A little impatient with American women
Clean-up on aisle 3.
A comment responding to Richard Dawkins’s comment here and cross-posted to his site.
Hermann Steinpilz*
Feb 17, 2016 at 5:14 pmThe SJWs keep bringing up Richard’s “Dear Muslima” comment, and keep deliberately misinterpreting it. Because that’s what they do. They lie, and lie, and lie some more. I’m thinking of folk like Adam Lee, who claimed in a piece in The Guardian that Richard was essentially arguing that women in Muslim theocracies have it much worse than women in the West, and that therefore the latter should remain silent about “sexual harassment and physical intimidation”.
I can imagine how infuriating such dishonesty must be to Richard. He should (and probably does) realize that SJWs are much like fundie believers. They are equally dogmatic; they are opposed to free speech (who needs free speech, when your side has all the correct answers?); and they routinely lie for The Cause. They are totally dishonest. It is no use trying to reason with the likes of Adam Lee, PZ Myers or Ophelia Benson.
Ok how am I misinterpreting it? What is its meaning that I am so dishonestly construing? What exactly is it that I’m lying and lying and lying some more about? How else can that comment be read?
Here it is again so we can refresh our memories:
Dear Muslima
Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don’t tell me yet again, I know you aren’t allowed to drive a car, and you can’t leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you’ll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.
Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep”chick”, and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn’t lay a finger on her, but even so . . .
And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.
Richard
Via David Allen Greene at the New Statesman, who of course got it via Pharyngula.
Ok: how else is that comment to be read? Explain it to me. Explain what else it can possibly mean.
But good luck with that. People pay me to write and to edit, and speaking as a writer and editor, I say the meaning of that comment is very clear, and the angry rudeness of it is very clear too. Dawkins wrote that hostile, contemptuous thing back in 2011 and he has nobody to blame for that but himself. We didn’t make him write it; we were gobsmacked when he did; so he can just stop with the blaming. His commenters can stop saying we lie and lie and lie again when we say that comment means what it so obviously says.
And anyway Richard spelled it out for a journalist himself. Kimberly Winston asked him about it in an interview in November 2014.
Bottom line: He stands by everything he has said — including comments that one form of rape or pedophilia is “worse” than another, and that a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate.
“I don’t take back anything that I’ve said,” Dawkins said from a shady spot in the leafy backyard of one of his Bay Area supporters. “I would not say it again, however, because I am now accustomed to being misunderstood and so I will … ”
He trailed off momentarily, gazing at his hands resting on a patio table.
“I feel muzzled, and a lot of other people do as well,” he continued. “There is a climate of bullying, a climate of intransigent thought police which is highly influential in the sense that it suppresses people like me.”
Kimberly quotes from Adam Lee’s article in the Guardian and then continues:
Dawkins, however, disagrees. He is, he said, not a misogynist, as some critics have called him, but “a passionate feminist.” The greatest threats to women, in his view, are Islamism and jihadism — and his concern over that sometimes leads him to speak off-the-cuff.
“I concentrate my attention on that menace and I confess I occasionally get a little impatient with American women who complain of being inappropriately touched by the water cooler or invited for coffee or something which I think is, by comparison, relatively trivial,” he said.
Does it need to be clearer than that?
*Updating to add: a commenter tells us Hermann Steinpilz (stonemushroom) is Jan Steen of the slime pit.
The very words Dawkins wrote seem right clear enough. Maybe Hermann Steinpilz has problems understanding English?
Nah, that’s not it. It’s that Hermann Steinpilz is lying. He’s simply lying. He can’t make a moral argument, so lying to tarnish so-called SJWs is his only option.
It must be laborious to defend someone like Dawkins. Then again, lying is pretty easy. And riding coattails, as a boot licker like a Nugent does, is powerful motivation.
Maybe Hermann Steinpilz has never even seen Dear Muslima, and has no idea what it says. Maybe he’s just assuming that Dawkins didn’t say what he did say (and then repeated in various forms many times, and still repeats to this day). But why do that? Why assume he knows when he doesn’t, and on the basis of that assuming, announce that 3 other people are lying and lying and lying some more?
