Dave wrote:
This is essentially the same thing as Elevator-Gate. While we dont know what Elevator-man looked like, I dont think there is anyone here who doubts that had Becky-boo found Lil'Paul attractive, it would have never been an issue.
So heres the thing for me -- We arent psychic. At least Im not. I dont know how a woman is going to react before I make the comment. I can make a inferences and a reasonable guess, but like anyone else, Im sometimes wrong. Lacking telepathy, sometimes we are going to get it wrong.
Last night, I was handing out beer samples at a competition. This one youngish woman rather liked my beer and brought over a couple of guys she was with (turns out to be her brothers) to taste. Now part of this competition is a "peoples choice" award, so, Im in sales mode, smiling, making small talk, etc. I made a comment that I liked her hair style.* I didnt really mean anything by it. At best I was trying to get her to remember me, and by proxy, my beer, favorably when she voted later on. Perhaps I was trying to be nice in return for her recommending my beer to others. Had she been Charlotte Proudman, she would have complained to the event organizers** I suppose. Or perhaps I would have found my face all over twitter as patriarchy personified. As it turned out, despite my 15-20 years on her, this young lady apparently thought I was closer to ooo-lala than old and gross. She noticeably brightened when I made the comment and kept coming back to my table to talk. Which was pleasant as the event wound down and I would have been otherwise just standing there waiting on people to come to my table.
Pleasantries like this are an everyday part of human interaction. Most of the time, they are a small easy thing we do to make interactions with others more pleasant. Sometimes they are a feeler for something more. Sometimes they are taken as an expression of interest when they arent. But to vilify others for engaging in this sort of behavior simply makes life less pleasant for everyone.
Just occurred to me: Since she took my comment as an expression of interest when I didnt mean it that way, was she objectifying me? Should I blame the Matriarchy? Wheres my Patreon moolah?!?!?
* It was a lie. Her hairstyle didnt really do much for her, but it was different and I suspected took some effort, so I guessed she was proud of it. Does the fact that it was a lie make the comment more or less objectifying? Social Justice is hard!
** Im picturing Josh's reaction to this: "He complimented your hair? OK, Ill go have a talk with him right now, he clearly has no taste in women's hair styles."
Heh.
There's actually a context difference between what you did and what the man that messaged Proudman or Elevator Guy did. You were at a competition, giving out beer samples, so the situation was fun and relaxed, and people who attend the converstion are used to interact in a less formal way.
You also didn't ask the girl out, like Elevator Guy, just made a nice comment about her hair style
The guy who messaged Proudman did it in a professional, serious social network. Elevator Guy made his "modest proposal" in an elevator, not a very fun or relaxed place to be, especially at night. They were awkward and made the situation uncomfortable (especially in Watson's case).
Both cases were blown out of proportion. Proudman was vile from the start. She could have easily deleted the message, or replied in an acerbic, sarcastic way if she felt like it. She chose to expose the man who commited a minor social faux pas to the world. That's textbook cyber-bullying, just like the 8channers who took a picture of the dancing overweight man and exposed it to the world. If it was 4/8chan which exposed a woman who had did a minor awkward thing to the masses the newspapers would have called them trolls and harassers.
Since Proudman is a feminist she can get away with it and even get rewarded from stopping the danger of the Awkward Compliment Giver.
Watson's initial video on the Elevator Guy was a bit patronizing ("Guys, don't do that!" as if every man who attends skeptic convention needed to be schooled by her) and whiny (she was obviously fishing for sympathy for what was basically a non-event) but
not especially bad, because she didn't name Elevator Guy, or post his picture for all the world to see.
Elevator Guy
did make a social faux pas. It
is very uncomfortable to ask people out when they're alone with you in a closed space and you're basically a stranger. Elevator Guy was probably just an inoffensive awkward Watson fan, but he came off as rather creepy.
Watson was right to call
him out for
his behavior, and didn't do anything wrong in doing it in public
without using his name, although she could have just as easily told him that his behavior had been creepy in private and shouldn't have assumed that he was a represenative of the average skeptic conference attendee.
At this point the worst you could have said about Watson was that she overgeneralized from a single event and was making some drama. This is what Youtube "vloggers" do for a living, though, so it wasn't a big deal. Ideally all rational people would have said "yes, he was a tad creepy, let's hope he learnt that he came off as creepy" and Watson's video would have been quickly forgotten.
Watson was insulted and trolled, and defintely didn't deserve it. However that's the nature of the Internet. Youtube videos about cats get people calling each other a "cocksucker" or a "motherfucker" in the comments for every conceivable reason. Videos of national anthems inspire hundreds of comments about who's going to kill or teabag any shitheads from country X or Y.
