Broomstick wrote:Covenant wrote:--but when I look up videos for people who used to post cool science stuff and now it's ranting about feminists destroying atheism I just throw up my hands.
Bwuh? I missed that particular weirdness - not that I seek out atheist postings by reason of them being atheist. Not that I want to spend time viewing these things either, so in a nutshell, how could feminists destroy atheism?
I know I'm more than a week late on that, but it was a kinda nonsensical comment for them to make, and they just can't seem to accept that it was nonsense so they keep at it. There's a camp of right-wing non theists but there's a lot of people, and by a lot I mean a whole stinking mountain of them, who are just easily rankled and overly defensive jerks.
Look at this whole GamerGate nonsense going on as another example. There has been reached a critical mass of frustration at people coming into communities and telling them how their actions alienate others. They feel that their private space has been invaded by outside commentators, problems have been inflated, and they snap back. They snap back so hard, sometimes, that they end trying to chase their detractors back to whatever horse they rode in on. When that fight occurs between members of one community and people like a feminist skeptic who felt unsafe at a convention, it ends up looking a lot like (and sometimes is) people criticizing a woman for feeling unsafe at her treatment. Which is exactly the kind of behavior which empowers people (like anti-feminists) to try and re-define that frustration into something nasty.
The worst part is that this backwash reaction is rarely driven by the genuine hate that the critics are going after. It is a big frustrated "don't tell me I'm a bad person!" reaction to someone coming in and saying "this was bad!" about someone else.
There were, like, two incidents that I think touched off the anti-feminist atheism explosion a while back. One was a woman in an elevator who is some notable and she gave some conference talk. Afterwards, much later that night, I think after some drinks, a guy in an elevator she was taking asked her if she'd like some coffee in his room. Lemme.... hold on...
Yeah, here we go. It was 4am. Here's the snippet where she describes it:
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 4am, 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.
Talk about a tame reaction there. I know some people might be like "What's the harm in that?" but why would anyone get offended that she found it a bit creepy? The defensive/upset that a woman would find that creepy seems to imply that they think a woman should be open to such a proposition, which is dangerous and stupid, especially considering the rates of convention rape overall. She wasn't mad, she just said it was a bit creepy and made her uncomfortable. That should not make anyone upset at her. But it did, and it got really stupid responses and Dawkins put his foot in it with really insensitive comments that blew the whole thing up.
So then there was a fight about if or if not this was a big deal, as well as if or if not more should be done to address the problem of women in these communities, and predictably a lot of people start kicking back and then you have crazy shit being posted on youtube by people who didn't act too crazy before. It's just insane.
It's some kind of wildfire effect. This was back in 2011 and now in 2014 we're seeing the same thing with GameGate. People have the most over-reactionary defensive attitude to social critique.
But yeah. It was a bit of lunacy. Best ignored, really, but it made me very upset with the state of play in basically any community out there. Mention there might be a diversity problem and bang, people are going to go berserk.