Didn’t Dawkins at one point give a half-assed apology for Dear Muslima, in which he recognized the reasonable implication of his remarks?
And whether he admitted it or not, there really isn’t any other reasonable inference to draw.
If Dawkins’ point wasn’t “you should shut up about such things because more important harms are occurring,” then what was it?
Was he just clarifying the relative importance of these issues? What was there to clarify? Who was saying anything to the contrary? It was Dawkins who first made the comparison to the plight of Muslim women. Watson hadn’t told any “Muslimas” that their issues were less important than hers; I’m not aware of her “ranking” the issues at all. It’s Dawkins who seems obsessed with this business of ranking harms.
Since this is all Rebecca [Skep”chick”] Watson’s fault – she once made my ice cream melt BTW* – it is worth pointing out that the whole ‘guys don’t do that’ was a brief throwaway in an otherwise perfectly interesting video summary of a conference. So throwaway that I barely noticed it at the time; and yet, there must be terrabytes of data archived worldwide at this point devoted to the fallout from that statement.
* Ok, it was a hot day and I did leave the bowl sitting in the sun while I did something else and RW was half a planet away; but I’m damn sure it was her and all because I’m a [cough] late middle age white male – damn her.
Screechy @ 3 – Yes, he did, although he did it while pouring contempt on the idea that he could have been at all…clumsy with that comparative rape tweet.
https://richarddawkins.net/2014/08/who-is-belittling-what/
(As an aside – I wish he would get in the habit of using italics rather than caps-lock.)
Maybe Steinpilz meant that Dawkins was deliberately making an outrageous comment to… score some kind of points, and that Dawkins didn’t *really* think… Western feminists… were…
Look, it’s really hard giving Steinpilz the benefit of the doubt. I tried, I really tried.
FYI: “Hermann Steinpilz” is a pseudonym of Slymepit regular Jan Steen.
Betcha Rebecca Watson has spent more time on reading about, hearing about, contemplating, writing about, and taken action on the horrors women have gone through in Muslim countries than Richard Dawkins has spent on contemplating the difference between having a small jar of honey confiscated as part of security theater and the no-fly lists, special searches, removal from planes, hostile questioning, etc that Muslim or kinda-brown people go through when trying to travel.
I’d prefer to concentrate on the enormous difficulties faced by Muslim women around the world and even here in The West and leave Richard Dawkins and his ‘Dear Muslimah’ aside.
There are 40 odd sharia run states where women are, at the very least, legally second class citizens. In some of those countries such as Saudi Arabia the restrictions placed on women are both numerous and intolerable.
Shouldn’t this be the ’cause du jour’ of human rights? We’re talking about 100s of millions of women.
Back in the 80 s everyone was on board to put an end to Apartheid in S.A., and yet that system of inequality was limited to only one country.
In the 60s everyone was on board to put an end to racial discrimination in the U.S.
When Bill Maher recently confronted Gloria Steinem with these statements about these 40 odd countries she neatly sidestepped the problem by replying that she didn’t “do monotheism”.
But it’s not as though the Trade Centers were brought down by a coalition of Zoroastrians and Evangelicals, is it?
And it’s not as though teams of roman Catholics and Reform Jews are promoting the practice of FGM.
Nor are Baptists setting up networks of ‘Baptist Tribunals’ that force women to remain with abusive husbands or which impose abusive inheritance conditions on Baptist women.
Were that ever to be the case, groups like NOW would spring into action and news of their fight would be splashed across the media.
Europe and America are now in the process of diligently importing millions of people from a deeply misogynistic culture, that of Islam, and yet opposition to the misogynistic practices of this culture are really nowhere to be seen.
Forty years ago at university I encountered groups of anti-war activists who claimed that if slavery could be eradicated, then so could war.
Thing is, in retrospect, only slavery practiced by Whites had actually be eradicated. Slavery as practiced by non-Western cultures was and is alive and kicking.
Should we likewise assume that since ‘White’ misogyny is at its lowest level in all of history, that other forms of it don’t count?
There’s just something here that is completely off base.
