit of the doubt. I would err on the side of caution.
I don’t see the connection between a stupid pick up line and…rape!
I don’t think she ever implied there was a threat. Why are people talking about rape? Because it’s possible for a woman to be raped???
A guy who walked onto the elevator and said nothing would pose the same threat of rape or other violence.
Thank you, SC. I was beginning to wonder if I was the only socially out of bounds person for saying it, since no one else seems to have mentioned it. And yeah, now that you mention it, it totally never gets invoked for women. This further supports my suspicion that it’s a (conscious or not) excuse to grab at to avoid facing up to exercises in male privilege.
Speaking of fallacies, yours is a strawman. I never took the extreme position that we have to eradicate rape from the face of the earth before we’re on more equal footing and I never said a ban should be placed on men sexually propositioning women. I’m making the very practical statement that there is no sexual freedom when one gender, in large numbers, tells you how uncomfortable they feel when propositioned at certain times and certain places by certain people.
Why not just admit that it’s extremely risky and probably not a good idea to wait until you’ve got a women alone and cornered to make sexual advances toward her? Or if you do, you proceed with caution while acknowledging that you’re possibly putting her in an uncomfortable position of having to confront you and say no.
Or even better, follow the link and tell us why you think it’s wrong.
Schrodinger’s Rapist
That is because you are blind to and refuse to set aside your cognitive and neurotypical privileges and seriously think about how perhaps that this “Elevator Guy” has ADHD or places on the Autism scale which means that he probably has real deficiencies in both reading social cues that the cognitive privileged and neurotypical privileged take for grant and the formal and informal instruction that the cognitive privileged and neurotypical privileged received and take for granted?
@#120
No we don’t need to seriously think about how perhaps.
Elevator Guy having ASD is irrelevant and worse because it’s pure stereotyping speculation.
Gee, History Punk, do you think you got enough privilege in there?
Instead, perhaps it’s because I’m suspicious of such great numbers of neurotypical (or otherwise) men assuming that autism—not boorishness or casual, unexamined ideas of women as less-than-people—is so frequently a more parsimonious explanation of acting like an ass.
Fuck me, it’s literally anything to excuse men’s bad behavior, isn’t it? No argument too desperate. No smirking too dismissive. No hand-waving too condescending.
And right here, on B&W.
This isn’t bad behavior. Yawnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
Get your yawns in while you can, Kenny, because O is gonna can your ass for calling people cunts. But you knew that already.
And ffs that fact that this gets thousands of comments tells you that it’s not even an issue that’s universally agreed upon or respected as a point of discussion. Discussing a come-on on an atheism website is fucking pointless. Talk about religion ffs
“because O is gonna can your ass for calling people cunts. But you knew that already.”
So what? delete cookies and get on a proxy and I could post here if I wanted? Not that I will care once this stupid issue is over with (until the next femdrama). I’m guessing these bloggers just love the extra traffic this crap is giving and that’s why they keep putting up multiple topics about it. You’re a sad fuck for vocally wanting someone else banned. “OMG someone disagrees with me, but good, they said the word cunt and I will make sure to say it should result in a ban because I curry favour with the admin”. Sad. Even sadder than this debacle.
Not at all. (Amazing, since we disagree on EVERYTHING. :))
Ew. Not worth anyone’s time.
PDD – Privileged Douchenozzle Disorder
Adam,
Good point about the threat of rape being there regardless of the coffee proposition. The answer to the previous question is Yes, people are talking about rape despite the fact that Rebecca never brought it up because women really fear it. Because it happens. A lot. Because when all those factors come together, a stranger, isolation and maybe an inappropriate request some of us are going to get anxious. So we can absolutely request that those situations happen less often.
Read David’s post at #105. If you still don’t get it then just accept it.
Actually, I don’t think we do (or is this a recursive example of that. . .LOL), really. We just have an unfortunate tendency to really get under each other’s skin until we’re raw, sometimes.
I only noticed it the once. Not that we hadn’t disagreed, but I hadn’t seen our interactions like this, and was surprised that this was your impression. (I invited you for a visit!) Not that it would be a huge problem. I mean, that’s my relationship with truth machine and it’s no prob
uh, never mind.
Kaelik:
I can’t speak for Ophelia here, but that was not my impression of what she said.
It may help to consider several different situations here:
(1) A man and a woman meet and chat flirtatiously for a while. He then proposes (euphemistically or otherwise) going elsewhere for a sexual encounter.
(2) A man and a woman notice each other from a short distance and exchange mutual admiring and salacious glances. He then walks up to her, and the first words out of his mouth include some kind of sexual proposition.
(3) A man accosts a woman on the street. She was not aware of his existence until the moment he walked up to her, and she does not send any flirtatious signals (verbal or nonverbal). The first words out of his mouth are a sexual proposition.
Assuming that in each case the man walks away if the answer is “no”, I don’t think Ophelia is suggesting that any of these behaviors should be legally prohibited (and in fact she said so explicitly). Rather, it seems to me she is saying that the behavior in item (3) is rude and inconsiderate, and there should be a social stigma attached to it. That is certainly my point of view.
As for situations (1) and (2), I don’t think there is anything morally wrong with them, provided that the man is being realistic about the signals the woman is sending. If he hits on her after a few minutes of ordinary friendly conversation and polite smiles, that puts him in situation (3), not situation (1). And “I could see her cleavage so obviously she wanted it” is no excuse for assuming you are in situation (2).
Again, I can’t say with certainty that Ophelia would agree with any of this, but I suspect her position is a little less puritan than you think it is.
I think one thing we can all agree on is that she’s lucky she didn’t get onto that one elevator in that crappy M. Night Shyamalan movie.
No worries, SC. My only impression is that it’s very easy for the two of us to irritate each other, even when we largely agree. Something about similar personalities and doggedness, maybe. Anyway, it’s a trait I’ve shared with many friends. And I still regret we couldn’t get together that time after your invite!
The thing is, you didn’t irritate me. You made me very angry (and don’t even get me started on being called untrustworthy) on one occasion, but other than that it was apparently – to my surprise – all me irritating you. Like personalities and doggedness I think is correct, but I’d seen this as friendship rather than friction as we’d largely been on the same side of things.
Wow, what a shitstorm. I’m with O on this.
Me too, it’s just that I tend to have friendships that sometimes involve friction. :)) At any rate, we should probably take this to email.
Unheard of! :)
Oh, great sweet potato, no. I suck at email these days. I’ll consider it water under the bridge. If you don’t, well, nothing I can do.
Hope we can meet up at some point.
Brilliant comment made by Danarra over on Skepchick,
‘Ummm…quick note to the good guys who just do not understand why women are always on their guard – the bad guys who are out there are impersonating you.’
Oh wow, it’s all so clear now. I can totally see why this is being discussed on atheism websites now!
The social cues were that someone repeatedly stated their position and this was ignored in order to corner them in a confined space at 4am.
That says “danger” to me.
Kenny – It’s being discussed on atheist sites because it’s a problem within the atheist community…
Kaelik said in #111:
But you’ve left out all the important context. Was she giving clear signals that she might be interested? Was there a connection already? Sure, ask away. Was she ignoring you and minding her own business? Then the default assumption should be that she’s not interested and wants to be left alone. It’s really not that difficult.
If you are serious about wanting women to feel safe, why are you advocating that your desire to ask women for sex trumps their desire to be left alone?
If you’re in the business of gifting Elevator Guy with your neurological condition of choice so as to make out how he was totally not creepy at all: please consider putting at least as much effort into understanding RW’s position as you have into inventing excuses for Elevator Guy.
If a man making an unwanted creepy proposition to a woman when she clearly isn’t interested is a sign of autism, then apparently autism is WAY more prevalent than I’d feared. In fact it would seem that almost every guy I went to high school with, most guys I’ve worked with including many of my bosses, and some of my male relatives are autistic. Also every woman I’ve talked to about this kind of thing, my sisters, mom, relatives, friends… every one of them seems to run into autistic guys on a regular basis. Almost daily.
I blame the vaccines.
I suspect the blogging world is susceptible to the same illnesses as television news. There is every incentive in the world to hype up personal drama. It’s what gets people chatting more freely, and it appeals to an especially wide audience. Viewership–and especially reloads in the case of blogging–goes up (though perhaps only temporarily), and that is the payoff. I hear PZ’s scienceblogs paycheck is significant.
Like all biases, the “hype” bias does not have to be conscious or planned. It just happens. It’s not like television news became what it is today out of some grand plan. It slowly inched its way in the direction of bullshit because bullshit pays.
