asks her to his room for “coffee”, a well-known euphemism for sex

Some of the mansplainers who were BSing about “he didn’t say sex, he just said coffee!” are easily disproved by the fact that hotel room coffee is unbelievably vile. Nobody would ever invite anyone to a hotel room for the coffee.

In the past, religious wingnuts guilt-tripped women who had abortions, and then those who used contraception. Now they’ve added women who physically can’t have children to the list of those they wish to shame.

Holy shit, these people just cannot wrap their heads around the existence of a woman who’s not popping out babies. It’s literally the only reason for women to exist for them. Do we need any more proof than this?

Seriously. My only question is, was it an immaculate conception, or did Jesus use her husband’s sperm to make a baby in magic uterus?

I can never get any of them to answer me when I ask if God made the women barren in the first place, why should women go against God’s (supposed) wishes and try to have a baby anyway?  They literally cannot think of any other use for women.

(To be clear:  I do not ask women this,just male anti-choicers.  Telling a woman who wants children that God wants her barren, no matter how obnoxious their religiousness, is unbelievably cruel.)

“he didn’t say sex, he just said coffee!”

This is the perfect illustration of the Catch-22 that many women find themselves in.  If she assumes he means sex instead of coffee, she’s wrong.  If she assumes he means coffee and he assaults her, she’s still wrong—“You went into his room at 2AM, what did you EXPECT would happen?”

I was willing to chalk the first few people claiming it’s impossible to know what a woman thinks of you before you hit on her up to people with social disorders. After hundreds of doods started claiming it, I was forced to rethink that. They don’t know what women are thinking for the same reason I don’t know what my table thinks of me. What an object thinks is completely irrelevant. You use it for its intended purpose and go on your merry way. Elevatorgate was an eye opener for those of us that don’t think like that.

I’d add the rape-safety tip list.

Every year.

“Most Jaw-Droppingly Audacious Lie”

...true enough, but what’s most disturbing to me is that I know there are wingnut-inclined morons who eat that kind of bullshit up specifically because it matches with their preconceived notions that all science is a lie (reference “Global Warming” and Evolution), and all scientists are working in league with the devil to ruin people’s lives (they’re merely drug dealers in white lab coats).

(To clarify, all science is a lie and by nature evil, except those branches of science that are involved with finding new ways to kill brown people in foreign lands, or new ways of adding even more bacon to a Whopper, or inventing an even better “hoveround”, or new and dangerous/toxic techniques for extracting oil, natural gas, and coal for our burning pleasure.  Oh, and those scientitions who build fiberglass dinosaurs with Jesus on their backs for Creation Museums in Red State America — they’re doing god’s work!)

When somebody with Bachmann’s profile can drop a load of bullshit like that and only get questioned on it by a few members of The “Librul” Media, while the rest of the teabagging hordes accept it as truth, it’s a sad indication of just how far back we’ve slipped into the primordial ooze of ignorance. The same is true of Kyl’s lies.

But I suppose that as long as people like me are upset over Reichwing moron’s stubborn ignorance and its negative influence on American culture and politics, they’re happier than pigs in shit.  Nice hand basket we’re strapped into…

My table probably resents me a bit; I’m a reasonably neat eater but a sloppy server.

As someone who actually doesn’t often know what people think of him if they don’t say (which I don’t think is so unusual as to constitute a disorder), I don’t tend to assume that attractive women are just waiting for me to give them the go-ahead before leaping joyously on my cock.

I don’t look good in red.

No wish to bail out Michele Bachmann here but I wonder if this was actually a case of ridiculous ignorance on her part. I suspect she heard about a case of Acute Disseminate Encephalomyelitis after HPV vaccine. ADEM is a very rare but reported side effect of a fairly large number of vaccines actually, including HPV (http://www.neurology.org/content/74/10/864.2.extract  and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_disseminated_encephalomyelitis). It is an explosive onset of demyelination due to activation of the immune system for reasons we don’t fully understand.

The clinical consequences of ADEM are quite commonly that a patient, who was previously normal, might be left with major cognitive and motor deficits that are permanent. I wonder if Michele Bachmann in ignorance called this “mental retardation”. I think the resulting swarm of media then didn’t allow anyone to come forward and bail her out.

