In which the Dawkins AMA inevitably breaks into elevator-gate drama. (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
72 ups - 29 downs = 43 votes
96 comments submitted at 05:49:28 on Nov 27, 2013 by JordanJordanJordan
In which the Dawkins AMA inevitably breaks into elevator-gate drama. (np.reddit.com)
SubredditDrama
72 ups - 29 downs = 43 votes
96 comments submitted at 05:49:28 on Nov 27, 2013 by JordanJordanJordan
Ok, I've been going from link to link and still have no idea what the hell elevator-gate is, can someone ELI5?
Rebecca Watson went to an atheist convention and spoke about why women weren't more involved in the movement. Afterwards she hung around talking with people in a bar, when she left to go her hotel room in the early hours of the morning, a man from the group she'd been talking with followed her into the elevator and invited her back to his room.
Afterwards she made a video, and pointed out that was the sort of insensitivity that made women at such conventions feel uncomfortable.
HUGE DRAMA ensued of the "how dare she not want men to ever talk to her ever" type of over-reaction.
It's also worth noting some of the drama exploded because of other comments on Watson's "side" ranging into over-reaction territory, like PZ Meyers stating that every case of a man speaking to a woman in an elevator is a potential rape.
Like every other situation like this on the internet, plenty of people on both sides were total assholes. The problem is that people on side A can't seem to understand that pointing out that a particular person who is also on side A is being an asshole isn't the same thing as saying that all people on side A are wrong. The end result is that no productive conversation can be had and everybody just hates each other.
I'm pretty sure "PZ Meyers (sic) stating that every case of a man peaking to a woman in an elevator is a potential rape" is more your own exaggeration than his overreaction.
Actually, something very much like that did happen, but it wasn't PZ Myers who said it; it was Phil Plait, and he called it "potential sexual assault". That was in response to Dawkins' 'Dear Muslima' letter, but I will admit that I don't think it was far off from plenty of rhetoric I saw before the 'Dear Muslima' letter.
Thanks for the explanation, be it slightly colored with your own opinion. I had also completely missed this particular gate. But I also read something about a "Dear Muslima" letter, but haven't been able to find said letter anywhere on the blagoblag.
Can you give us a TL;DR and how was it recieved?
Edit: After some digging I found the actual video.
This doesnt seem that bad though, she just said that she isn't really comfortable with this, which seems reasonable.
>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
Thanks!
Yeah, I actually thought this and Muslima were related incidents. Man am I out of the loop on DawkinsDrama.
They are related. The Muslima letter was Dawkins trying to give Watson a dose of perspective.
> Thanks for the explanation, be it slightly colored with your own opinion.
That version left out a great deal that matters.
Watson's video didn't immediately provoke a huge reaction (except insofar as she was already a bit of a public figure and a target for regular hate mail and comments on the internet). Her supporters talked on a number of sites about what a great point that story was, and how that kind of activity is anti-feminist, and those men are dangerous, and she could have been hurt or killed! Some people objected, however: it's fine if she wants to say that she personally doesn't want to be approached like this, but she's bringing up being approached in an elevator to be a creepy, anti-feminist thing. They disagreed, saying that he acted in a respectful manner, and that Watson doesn't get to speak for all women (I should note that at least some of these critics were women themselves).
However, things blew up after Watson gave a talk entitled "The Religious Right Vs Women", in which she discussed some of the hate mail she receives, and then, shortly after quoting some rape threats she has received, and then quoting a number of the more abusive comments she received regarding her 'elevator' comments, she then singled out the fellow female atheist/skeptic blogger who had made the post I linked to in the previous paragraph, and claimed that she was giving "a pretty standard parroting of misogynistic thought", and accuses her of not being a feminist or knowing anything about feminism (when she is, in fact, an outspoken feminist herself). This was at a skeptic conference, and she knew that the woman in question (Stef McGraw) was in attendance.
It was backlash to that, along with backlash to the amplifying rhetoric in the internet skeptic community (particularly in the comments section of Watson's own Skepchick site, which she moderated and participated in, without objection to this rhetoric) about how elevator guy was a creep, and potential rapist, and Watson should have named who it was so he could be shunned, which produced a huge drama-splosion, including Dawkins' "Dear Muslima" letter (which set off an even BIGGER drama-splosion).
To further add, the man said he liked her talk and wanted to have a conversation over coffee.