SAWells (#147),
I don’t believe anyone entertaining the idea that elevator guy MIGHT have some Asperger’s type problem (or any other kind of social problem) thinks his behaviour wasn’t creepy. It was; that’s acknowledged. It’s also acknowledged that it must’ve been an awful experience for RW. We’re considering another point, namely the legitimacy of the jump from creepiness (ACKNOWLEDGED) to imputing to him errant sexual notions, as Verbose Stoic explains in #85.
I think Watson did allude to a threat of rape or assault in her post: “It also negatively affects the women who are nervous about being in similar situations. Some of them have been raped or otherwise sexually assaulted, and some just don’t want to be put in that position. And they read these posts and watch these videos and they think, “If something were to happen to me and these women won’t stand up for me, who will?””
I agree that the proposition does not in itself increase the danger. However, the proposition might suddenly alert the recipient to a potential threat – it could be that that kind of ‘expression of interest’ is correlated with an increased likelihood of assault compared to any random guy who happens to share the elevator. But if the guy makes a pass but appears to accept no for an answer, then potential threat defused, at least until you can get out of the “enclosed space”. Still inconsiderate and extremely awkward.
Well I agree to that, except that it is complicated. Women do not break out of the role of being passive and approached hence why men have to approach and then be potentially accused of seeing women as prey.
Now I don’t approach strangers. Period. I don’t do this EXACTLY for the reason you cite. But what is the consequence? In some 20-odd years I have been approached twice! Yes it’s a recipe for single-hood. And that single-hood is not perpetuated by men, but by women, who do not do 50% of the “getting to know” or “doing the discourse about initiating sexuality” part. I actually had this conversation with a number of women friends, some who went to bouts of being single when they didn’t want to be. One actually tried to ask out a man and got rejected. She felt so awful that she said she’d never do it again. Sadly she didn’t understand when I said that she was privileged. She had a choice to not try. Over time she will well be approached. I on the other hand will not be. But we are not far enough in gender discourse that in some areas men don’t have a choice. We all are blind to the choices we have and assume others have too.
And to add another point, to approach even casually another person for a sexual encounter is not viewing them as prey. Or at least it only is on a view that sees that as bad. In fact it happens all the time where the advances are accepted. Those are the ones that don’t end up being labeled as being a predator/prey configuration in the end. I think we have to have a better and more nuanced discourse than say that the guy in the elevator saw Rebecca as sexual prey. Because I certainly would not concede that automatically.
This is at least implicitly a discourse that men are to blame (where there is a mentality of prey there is a predator). And yes they are to blame. But they by and large do not actually maintain this situation. We have no choice. We either approach or nothing.
What’s missing in this discourse is exactly why Richard says it’s zero problem. It’s “zero problem” exactly because if men concede that approaching women is bad, they end up living my life. A life where you indeed never risk making another person uncomfortable, or being accused of seeing another person as sexual prey, but you end up living out a self-imposed and unsolvable Lysistrata. Perhaps, if we are honest, and actually understand the trouble that is getting to know and engage another person, sexually or otherwise. And see how all “sides” contribute to what we have today.
In reality most women are happy to be approached, by passive, and not have to fear rejection. They are happy to never be accused of being predators. They are happy to get attention. And this is why it doesn’t change. It is exactly because this is not a post-gender situation. Where 50% of the burden is distributed evenly. But noone even dares to say that.
Rebecca Watson is a public figure who has made a giant huge deal about not wanting to be approached in a sexual manner. He’s not supposed to flirt with her, or proposition her, or make advances towards her in any way, because she’s at that conference in part to tell people thatshe’s uncomfortable being propositioned at conferences.
In that case, it sounds to me like he was trying to be funny. But – intentionally or not – it would come over as pretty aggressive, or tiresome at the very least.
@Hitch: the problem is not “men approaching women” in general. Indeed, you shouldn’t be making generalisations like “women do not break out of the role of being passive”. There are three billion women in the world.
The problem is that if you want to make a casual approach to someone, you shouldn’t begin by shutting yourself into a small metal box with them at 4 am when they’ve already said they’re tired and want to sleep. That’s creepy. Don’t do that.
SAWells, I wish there was studies on this. No I’m not saying that no woman ever approaches a man. I am saying by and large in the US and Europe we have a gender-role pattern set up that sees man as the one approaching and women as the one being approached, and by and large that is what happens.
Problem is that many women think that if they approach once or twice they actually do as much work as men in the department, but that is just delusional. But sure put asterisks on things as you like. Basically you dodge my point.
Yes it can be creepy to be approached at 4am in an elevator, and it can be welcomed. And yes it is uncomfortable to approach someone and get rebuffed, or it can be OK.
I already said that I never do such things. I’m trying to articulate what the consequences are of never doing such things. But as I said it is unspeakable to discuss those consequences.
To take the last first – Hitch, with all due respect, that’s nonsense. Have you never heard of bars? I understand there’s even such a thing as a “bar scene.” There are also other kinds of social gathering, at which one can make friends with people, and progress to sex/romance.
It’s not a stark choice between 1. meet no one, ever, and remain permanently celibate, and 2. ask total strangers for sex.
# 105 David
I think you mean raped. The figures for sexual assault are much, much higher – it’s nearly universal. Even I have been assaulted in one way or another several times, and I’m a nerd who doesn’t get out much.
# 110 Kaelik
Hamilton corrected this (correctly) in # 135 but I’ll just confirm – no I’m not; that’s ridiculous. I’m saying men should not ask strangers for sex. I mean strangers – I don’t mean women they’ve been chatting to, or exchanging flirtatious looks with, I mean strangers.
It’s amazing what a lot of stupid this subject brings out.
Well it was the last at the time – I forgot to refresh. That was addressed to Hitch @ 152.
Ophelia, yes there are choices. But where is the line. Could he have asked outside the elevator? At 3am?
Don’t forget, I agree that it’s bad that men have the approaching role. I agree it’s not great to make advances on a woman in enclosed spaces without immediate and graceful exists. But that’s a lack of sensitivity or awareness perhaps and not automatically “seeing as prey”.
Also a friend of mine who works in the medical fields tells me that conferences in his field are basically laden with sexual activity between conference participants. It seems to me that it is a cultural norm if conferences are seen as being a space where causal sex is OK or if one argues that it has to be bars.
But all that does not detract from my point. Even in bars women don’t tend to buy men drinks. And even in bars women can be uncomfortable by being approached by a guy. And she has all the rights to not be comfortable in that setting too.
LOL @ Jafafa Hots! Yeah, those autistic guys are everywhere.
(Funny that none of my actually autistic friends have done this. They must be faking it.)
gillt,
“I think it’s the behavior Verbose, not the person. Maybe he was a sociopath or Rebecca is a chronic liar. The argument is about a behavior pattern, within the majority toward the minority, at atheists conventions and this being an example of that. Agree with it or disagree with it, but since when does playing armchair psychologist add an interesting dimension to any issue?”
Well, I was clear about my point, which is about determining whether the leap to “sexualization” and sexism is warranted. Armchair psychology is useful to see what might be likely to be the case. As for the behaviour pattern, all I can see that indicates a pattern is “Man approaches woman”, and most people here have insisted that they aren’t saying that that in and of itself is a problem.
Petria,
“How do you assume an awkward pass is not objectifying a woman especially in Rebecca’s situation. Whenever a guy has propositioned me and I don’t know him, we have no shared experience and he knows nothing about my personal life I can only assume it’s the body he is seeing.”
Don’t want to just source my own blog but I just did a post about that the other day:
http://verbosestoic.wordpress.com/2011/07/04/two-things-women-and-everyone-should-know-about-male-attraction/
The first point’s more about just plain attraction but the second point, summarized, is that at least for me any judgement about your physical attractiveness includes a guess about your personality, who you are as a person. I don’t think that I’m alone in this.
David @97,
That’s actually why he does strike me as autistic: made a plan and rehearsed an approach and took it without being aware of what that context meant to her.
Claire Ramsey,
“V. Stoic, my hypothesis also did not include the strong possibility that among the 3.4/1000 grown up children w/ASD would be one or a portion of one that was sufficiently disabled to be unable to attend any conference, rational or not.”
But you are still ignoring other similar conditions that could cause the same sort of clueless behaviour.
gillt,
“Or even better, follow the link and tell us why you think it’s wrong.
Schrodinger’s Rapist”
Not going to say much about that link, but will say this:
I don’t really have a problem with a woman treating me as if I might be a rapist in conditions where she needs to worry about that. I will say that there are some conditions where her treating me as a potential rapist would be out of place, but I’ve already said repeatedly that I don’t think Watson was being unreasonable to be uncomfortable in this situation.