Politically, I’m glad she went down in flames, but I wish it had been over her political views instead of what to me, as a neurologist, sounds like a case of stupid pig ignorance. Of course, this type pig ignorance should probably disqualify her from office as well!

There was a Miss America who claimed that Jesus healed her shortened leg, but a college friend of mine pointed out that the difference was still apparent in her gait to someone who knew what to look for when she was walking on the TeeVee.

That “she grew a new womb after the big bad doctors took it from her” lie is SO illustrative of the right-wing understanding of reproduction (of proper, christian white lady reproduction, women of color are just sluts). There is so much magical thinking in their world view, specially focused (I blame Mary…no, wait, I blame her rapist, the pedo God dude) on conception/pregnancy/sperm magic, that even the absence of a womb is immaterial for their modern myth making. As soon as a charlatan starts fixating on how a god-fearing soldier who lost both of his legs in Iraq miraculously grew them back through the power of prayer, I might budge a bit on how their “sex how does that work? Its all Jesus, all the time up in those wombs” mentality. But that wouldn’t happen because shaming all the other god-fearing soldiers who had their legs blown off with fake stories about regeneration might actually be too far.

@12

Recipe for a baby:
-1 sperm
-1 Jesus

This is true for 100% of pregnancies. All that stuff about eggs are a liberal lie. Menstruation is God’s punishment to a woman for not being pregnant.

Last two I hadn’t heard.  Very creepy.

I can see finding the reverse-hysterectomy creepy, but I am still LMAO off over that one.

it is, after all, also possible for a proposition to be unwanted at first but for the recipient of the proposition to change her mind after persuasion.

I’d really love to know how this shitstain thinks badgering is going to somehow turn it into “wanted” rather than “putting out unwillingly because she doesn’t see any other way to get rid of him.”

And honestly, if someone is so socially inept that they can’t tell if a woman’s interested before the proposition is delivered, how the HELL do they expect to be able to tell the difference between “actually interested” and “worn out of resistance?” I submit that if you consider yourself unable to identify disinterest prior to The Question, you lack the competence to determine interest afterwards. Or, to put it in soundbyte fashion, Yes only means Yes when any previous No has been accepted to mean No.

(I can’t fail to notice they only have trouble with “no.” I doubt any of them would respond to a “yes” with “are you sure? are you sure? we can always go our separate ways and no harm no foul. are you sure you’re sure?”)

Never mind the question of whether the “persuasion” is coercive . . .

I’d really love to know how this shitstain thinks badgering is going to somehow turn it into “wanted” rather than “putting out unwillingly because she doesn’t see any other way to get rid of him.”

In this, MRAs and PUAs take a cue from Lonely Island: “Doesn’t matter, had sex.”

It is an explosive onset of demyelination due to activation of the immune system for reasons we don’t fully understand.

The end of that sentence, to an evangelical, translates roughly as, “Scientists don’t have a clue how the world work, despite years of study, so instead you should read the Bible because it is possible to perfectly understand everything in the universe by studying a translation of a 2000-year-old book.”

I normally try to live and let live when it comes to religion, but the reliance on biblical interpretation drives me nuts. Your average person struggles with Shakespeare, and that’s much closer to us culturally and linguistically.

Another nomination:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/jun/08/hiv-aids-pope-benedict-xvi

Who can forget Pope Benedict XVI’s first tour of Africa as pontiff in spring 2009? He told the continent hardest hit by the global HIV/Aids crisis that more stringent moral attitudes toward sex would help fight the disease – indeed, that condom distribution “increases the problem”. There was no sign that his Holiness understood the depth of the pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounted for 75% of all HIV-related deaths that year, or had made any attempt to reconcile religious doctrine with compassionate public health policy.

Now, it’s June 2011, the 30th anniversary of the Aids pandemic, and the Holy See is at it again.

Today marks the opening of a United Nations general assembly “high level meeting” on Aids in New York City that will evaluate the progress of that body’s response to the pandemic over the past five years and set the agenda for the next decade…For months now, their all-male team has been trying to strip all references to sexual and reproductive health and rights from the meeting’s declaration; gutting all mentions of education and prevention other than marriage and fidelity; and insisting that “families” be replaced with “the family”, as though that monolith even exists or that it provides some kind of magic shield against HIV.