At 2 in the morning, in his hotel room. Look, she didn't say "oh noes I've been harrassed", she did say following a woman to ask her to your hotel room at night / early hours after she's been talking about why women don't like to go to conventions is tactless.
It's obvious he was suggesting they sleep together, and it's equally obvious that she overreacted. He didn't pin her against a corner of the elevator and start talking about "implications" like Dennis from Always Sunny in Philadelphia, he just said "want to get together? No, ok then." and that was the end of it. His behavior was inappropriate but so was hers, especially when she started using her blog as a platform to bash other women in the atheist community for not agreeing with her position.
> she overreacted
how?
Cause if you'll remember, her reaction was to spend approximately one percent of a video going "Hey guys, don't do this, it's pretty creepy"
I'm referring more to how she responded to other women in the atheist community when they disagreed with her. Stef McGraw just said "this seems blown out of proportion a bit" and in response Watson went to a speaking engagement at McGraw's school, put her name up on a projector, and proceeded to call her the sort of brainwashed misogynist that is the root of all problems in the community. Here, read McGraw's reaction to it and tell me you don't think Watson is an ass:
>My first reaction was complete shock. I wasn’t surprised that she had seen my post, but I didn’t think she would choose to address it during her keynote, let alone place it in a category with people advocating for her to be raped. In fact, I was excited to possibly speak with her afterward in order to discuss the matter face-to-face. Instead, all I could do was just sit there and watch myself being berated for supposedly espousing anti-woman views and told that I wouldn’t stand up for women in sticky situations with men, as one hundred of my peers watched on. I found both of those accusations to be completely and utterly incorrect, as anyone who actually knows me could tell you I care deeply about fighting sexist thought. I started thinking, how can I respond? It didn’t feel right to have to endure a widely respected keynote speaker’s accusations that I was a living example of what was wrong with our movement while I sat there unable to defend my position.
That was the point where the incident blew up - people keep portraying it as "she just released the video and everyone blew their shit over a 10 second soundbite", but that's leaving out a few week's worth of other really important events that happened in between. Nobody who watched the video when it came out took offense to her statement (barely anyone even watched it at all) - it was only after a few other women in the freethought community suggested that Watson was possibly overreacting to a proposition from a drunken idiot and Watson responded to them by publicly shaming them at a conference that the whole incident exploded. It is also important to remember that her opposition was less mad about the statement itself (which few people would have taken offense to if it was made in a vacuum) and more about its context - although Watson did not go down the "all men are rapists" route in the video, her site was becoming host to a not exactly moderate Tumblr-flavored SJ ideology which was steadily getting more extreme over time, and this incident really pushed it over the edge. Things were said, lines were drawn, and the whole community more or less fractured in two, with Watson's camp going off to form Atheism+. In my opinion this was long time coming - there was an unspoken ideological rift that had been running through the community for a quite a long time that was generally ignored, and the drunkard in the elevator was just the spark that set off the whole powder keg. A shitstorm was gonna go down one way or another - it just happened to go down like this, and a lot of the stupid that came out of it was from people not really realizing the significance of what was happening and being unable to properly communicate in terms of the ideological and philosophical schism that was underlying the whole discussion.
Most people don't use their blog platform to whine about every minor faux pas that they experience.
Really? I think that's exactly what most blogs are about - everyday stuff and petty grievances.
> To further add, the man said he liked her talk and wanted to have a conversation over coffee.
It is exactly that kind of oppression that is forcing women out of atheism.
"I enjoyed your talk and would like to hear more (with vague hints of flirting)"
-ugh, disgusting. That's it, I'm becoming Mormon.
Yes because of course going to a strange man's room at 2 in the morning is just for "coffee" and a "vague flirting"
C'mon on are you seriously 5 years old? Every adult in the bloody world knows that's an offer proposition.
He is a pretty well respected man and from the context I am not so sure.
You know it wasn't Dawkins who said that to her right? And that she never said the name of the guy who asked her?
Dawkins only was involved when he made a big deal about how "well women in other countries can't be educated! So just shut up and sit down". Which is completely irrelevant and dismissive.
Guys, it's sarcasm.
> That's it, I'm becoming Mormon.
And the women of the world breathed a sigh of relief.
You're misrepresenting what happened. This was the problem: She attacked, in a pretty shitty way, another young woman who had disagreed with her in a youtube video. That was the point where people turned against RW.
