Atheist Ireland Forum

Hi bipedalhumanoid
some instant thoughts...


Disagreeing is not rebutting. You can't rebut someone else's experience.


Yes. It all looks like fallout, rather than any attempt from McGraw onwards to understand what Rebecca was feeling and saying.


So it's OK if it's not emails? I would have thought that intelligent humans could understand and extrapolate that intrusive and unpleasant approaches via any medium are unwelcome from any quarter.


That was my point about all "communities": physics, music, education, journalism, psychology, kayaking, etc, etc... If empathy fails at the first fence, people's deep unconscious feelings are exposed and so sensitive that these divides ALWAYS erupt.


No, what she was doing initially is suggesting that someone might learn something from listening to her experience, that women have to put up with this stuff all the time and if they dare to suggest that the (usually) men in question could learn something about another person's experience they are called "feeble, weak and precious creatures that need special protections... who needs a big strong man to protect her." You have made my point for me.

It might help if some of the men offended by her initial video go back to the start and try to imagine what it might feel like to live with the need to be alert to attacks in this way, and to ask, nicely, for it to stop, and to get trashed for it.

As I mentioned earlier, requiring Rebecca to be a saint and explain all of this patiently without retaliating against attacks indicates a wish for her to be a saintly figure - this, I believe, is where the madonna/whore stereotype comes from, along the lines of: "if you do as I tell you you're a saint, a perfect mother, but if you even once suggest that my reading of your feelings is ever so slightly off, you'll break the precious pure image I have created for you, be sullied, and I'll have to think of you as bad, then I'll hate you."

Thanks for the opportunity to think more about this - it's good exercise for the mind!

Try watching McGraw's video. She rebutted the idea that Men shouldn't approach women in elevators as some kind of objective feminist no no. It wasn't a disagreement, it was a rebuttal. A rebuttal that this is a feminist issue and that the man's behaviour is up there with what she equted it to, ie. people threatening her with rape in emails.



It doesn't take much to understand what it feels like to feel the way she did. The constant suggestion that people don't understand is a red herring... especially considering there are men and women on both sides.



And here's the part where you exit from reasoned debate. This is a Strawman argument and in the interest of civility I'd invite you to withdraw it.

I didn't say it was ok to threaten a woman with Rape if the medium used is not an email. RW did not complain that people asked her to their room for coffee via email.



Had she relayed her experienced, stated how it made her feel and left it at that, then you'd be corect. Unfortunately, she attempted to use it as evidence for misogyny in the atheist community and equted it to what she discussed in her talk.


Just the men? What about all the women who also disagree with her?

Hi again, thanks for responding.


I don't think McGraw rebutted anything. Whatever category of issue 'it' is, telling someone their experience is wrong or invalid isn't a rebuttal. McGraw doesn't think this issue matters; clearly Rebecca does. I do too. We disagree.


I haven't exited from reasoned debate, nor have I said what you impute.

What I was trying to say - forgive me not being able to make my argument hermetically clear - was that Rebecca seemed to have been talking about getting unrequited approaches (all the way up to threats) when trying to conduct her normal business (including intellectual debate but, presumably, not excluding getting in an elevator to go to her room). She seems to have imagined that the man concerned would have the ability to extrapolate from extreme cases presented in conference to a relatively minor one at 4am.

The straw seems to be in disputing emails vs conversation - it really is irrelevant, I think, but perhaps you don't. Getting bogged down in squabbles over medium used seems to me a distraction from the meaning being communicated. The point is, I believe, about empathy. But the heat coming off your post suggests we're in danger of making this forum unworkable, like all the others, which would be a shame.


It seems to me to fall into the same ballpark - as I said in an earlier post: there's a continuum, from Rebecca's experience all the way through to Dawkins' examples.


You're quite right! Thanks for picking that up.

And thanks for the debate. I'll follow, but probably won't post any more as I think I've said all I want to say. I've entered into debates remarkably similar to this many times in 50+ years and don't enjoy the ad feminam attacks that always seem to boil up and take over.

Best wishes with the atheist campaign!

Except she didn't tell anyone their experience was wrong.



That's where your strawman lies. The argument I made had absolutely nothing to do with the medium and yet you choose to rebut it as if it did. Where we seem to disagree is in that I consider asking a woman for coffee in my hotel room a completely different situation to telling her I want to rape her. Nothing to do with medium.