However, I do start to have problems if she moves on to conclude that I am a rapist or sexist just because I might be. It’s okay for her to wonder at my intentions, but not to assume them.’
SAWells,
“If you’re in the business of gifting Elevator Guy with your neurological condition of choice so as to make out how he was totally not creepy at all: please consider putting at least as much effort into understanding RW’s position as you have into inventing excuses for Elevator Guy.”
Who’s actually not doing this? As an example, I’m one of the ones who’s talked the most about ASD, and I’ve both said that it was creepy and that Watson was reasonable to feel uncomfortable. I just don’t think it indicates sexism or any sort of underlying cultural condition other than “Men approach women”.
Jafafa Hots,
“If a man making an unwanted creepy proposition to a woman when she clearly isn’t interested is a sign of autism, then apparently autism is WAY more prevalent than I’d feared. ”
Isn’t it actually clear that she isn’t interested in those cases? Signals are a lot harder to read than people think, and I know both from personal experience and talking to others that if you wait for unambiguous signals you’ll miss a lot of opportunities, just because it’s too easy to overanalyze it into “She’s just being nice; she does that to everyone”. Sometimes the best way to find out if she’s interested is just to ask. Which, BTW, is the well-meaning advice often given to shy men: stop trying to puzzle out the signals and just ask. If she says “No”, at least then you know.
@Hitch in #152: nobody says that approaching women is bad. Trying to get women to go from zero to sex-partner in the course of a single line, however, is just a bad idea in general.
If you approach a woman you don’t know, and have never spoken to before, for sex, then the message you are sending is that you only care for her as a provider of sex, not as someone with her own personality. Whether doing this means you see women as prey or not is a different question, but not all that relevent. I’d still say it’s a message you don’t want to send to women.
@Verbose Stoic:
It indicates “men ignores women’s explicitly worded desires to be left alone”, which might indeed indicate sexism. When dozens of people then pile on to defend why women are wrong to complain about it, and men are entitled to do so, that’s when the underlying cultural condition of sexism becomes abundantly clear.
No, this is very relevant. That is what I’m trying to say. If you want to understand why Richard claims there is no issue, you have to understand that this “viewing as prey” accusation is on the table.
I think we can have a discourse about how to approach people. That is a good discourse to have. In fact I am trying to have that discourse, but on a broader, more egalitarian basis.
Incidentally I don’t fully agree with you. People pick each other up with one-liners all the time. I understand that that is not for everybody and is not understood the same way by everybody. But it certainly is not so easy to just label it as a bad idea.
Hitch
But I didn’t say “seeing as prey” – I have no idea how Elevator Guy saw Rebecca. I said “it’s a way of treating women as if they’re fundamentally there to be sexual prey.” Treating, not seeing. Actions, not thoughts.
Ye-non-existent-gods.
If a girl says she wants to sleep , dude she wants to sleep – & not in the euphemistic sense of the word.
Approaching her in an elevator?
At 4 am?
When you don’t even know her? Certainly NOT properly.
WTF?
NO just NO. Bad idea. Don’t do it. Not cool.
Really. Stop for a second and think and consider what the girl might wish. Just try a smidgin to imagine how she might feel about it. Really,
Be considerate, show some respect, show some thought.
Is that really so hard to grasp??? Is that so horrible and harsh and unforgivable to say? Nyet, nup, no way, never, nada, nyx*
So tough an intellectual proposition that even a brain the size of Richard Dawkins one cannot get that?? Surely to JC on a pogo stick patting a pony it ain’t!
I am disappointed in Richard Dawkin’s comments. I expected him to know and think & empathise & argue a lot better than that. Nobody’s perfect – me least of all – but, sheesh, really, RD? Really?
Read about this on Pharyngula the last day or so and, this is my reaction, hope its okay to note here. Apologies if not.
————————–
* A moon of Pluto’s the others are declarative statements in the negative
Oh, I see Deen just basically told you that.
Flying, it’s fine to note here – it’s a lot more sensible than much of what’s been noted here!
Yes it is — which is why I’ve refrained from addressing the issue here or elsewhere. There seems to be a general idea that women are there for men, for their pleasure, convenience, or just to be approached indiscriminately in the offchance they will be ready for sex. This, by the way, was one advantage of being a Rector’s wife for Elizabeth. No one hit on her, and that was, for her, a liberation. She didn’t like relative strangers, or even acquaintances hitting on her just in the off chance she was ready for sex. And her social position as the Rector’s wife put her off the menu.
There seems to be a general masculine idea that women are always sexually liminal, which is why so many religions exclude women from leadership. The truth is that men are very often, if not always, sexually liminal.They fact that men attribute this liminality to women instead leads to the kind of thing being discussed here, as though anytime anyplace is a perfectly appropriate venue for asking for sex. But this is not only a lack of appropriate respect for the other, it is also the kind of thing that keeps women in subordinate roles in society. Religions already do this, mainly because of the male perception of women, even though they give different reasons for doing it. Atheism should have learned from religion that the myth of female sexuality as forever liminal, always, in a sense on the threshold of expressing itself, given the right stimulus, is precisely that, a myth, and needs to be reined in in favour of a new respect for women. This is the only way that women are going to achieve equality.
It is important to notice here that the Muslim practice of dressing women in bags is not a matter of respect or modesty. It is the result of the male myth of female sexual liminality. It is because women are so highly sexualised by men in Muslim society that they need to be haltered and controlled. The best way to restrict women’s natural expression of boundless sexual desire (the male myth) is to dress them in bags. The effect, actually, is to perpetuate and to intensify the myth — which is why being mauled and fondled by men in public is/was such a problem in Egyptian society.
@Hitch in #163: I don’t need to talk about seeing women as prey, because seeing women primarily as providers of sex is bad enough in itself. If Dawkins thinks that is a non-issue, he’s wrong.
“Picking women op with one-liners” – what exactly do you mean by that? Getting a woman’s attention with a one-liner to start a conversation? Sure, that happens, and that’s fine. But that’s not the same expecting she’s already willing to go to your place immediately after the one-liner, without any conversation, is just unrealistic. And be honest – would you really want to have a long-term relationship with a woman who did?
Sorry Ophelia, but you are making a semantic argument. He didn’t treat her as if she was that. He approached her inartfully. That in no way indicates that he treats her that way.
But this is an issue. Guys live in this substrate how their clumsy behavior is branded as being “as if they see women as sexual prey”. Sure you may not mean to imply even that they guy sees a woman that way, but really that distinction is semantic. How else is the guy going to see that statement?
If you want to understand why guys defend that approaching woman as fine and no issue, you do have to understand that they are accused of being predators. Now which guy, you think, will admit that the last 50 years of their lives they have treated women as prey, when they don’t think they did. When they think approaching is fine and the woman is fine to say no.
In reality there is a discussion to be had here for sure, but it is not as simple as branding it as “treating women as if they’re fundamentally there to be sexual prey”.
We make discourse over this harder by bringing in these narrative about predator and prey. In some cases that is actually correct. But in some cases, there is a serious gendered situation that ought to be understood on its terms not framed on those.
Yes I know I’m trying to make a difficult point, a point that I have looked long and hard to even find some literature on (there is virtually nothing, at least nothing good), and that is that in situations like this you have to look at all sides, and what creates the situations that we are seeing. And sadly that does mean that we do have to look at the situations the guy is in as much as the situation the woman is in, and it also means that behavioral changes perhaps need to happen on more than one side to get to a more equal and productive setup.
@Deen: Erm, I might well have a long-term relationship with a woman who does respond to such lines. In fact I know women who do go for non-commital one-night stands and that doesn’t make me look at their worthiness for a relationship any less. They are all wonderful and respectable people. To be honest, I don’t like what you imply here.
@167 Ophelia Benson : Thanks – great article Btw. agree completely.
[bangs head on desk]
Deen,
In 161 and 162. you basically say both that approaching someone who is a stranger and approaching someone who is a stranger who has expressed a desire to be alone are both indications of sexism. I don’t think the first is at all and think that the second may not be in a lot of situations. And I think a lot of the reactions really are to either including the first one as being sexist or insisting that the second one reflects sexism, not about men being entitled in any way.
That’s a great way of putting it, Eric; I hadn’t seen it before. That’s something I’ve noticed in a lot of Elizabethan drama, the frame story of the 1001 Nights, etc – this basic assumption that all women are always ravening for sex and will leap at any opportunity for it that offers. Talk about not very observant………..