And of course then there came all the white knight and super angry ally posts, that exaggerated ever more what happened.
Ok this is all how I remember it, but the first oil in the popcorn machine was another lady atheist blogger saying that it was bad for Watson to say 'don't do that' etc to guys trying to talk to women in elevators. Then Watson included this lady in her 'litany of hateful misogynists' responding to her bit about the elevator. After that things descended into an ocean of popcorn.
Rebecca Watson, who is fairly well known blogger and a terrible person (more on that later) was propositioned on an elevator at an atheist convention. The timing was especially unfortunate given that she was at the convention to give a talk about why there aren't more visible women in the atheist community, which is a fair point and not at all the source of my disdain for her. The guy didn't say anything filthy (more on that later) but it was still inappropriate.
She described Elevatorgate as being harrowing, but eventually admitted that the guy just said "I like your work, would you care to join me for coffee?" She said "no thanks," he said "no problem," and that was the end of it until she got home, at which point she waxed melodramatic about the Assault That Wasn't all over her blog.
In fairness, you shouldn't hit on women in elevators, especially late at night. It's a confined space with no easy exit, and the situation could easily become uncomfortable. That being said, she blew this way the everloving hell out of proportion. Even Watson admits (begrudgingly) that the guy didn't say or do anything inappropriate and left her completely alone when she expressed disinterest, so publicly shaming him on her blog with a "LOOK WHAT THIS POTENTIAL RAPIST MIGHT HAVE DONE TO ME (but didn't)" seems excessive. This sort of thing is par for the course for her, though; she likes to use her pseudo-celebrity as a bludgeon. Not long after Elevatorgate she gave a talk at CFI about a largely unrelated topic and instead just used her time and platform to name and insult various people that disagreed with her stance on Elevatorgate, some of whom were students in the audience.
There's a summary here from a guy that normally defends Watson and even he found her behavior to be indefensible:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2011/07/02/everyone-needs-to-calm-the-fuck-down/
So, shorter version: man flirts with woman on an elevator at 4 AM, bad. Leaves her alone when she says she's not interested, good. Woman publicly shames him on her blog, bad. Different woman expresses extremely mild difference of opinion, original woman publicly shames HER at a conference at her own school, very bad. Watson's an asshole.
She didn't "shame" him she never even mentioned his name.
Propositioned? Way to uneccesarily color the facts.
What exactly do you think is implied when one asks a member of the opposite sex to join one in ones hotel room in the wee hours of the morning?
I'm not sure what your objection is.
Watson gave a speech at an atheist conference about how women have to put up with guys hitting on them there. That night, a guy hit on her in an elevator. She said simply that it was a bad idea. Then people got pissed that she made it an issue, no matter how small, then she started playing the victim card for attention, and the whole thing just got way out of hand. Both sides are made up of idiots.
>can someone ELI5?
One day when you're an adult and alcohol, sex, and staying up late are things you're allowed to enjoy, then sometimes, when you've been up late drinking alcohol, you'll politely and roundaboutishly inquire about sex with any girls who've also been up late and drinking and you think might be down for that.
And if you're at an atheist convention, then you're the reason women can't be atheists.
I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but an elevator is a bad place to proposition someone. There's nothing wrong with an invitation at a bar or in the lobby (I've accepted a few myself), but someone following me into an elevator would skeeve me out.
That said, I think RW may have jumped on this incident to make a point that could have better made with a better illustration. However, I really don't think that the backlash, hate, vitriol, rape and death threats she received were in any way proportional to her initial video.
The OTT backlash is why we can't have nice things, not because some woman took offense to an invitation.
>There's nothing wrong with an invitation at a bar or in the lobby (I've accepted a few myself)
Sure, to you. Some other woman somewhere can't stand it. Whatever she's all right with, some other woman hates.
Which is fine, everyone has their preferences, but some people like to declare rules for other people are obligated to follow based on those preferences, and "nobody anywhere should ever do this thing because it happened once and momentarily bothered me" isn't a kind of rule I have a lot of regard for in pretty much any context.
If the OTT backlash is what's wrong then fine, any time Rebecca Watson says "hey guys, don't write emails telling people they deserve to get raped and killed" I'll 100% agree with that. But the overreaction gets used to validate the initial argument and invalidate any contrary response, which is plain tone argument and nonsense for all the reasons tone arguments are nonsense.
