Rebecca Watson: ‘Stop Sexualizing Me!’

Posted on | July 7, 2011 | 94 Comments

This was originally going to be titled, “Agreeing With Richard Dawkins,” because one of the world’s most notorious Darwinists has offended feminists by telling them that there are worse things than being propositioned in a hotel elevator. But then I saw the video in which the atheist chick at the epicenter of this controversy made the complaint that prompted Dawkins’ rebuke and said, “Oh, hell.”

This gets funny, so keep reading. Hat-tip to Ann Althouse, and thanks to commenter Joe for pointing it out.

First, it seems that Rebecca Watson rates as the total smokin’ hotness of atheist chickdom. Atheist guys get all torqued up when they see awkward nerd chicks with magenta-tinted hair, and Rebecca’s been driving ’em wild with her weekly online videos.

Second, why did Watson feel the need to lecture the world of atheist guys about how it “creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner”? Here is the failed pick-up line that triggered it:

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”

He might as well have said, “Gimme dat thang, bitch,” to judge by Rebecca Watson’s reaction. Here, watch the video (skip to the 4:20 mark to hear the relevant part): 

Granted, this occurred in an elevator, at 4 a.m., after Watson (and also, apparently, her propositioner) had just left the lobby bar of the hotel. But there wasn’t anything even vaguely uncivil about the man’s invitation, preceded as it was by “Don’t take this the wrong way . . .”

Was the guy a creepy stalker, perhaps a serial killer? Was he thinking: “Nerd chicks are easy”? Or was it possible that he was just a Nice Guy being entirely sincere? Maybe he only wanted to continue the conversation over coffee because he really, really liked her.

Was Watson merely criticizing this guy’s timing and tactics? Was she dissing his game? Or was she saying that men should never make the first move or take the initiative in matters romantic? Because that’s what it comes down to, really. Watson is saying that if she is interested in a guy, she’ll let him know, and that only when she gives the clear green light is a guy even permitted to approach her.

The female exercises unquestionable authority. That’s “equality.”

And it’s rather obvious why atheists aren’t taking over the world, isn’t it? Despite their enthusiasm for Darwin’s theories, they seem to lack the rudimentary animal vigor necessary to the procreative project. The world of atheism is apparently a place where nervous Nice Guys make fumbling advances toward awkward Nerd Girls — and it creeps the girls out, as well it should.

Meanwhile, lusty red-blooded Pentacostals, Evangelicals and Catholics are gleefully doing the horizontal boogie and getting busy with the whole “be fruitful and multiply” plan.

The meek shall not inherit the earth merely by being meek but by faith in God. Having abandoned God, the atheist Nice Guys and Nerd Girls have abandoned all hope.

UPDATE: Vox Day on the misery of atheist guys:

No wonder they’re so furious at God. He created all those lovely women with those beautiful breasts and they aren’t even allowed to even talk to them.

There were 857 comments (!!!) on the Tuesday post in which Rebecca Watson lectured Dawkins:

Richard Dawkins believes I should be a good girl and just shut up about being sexually objectified because it doesn’t bother him. Thanks, wealthy old heterosexual white man! . . .
[Women complained to Watson they didn’t want to attend atheist events] because they felt uncomfortable in a room full of men. They told me about how they were hit on constantly and it drove them away. I didn’t fully get it at the time, because I didn’t mind getting hit on. But I acknowledged their right to feel that way and I started suggesting to the men that maybe they relax a little and not try to get in the pants of every woman who walks through the door. Maybe they could wait for her to make the first move, just in case.

So the typical atheist event is a Sausage Festival, and atheist guys are lonely desperate creeps with poor social skills whose only interest in women is sexual. That’s what the proudly atheist Rebecca Watson is saying, and for that I am grateful.

I’m also grateful that Ms. Watson has given Amanda Marcotte and Melissa McEwan an opportunity for further auto-beclownment, but that will have to wait for the next update.

UPDATE II: Introducing the Amanda Marcotte doll! Pull her string and she unleashes a torrent of idiocy:

Talking about my commitment to feminism through an atheist angle always pleases me, since the two are firmly intertwined in my mind — religion and patriarchy are so intertwined as to be functionally the same thing in most ways, especially in the context of history. Pulilng down one means pulling down the other, and I think it’s naive when anyone denies that and instead claims that there’s a way to preserve religion without patriarchy or vice versa. I’m thinking long term here; obviously in the short term there are religious feminists and sexist atheists.

That’s some Grade A industrial strength idiocy, my friends: Somehow Dawkins’s patriarchal attitudes must be blamed on religion, even though he is one of the world’s most famous atheists. You should read the whole thing, because Marcotte throws elbows at both Ann Althouse and Dr. Helen Smith, and includes this interesting comment about the man who propositioned Rebecca Watson:

In sum, men who corner women know what they’re doing. And yes, they are relying on the fear of rape to grease the wheels towards getting laid. . . . It also strikes me, in my dealing with geek culture, that there’s a taboo against rejecting someone, and creepy dudes also are happy to exploit that, knowing that women who reject them will be condemned for violating the “don’t be judgmental” rule.