Ok try again.
Hitch –
Bollocks. He approached her selfishly; he approached her I want what I want and I don’t give a shit what she has firmly said she wantsly. It wasn’t just clumsy, for the reasons that have been stated some 5 trillion times by now. It wouldn’t have been better if he’d done it in in dinner jacket with a bottle of aged cognac under his arm.
It’s just ludicrous, and frankly self-pitying, to say that that degree of indifference to the other person’s stated wants “in no way” indicates that he’s treating her as prey.
Recaping his actions, he propositioned in an elevator at 4 am a woman who had made it clear how such approaches made her uncomfortable and feel objectified hours before and expressed a desire to go to bed for the night. This is past inartful. I may not be particularly bright but that does not appear to be the behavior of someone treating someone as a person opposed to as a sexual object.
No we don’t. As EG just demonstrated most men don’t think about it. Or at least not very much.
:- )
Snap, julian.
Eric,
What a bunch of gibberish. So this inept guy in the elevator helps keep women as “subordinates”. You can’t make that up. He made a pass. Sorry but he didn’t ask her to have sex. You don’t know his motivations. Not every guy wants to have sex at 4am in the morning. And that’s absolutely what people are implying. Not that he was infatuated or being flirty but that he wanted sex, immediately. With his PREY.
I think my problem here is my thoughts aren’t as lurid as everyone else’s. All women are under siege with men waiting for women to let down their guards. I know men who are as timid as mouses approaching women. And I know women who sleep around.
My wife is going to a hearing in New Orleans later this summer. I hope they have fainting coaches lest a man flirt with her. I’ll tell her to use the stairs.
Ophelia @ #175 That’s been a long standing idea. It was rather prominent throughout the Medieval period in Europe as well. Women were the seducers, and there stood in some laws of that period that if a woman’s husband could not sexually satisfy her, she may divorce him.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight touches on the fact that the woman will also pursue, and it is in fact the man’s job to resist. That doesn’t make it any better, of course, since they saw women as sinful, lustful creatures of the flesh, which isn’t better than seeing us as the gatekeepers of sex in other ways.
As to the rest of this, I’m afraid that if I try to comment or ‘discuss’ this I will break down in rage and tears, and will only be able to post whatever keys I’ve pounded on the keyboard. Utterly illegible and not at all helpful, I know. Stupidity and purposeful obtuseness does that to me. So I’m grateful to you, Ophelia, for stepping up to the bat for this one. As well as the other commenters who seem to get it.
@Hitch in #171: No, I’m not implying anything about the worth of a woman who engages in casual sex, and I apologize if I made it look like I was. What I was trying to say is that you may not like being seen as a walking sex-toy yourself, but would prefer the woman would actually get to know you as well. But perhaps that’s just me projecting my personal preferences onto you. I’ll try to stop doing that.
However, you are conflating two things here: having casual sex and non-commital one-night stands on the one hand, and having sex with people you don’t know anything about on the other. For most people, these are two entirely different things.
Would you care to respond to the question in the comment?
Ophelia, I never defended what happened in the elevator as right. There is no indifference here. Rebecca is right to feel uncomfortable in the situation. I am trying to articulate the various positions, not just the one that you insist on pounding on. There is a sensible discourse to be had here that includes understanding and improving upon the underlying mechanisms and attitudes.
But yes, I also don’t buy into it all. Plenty of women are approached in elevators and don’t have Rebecca’s or your reaction. They are right too. And plenty of men never do this. Etc etc. But I guess we just have to admit that this is an act of sexual predation, right? Or else we are ludicrous or self-pitying. You don’t like the word inartful. Pick another word, put on asterisks or other qualifies, try to articulate the severity etc etc. Doesn’t really change what I am talking about.
Was the Elevator Guy (EG) :
a) clueless?
b) perhaps just too drunk?
c) displaying poor social skills?
d) just a harmless putz who said the wrong thing at the wrong time perhaps out of good feelings and false impressions?
e) a potential rapist or slimeball from her Point Of View?
f) ALL of the above
I’d say (f) all the above are true! Possibly. Probably even.
Thing is, Rebecca Watson has the right to call it as she sees it and speak up in her own defence.
Richard Dawkins being a man who won’t – who cannot given his background – understand; is also entitled to say what he wants & he’s entitled to dig himself even deeper – but while everyone is *entitled* to their opinion, given freedom of expression and thought – however ill-considered or plain erroneous it might be – everone *else* is also entitled to their opinion too and some opinions are wrong in a number of ways. Dawkin’s opinion, the case he makes here is wrong in fact. Is wrong, I think, ethically and is plain bad argumentation. His opinion in this case, lowers slightly, my opinion of him. I hoped and expected better from him.
Pointing at a worse crime doesn’t excuse a lesser one. It’s like saying “Oh Islam kills apostates and heretics thus XN Creationism is nothing to worry about at all!” The conclusion does NOT follow from the premises.
Dawkin’s argument also shows a lack of willingness to hear Rebecca Watson out and to respect her POV. To think about what she’s said and NOT just dismiss it because oh “elevators have buttons” like she’s not smart enough to know that. Elevators have buuttons. Well duh! Rapists can have weapons or y’know non-rapsy clueless drunk guys can make stupid propositions that they may regret the day after if they remember them at all. That’s hardly Rebecca’s fault and hardly what she’d know or be able to tell the difference between.
As if Rebecca Watson would be ignorant that Muslim woman have some horriific situations forced upon them or have things far worse. As if that’s some valid excuse! 100 minus 50 isn’t 1 – but it equally isn’t twenty either. Both answers are wrong and pointing out that one is more wrong than another doesn’t make either answer correct. Same deal here. And Ricard Dawjkins who ifreely admit is alot smarter than me should be waa-ay smart enough to know that and NOT spout stoopid in an attempt to try and FAIL to justify himself.
Elevator Dude you were wrong. Richard Dawkins, you are wrong to defend him. You should, you must know better. It’s not hard to see. Not for me and surely not for others. Just “man up” (so to speak!) and apologise and we’ll move on. You’ll have learned, we’ll still respect you – will respect you more in fact coz, yeah, we’re all fallible creatures. Nobody’s perfect , me least of all. Better to say sorry than keep digging. FSM knows, I’ve learnt that the hard way myself.
This seems so obvious – so clear to me. Why is this even an issue and such a big deal?
Oh yeah, sexism. Probably. I think – and in this day and age and from people I respect this much that hurts. :-(
@Deen: I would prefer if women actually treated me as worthwhile both sexually and personally. But I have no problem if the agreement is one or the other. And someone saying to me that they want to go to their room is not in any way a detriment to the judgment of my personhood.
Deen, how do you feel you are treated sexually and personally if you don’t ever get asked out? What does that say about people who don’t express the worthiness of the person who is ignored?
I think there is a very real question to what you are saying but that question goes into many deep, complex ways. I happen to think it’s very detrimental to the self-worth of guys that they are not told that they are worthwhile to approach. In fact if you are not seen at all, perhaps being seen as a walking sex-toy is much preferable. At least it is something. Not that I think for a moment that agreeing to a one-night stand or asking for one in any way even implies that the other person is just a sex-toy.
But can we do this, actually talk about the worthiness of all, about what the exchanges actually mean, rather than how we can frame them (the sex-toy thing). etc.
By reaction you mean reminding men this is poor form and advising them to seek out more appropriate venues or to employ basic empathy? I would hope most people would have that reaction. It seems an entirely productive way to respond to inappropriate behavior.
You’re jumping to hyperbole and misrepresenting the positions of the people you’re arguing with.
@Verbose Stoic in #174:
I wasn’t talking about approaching strangers in general, I was talking about men out of nowhere approaching women for sex. Even though most people agree that the expected result is creeping the women out. I was talking about the many, many people defending this as somehow entirely appropriate. If you’re going to leave out half of what I said, then we’re not really talking, are we? No wonder you don’t see sexism, you’re trying so hard not to see it.
Oh I see – I’m insisting and pounding (how very unladylike of me) while you are trying to articulate. I do beg your pardon, Hitch. Perhaps I should just let you take over.
Deen,
I’m sorry to offend you, but you should have noted from my posts that “approaching”, as I use it, refers to essentially “hitting on” or things like that. And that shortening has nothing to do with my point, nor with the fact that you used one of the usages replying directly to me who has said umpteen million times that it wasn’t entirely appropriate, or appropriate at all. If you aren’t going to read what I say, why in the world should I take your claims about what I’m trying to do seriously?