Oh good god. Yes, I see your point. It's ridiculous to dumb down society to the point where no one can interact with any one without fear of offense (and a recent example in my town, no one can put up Halloween decorations for fear of offending someone), but a little common sense can go a long way.
Number one would be 'Don't corner woman in elevators'. Considering the screaming about 'false rape' allegations, you'd think that men would want to keep these things in plain sight. ?
>all the reasons tone arguments are nonsense
I don't at all see that this is about 'tone', when commenters post crap like "shut your whore mouth or I'll shut it for you". I suppose I'm just missing the 'tone' that makes this jolly fun?
It's about tone because people use that extreme and unjustifiable overreaction, not as an argument against that reaction, but to validate their agreement with the original argument, and elide and dismiss contrary responses that don't say anything like that.
>a little common sense can go a long way. Number one would be 'Don't corner woman in elevators'. Considering the screaming about 'false rape' allegations, you'd think that men would want to keep these things in plain sight. ?
Wow, uh... between describing being on the same elevator as cornering and the part about keeping things "in plain sight", because of.... false rape allegations which I wasn't bringing up, in any way, at all... this pretty much reads like we're now expanding from "don't proposition women on elevators" to "don't be alone with a woman on an elevator".
No I don't think that's common sense, and this is part of why I don't agree with this sort of rule.
Yeah it's funny and reminds me of the whole anita sarkeesian thing. The elevator thing is a non-issue, big deal someone asked you out in a place that's not super ideal but did it politely and didn't harass or insist or insult or do anything physical. But then the reaction reveals actual misogyny.
you're probably missing some key information on what went down.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1rjz0h/inwhichthedawkinsamainevitablybreaks_into/cdoa9d4
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1rjz0h/inwhichthedawkinsamainevitablybreaks_into/cdoam6x
I had already read the first comment you linked, and the 2nd one is new but doesn't really change my point. She's nuts for thinking this elevator incident was a problem, let alone attacking who disagree. And Sarkeesian makes stupidly shallow videos. But the way people then respond to the situation reveals misogyny, and whether she is a good person or not is irrelevant, because they are saying and doing things which are blatantly woman-hating.
>the way people then respond to the situation reveals misogyny
the way some people then respond.
no matter what controversial topic there will be immature assholes, trolls, etc.
What people like RW try to do is: take the worst troll posts and hold them up as proof that "everyone who disagrees with me is a rapist monster! Therefore I'm right about everything QED. donations to the left!"
There usually are valid reasons why people think RW or similar people are full of crap. Focusing only on the 10% actual shitty misogynists is just an easy way to ignore criticism and to get some oppression points by playing wounded gazelle.
"Are games/gamer culture sexist?"
"No! Fuck you slut for even asking the question, you should be raped to death!"
More like
"Are games/gamer culture sexist? Let's head over to the internet's self-described asshole and spam them, then use those negative comments to play the victim."
>"Are games/gamer culture sexist?"
"I mean, I don't even play video games, so I don't know or care, but my SJW boyfriend said that asking for a lot of money to make videos where I read out his viewpoints over videos of other people playing the game would be a good idea."
EDIT: On the topic of Anita's sources: http://victorsopinion.blogspot.be/2013/07/anitas-sources.html
On the topic of her interest in video games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUxVEU-7zb4
On the topic of her only making Tropes VS Women at her boyfriend's behest: http://anongamer.tumblr.com/
Thanks for providing an example!
> "No! Fuck you slut for even asking the question, you should be raped to death!"
Lol, what a nice strawman. You see the same shit happening when people describe feminists in reddit all the time... here we have the exact same thing. That quote you just made... that literally NEVER happens.
> Lol, what a nice strawman.
It's not a strawman if that's what happened. See: any thread on /r/gaming about her.
