Summations Only

Well, no. It hinges on the woman, not on the man, and whether the woman's independent, individual desires and feelings are a function of concern and attention or if they're simply ignored.And they were ignored. We don't need to read anyone's mind to know that, because ignoring them was an action and not a thought. That happened because the Elevator Guy did it, not because he thought it. His thoughts are completely irrelevant. It would depend on how I insulted you, wouldn't it? He issued an invitation for her to do something he wanted her to do, not what she had already said she had wanted to do. The part where he ignored her individual desires and wishes, and therefore objectified her, was in his actions, not his thoughts. That's why we don't have to be mind-readers, merely word-readers.She was certainly objectified, QED. Whether or not she was sexually objectified, I suppose, depends on whether you view "coffee in my room from the shitty, in-room coffeemaker and months-old single-cup packets" as a genuine if somewhat self-defeating invitation or as a pretty obvious pretext for casual sex. To the credit of most of Elevator Guy's erstwhile defenders, few have been so stupid as to genuinely suggest that it may have been the former, so we can comfortably conclude that Watson was, indeed, sexually objectified during the encounter.

Not at all. He would only have had to listen to her words. She had already told him what she wanted to do. Sure he would have. All he had to do was recognize that she had just told him what she wanted to do, and he was ignoring it. Now, of course it didn't occur to him that a woman's statements of her own desires was something he had to pay attention to, because that's just not something the community of movement atheism has ever stressed. Indeed, when asked to, they object - often violently. So we can hardly blame the guy for acting as though he was entitled to ignore the desires of women when the entire community was telling him he was expected to ignore the desires of women.But we can blame those who, like you, know better but are defending that perspective regardless. (Consider yourself blamed.)

No, I'm flat-out serious. It's you people who expect me to believe that people talk to each other without having any notion of how their interlocutors are reacting that I can't believe are serious. I know an internet science forum is liable to attract its fair share of aspies, but come on, people aren't Vulcans or Martians, it's not impossible to talk to someone and figure out if you're insulting them or making them uncomfortable or if you've really got some game right now. It's just not common to lack that kind of situational awareness. Especially if you're the kind of person who is trying to proposition random people for casual sex, there's no way you could ever have been successful at that without being able to accurately judge the reactions you're causing in people.

I guess I spoke too soon when I said that nobody had been stupid enough to try to defend his come-on on its face. Sheesh!

My views on it are irrelevant, but what transpired that led Watson to describe it as an act of sexualization has already been put forward. Nobody's called it "misogyny" but Roxrkool. We're talking about a situation where a man was told that a woman wanted to go to her own room and sleep, and in response, he twice asked her to come to his room for "coffee."Now, obviously our interpretation rests on what we think he meant by "coffee." It's worth noting, though, that the only coffee typically in a hotel room is that which you bring yourself as that produced by an in-room coffeemaker is not fit for human consumption, and he had brought no coffee. So there was no coffee in his hotel room. Thus, he invited her for "coffee" to a place where they both knew there would be no coffee.So, we either must conclude that Elevator Guy suffers from profound mental disability bordering on justifying involuntary commitment in a facility, or that the invitation for "coffee" was a pretext for something else.Honestly I would not have thought that anyone would have been so stupid as to try to defend this as an actual invitation to coffee but the lower end of human intelligence, I'm discovering, is truly boundless.

Is there some reason you can't apply the rubric we've already talked about?Did you do what you wanted to do, or did you only do the things he wanted to do?

No, I told you what the legitimate debate strategy was. I get to argue against your examples, even if you think they support your argument. Think of your examples as the legs of a stool, and the seat is your argument. Your argument is upheld if your examples are valid. But if I can kick the legs out from under your stool by showing that your examples aren't, actually, supportive of your argument, then your argument collapses.Why do you think I don't get to do that? Like I said back then:

quote:

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If I say that there has never been a female President of the United States, and you say "what about Abraham Lincoln", I get to defend my position by pointing out that, in fact, Abraham Lincoln was not a woman.