John – can you tell me exactly why you are doing a Dear Muslima in Ophelia’s comment section? Do you think she does nothing? Do you think she needs to be lectured? Do you think you just told us anything that everyone here doesn’t already know and fight against? For some reason, we seem able to worry both about women in Muslim countries and also women at home who are facing difficult odds. Okay, so not as difficult, but that doesn’t mean we should stop the battle.
And I have read articles where other countries actually point to the inequality in our countries, both racial and sexual, and tell us we have no business telling them what to do when we are far from there ourselves. This isn’t actually a half bad argument, even though it is one used to shut people up. They do have a point. We can clean up our own house, and we can do it while helping other women in other countries. And we can do it without a lecture from you.
Dear John,
I think you should pay attention to what Ophelia has been writing about for years and years and years…
Ophelia Benson is more careful of Richard Dawkins words than Richard Dawkins is.
I’d never read the actual ‘dear Muslima’ post before…that is much worse than I’d thought it was.
I’m not taking Ophelia to task. To her great credit she’s been taking on the consequences arising from the introduction of deeply misogynist cultures into western countries. Her exposés on secular, public Toronto area schools that use their cafeterias for gender segregated Friday prayers is a wonderful example of her courage.
On the other hand, why is it incumbent upon an American feminist/secularist to talk up what is a particularly ( for the moment) canadian probleme?
What I don’t see are high profile Canadian feminists taking on these new challenges to gender equality. As far as I can tell, veteran feminists/secularists such as Judy Rebbick, have said nothing about these developments. She doesn’t “do monotheism”, I guess.
It seems to me that were the Catholic Church to hijack the cafeterias of secular, public schools in order to celebrate First Friday Mass ( Catholics traditionally attend mass on the first Friday of each month), the outrage from secularists would be deafening.
Dawkins is wrong, very wrong, to downplay the many obstacles western women still face. However, he is correct when he points to the danger the ever growing number of sharia-complaint initiatives undertaken by western Islamists pose to the overall position of women in society. What is the point of ensuring women receive an equal inheritance when at one and the same time, religious tribunals, rejecting such equality, are allowed to set up shop, to multiply and to publish deeply misogynistic rulings?
If this situation is allowed to fester, then in 15 or 20 years hence the overall equality of women will have deteriorated to a great degree.
John, we all share your frustration with leftists who won’t make a move against FGM and other sharia-law issues because of “cultural sensitivity” or not wanting to offend Muslims. We all share your concern about the spread of these regressive practices, forcing women back into burqas in countries that had managed to achieve some measure of motion toward equality until recently. The big difference is that most of us do not see how that situation will be helped by allowing sexism to thrive in our own populations just because it isn’t so extreme.
I think almost everyone here has taken on that issue at some time, and we are all disturbed to see what’s happening. That’s why I still wonder why you felt you needed to post this here, since there hasn’t been an ignoring of gender segregation here, whether the perps were Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or just plain MRA. Your post sounds like a lecture to us, it sounds like you are mansplaining to us feminists why we need to focus our energies somewhere you consider appropriate. If you are not saying we should drop the problems of sexism in the west, than I’m sorry you were misunderstood, but that is definitely how your post reads.
justin @ 7 – ah, that explains a lot. Thank you.
A fictitious conversation somewhere the Middle East as imagined by Richard Dawkins (Disclaimer: Should not be read as making any kind of statement about real Muslim women):
Woman 1: “Oh boy, this Burqa business is killing me”
Woman 2: “I know, it must be at least 140 degrees in here. Oh well, at least it hides the acid burns”
Woman 1: “Yeah, I heard about that. What happened?”
Woman 2: “Oh, just the usual stuff. I was caught reading a school book, so these men threw some battery acid in my face”
Woman 1: “Sorry to hear that”
Woman 2: “Well, what can you do. So when is your stoning?”
Woman 1: “Next Friday. My lawyer thinks I might get off the hook if I marry my rapist, but I hear he just got arrested for defending me”
Woman 2: “*Sigh* Life really gets you down sometimes doesn’t it?”
Woman 1: “It does”
Woman 2: “Hey! I know what could solve our problems! If sleazy white guys in the West got to have all the fun they wanted at the expense of white women, and the women just had to put up with it or face nonstop abuse, our situation would greatly improve!”