But that is not exactly what happened to RW, since the guy is likely to have heard her speech and know something about her views (although, it appears, misunderstood or not listened to some significant parts, which was understandably a red flag). The offer for “talk” and “coffee” might not have been entirely sincere but presumably there would have been an opportunity to talk (there are in most such encounters) even if the guy’s ultimate expectation was casual sex.
@Hitch:
It says very little. It will still suck, of course, but people who don’t know you don’t have an obligation to make you happy. In particular, women don’t have an obligation to make men happy, and provide them with dates and/or sex, even though many men in society evidently think they do. Don’t become one of them.
And no, I don’t plan on making this discussion about the problems that shy men have with dating. I’m not saying it’s not a worthwhile discussion in and of itself, but it’s not the discussion we’re having here. Don’t you think it smells a little bit of male entitlement to come into a discussion thread about women’s issues and want to make it about men’s issues instead?
Thank you! What I would have said myself if only I’d thought of it.
Well, Adam, you can take it in the stupid way, or you can actually think about it! The stupid way is that I’m saying of an individual that he is contributing to the subordination of women, whereas what I said was that there is a cultural norm about women being sexually liminal and that is what keps them subordinate. And the myth of sexual liminality is a myth made up for men’s convenience. So the guy on the elevator is simply playing into a cultural stereotype; he isn’t, all by himself, the reason for the subordination of women. Try to read intelligently, please. And don’t trivialise, in the way that Dawkins did, a cultural problem which is genuinely serious.
@Windy in #189: I know. In this case, the offense was ignoring her express wishes not to be hit on, and her clear message that she wanted to sleep.
!!!!!
So because there “presumably” “would have been” an “opportunity” to talk (RW could have blurted out a few words about the weather while EG was yanking her pants down) therefore EG was not sending the message that he was interested in her only for sex?!
Oy.
@Flying: You make many good points and I agree with virtually all of it. I don’t think Dawkins was particularly sensitive to bring the issue back the way he did and to set it up comparatively was at best irrelevant. And absolutely the whole thing is not Rebecca’s fault. It should be perfectly fine to articulate how one feels in certain situations. What I try to do is actually articulate the substrate behind of all this, including where it comes from. There is plenty of sexism all around in fact I am actually saying there is more sexism that lots of people who participate in this discussion concede. The very fact that men approach and that women are approached is sexist. And to not actually discuss this broader dynamics is part of it all here. But it seems hard for people to “person up” and look at those broader issues, becausen (gasp) perhaps we all need to change our behavior and attitudes.
@Ophelia: I never even implied that anything you do is unladylike, in fact the whole concept of “ladylike” is rejectable and sexist. Stop strawmanning me, thank you. I am not asking for control, I am trying to talk about a broader point, but alas nevermind.
Deen, it’d be nice if you took what I said. I already said that I don’t do those things. But I try to articulate the consequences. But I’m not surprised. Only some people’s discomfort can be heard, not everybody’s. Because some discomfort is framed as “Don’t you think it smells a little bit of male entitlement to come into a discussion thread about women’s issues and want to make it about men’s issues instead?”
I’m sorry, but if we are honest feminists these things go together. There is a man and a woman in the situation and there are patterns. I don’t actually agree to the man/women’s issue divide here at all. If women get approached in ways that are problematic, that goes to behavior of men and it goes to the substrate that leads to that behavior. That’s a topic for everybody, not a “men’s issues” topic.
But yeah, we can stick our heads in the sand and classify certain aspects as “men’s issues” that should not be brought in. I think we are worse for it if we don’t actually try to look at the whole picture.
Let me say one thing though. You don’t address the actual points I make, rather you turn the discourse about my supposed entitlement. I’m disappointed, in fact I think that’s a sexist move. But yeah. How about we actually talk about things rather than try to qualify who can speak?
@Verbose Stoic in #188: You were just restating your opinion, and not responding to me at all. You still aren’t -where did I accuse you of thiking it was appropriate behavior? And don’t start your post with “I’m sorry, but”, it looks stupid and dishonest.
Why do people who are usually reasonable people suddenly suddenly get so dense when it comes to women’s issues?
Just so we’re clear:
Men approaching women in general: OK
Women approaching men in general: OK
Women and Men wanting, participating in, and enjoying one night stands with people they’ve just met: OK
Men asking a woman who said she’s going to sleep for a one nigh stand while in an elevator at 4AM: NOT OK
Why? Because it corners the woman, it will put most women on guard, if not make them downright afraid.
Women are frequently propositioned or harassed in situations in which they are just going about their business and don’t want and probably aren’t even thinking about sex and in which they don’t want sex with a stranger. These situations include: walking down the street, at the store, on the bus/train, and many others. Men who are in those situations don’t have to deal with being catcalled, harassed, or otherwise propositioned as if the man’s desire to go about his business without being bothered is less important than the propositioner’s desire to engage in those behaviors.
That is what women mean when they say they are being objectified. They are being propositioned (I’ll use this word as a catchall for the behaviors I described above) in situations in which there should be no expectation of sex, either because of the situation or because the woman has made it clear she isn’t interested. The woman’s desires are ignored because a man sees her as sexually available.
This is essentially what happened in the elevator situation, he ignored her desire to get some sleep because he wanted to have sex, coffee, a talk with her.
The other thing is that the man is ignoring the boundaries that the woman has set. If a man ignores a woman’s stated boundaries once, it’s very likely he’ll do it again, which means it’s likely the woman could be raped (because he’ll ignore that she doesn’t want sex). In established relationships, this type of boundary breach often is the precursor to much more serious, abusive behaviors.
Women know this and this is why we are creeped out/angered/nervous in situations like this.
No, if he proceeded to yank her pants down without consent that would be assault, I’m talking about consensual sex. I thought Deen was equating this case with a man propositioning a woman he doesn’t know anything about, but she already answered she wasn’t.
cheering David, #105. Thank you.
Except in cases where it turns out to be OK. Sorry, I wish it was that simple. But yes Rebecca is completely right to say that for her it is not OK. Anybody who chimes in and says that for them too it is not OK either. For those who end up in a room together, it’s a different story.
And I’m sorry, in many cases the woman says, “I am going to sleep” and that does not signal that she is not interested in anything else. Not that I think this applies in this case, as clearly Rebecca earlier made her stance plane, and I guess almost everybody is working under the assumption that her presentation was heard by the man in question. Sad fact is that when such advances are made, they are usually made without witnesses. I think it’s problematic exactly for the reasons people have given, but part of the argument simply denies how these casual hookups work. They tend to work often precisely following this pattern. People drink till late, woman says “I go sleep”, man follows and when there are no witnesses around (because it’s embarrassing to be rejected in public etc etc) he asks. She says yes or not or bugger off. Yet it seems to be that the very reality of these exchanges and that at time they are welcome (rather than “not OK”) is obfuscated. But all of this takes NOTHING away from the fact that I think it is wrong to approach someone with a proposal of this sort in any confined space. I think it is. But I have yet to hear actually sound proposal how to change all this so that everybody’s comfort zone and safety can indeed be maintained. Rather apparently there is a “right” and a “wrong” and we can just paint a simple picture.
But shouldn’t we talk about _why_ guys do this? Isn’t that the real issue? That’s what was hoping to have some dialogue on.
Deen,
Tell me where in this:
“I wasn’t talking about approaching strangers in general, I was talking about men out of nowhere approaching women for sex. Even though most people agree that the expected result is creeping the women out. I was talking about the many, many people defending this as somehow entirely appropriate. If you’re going to leave out half of what I said, then we’re not really talking, are we? No wonder you don’t see sexism, you’re trying so hard not to see it.”
You say anything having to do with my actual point. Recall that at 162 you said, to me:
” indicates “men ignores women’s explicitly worded desires to be left alone”, which might indeed indicate sexism. When dozens of people then pile on to defend why women are wrong to complain about it, and men are entitled to do so, that’s when the underlying cultural condition of sexism becomes abundantly clear.”
And in 161, you said:
“If you approach a woman you don’t know, and have never spoken to before, for sex, then the message you are sending is that you only care for her as a provider of sex, not as someone with her own personality. ”
My response to that was:
“In 161 and 162. you basically say both that approaching someone who is a stranger and approaching someone who is a stranger who has expressed a desire to be alone are both indications of sexism. I don’t think the first is at all and think that the second may not be in a lot of situations. And I think a lot of the reactions really are to either including the first one as being sexist or insisting that the second one reflects sexism, not about men being entitled in any way.”