Either the Holy See does not understand, or does not care that their hardline stance is not actually “pro-life” in any sense. They ask that paragraph 60 of the declaration, which addresses research and development for treating and curing HIV, delete all mention of “female-controlled prevention methods”. This despite the fact that female condoms and the very promising looking microbicides now being developed have no relation to abortion and represent the single greatest potential life saver for women worldwide.

Ditto for paragraph 58, which makes the all-important and entirely sensible promise that the UN will “commit to ensuring that national responses to HIV and Aids meet the specific needs of women and girls”. The Holy See, allied with the African Group and Iran, asks for the deletion of the very sentence that spells out what that really means:

  “… by ensuring that women and girls can exercise their right to have control over, and decide freely and responsibly on, matters related to their sexuality in order to increase their ability to protect themselves from HIV infection, including their sexual and reproductive health, free of coercion, discrimination and violence.”

(Psst, Amanda: “Amenable,” not “amendable.”)

I have to agree with most jaw-dropping, but the last I had not heard of.  Or I did and dismissed it so completely out of hand not to remember.  Barrennes has been reason to shame a woman and acceptable reason for a husband to abandon, divorce or kill her for millenia.  This is not a new thing conserathugs have just discovered.

I half-suspect that thinking hysterectomies can be ‘reversed’ is evidence that these guys just don’t know anything about actual ladyparts, and aren’t interested to learn. Maybe they think a hysterectomy is that thing where you take the hysterical out of a woman, so she can better be used to baby-birth minus all that complainin’.

The second to last one is one of the worst trends in the gay male community. From Jack Malebranche to this fucker, it’s getting old. If you don’t want to have anal sex, don’t fucking have it. How hard would it be to make a group that says “let’s just frot, no judgin’ others who want anal sex, but I don’t”? Leave the dudes that don’t shit themselves at being perceived as “feminine” by douchebags for enjoying receptive sex alone.

Or, at least extend your critique of receptive sex to women as well, if you want to be consistent. Where are the guys empowering women who don’t like to be penetrated to not feel pressured into doing it? Oh right, it’s their “natural” role to do so, so they should put up with it even if they don’t like it, while even guys who DO like receiving should be “liberated” from it. Gotcha.

benvolio: It’s a woman claiming to have reversed the hysterectomy.  But the guy interviewing her does seem uncertain when he’s talking about girl-parts.

I’m always impressed at how many men are willing to put their penis into a hole when they have no idea what’s in there.

Jesus lives in there and gives you a magic hand-job. Why? Isn’t that what you were taught in Sunday School? (Unless you’re doing it in the butt. That’s where Satan lives. But I hear the hand-job is still pretty awesome).

I think the red-shirt idea is the funniest.  Not least because red-shirts are the doomed ones.

AS IF the assholes who cold preposition women would see the red “don’t proposition me” shirt as anything but a challenge.  They don’t respect women; why would they care what women say?  Better corner her and double check that she meant to wear red to warn ME off, and not just those other guys.  Or maybe she thought red meant “proposition me”.  Better just creep on her to be sure.

The thing that bugs me most about Elevatorgate is that dudes try to insist that it was just a shy guy asking her for coffee.  She’d spent the day discussing how being propositioned at these conventions was really creepy.  She continued the discussion at the bar until 4 am when she said she was tired and going to bed.  Dude was present during the conversation, as he later makes clear.

Dude prefaced his proposition with the acknowledgement it was inappropriate, and then asked her to *continue her talks about how she dislikes inappropriate creepiness at these events* over coffee in his room.

In other words, he claimed he was interested in what she had to say—so interested he needed to continue the conversation—but hadn’t listened to a single word she had said.

ElevatorDude would have done the same had she been red-shirted:  “Hi, I don’t mean to be creepy, and I see you’re wearing a red ‘don’t proposition me’ shirt, but I’d like to discuss the whole red shirt thing with you in my room over coffee”

Satan’s Hand Job would be a good band name…

The simple response of these guys seeing a “don’t proposition me” woman in a red shirt would be to tear it off her.  Problem solved!

