Some empathy and intellect, please.
Written by Robin Marie in News, Opinion, Politics at July 10, 2011
As the token woman at An American Atheist, I feel obligated to respond to the recent controversy about Rebecca Watson’s recent experience at an atheist conference and Richard Dawkins’ response. I am also happy to do so, as I do identify myself as a feminist.
If you are not familiar with the basic outline, you might want to familiarize yourself with Watson’s original video and PZ Myers’ reply to Dawkins. But basically, Watson recounted her experience of being propositioned in an elevator at a conference, and made what I think is a pretty mild comment about it:
Um, just a word to wise here, guys…uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and—don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
Now, you can disagree with Watson about whether or not she interpreted this event correctly – many bloggers sympathetic to her have already pointed out that of course, this guy could have had innocent or “romantic” intentions. Yet of course, none of us were there and it is hard to capture a creepy affect and awkward atmosphere in a retelling. However, I am not of the opinion that when it comes to questions of sexism, the woman’s interpretation is automatically the correct one – I know that women are as capable of misunderstanding as men.
But here’s the thing. Watson’s comment, whatever you happen to think about it, was hardly hysterical, was not even approaching bombastic or dramatic. It was merely a comment on an incident which, while unpleasant, she never characterizes as horribly traumatizing. This is why I was very disappointed to read Dawkins’ sarcastic reply, which went as follows:
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
Dawkins went on to the make a second and third reply to critics, only digging himself into a bigger hole of cluelessness. But here is my problem with this – there was absolutely no reason for Dawkins to respond with belittling sarcasm.* By doing so, he continued a great tradition in the history of sexism that ridicules women for complaining at all. In this case, Dawkins did so by the classic move of comparing Watson’s experience to the objectively much worse experience of someone else, thus arguing that she had no grounds on which to recount her experience or to suggest that men should refrain from such behavior.
That was uncalled for. Again, it is not that I object to anyone arguing that Watson’s interpretation would not have been their own. But there is a difference between disagreeing with someone’s opinion and belittling them with condescension. What Dawkins did was essentially to dismiss Watson’s feelings about the matter, and then to ridicule her for even bringing them up. When men (and sometimes women!) behave like this – especially men that should know better – and then wonder what women are talking about when we bring up feminism and sexism, it displays an astounding lack of empathy.
And by empathy, I do not necessarily imply sympathy, a sharing of sentiment about Watson’s feelings. I simply mean the intellectual capacity to grasp the situation and position of someone else, therefore gaining the capacity to understand how – even if you still view their response as unreasonable – they could have had such a response. But Dawkins’ explicitly denies that Watson had any reason under the sun to feel uncomfortable – and this seems particularly absurd considering that he had just been sitting next to Watson while she talked about women in the atheist movement. During this panel, Watson discussed getting lewd e-mails from admirers and threats of rape from her opponents. After the presentation, she spent some time in the evening talking with other participants about these very issues – and it was in this context that the man in question decided to invite her back up to his room. This strikes me as somewhat like going to a conference about racism, and then making a subtle racist joke to surrounding participants. No wonder women occasionally doubt whether or not men are actually listening to them, and worry instead that they are merely looking at them.
Now, perhaps this man had perfectly good intentions. It is quite possible. But one thing that can be said for him is that he was at least clueless, and had very little excuse to be so. Being clueless is not the worst thing in the world; indeed shocked laughter is a possible response to this story. But as others have pointed out, a situation like this comes with a huge amount of background and context that someone like Dawkins clearly cannot, apparently, wrap his mind around. That isn’t just “insensitive” but stupid – and Dawkins’ multiple replies display a disappointing lack of intellectual seriousness on the part of someone who certainly has the intelligence to make a better effort.
However, I am not personally shocked that Dawkins behaved like this, and this lack of surprise makes me perhaps less angry than some other feminists in the atheist community. Therefore to place so much emphasis on how Dawkins acted like a jerk seems like a very mistaken and ineffective approach to me – because feminism becomes most misunderstood by the general public when it gets sidetracked into debating how sexist a particular person is or isn’t. This convinces almost no one and makes people who might otherwise be open to listening defensive. So rather than fixate on how Dawkins behaved, I think it would be better to talk about how all of us are impacted by sexism, and to show a certain amount of patience towards those who do not seem to “get it” by extending our intellectual empathy to them as well. I hope we can have this conversation, because as this incident and many others like it have displayed, sexism is an issue the atheist community needs to confront.
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* An objection might be made here that atheists participate in this kind of ridicule all the time of religious people – should we stop? Well, I think it is worth noting that as the atheist community has grown bigger and progressively more serious about what we are doing and what we are about, the strategy of ridicule has dropped off a decent amount; and indeed, while I myself admit to enjoying the humor of ridicule, I don’t find it the most interesting, productive, or compassionate way to go about making our argument against religion.
Thank you. Just thank you.
Also posting to BlagHag.