Right. I wasn’t going to talk about this, but I’ve unexpectedly had an opinion, so what the hell.
Brief summary of what’s been going on, in case your Twitterstream and RSS feed haven’t been exploding over this in the same way that mine have. Skip the next four paragraphs if you know what I’m talking about and it’s already given you a headache.
Rebecca Watson. Cool lady, Skepchick, atheist activist. She’s at a conference a while ago, giving a talk on religion and feminism and stuff, mingling with other critical thinkers. Hangs out in the bar afterward, decides she’s done and announces her plans to go to bed at around 4am. Is followed into the lift by some guy, who invites her to his hotel room for coffee.
Rebecca makes a video, describing this encounter and why it made her really uncomfortable and was not an okay thing to do, and offers this advice to any men in a similar situation: “Don’t do that.”
You know how YouTube comment threads can get. Some people went a little over-the-top in castigating this guy as a sick sleazy creep deserving of nothing short of contempt and disgust. Others went a little crazy in slamming Rebecca for speaking out about something that made her uncomfortable, and for daring to criticise a man for what they – from their expert witness position of not being there and not really knowing a thing about what happened – deemed totally innocuous and nothing to get worked up about.
PZ Myers offers some advice, regarding just when it is and isn’t okay to make sexualised comments at a stranger in a confined space in the middle of the night. Hemant, in the friendly manner that earned his blog its name, calls for calm. Richard Dawkins weighs in on a comments thread, and Jen McCreight picks him apart. PZ has another go at explaining things with a calm civility that many wouldn’t expect from him.
And here we are. You’re up to speed.
Now.
To get to my Opinion wot I has had, we need to take a bit of a detour. I’ll try not to ramble.
Who remembers Dr Laura? She’s been a talk-show host and self-help guru type in America, and was the inspiration for the character at whom a famous Jed Bartlet rant was directed. She’s kind of a dick.
Last year, she was fielding a call on her phone-in radio show, from a black lady wanting some advice on dealing with her white husband’s friends, who would sometimes casually use racial slurs that she found offensive. Dr Laura questioned whether the n-word was really something to be offended by, and said it herself eleven times over the course of the conversation.
She repeatedly said arguably the most objectionable word in the language, in a rather confrontational manner, to a black woman who’d come to her for help, after the woman expressed some surprise that Dr Laura would say it at all in such a blasé fashion. Dr Laura was widely criticised for being insensitive, and apologised the next day, but completely undermined this later by saying some bullshit about her First Amendment rights.
Here’s where I think much of the problem lies:
One thing I suspect Dr Laura knows, with considerable certainty, is that she’s not a racist.
Racists are other people. Racists hate black people, or at the very least think less of them just because of the colour of their skin. That’s a horrible way to treat people. Dr Laura would never act like that. She doesn’t have a problem with black people just because they’re black.
So when this black woman comes along, and starts implying that Dr Laura is racist – as if it’s somehow offensive when she, Dr Laura the non-racist, utters a perfectly harmless word that she hears black people using all the time – well, that’s just rude. This black woman needs to calm down and get some perspective and stop making these horrible accusations.
Because Dr Laura knows that she’s not a racist.
And, goes my thesis, one thing that a lot of men know is that they’re not sexist.
A number of people have been indignant and quite angry that Rebecca found the behaviour of Elevator Guy (as he’s come to be known) at all creepy. One thing that I think motivates this is that he wasn’t doing anything that far off what many of them might find themselves doing: approaching someone they find interesting and attractive with an invitation to further discourse. They’ve tried to chat up women before, maybe under similar-ish circumstances, and they’re not all chauvinist pigs.
So how dare this woman come along and start implying that we men, because of perfectly innocent behaviour like this, are all sexist? She’s obviously making a fuss about nothing. Sexists are other people who hate women and only think of them as objects. We’re not like that.
The problem being, of course, that people are quite capable of getting things wrong, offending others, revealing hidden prejudices, and otherwise failing to be perfectly politically correct and socially acceptable, even without being some horrible sexist racist monster, and without meaning any harm at all.
What Dr Laura didn’t appreciate was that racism is a much bigger deal for some people than it is for her, and that even if her intentions weren’t actively to disparage any person or any race, there’s a wider culture of racial tension and abuse out there, and she can’t claim to be apart from all that simply by knowing, as I suspect she does, that she’s just better than all those horrible racists out there. (And also that her bruised ego at being accused of racial insensitivity isn’t the most important part of the conversation.)
Similarly: what some of Rebecca’s critics might not appreciate is that gender politics is complicated and difficult, and even “nice guys” can misjudge things, or make faulty assumptions, or just get it wrong, and should really consider accepting the mild rebuke when it’s offered, rather than passionately insisting that they didn’t do anything wrong, because they’re not sexist. (And their offense at having their “nice guy” status called into question isn’t the most important part of this conversation either. Rebecca didn’t even call anyone sexist. Nobody’s been written off as a horrible monster because of what they did. Just learn from this.)
And I think I’m done.
I like having opinions. I should try it more often. Feel free to tell me why this one’s a load of bollocks, though.
I haven’t followed this at all. So I don’t know the details of the incident or Rebbeca’s video.