Addressing specifically both points. Your reply to that was:
“I wasn’t talking about approaching strangers in general, I was talking about men out of nowhere approaching women for sex. Even though most people agree that the expected result is creeping the women out. I was talking about the many, many people defending this as somehow entirely appropriate. If you’re going to leave out half of what I said, then we’re not really talking, are we? No wonder you don’t see sexism, you’re trying so hard not to see it.”
Let me break it down for you:
Your first point coupled with the “If you’re going to leave out half of what I said …” can only mean that you were mad at me for using the term “approaching”, despite the fact that you had no trouble understanding it at 162. It’s also not relevant to bring up people find that appropriate in a reply to me who has no said that, especially when you end with the idea that the only reason I don’t see sexism is that I’m trying hard not to see it … except that I wouldn’t have been one of or even talking about those people, so how’s it relevant?
So the problem, Deen, is not that I’m not replying to you. It’s that you’re not replying to me. Most of what you say directly to me has nothing to do with what I actually said or hold.
@Verbose Stoic #202
You seem to be missing that the GENDER of the people involved here is important. It is not just *someone*, it is an entirely unknown *man* approaching a strange *woman*. Seriously, are you deliberately being stupid, or is this just the way you always are?
We have been talking about why guys do this. We just haven’t been doing it in terms of “guys are shy and lonely and if they don’t hit on women at 4 in the morning they’ll be shy and lonely all their lives.”
And Hitch, don’t be silly and point-missing. Obviously my point in # 187 was that it was a bit rude of you to say I was insisting on pounding my take on the subject as opposed to yours. Loaded words.
There I go tone trolling again…
Tricster,
Um, consider the context. Do I have to specify “Men approaching a woman who is a stranger” when I’ve said that in every comment I made before that point?
@VerboseStoic: Copy/paste of previous posts does not an argument make.
It appears Tricster found another possible reason.
You were denying “any sort of underlying cultural condition” – well, there’s the culture, weighing in en masse.
More strawmanning. Geez. And no you haven’t. You have done everything to approve of those who say that discussing this is “bringing in men’s issues” and be dismissive.
Deen,
Copying and pasting does not make an argument, but it surely does demonstrate the context.
If you were upset about my dropping the “men and women” then I still submit that it should have been obvious from the context of the discussion. As well, my point did not rely on that at all.
I will say that I probably should have caught the italics. I interpreted it as you being mad about my not explicitly mentioning the sex part, not the genders involved. So I apologize for that.
As for the point, again, my points were precisely on the EG scenario, not that supposed response. You would again have not been replying to me to bring it up, even if that’s what’s bothering you. It’s not something that would be relevant to our exchange since I, again, was quite precise about what I was referring to by saying that I didn’t see sexism. Specifically:
1) A man approaching a woman, even if just for sex, is not an indication of sexism.
2) A man approaching a woman who has expressed a desire to be alone is not necessarily an indication of sexism.
You have a point, but wasn’t this significantly different from the average hook-up if the guy did not make any attempt to connect with Rebecca before? (I’m not sure if that was the case, but that’s the impression I get from all the blog posts from people who were there)
Deen,
Oh, and tack on “who is a stranger” after “woman” in the above …
No, Hitch, we have been discussing why men do this. We’ve been discussing the culture that makes it permissible, we’ve been discussing the privilege that prevents men from realizing they may be placing women in uncomfortable situations, we’ve been discussing pretty much every element of this. What we have not done is try to make excuses for EG.
Ophelia, it’s OK. It’s a difficult topic and frankly I have yet to succeed to properly discuss this anywhere. I don’t blame you for reacting to my rebuke the way you did. I don’t take it back because I do think we should have a broader dialogue about gender roles in dating and relating, a dialogue that is sorely missing even from the best feminist writing. And the “men’s issues” writing on the whole topic is just gawd-awful. I am certainly not surprised that this topic is a mine-field of complications.
If there is one thing that I certainly agree with it is that Rebecca has gotten flak that is so out of proportion, that it is not even funny. And to try in the context to articulate how things that are in her defense said are not quite right either, is perhaps an attempt that is just bound to fail.
perhaps this is not the time or place to try, and that certainly is in part on me.
Julian, did you read my argument that in terms of approaching men don’t necessarily have a privileged position, because the choice of whether to approach or not approach is not really available? Do you think that’s wrong? If yes I’d love to actually hear about it.
(Full disclosure: Tricster is my girlfriend, but she’s in a different location from me at the moment, and post #203 was made independently of me)
Ophelia, I’m sorry but to make this about “shy and lonely” can be read as rude too. I try very hard to not be rude while being clear and firm what I think. Yes I do think that you don’t welcome my perspective here, and virtually all we have done is argue that my way of looking at this somehow, without actually making the argument why, is not done.
So am I wrong in arguing that gender relation patterns around getting to know each other are asymmetric? If yes, I’d love to hear why I am wrong about this. If I am not wrong, I would like to hear why that is not relevant and worth articulating in this context.
And if you want me to just let it go. Fine. I really don’t have to try to voice a perspective. I can try to find a place where we have an argument on what I say, not whether “my way of doing” is right.
Ignoring a woman’s wishes and substituting your own for hers especially when that wish is sex sounds very close to sexism and objectification to me.
I wasn’t apologizing, Hitch, so I don’t know what you’re saying is OK. I don’t think your choice of words was entirely OK.
You think we should have a broader dialogue about gender roles in dating and relating, but that’s not what this thread is, and given what this thread is, you are attempting to make it about The Sorrows of Men.
Verbose – this isn’t actually all about you. Be less verbose.
That was addressed to 213, not 216. I can’t keep up. I’m going to drop out again for awhile.
No. I don’t attempt it to be “The Sorrows of Men”. That’s why I have continued to argue that you strawman me. But alas it’s OK (and that’s how I meant the OK before).
Chomsky has already said that if you have an unusual position you end up being verbose, and demands to concision serve to censor and delineate. He is of course right. But you said it. This is not the place for me to articulate what I try to articulate so I’ll move on. Thanks.
Hitch @#201,
Sometimes it’s okay to ask a woman for a one night stand at 4am. Obviously, most of these things happen late at night. So, of course, this is sometimes acceptable.
HOWEVER, unless you’ve been talking to the woman during the night and there are sparks there and the woman says “I’m going to sleep” and winks or gestures that you should come or, gasp, outright states that you should come with her, then it’s safe to assume that she’s actually going to sleep.
Also, it’s easy to proposition a woman in an out of the way place that ISN’T AN ENCLOSED ELEVATOR. Such examples include near a wall, at an otherwise empty bar, in the area just outside the bar/dance floor, or even on the dance floor while dancing with a woman. I’ve been invited back to guys places while dancing with them. If I say yes, it works out for both of us, if I say no, no one’s the wiser because they aren’t concerned with what he and I are doing. Plus, it’s too loud for anyone to hear.
Finally, yes, people have been discussing why men do this.
And yes, it’s silly that men have to do all the asking, I agree with that. I think it’s silly for women to sit around waiting for a guy to ask her out (or for a hookup) and I think women should take the initiative more often.
However, there are also drawbacks to that. Sometimes women who do that are seen as too forward or promiscuous and are shamed. In some groups of Americans (can’t speak to other countries or cultures) it’s just considered not right for a woman to ask a man. It’s not something that feminists never talk about or don’t care about.
Okay, so let me try to take a look at the reasons to start a discussion, since if I’m anything it’s detailed [grin].
Okay, so societal implication #1: Men are expected to do the approaching when looking for sex/relationships. Women can but a) aren’t expected to and b) are actually subtley discouraged from doing it. In my view, this isn’t something that you can say privileges one or the other; there are good and bad points about being on either side. (Some will say that the woman is privileged here, but that only works if she’s getting approached by men she likes. If she isn’t, for whatever reason, that she ought not do it herself impedes her, especially if the guy is clueless).
Societal implication #2: Violence against women — including rape and sexual harassment — happens. Thus, there is a not insignificant risk for her if she is ever alone with a man.
Societal implication #3: Approaching for sex/relationships is generally not to be done too publically. It is considered at least gauche for a man to, say, ask a woman on a date or for coffee or to his room or whatever if she is in a group of people. It’s supposed to be done one-on-one.
So what we have here is:
1) A case where being alone with a man may reasonably make a woman feel uncomfortable …
2) But being alone is what best suits making an approach …
3) That men have to do.
So, obviously, compromises have to be made. Some cases of even trying to get a woman alone to approach her have to be allowed, but that doesn’t ,mean that all of them do. So, for example, in an elevator alone at a time where there is likely to be no one around can be rightly considered out of bounds, but, say, in the hallway as you normally pass should be okay. But as with all things, there’s a gray area. What falls into that gray area?
