The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

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. Read more

Category: Feminism, Science, Sex

Black People Say Casey Anthony Trial Proves America Is Racist or Something

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 39 Comments

Having called her the “O.J. Simpson of baby-killers,” I honestly didn’t even think anyone could actually imagine a racial angle to the bizarre media circus that was the Casey Anthony trial. Evidently I was wrong:

I logged onto Twitter precisely as the verdict in Casey Anthony’s trial was announced. A good portion of the reactions I read in my timeline were ones of shock and anger. . . .
But there was another notable reaction. I read tweet after tweet with the following formulations: Had Casey been a black woman, she would have been convicted. . . .

That’s from Imani Perry at TheGrio.com, which is the “by black people, for black people, about black people” Web site. (Is a cracker like me even allowed to read TheGrio.com?) It’s kinda like those feminist Web sites where women get paid for being women writing about women’s issues for women, except that TheGrio.com is a commercial site owned by a major media conglomerate, NBC/Universal, so they’re really just workin’ for The Man, right? But I digress . . . Read more

Category: Crime, Racism

Use a Pistol, and They Call It ‘Robbery.’ Use a Labor Union? That’s ‘Fairness.’

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 10 Comments

“This is the month the state of Maryland, on behalf of the public sector union known as AFSCME, steals somewhere in the area of $400 from my yearly salary in order to enrich the union.”
— Jimmie Bise Jr., “How Maryland Will Rob Me to Enrich Union Fat Cats”

Category: Jimmie Bise Jr., Maryland, Unions

Sarah Palin 2012 Prospect ‘Dwindles’?

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 34 Comments

Tucked into a Foreign Policy article by Josh Rogin:

“As of now, it’s unclear how far Palin’s foreign-policy shift will take her. But as the prospect of her presidential candidacy dwindles, it matters increasingly less.”

There was zero reaction from Palin to this morning’s quote from a grassroots organizer in Iowa, saying he’s “100 percent” sure that she’s running. Instead, she reacted to a U.K. Daily Mail article about the Iowa premiere of The Undefeated.

What’s the best way to get Sarah Palin to announce that she’s in for 2012? Encourage a new round of “she’s not gonna run” talk from the Committee of 43 Pundits Who Know Everything.

Because whatever the pundits say, Palin will do the opposite.

UPDATE: Politico‘s Alexander Burns says “her ability to capture the spotlight appears to be fading.” That’s a double-dog-dare-ya, if I’ve ever seen one.


Category: Election 2012, Sarah Palin

Milwaukee Celebrated 4th of July With Fireworks, Looting, Racial Mob Violence

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 28 Comments

Guess which was more dangerous?

Shaina Perry remembers the punch to her face, blood streaming from a cut over her eye, her backpack with her asthma inhaler, debit card and cellphone stolen, and then the laughter.
“They just said ‘Oh, white girl bleeds a lot,’?” said Perry, 22, who was attacked at Kilbourn Reservoir Park over the Fourth of July weekend.
Though Milwaukee Police Chief Edward Flynn noted Tuesday that crime is colorblind, he called the Sunday night looting of a convenience store near the park and beatings of a group of people who had gone to the park disturbing, outrageous and barbaric.
Police would not go quite as far as others in connecting the events; Flynn said several youths “might” be involved in both.
“We’re not going to let any group of individuals terrorize or bully any of our neighborhoods,” Flynn said.
Perry was among several who were injured by a mob they said beat and robbed them and threw full beer bottles while making racial taunts. The injured people were white; the attackers were African-American, witnesses said.

(Hat-tips: Gateway Pundit and Fox Nation.)

UPDATE: Noting the 2010 Census results for Milwaukee — “Today the city is 40% black, 37% white, 17% Hispanic and 3.7% Asian” — Vox Day writes:

It’s really not that difficult to understand that whereas small minorities usually conform, more or less, to the behavioral patterns of the majority that outnumbers them, they cease to do so once they become the numerically dominant population. And to be fair, why on Earth should they? It’s now their territory by ancient right of conquest and modern right of self-determination. So, one can safely predict that it will not take long before the Milwaukee crime rate rises to the level of Detroit.