I hope you wont stop posting here malvolio your very welcome.

+1 It was a joy reading your posts even when I did not agree with all of it.

Yep. I'm with bip on this one. I fully accept that he shouldn't have done it in a lift and the Rebecca was perfectly entitled to publicly state that it made her uncomfortable. The problem lies with her equating what he did to the nasty stuff she mentioned in her talk, particularly given that it was only in the aftermath of criticism that she started to suggest that she had been talking about men making gerenal advances to women at atheist conferences and meetings, when if you look at the video of her speech, she did no such thing. The only topic she discussed which relates in any way to men from the athiest community making advances on her were ones in explicit and graphic sexual detail. Again, what elevator guy did was not comperable.

I'll echo the pity that you don't intend to stick around. It has been an interesting dscussion.

The story made the 'Atticus' column in yesterday's Sunday Times.

I see also that Dawkins has written a children's bok on evolution with illustrations by a Harry Potter artist. Looking forward to that. He's doing a reading in the Albert Hall. Wonder will there be protests??

The only good thing about Malvolio's contribution was the name.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7NXsamFT6f0

sez it all really

She's persistant. I'll give her that...

http://skepchick.org/2011/07/frequently-answered-questions/

So saying that she will no longer buy his books or attend events he is talking at and will no longer recommend others to buy his books or attend events he is talking at is not the same as calling for a boycott. Okaaaay.

I suspect she has been looking for a crusade for some time and has now found it. Being an anti-Dawkins campaigner gives her the notoriety she craves.

The Skep Chick business is a glugger with any thinking feminist and she can't cut it as a public speaker on atheism. What better then than to be an anti-Dawkins campaigner?

I, myself, am vehemently opposed to the work of Madonna and have instructed all my followers not to attend her shows or buy her CDs. I bet she's sorry now she didn't answer my letters.

Just thought I'd mosey on here to check if anything had been said, and lo and behold, a nice big thread to catch up on. I've been following some of the debate on a boards.ie thread too, and just waded in today to give my two cents. It's gotten a bit messy over there, with a lot of personal clashes making it a bit difficult to follow.

I've just finished blogging about this myself, I took a long while thinking about it before I finally committed something to print. I think that RW is just being far too sensitive, and I say this from my position as a female computer scientist and martial artist (i.e. a woman who is, most often, in a man's world). As per the point I recently made on the boards.ie thread, it's fine for her to say "guys, don't do that to me because I don't like it", but it's an entirely different thing to say "hey, every guy, don't do that to any woman ever", which is a lot more like what she did.

The whole mess has resulted in an awful lot of male apologist claptrap, where people with male genitalia seem to want to pro-actively apologise for possessing it in case it might offend my delicate female sensibilities. It's ok though, it probably won't. I don't wear my gender as a badge, and I don't treat it like a disability, so I don't expect anyone else to either. What Dawkins said was crude, but broadly, I'm inclined to agree. I'm lucky enough to live in a society where I am afforded so many rights and privileges that I couldn't even count them, but a plane journey away, there are women who are mutilated for trying to escape abusive husbands and in-laws. With this in mind, I don't discount modern feminism, but I do absolutely think carefully before branding something sexist. To brand this non-issue as sexists lends it gravitas that it doesn't deserve, and also, diminishes the importance of the struggle that many women must endure to enjoy the rights that most of us take for granted.

I know that, as a woman, I'm more likely to be paid less and overlooked for promotions in the workplace, and I'm less likely to be taken seriously as a martial artist. And yes, this is sexism, but the way to combat that is to continue to strive for equality in these areas where equality is still not seen, not to bandy the words feminism or sexism around at the drop of a hat. It diminishes the impact of the words, it diminishes all those who fought for the freedoms that we enjoy, and frankly, it diminishes those who do it themselves.

Rebecca's response to this whole mess hasn't really raised her in my esteem. I don't have much respect for someone who uses their gender as a crutch, and I don't respect her reactions to it. To brand the guy a creep who doesn't get it, simply because she felt uncomfortable, is overkill. To further speak about McGraw in the same context as rapists and other sexual offenders was unfair, and an abuse of her position, especially given that McGraw was a) misrepresented, and b) given no opportunity to respond. To do all this under the banner of "feminism", well, that's just insulting.

i'm sure he's worried