Now, then we have the idea of what to do “When in doubt”. If you aren’t sure if it’s the right time, should you approach or not? If you take the side of not approaching, you likely won’t offend or make women uncomfortable, but you might be missing out on rare opportunities. But if you do approach, you might offend or make women uncomfortable.
So now we add in that people have differing abilities to spot these situations, and social situations — unlike, say, science equations — are not taught in any way explicitly and there really arent any rules that are taught. We’re expected to pick this all up by osmosis from being in social situations. Which leads to a wide range of potential reactions depending on the individual.
So you’ll have a range of men from the totally clueless — EG fits in here, I think — to those who are really good at it to those who know the rules but break them because they can make it work for them (the last part are actually the sexist ones, I’d say). And you’ll have a range of women from the fearless — nothing bothers them — to the overly concerned. And so screw-ups will happen, just on that.
Maybe EG is really someone who breaks the rules knowing it can work, but I doubt it. I think he’s clueless. So how do we go about ensuring that no one is clueless? Calling them sexist ain’t gonna do it. How do we outline the rules so that we aren’t just judging it by obviousness?
I fail to see how this isn’t a position of privilege. The man is still in control of initiating sex, of where the request is made and who gets propositioned.
Are we all talking cross purposes here?
The most confusing aspect of the whole debate has been that people who state that the actions of EG were bad – it was the wrong place to make a pass and RW was justified in feeling creeped out – are being accused of being mysogynistic pigs.
Well it confused me until I saw the problem explicitly outlined on another thread. In that thread it was stated that the major issue is the failure of some people to see that the
idea of ‘hitting on’ is inherently offensive. In other words the elevator location is irrelevant. The major error the guy made was making a pass, or saying something that could be construed as a pass. Doing so involves the sexual objectification of RW and this is inherently offensive. The acceptance of such offensive behavior (hitting on, making passes, chatting up etc) makes the Skeptic/atheist conference scene intolerable for many.
That, essentially is the argument as I see it. I realize that not many on this thread are making this exact argument but many people within the overall debate are. It also explains why very few people have a problem with RW equating Steph McGraws remarks (which basically amount to her stating that it should be OK for people at these conferences to make passes if they so desire) with rape, or calls for rape.
I think this is a serious issue that has arisen from the fact that many skeptics and atheists regard the conventions as social events. They treat them as parties and chatting up people at parties is seen as an acceptable thing to do (although within limits – the evidence suggests that almost everyone thinks that making a pass on an elevator is a no no.)
Clearly this feeling is not universal and I don’t know an easy solution.
On a personal note I have never been to any of these conferences. Reading the various hyperbolic posts I am picturing an episode of “Girls Gone Wild – Spring Break in Dublin” Seriously, someone who has been there, how terrible are these events for women?
And here was me thinking it was just all that tap dancing.
Sigmund,
I commented on Daylight Atheism at one point that I think that aversion to “hitting on” has more to do with frequency than with the act itself. It’s one thing to, say, get approached once every or every couple of conferences, but quite another to get it multiple times across the conference. But with any event where one sex dominates that’s what’s going to happen, since the sex/relationship drive is so important to people.
So I can understand why people get annoyed by it and might find it ruins their experience, but I don’t know how to fix it. Especially since a blanket “don’t make passes” will end up annoying women who meet someone they like and think that he doesn’t like them if he doesn’t make a pass.
Julian, I’m moving on but I did want to respond to this. I’ll put it in overly simply form to keep it concise:
Male options:
1) Approach
Female options:
1) Be approached
2) Approach
Not having to approach is a privilege. But yes approaching can be a privilege too.To test the weight of privilege, all you have to do what options remain if they stop doing the one thing they are privileged to do.
@ Godless Heathen: I agree with your socio-dynamic argument about the judgment of women that approach, but I know women who successfully approach without there being an issue. The feminist point here is of course that we ought to oppose those judgments and that it should be perfectly fine to approach and be approached.
@VerboseStoic: no, it does not not necessarily indicate overt, conscious sexism on the part of the man, and most people have acknowledged that long ago. On the other hand, it definitely doesn’t indicate an absence of sexism, especially sexism in the form of subconscious biases and unexamined privileges. It’s hard to believe that EG is somehow completely free of these.
What it is an indication of, however, is that our society somehow allows men to grow up without thinking about how their actions might creep women out. Therefore, it indicates sexism in society.
And your desire to see EG’s action as wholly separate from the reactions and culture as a whole is misguided. These things don’t happen in a vaccuum.
Hitch,
Option 2) for women isn’t quite one yet; there’s still some social backlash against it which means that if she approaches she risks being rejected just for that.
No it isn’t. Having control of over who you interact with, how, when and where is not a privilege.
Oh you! How adorable!
@Hitch and VerboseStoic: why do you guys see this as a game of “approach or be approached” anyway? Seems to me, most people meet over shared interests or shared activities, gradually hang out more and more, and grow closer from there. Sure, eventually one of them will have to “make it official”, but at that point it hardly matters anymore who it is. Whatever happened to that model of relationships?
What thread was that? There may be some people arguing that, I don’t think that is “the argument” though. IMO, for most people the argument is subtler than that, for example RW says it’s okay to “flirt, have fun, make friends, have sex, meet the love of your life, whatever floats your boat” and contrasts this with “sexual objectification”.
@Deen
It’s pretty outdated and a lot of current relationships aren’t reflected by it.
Still, talking to someone and getting to know if their interested or not seems a perfect way to avoid scenarios like EG’s especially in venues where the concern isn’t a random hookup.
VS: Depends where you live and what circles, but sure. It doesn’t really change my point. My point is precisely that both genders should have both option, and a sign of egalitarianism is that each option is exercised without large difference between the sexes. If one side approach much less it forces the other side to approach that much more. So yes, let’s remove the stigma. But let’s be real. Approaching is work and full of potential rejection and discomfort. People have to agree to do their part. It can only lead to less sexist, and less risky modes of engaging with each other.
Julian: I don’t think that works but it’s quite irrelevant to what I aim for. Lets remove privilege and replace it with egalitariaism. In that setup everybody will get to choose and be chosen.
@Hitch: let me fix that for you
By this standard serfs would be privileged over lords.
First step to removing privilege is those of us with it recognizing we have it. Trying to side step the issue or pushing blame on the group we are privileged over does nothing to help anyone including ourselves.
I’ve only ever been to one, and it wasn’t really a conference anyway, more like a series of classes. That did turn out to have a large “Girls Gone Wild – Spring Break” component, which I wasn’t expecting at all and was deeply disconcerted by. The worst thing about it from my point of view was that it totally sidelined me. I wasn’t there for that or at all interested, and I was ineligible anyway (being ugly and 153), so where I had been expecting interesting conversation, I got being abandoned in a dreary suburb of Buffalo miles from anything. It was horrible. (If it had been in Buffalo itself it would have been fine, I could have just gone out exploring, which I love to do, but it wasn’t, it was in an empty wilderness next to the ugliest university campus in the universe. So the lesson is: don’t go to a conference of that kind unless it’s in a city.)
Verbose – did you miss the part where I said be less verbose? I wasn’t joking.
Deen, you make a valid point. Let’s really fix it though:
With all the needed footnotes that overly simple model needs. So yeah would be neat if everybody could have all options, preferably to their liking. That’s what I advocate for.
Paradoxically I argue that indeed if the male expectation to approach is lessened it can only help. I still haven’t heard any argument that this is false, or proposals how to make to happen.
@julian: You missed the point where I stated clearly that I have given up my privilege. I don’t approach. I agree that men holding the position of the approacher is maintaining a sexist setup. However I found consequently that I am simply not being approached. What now? I did my part. Clearly that is not enough. Btw to characterize woman who wait to be approached because they don’t like rejection as serfs is rather sexist.
“Maybe coffee was coffee.”
“Coffee’s coffee in the morning. It’s not coffee at 12 o’clock at night.”
“Well, some people drink coffee that late.”
“Yeah, people at NORAD who are 24-hour missile watch.”
Windy @ 189
But that is not exactly what happened to RW, since the guy is likely to have heard her speech and know something about her views (although, it appears, misunderstood or not listened to some significant parts, which was understandably a red flag). The offer for “talk” and “coffee” might not have been entirely sincere but presumably there would have been an opportunity to talk (there are in most such encounters) even if the guy’s ultimate expectation was casual sex.
