slight detour from the EWTS conference notes, there's one coming later!
A friend asked me on twitter why women often feel
uncomfortable at purely atheist/secular conferences, and then remembered the
Richard Dawkins – Rebecca Watson ‘elevatorgate’ from 2011.
At an atheist conference, Watson had been talking about how
shitty it is that women get sexualised at conferences like this. She was then
hit on by a guy in the lift, in a situation that could very easily gone from
bad to worse. After speaking up about this, she received a lot of criticism
from Dawkins in particular, who wrote a satirical letter to a Muslim woman undergoing
FGM (female genital mutilation), comparing her plight to Watson’s experience.
The problem with this is similar to the problem with the
phrase ‘you shouldn’t be sad, because someone, somewhere has it worse than you’.
Under this logic, nobody should ever be happy, because someone will always have
it better than you. It’s comlpletely ridiculous. Obviously, on the grand scale
of things, being sexualised and hit on in an enclosed space by a stranger is
nowhere near as horrible an experience as FGM. But it doesn’t invalidate the
experience, as Dawkins claimed it did. It’s worth noting that in this case, a
man was telling a woman that she was overreacting when she was faced with an
uncomfortable and overly-sexualised situation. This situation could have very
easily not ended as it did, things could have gotten a lot worse, and Watson
very easily could have been sexually assaulted. Dawkins trivialised a situation
which he will probably never experience, but one which Watson will most likely experience
a hundred more times.
This is just one example of why women are often apprehensive
about atheist/secular conferences, even those aimed specifically at women. My experience
was not on the scale of Watson’s, but again, it’s still valid. And while I
received little negative backlash for feeling this way at the conference
itself, the world of twitter took care of that afterwards. People who weren’t
even at the conference. And whose only knowledge of the conference was through
the MRA blogger (I refuse to plug him, also he’s a male supremacist dick), were
telling me that I was overreacting, that I was being ridiculous, who couldn’t
understand why I was upset. And because they couldn’t understand it, it was
invalidated.
If women are going to continue to be involved in the secular
movements, which is necessary for our empowerment, these spaces need to be
safe, both from physical threats and belittlement of valid experiences.
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