Woman 1: “Yes! that would be quite helpful!”
It’s rather amusing that a slymepit regular would be bemoaning people who “lie, lie, and lie some more”.
A falsehod that may ironically contribute to the persistence of FGM. From a UNICEF study viewable here:
And:
source: http://www.childinfo.org/files/FGCM_Lo_res.pdf
Hey John @14:
The Catholic church *IS* hijacking public schools for Mass in Ontario – we have a separate public school system that provides religious education and there are religious functions (including mass) performed in these publicly funded schools (http://www.humanistperspectives.org/issue173/young.html )
Canadian secular groups, such as CFI Canada, Secular Ontario, and others are continuing take action to oppose this state of affairs (see http://myexemption.com/ ), while also speaking out against the “mosqueterias”. (And one of my favourite arguments opposing mosques in school is that the separation by gender that is imposed on the participants is a human rights violation that should not be permitted for an activity on public school property.)
@19
FGM is virtually unknown in Judaism and is actually considered sinful. The only Jews who ever practiced FGM were a small Ethiopian sect who did so to conform culturally. Since they emigrated to Israel the practice has totally disappeared. Similarly, some (Christian) Copts in Egypt practiced FGM as well. For equivalent reasons. The (Catholic) Church, to its credit, has worked hard to ban the barbaric practice among its adherents in Africa. There is no prescription for FGM even in Islam but, like hijab, it has become customary in many Muslim countries, especially since the rise of Islamism. Islam is the only religion where FGM has influential defenders. So, in fact, John’s statement (“And it’s not as though teams of Roman Catholics and Reform Jews are promoting the practice of FGM.”) is correct.
Imagine if I were to walk past Richard Dawkins and tread upon his toe. RD says”Ouch!” Now, two realities diverge.
In one reality, I say “Oops! I’m sorry I trod on your toe.” And I try not to tread on any more toes.
In another reality, I say “Don’t you realize there’s a civil war in Syria? The suffering there is incomparably worse than your trivial little toe problem.”
In the second reality, am I providing a valuable and much-needed dose of international perspective? Or am I being a raging asshole using other people’s suffering as an outrageous red herring to avoid addressing another issue I just don’t want to deal with?
Dear Muslima? Go fly a kite, RD.
@21. I know that Theo…I went to one. Catholic Schools exist in Ontario as a result of certain constitutional arrangements. They’ve been around as long as the province…so what can I say? This has nothing to do with Mosqueterias being imposed on faith-neutral, secular schools attend by students with a myriad of religious backgrounds.
@22. Thanks for demolishing that lame attempt at FGM equivalence. For sure a few non-Muslim women are victims of the practice, but it still stands that nearly ALL of the women who’ve undergone FGM are Muslim. It should also be said that FGM is spreading to Muslim communities is South Asia where it previously had never been practiced.
John @21:
Yes Catholic schools have been around in Ontario for a long time, but in the early 1990s, the Ontario government extended the arrangement to provide full public funding from K-12. Several other provinces which had similar constitutional provisions have instead taken the opposite action of amending the constitution to allow for the elimination of their separate Catholic school systems. The Ontario Catholic school system has been condemned by the UN Human Rights Council (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/un-says-funding-of-catholic-schools-discriminatory-1.175008). Though the schools are required to meet provincial standards, they have a fair bit of leeway to implement sexist and homophobic attitudes, policies, and procedures. Though the schools are fully publicly funded, they are allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion for hiring of staff and teachers, and also for admission of students up to Grade 9.
Here’s where we get back to “Dear Muslima”: Many supporters of the Catholic system are fine with the idea of mosques in public schools. The mosqueterias are no threat to the Catholics, who get their own schools with taxpayer funded chapels. But any rational argument made against the school-based mosques also applies to publicly funded religious education at the Catholic schools. And, as we saw after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, the “moderate” Muslims and Catholics are quite willing to form (unholy) alliances when it suits them.
John @25: I provided a link to an authoritative source. I can’t force you to read it, but you’ve established yourself as someone who, due to an unwillingness to have your prejudices challenged by facts, is not worth talking to.