Celebrities big and small get nasty comments, assorted insults and even ineffectual threats. I don't think that what Watson received was worse than the general trolling that anyone receives on controversial arguments, like feminism. Trolls and Internet Tough Guys love insulting and rustling jimmies. Most of them are just crude, immature people who seem to be suffering of some kind of written Tourette syndrome.
Anyway, Watson was still within her rights to be pissed off by those comments. She didn't name Elevator Guy, or argue that he was a rapist, or that he had some other ill intent. (That came later, and not from Watson but from mindless sychophants like theophontes).
She crossed the line when she implied in a public conference about the Religious Right that Rose St. Clair and Steph McGraw, who had told her that she was being patronizing and overreacting, needed some feminist schooling and were part of a continuum which included the misogynistic trolls.
This was even more patronizing. Watson exposed McGraw to the masses as a pitiful ignorant "chill girl" who couldn't see the inherent sexism of saying "My concern is that she takes issue with a man showing interest in her." or how horribly and "sexually objectifying" the situation had been.
Rebecca Watson wrote:I want to use it as an example, not to embarrass this person, but to point out that we have a serious problem when young women are this ignorant about feminism.
Watson infantilized McGraw and deprived her of her agency. She implied that the disagreement between her and McGraw was due to McGraw's young age and "ignorance of feminism". Like many feminists she simply assumed that all women are naturally feminists, and those who aren't are simply too naive and ignorant to "see the light".
Watson also hijacked a conference, which wasn't about her internet drama over a minor awkward event, to make it all about how she had to deal with some trolls and with the horror of a woman disagreeing with her.
It was at
this point that Watson became almost as bad as Charlotte Proudman, as
ERV wrote in this old post. She cyber-bullied McGraw, albeit in a less vile way than what Proudman did to the LinkedIn Guy.
Most of all though she argued that her inconsequential Internet drama was actually an important issue about the atheism movement. The SJW jumped on her bandwagon to promote their ideology.
Dawkins's Dear Muslima was all about saying "we've all devoted too much time to a non-event, let's get back to discussing real issues, please". Rebecca Watson was disgusted because someone was trying to steal the spotlight from her Internet drama to worry about women who were actually being harmed by religion.
That's when she became pretty vile. She said that Dawkins' Dear Muslima, which was about putting things into perspective, was actually a misogynistic attempt to "silence" her. She started the boycott/not a boycott of Dawkins. She implied that the fact that she had been called a cunt by some internet trolls, and criticized by some women, was at least
as important as female genital mutilation or Muslim mysogyny.
That's insane.
Time and energy are limited, and some issues are much more important than others. If you had the choice between devoting the exact same time to reducing FGM and violation of women's rights in Muslim countries by 1% and to reducing Internet trolls by 99%, most rational, empathetic people would choose the first option.
Rebecca Watson implied that her Internet drama was at least as important as FGM, or the stoning of the adulterers. Dawkins wrote that this is basically equivalent to choosing the second option, and it's easy to see why.
Dawkins was naive enough to believe that people could have dropped the discussion about the Internet drama. He didn't recognize that there was something else going on, that the rift wasn't really about trolls or awkward advances in an elevator.
It was about the role of radical feminism in the atheism movement. It was about the freedom of women like Steph McGraw, Abbie Smith, Rose St. Clair, Miranda Hale and many, many others to be women and atheists without being radfems. It was about the freedom to care more about atheism, separation of church and state and the bad consequences of religion than about Internet trolls or "everyday sexism".
It was about the freedom to call yourself an atheist, go to atheist conferences and not have to listen to unchallenged and dogmatic post-modern radical feminism preachings about invisible sexism, privilege and how awful white cis het male are.
It was about the freedom to make black humor jokes about dark subject matters (including rape), or to wear shirts with sexy women on it, or to make jokes about female underwear, dongles, or to flirt, or to express opinions which aren't 100% in agreement with radical feminism and social justice without having to worry about the PC police doxxing you, or trying to boycott you, smear you, get you fired and call you a sociopath, evil,a rape apologist, the creator of a haven for rapists, or as bad as the KKK.
It was about the chance of being an atheist and a libertarian, or a conservative, or a moderate, or a leftist who doesn't care about bandaids of a "wrong" color or "culturally appropriated" food, or who thinks that terrorists who kill satirical journalists are a much bigger problem than a shit swastika of dubious origin.
It was, in short, about the freedom of speech and thought in atheism and about the rational choice to devote more time to real issues than to offended sensibilities. It still is about those things.