Sure EG had heard Rebecca speak, but had he spoken to her? Was she even aware of his existence? If not, then he was a stranger to HER. However many of her talks he had heard, he was a stranger to HER. Perhaps what he was hoping for was sex with some whose ideas and intellect he truly admired, but if there was no previous communication from him, then what he was offering her was sex with a stranger. To do so after deliberately following her to an isolated place late at night just makes it even worse.
I really don’t get these guys who are interpreting the upshot of this as “Now I am not allowed to talk to a women EVER” or “Now I’ll never get laid”. If taking EG’s way of doing things out of their own repertoire of ways to get a date is that much of a diminution of their imagined range of options then maybe that’s a good thing. Unfortunately if all they’ve taken away from this is those two points then they’ve pretty much missed what all of this was about; that is to say, it wasn’t about them and their feelings.
Windy asked “What thread was that?”
It was the Friendly Atheist thread about the Dawkins Ray Comfort cartoon.
A cautionary note on coffee and “coffee”:
Many years ago I gave a philosophy lecture and afterwards one of the attendees approached me saying that I had interested her in contextualist epistemology(!) and would I like to go for a “coffee” to discuss it a little more. I did.
Eventually, she moved in with me and we stayed together for over 10 years. However, at this point she cheated on me and left me for someone else. If I had understood what she actually intended when she mentioned “coffee” I could have saved myself some heartache.
Ghah. I’ve rewritten a post about 3 times now.
There’s much I want to comment on, but it’s just too heated at the moment.
Man Rebecca Watson’s follow up post, The Privilege Delusion, is pretty damn amazing. (That’s amazing good, not amazing I can’t believe she said that, by the way.)
I’ve been catsitting for a friend. She recently moved to a new neighbohood. Last week, I was coming in from watering the plants, just entering the breezeway, when…a man approached from the back yard. He started talking and I realized he was the neighbor from across the street, harmless from what I happen to know of him (but really this isn’t everything), who thought I was his new neighbor and wanted to introduce himself. Though no explanation was provided, the assumption we’ve reached is that he was probably in the back yard because he was curious about and checking out the garden. When he approached, I jumped (I have what I’ve recently seen called an “exaggerated startle response”) and said to him “Oh! You startled me!” He didn’t explain or apologize, though he was perfectly pleasant. I didn’t explain to him at the time how his approaching me out of the blue from the back yard was threatening, as I was most interested in extricating myself from the situation and locking the door behind me. I’m not sure if he would have understood had I done so. I think he would have felt bad, but I’m not sure he would have “gotten it” that his behavior was a problem, much less that this cluelessness was the result of privilege.
But even if he can’t (out of it, naive), other people can get it. Saying to men “Don’t introduce yourself to your new neighbor by approaching her from her back yard while she’s alone (in fact, don’t be in her back yard uninvited at all) because it’s scary” should not be remotely controversial. Saying it should make men who haven’t thought about it before think about the circumstances in which they introduce themselves. This really isn’t complicated.
(This situation didn’t have some of the important aspects of Watson’s, but…)
Yikes, Salty.
David M, yes, Rebecca’s new post is good. Phil Plait’s too – makes up (some anyway) for DBAD.
I can’t say I’ve been enjoying watching the debates, but its at least been interesting. I’m still mulling it all over, and still seriously pondering Schroedinger’s Rapist (seriously?? that stuff really goes through women’s heads that much? just… wow. that’s kinda hard to swallow, but it does explain a few things about the women in my life). There is much here I had never thought of, so thank you all for that at least.
Just a couple things. When EG said “Don’t take this the wrong way. . . ,” am I the only one who thought that opening phrase was an attempt to imply that he was specifically not asking for sex? Please note that I’m not trying to defend his action, it just seems that’s the sort of phrase I would expect if someone (like, say, me) was aware that inviting a woman to coffee (in his room or elsewhere, and even at 4pm in the afternoon instead of 4am) could be taken as asking for sex, but wanted to indicate they were not asking for sex. If that’s not how women would interpret that phrase, then what would be a good way to make the invitation to talk over coffee while making it clear you weren’t using a euphemism? Let’s say at 4pm, not in an elevator, since it’s pretty clear to me that there doesn’t seem to have been a good way to make it work in the situation at hand.
Second, while this thread hasn’t really touched on this, one thing that some have argued about is whether it was appropriate for Rebecca to call out Stef by name, in a public forum. Purely on a personal level, if I do or say something that you think needs to be called out, I just want to be on record as saying that I’m cool with you calling me out, by name, in public or private, whichever you prefer, and whichever you think will achieve what you’re aiming for. I hope you’ll be aiming to help me improve and giving a little education to me. Also, if you haven’t discussed it with me in private first so I know what your issue is, then don’t discuss it in a public forum without using my name and making sure it gets back to me. How else will I learn?
Feel free to read and not respond to my second item, since this hasn’t been what this thread’s about. Or not. As you will.
If I could interject, since this is the thread I’ve seen the most comments about “maybe he was autistic” on – I just asked my 11 year old autistic son whether it was polite to ask someone out for a date right now if it’s the middle of the night and the person just said they were tired and going to bed. He said no, they should wait and ask in the morning.
Everybody seems to think they can read the two people’s minds. I also get the distinct impression that many people think that women always tell the truth and men never do (buddy should have **known** she was unavailable because she had said she was, and his invitation to coffee was **obviously** an invitation to sex). And obviously he was neither jet-lagged nor tired at 4 am and just as obviously Watson was. As for “sexual prey,” that is just puritanical sexual stereotyping. He asked, she said no,and then, I gather, she went to her room by herself. Worse things probably happened on the next elevator.
As a woman, if a stranger asked me for coffee (or a drink) at 4pm, I’d assume they meant what they said and that they wanted coffee or a drink. Unless they asked me to come back to their room/home for that coffee. Then it’s unclear what they want and I’d say no.
Also, the whole issue here is the context in which the question was asked, not the question itself. If the situation had happened at 4pm and not in an elevator (or other enclosed area), it’s extremely unlikely we’d be hearing about it. Context is so important.
As an aside, I’m a pretty shy woman myself, and was a very, very shy, awkward girl. Given that, if a stranger asked me for coffee at 4pm, I’d almost certainly say no, even though I wouldn’t assume he meant sex. Unless, as I said before, he asked me back to my room. In which case, I’d assume he wanted sex and I’d freak the fuck out and run the other way.
Finally, for a man who cares about not being a creep and about not objectifying woman, the best way to meet women and, potentially, get laid, is to get to know women and become friends with them and see where it leads!
If you want NSA sex with a stranger, there are plenty of ways to get that (go to bars/clubs, Craigslist, other online personals… I don’t know any other sources, try Google).
Context. Damn. I was hoping for something easy.
Not sure what NSA means, but I’m betting it goes against the rule I have with my wife: I’m only allowed sex with people I know, not people I just met. Something about disease, or something. NSA sounds like it might be an STD.
@Nathan DST aka LucienBlack
Oops, should have defined the acronym. NSA=no strings attached. However, it could involve strangers, acquaintances, or friends (e.g. friends with benefits). But, it frequently involves strangers that people pick up in bars or clubs or wherever.
I’ll feel free to object even without your permission.
You don’t have anything like enough information even to “suspect” EG has ADHD or any other disorder. Your claim is question-begging to the point of absurdity – EG acted in a rude entitled way, so there’s reason to think he as ADHD. Please.
You’ve got to see this new Mr. Deity episode… all the way to the very end! Soooo spot on!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKAO_ieeqTo
THANK YOU, Mr. Deity!
Okay, Help me out here.
Rebecca is complaining that guys are hitting on her all the time at conferences.
Well, okay but what does she mean by that?
Does that mean guys are flirting with her and that annoys her because flirting is sexualizing? Or does she mean that men are straight out constantly propositioning her for sex?
If it’s the first case then I think she’s a hypocrite because she does that to men. (as has been noted by previous bloggers) If it’s the second case then maybe she’s just interpreting men as propositioning her? I mean based on her knee jerk assessment of a guy asking her out for coffee, it sounds like she kind of projects sexual intentions on to men. Am I naive for thinking that way?
About the first part, no, I don’t think so – I think there’s a big mixed messages problem in a lot of this (not just from RW). About the second part, yes – he didn’t ask her “out” for coffee, he asked her to his hotel room for coffee, at 4 in the morning. No I don’t think it’s projecting to think that’s a lightly-disguised proposition. Hotel room and time of day really do make it different from asking someone out for coffee, which of course is the opposite of a proposition.
[…] A priest and a rabbi go into an elevator and … […]