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Since you never replied to that post, I assumed you'd withdrawn your objection. But here you are, repeating it in another thread. So what's the deal, here? Why on Earth do you think you get to raise examples that are beyond challenge? I can only ascribe this to the dizzying power of my breathtakingly effective arguments. It must be a disconcerting thing indeed to be so quickly and incontrovertibly proven wrong.

I did explain. Watson explained. What remains unclear to you? You'll have to be more specific than just asking for explanations that have already been given. Well, yeah. In Message 245 and Message 252. Like I said before, it beggars belief that anyone would think that an invitation for "coffee" to a place that doesn't have any coffee at it is something to accept on face value, but you and Rahvin both tried to at least imply that we couldn't reject that interpretation out of hand.But that's clearly nonsense. It's just not a matter in doubt that the invitation was meant to be sexual. Your implications to the contrary are just trying to confuse the issue. But she didn't make a big deal about it. She made a very small deal about it. The problem is that even making a small deal about it - a single comment about it in a single YouTube video - was sufficient to create a Very Big Deal of a sexist, violent response from the community of movement atheism. That's the problem. Rebecca Watson complaining about something that made her uncomfortable in the elevator was never the problem. The problem is that the atheist community decided, apparently almost as a whole, that as a woman she could not possibly be allowed to complain about the actions of any man.

Oh, sorry. I guess that's one of those words I overuse. Seriously, my apologies for the confusion.It means "a scheme for grading or measuring something." It's mostly used in an academic sense; when the professor tells you in advance how he's going to grade your presentation, he's giving you his rubric. That's not what I asked, though. I'm not asking you to read his mind, I'm asking you to read your own. Did you do what you wanted? Or not?

Yeah, probably some aren't. Why would that be surprising?And how do you explain the greater female attendance at skeptic conferences that have adopted an explicit sexual harassment policy compared to those that haven't? Isn't that a pretty obvious indication that there are at least some women whom the community of movement atheism has, in the past, discouraged from attending by not taking sexist violence seriously?Why is everybody acting like "sexism in atheism" is a self-refuting proposition? No, the story makes it pretty clear that she was not the first to raise it, but rather, she was responding to people who accused her of taking offense at merely the idea of being found sexually attractive, which isn't what happened.You don't seem to have read what you posted, I guess. Somehow you arrived at exactly the opposite interpretation of events.

What qualified as sexism is the part where a woman's own desires and expressed preferences were completely disregarded in the service of a man's sexual pleasure.Like I've said I don't see what's so hard to understand about that. We don't need to read minds to know if it happened because it's not a matter of his thoughts, but his actions.

Apparently a significant number of women do. Since they're the ones it's happening to, isn't it their opinion and not mine that matters?I mean, it seems like you have the same kind of blind spot that the movement atheists have had about this. "Is sexual harassment and assault a problem at atheist conventions? Let's ask a bunch of men and find out!"

Did someone say that they did? What are you on about, here? Didn't I just fucking tell you? Seriously, straggler, I don't understand the issue you're having with this. Why are you asking questions if you're just going to ignore the answers? His intent has nothing to do with it, I keep telling you that. It's about his actions - his action of completely disregarding her individual desires and wishes. Like I've told you, you're going to have to elaborate on what, specifically, is confusing you here.

I'm a man, straggler. I assume even you know that. So why are you asking me about the source of a widespread view among women that movement atheism is largely dismissive of their concerns? Why don't you talk to movement atheist women about it, or read some of what they've already said about it?You don't seem prepared to accept any information about this not delivered by a man. Why is that?

Yes, and they've hardly taken steps to conceal their views from the rest of the internet. Why don't you find out what they have to say about it? The source is the women who are expressing these views. You could start with Rebecca Watson, or Greta Christina. They'll point you to others, I'm sure.