Writing something like that should elicit accusations of “raaaaacism” — from white liberals who wouldn’t dare set foot in Milwaukee after dark. Liberals constantly patrol the Internet looking for opportunities to shriek “raaaaacist” at conservatives, rather than concerning themselves with the actual (and more dangerous) racism of “youths” engaged in mob violence.

Vox Day’s blog has never punched anybody in the face. Or looted a convenience store, for that matter. Just sayin’ . . .

UPDATE II: Welcome, Instapundit readers! As I remarked earlier on Twitter, “Liberals believe ‘racist’ is the antonym of ‘Democrat.'” That is to say, the issue of race has become so politicized that the accusation of “racism” is now almost always an attempt to score political points, rather than a warning against genuine danger. Liberals constantly accuse conservatives of racism — there are 5 A’s in “raaaaacism“ — merely to gain political advantage, and have thus stripped the word of any useful meaning, which is why “That’s racist!” has become a popular joke.

Speaking of popular jokes: “Black People Say Casey Anthony Trial Proves America Is Racist or Something.”


Category: Crime, Racism, Wisconsin

Casey Anthony: More Important Than Mitt Romney, Michelle Bachmann, Et Al.

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 26 Comments

The O.J. Simpson of baby-killers:

A Smart Politics study of Lexis-Nexis transcripts from CNN, FOX, MSNBC, ABC, CBS, and NPR found more news reports mentioned the Casey Anthony trial at least one time than any of the 10+ major and minor Republican presidential candidates since opening statements were delivered on May 24th.
The Anthony murder case was covered in 899 reports overall, with Mitt Romney mentioned in 764, followed by Michele Bachmann at 609, Tim Pawlenty at 454, Newt Gingrich at 438, and Herman Cain at 321.

And all the people who were riveted by wall-to-wall cable TV coverage of the Casey Anthony trial are eligible to vote. Scary, isn’t it?

(Hat-tip: Ed Morrissey at Hot Air.)

Category: Crime, Election 2012, Media Bias

What Does Solid Progress Look Like?

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

As exponded by none other than Jello Biafra, in all his whacko glory:

Props to tahDeetz on Twitter for bringing this one to mind.

Category: Uncategorized

Feminism, Victimhood, Therapy

Posted on | July 6, 2011 | 20 Comments

“To me the piece was a stunning example of journalistic malpractice, the kind that reinforces the public perception that deep down journalists think every story or major news event is somehow really all about them.
“McClelland, who covered Haiti for Mother Jones, has provided us with yet another clichéd, egocentric article about documenting unimaginably terrible things experienced by powerless, broken, poor people who are victimized on a regular basis. But here’s the rub, we get a mere few lines about the pain experienced by a Haitian rape victim named ‘Sybille’ but a long screed about McClelland’s pain, albeit with the provocative spin of needing violent sex to cure her of all that ails her. Sybille’s violent rape feeds McClelland’s need to feel victimized.”
— Marjorie Valbrun, Slate, “Mac McClelland: What’s Happening in Haiti Is Not About You”

“[W]hen other women speak out, our first reason shouldn’t be to punish or criticize our own. . . . When men write about their personal experiences and their observations and their roads to recovery and self-discovery, it’s a great American novel or a shining example of journalistic bravery. When women do it it’s narcissistic and selfish.”
— Jill Filipovic, Feministe, “But sometimes it is about you”

Well, let’s you and her fight, huh? It’s probably not necessary to say that I agree with Valbrun’s criticism of Mac McClelland and despise Filipovic’s girls-gotta-stick-together cheerleading. Implicit in Filipovic’s argument is not merely gynocentric tribalism — where all women must support the criticized woman, merely because she is a woman being criticized — but also feminism’s telltale gesture, an insistence that victimhood is the essence of the female experience.

My own reaction to McClelland’s article (other than sarcastic contempt) was a profound skepticism of her veracity as a reporter, inspired by an instinctive distrust of her dramatic “just-so story.” Rigoberto Menchu, Misha Defonseca, James Frey, “JT LeRoy,” Herman Rosenblat, Greg Mortenson — how many times do people have to see the fake-memoir saga re-enacted before they learn to recognize the aroma of bovine excrement? Read more

Category: Feminism
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