But the thing that I don’t like the sound of is her ‘lecture’ to the men of the world, telling them how not to behave. If men tell women how to behave/dress etc they get it in the neck.
I have also had a few discussions with her on twitter and sometimes find her kind of well, kind of like most feminist women I know.
so let me get this straight…
You haven’t seen the video, but you’re condemning its content based on what you’ve loosely gathered about its content, and this is justified because Rebecca Watson is “like most feminist women you know”?
Maybe, just maybe, if you haven’t seen the video, you should watch it first and judge afterwards?
I have been following this. I’ve been in similar situations before, it’s not nice. Especially when the guy offers something innocent when you’re wary your answer could be a yes to something you didn’t quite plan for.
Erm – you’re missing the part that took it all public and was the subject of PZ’s original post…
I think you are correct, at least up to a point. I think we can agree that Elevator Guy showed poor judgment and that male privilege may have been involved in why it struck him as appropriate and Rebecca as creepy. But I’m not sure that sexism follows from this. That is, I think we are over-reaching a bit to conclude that Elevator Guy is sexist.
The only other thing I’d add is that some people seem to be reacting to this situation based on experiences they have had rather than the details Rebecca provided us about this particular experience. Some seem determined to turn what happened into proof not just of sexism and male privilege but of misogyny. I think that sexism and misogyny are fairly different, and confusing them detracts from the discussion. I don’t see you doing this, but I have seen plenty of others who seem to be doing it.
I don’t want to watch the video. Because people always make out they know what has happened in an incident based on one person’s account of the incident.
The video is not a video of the incident itself so we will never know what happened. I like to hear more than one side to a story.
hold on a moment…
You’re judging her based on the things you said. You said:
“the thing that I don’t like the sound of is her ‘lecture’ to the men of the world, telling them how not to behave”
and yet you refuse to actually listen to the words she said? The ones that you just passed judgement on?
And somehow, just to put the final cap of crazy on this, you’re refusing to watch the video because “I like to hear more than one side to a story.”
You’re not hearing ANY sides of the story!
The people (including you) passing judgement on Rebecca are passing judgement on that video. That’s what the controversy is about: her response to an encounter. You yourself have explicitly passed judgement on the video, calling it “her ‘lecture’ to the men of the world, telling them how not to behave” and yet you have absolutely no idea whether she lectures people or tells them how to behave because YOU HAVEN’T WATCHED THE VIDEO!
That’s as dumb as it would be for me to tell you that your blog is stupid and full of dumb opinions without having read it. (for the record, I haven’t read your blog and have no opinion of it because, as I said, I haven’t read your blog).
Judging something without seeing it is a fairly good definition of prejudice.
Being presented with information and refusing to look at it is a fairly good definition of ignorance, and there’s nothing quite as sad as willful ignorance.
James said this is what Rebecca did/said:
‘Rebecca makes a video, describing this encounter and why it made her really uncomfortable and was not an okay thing to do, and offers this advice to any men in a similar situation: “Don’t do that.”’
She said to men in general ‘don’t do that’. That strikes me as lecturing. Maybe she said ‘please’?
There are loads of women making blogs/videos about men and harassment I would be busy if I watched/read them all. I am not interested in hearing women tell men about how men harass women. Over and over again. I am interested in discussing how we can change the way in which we perceive gender relations in our society.
P.s. My blog is ace! You’ll love it!
here, one more time, is the problem:
You are judging her based on someone else’s summation of what she said, and not what she said.
If you have the time to read a blog post about the incident, you have time to watch the video. The part of it that people are crapping themselves about is really very very short. In fact, sod it, here’s a transcript:
(Talking about how everyone at the conference was awesome). “…all of you except for the one man who didn’t really grasp, I think, what I was saying on the panel, because at the bar later that night, actually at four in the morning, we were at the hotel bar. Four a.m., I said I’d had enough, I was going to bed. So I walk 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 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…”
As you can see, this wasn’t a lecture. Even if this didn’t change your opinion of what she said, you now have a more informed opinion of what she said. You’re very welcome.
thanks. that sounds like a lecture to me.
Some people like being propositioned sometimes. How can one woman decide for all men and all women that that is the wrong way to behave? I don’t see objectively that he did anything wrong. Or, if she is telling men to not behave like that to her in particular, I hope they watch the video a few more times or else they might forget who to look out for.
OK I watched the damn video. And I agree with this comment left below the video on youtube:
‘This was likely a sexual advance. But,
- What happened was not criminal and not sexist. This is something that a woman could offer to a man.
- You are speaking on behalf of all women to all men. What gives you the right? Women complained to me about not being approached my men
- Sexualize? Unless you are completely asexual, I’m sure you’ve sexualized people in elevators. All of us did
- Physical danger? Because of coffee invite? Most elevators have “Alarm” button – wasn’t a forest
Too Dramatic’
all right. You’re entitled to your opinion, I’ve just helped you make sure it’s an informed one. I disagree, but I’m fairly sure you’re not in the market for having your mind changed. Let’s leave it there.
Note I said the exact same thing before I saw the video as the commenter said under the video that I quoted! But thanks for helping me make sure my opinion was informed. My opinion of feminism is very well informed indeed.