OK, so now we have Amanda Marcotte accusing this guy of using fear of rape, and being part of a “geek culture” wherein guys exploit non-judgmentalism for sex.

All of this, you understand, because the guy asked Watson to come to his room for coffee. Nice Guy makes a clumsy play for Nerd Girl, and it becomes a world-historic apocalypse of feminist auto-beclownment. And we haven’t even gotten to Melissa McEwan’s reaction yet.

UPDATE III: McEwan at least does something useful in providing a transcript of Watson’s video comments, which is the only one I’ve seen so far, except for my own transcription of the guy’s clumsy pick-up line:

And I was on a panel with AronRa and Richard Dawkins [which] was on ‘communicating atheism.’ They sort of left it open for us to talk about whatever we wanted, really, within that realm. I was going to talk about blogging and podcasting, but, um, a few hours prior to that panel, there was another panel on women atheist activists, and I disagreed with a lot of what happened on that panel, uh, particularly with something that Paula Kirby had said.
Paula Kirby doesn’t have a problem with sexism in the atheism community, and, because of that, she assumes that there is no sexism, um, so I thought that I would, during my panel, discuss what it’s like to communicate atheism as me, um, as a woman, but from a different perspective from Paula. I don’t assume that every woman will have the same experience that I’ve had, but I think it’s worthwhile to publicize the fact that some women will go through this, and, um, that way we can warn women, ahead of time, as to what they might expect, give them the tools they need to fight back, and also give them the support structure they need to, uh, to keep going in the face of blatant misogyny.
So, I was interested in the response to my sort of rambling on that panel, um, which, like this video, was unscripted and rambling, for which I apologize. [grins] But the response was really fascinating. The response at the conference itself was wonderful, um, there were a ton of great feminists there, male and female, and also just open-minded people who had maybe never considered the, um, the way that women are treated in this community, but were interested in learning more.
So, thank you to everyone who was at that conference who, uh, engaged in those discussions outside of that panel, um, you were all fantastic; I loved talking to you guys—um, all of you except for the one man who, um, didn’t really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel…? Because, um, at the bar later that night—actually, at four in the morning—um, we were at the hotel bar, 4am, I said, you know, “I’ve had enough, guys, I’m exhausted, going to bed,” uh, so I walked to the elevator, and a man got on the elevator with me, and said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting, and I would like to talk more; would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?”
Um. Just a word to the wise here, guys: Uhhhh, don’t do that. Um, you know. [laughs] Uh, 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 am, in a hotel elevator with you, just you, and—don’t invite me back to your hotel room, right after I’ve finished talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.
So, yeah. But everybody else seemed to really get it.

There is nothing wrong with “don’t do that” as advice. The guy’s approach was clumsy and creepy. But it seems obvious, to me at least, that he was merely exhibiting a deficiency of social skills, rather than predatory menace.

While we cannot rule out the possibility that the guy is a serial killer with the bodies of 11 victims buried in his backyard, I’m inclined to believe he was just awkward and clueless. It was 4 a.m. and, in the famous words of Mickey Gilley, “The women all get prettier at closing time.” What was this guy’s blood-alcohol content? Was he at the beer-goggles stage where he saw Watson as Ingrid Bergman and thought he was Humphrey Bogart?

Well, as Watson says, “don’t do that.” But it’s a huge leap from “don’t do that” to a very broad and general accusation of misogyny and a complaint about being sexualized.

What set off the big brouhaha amongst atheists and feminists, however, was when Dawkins showed up in the comments of a blog to belittle Watson’s complaint by comparing her unpleasant elevator experience to the sufferings of women in the Islamic world. Once the feminists started screaming for blood, Dawkins’s fellow atheists were only too happy to throw him under the bus. The reaction was as if Dawkins himself had hit on Watson.

This is one of those episodes where the totalitarian impulse of feminism is glaringly apparent. Feminists ferociously suppress dissent and seek to impose a conformity of thought, so that anyone within the movement who expresses doubt about the dogma and the agenda is condemned as a heretic. Tammy Bruce got purged from the National Organization for Women because she didn’t check with headquarters before organizing a domestic violence awareness protest against O.J. Simpson. (NOW enforced an official silence about Simpson because they didn’t want to be accused of racism.)

All in all, it’s rather ironic that the atheist Watson ended up a devotee of feminism, the most intolerant religion of them all.

UPDATE IV: Linked by That Mr. G Guy and Kathy Shaidle at Five Feet of Fury — thanks! — and welcome, Instapundit readers!

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