The threads that at the end of the day get more than 1k comments where you have people giving very different point of views and usually downvote shit like that quote you made up? Yeah.
http://www.gamepolitics.com/2013/07/30/twitter-ignores-rape-threats-aimed-anita-sarkeesian#.UpaFk9JDt8A
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internet-why-you-cant-have-anything-nice
http://www.dailydot.com/entertainment/e3-anita-sarkeesian-sexism-rape-violent-threats/
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/08/how-free-should-speech-be-on-twitter.html
>A petition began circulating to make it easier to report abuse on Twitter, demanding a “zero tolerance policy on abuse”; by now, over a hundred thousand people have signed it. A Labour MP named Stella Creasy published an op-ed defending Criado-Perez in the Guardian this weekend, headlined, “Twitter’s inadequate action over rape threats is itself an abuse.” Shortly after it went live, she began to receive rape threats herself. One warned, “YOU BETTER WATCH YOUR BACK….IM GONNA RAPE YOUR ASS AT 8PM AND PUT THE VIDEO ALL OVER THE INTERNET.”
So what? What exactly does that prove? One case doesn't mean anything at all. Not even /v/ of all places reacts to Anita's video in the way it was described above.
I'll use this attempt against you. Every single time reddit's brand of feminism is criticized for making fun male safe spaces, the go to counter argument is yelling "straw feminists!", etc. Yet look at what happened today in /r/pics. Now I can be a reasonable person and ignore the loud, hateful, annoying people, acknowledging people who take disgusting stances such as this one are not representative of the whole movement, or I can just follow your logic and say feminism is hateful against men because of that post.
(do mind that person laughs at the idea of male abuse in another post).
I've got nothing to say about that other post, I was responding to your comment that rape threats like the one mentioned "literally NEVER happen" with an example that proves that they do actually happen.
>That quote you just made... that literally NEVER happens.
Is this your first day on reddit? That happens CONSTANTLY.
You stated that perfectly.
you seem to be missing some key information on what went down.
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1rjz0h/inwhichthedawkinsamainevitablybreaks_into/cdoa9d4
http://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1rjz0h/inwhichthedawkinsamainevitablybreaks_into/cdoam6x
> , but an elevator is a bad place to proposition someone
He didn't proposition her. Proposition by definition involves sex. He only politely asked her for coffee.
At 4am in his hotel room? Right after she'd just just told the group that she was tired and wanted to go to bed?
If you want to sleep with someone, ask them. If you want to continue a discussion, ask them if you can meet up tomorrow. But let's not be naive here. Asking someone to come with you right now to a private room is either deliberately clueless, or pathetically clueless, and her response was simply 'hey, don't do that'. For which, I gather she deserves rape threats and death threats?
I never anywhere said she deserved rape threats. I'm saying your use of the wprd proposition is wrong.
Ok, I can see that. She may have felt more than what was actually said.
Tell me, considering the amount of attention this got, did we ever hear from the guy? Because if I were that guy, I might have come out with my version of that story, if it differed from hers, significantly.
But again, all she said was 'don't do that'. Not, like, "You're a horrible, cishet patriarchal misogynist rapist" All she was asking is that men listen to women when they say they don't feel welcomed or safe. What's so hard to understand, that he should follow her into an elevator, and ask her to a private room at 4am? It's almost like, he was so interested in what she had to say (and so wanted further, private conversation), yet didn't actually hear any of what she'd already said?
I don't know why you are arguing against me and barraging me with questions. I'm only making a correction to your use of one word.
Sorry, I thought you were actually interested in the discussion. I won't bother you again.
I still don't know why you're so antagonistic. Your questions were antagonistic. Now this. You need to calm yourself.
Ehhh, to be fair this seems like both sides taking too much offence (the angry-atheist-men side very much moreso, I'll happily admit). I mean, what he did is definitely creepoid, but from what I gathered from the story it seems more like "shut-in with awful social skills at a convention doesn't realize he's making people uncomfortable" rather than "JOIN MY HAREM, WOMANTOY"
This is just typical back-and-forth-drama-snowballing.
> "shut-in with awful social skills at a convention doesn't realize he's making people uncomfortable" rather than "JOIN MY HAREM, WOMANTOY"
hah, How do you tell the difference?
Just kidding, and I agree the internet magnifies everything, at this point. How much worse can it possibly get, is there a saturation point?
There is only one. See, everyone has to out-anger each other on the internet, back and forth, back and forth... so the saturation point is when a little flamewar on a tiny forum eventually explodes into a global war that annihilates the human race.
AND THEN, THE POPCORN WILL RULE THE EARTH.
So, I guess SRD are the only REAL winners?!
I couldn't see the ELI5 quoted in your post because my phone is dim and the sun is bright, and I thought this was the most weirdly condescending comment ever.
Yeah nah I was definitely aiming for nothing higher than the standard range of condescending.