I think the problem with the dude in the elevator was that he really thought the woman was amenDable.

I’m always impressed at how many men are willing to put their penis into a hole when they have no idea what’s in there.

Far safer to stick to glory-holes, amirite, guys?

I would have said there is a one-to-one correspondence between Neuro-Linguistic-Programming and misogyny. NLP is the “science” behind Pickup Artistry (for lack of better terms). So every guy who sees a woman as an object to be manipulated; every guy who insults a woman he considers attractive, as a seduction technique; has NLP to thank.

this system seems unfair, because it puts the burden of monitoring the behavior of the slim minority of men who feel they’re too good for flirting onto women.

Again, I would have said that such men lacked the ability to flirt with women, but I see how arrogance and entitlement could mean that men who could flirt and meet women, outside of situations that put the women in fear for their lives, simply couldn’t be bothered to.

The world would be nicer if people like Cindy and Mike Jacobs took up huffing gasoline.

By an open fireplace.

how the HELL do they expect to be able to tell the difference between “actually interested” and “worn out of resistance?”

That’s not a hair that needs splitting.

...“coffee”, a well-known euphemism for sex…

I don’t have lots and lots and lots of sex, but I DO have lots and lots and lots of coffee!

BW -
Would you like to come in/up for coffee is so cliched as to be trite, signaling a desire to continue an encounter, generally but not always a date.  Don’t be fucking obtuse.  We had enough of that the first time, the tenth time, the thousandth time…. 
If a man follows a woman from a bar at 4 a.m., where she was talking with a group while he hovered around the fringes, after she has said goodbye to the group because she is tired and stated that reason outright, and then tries to get her to come up to his room for coffee, what the hell does that mean?
1 - it defentately means he is a clueless asshole. 2 - it definately means he has either not listened to anything she has actually said or assumes she meant those other guys. 3 - is an idiot who appears to think “I am tired and going to bed” is an invitation, directed at him, to proposition her with at a minimum going to his hotel room in the wee hours of the morning.
Seriously, do you think you are the least bit original with that shit?

I don’t have lots and lots and lots of sex, but I DO have lots and lots and lots of coffee!

Have you tried drinking coffee in indie coffee shops? In my experience that occasionally leads to sex.

No, I’m just kidding, I know you’re trying to troll. I’ll let you get back to it.

I asked someone i was sort of on a date with (don’t ask, even I’m not sure what it was) and I asked her in for coffee… and I meant coffee. That was a long time ago, though.

I asked her in for coffee… and I meant coffee.

Like sometimes a cigar is just a cigar?

Exploring it a bit: Could it be that he prospect of getting a mini pot of no name coffee, ground who knows when, dripped through a machine that is never properly cleaned, served with a dry “creme” made up largely of transfats and sand (Silicon dioxide), is so vile on the face of it, that no one who accepts such an invitation could be doing it for the coffee?

But 99/100 times when I want to prolong an already long evening, my motive is to continue an enjoyable conversation, not get naked and sweaty.

However, I may just be fooling myself, and in such a situation I would merely be having a NiceGuyTM fantasy that a woman who accepted such an invitation would start taking off her clothes or mine.

Hector: Nudity would have been much appreciated at that point, but wasn’t going to happen in that location on that night. And, frankly, I was kind of a Nice Guy (tm) at the time, so…

Out of curiosity, what was the cause of the mechanical malfunction that caused the elevator to trap Rebecca Watson and the other guy inside?

Rapes on elevators that are not broken down are not uncommon occurrences. One can be trapped on a functioning lift.

Well, coffee is a common first date for me, but when I say “let’s get some coffee” and then name a public place, it’s generally understood that I’m not proposing public sex.

Apparently Hector doesn’t believe that an enclosed space gives any attacker an advantage.

Duh.

“Helen w. h.” and “Triplanetary”: I take this quite seriously, and cannot imagine harassing a woman for sex, especially if she says no.  In fact, I’ve been married for 17 years and have had only ONE partner for that amount of time.  This is a touchy emotional subject for many of you and I appreciate that.  No woman should ever have to say “no” twice, and I respond emotionally and negatively to the idea of rape.  I guess I’ll keep my mouth shut in this otherwise OPEN (?) conversational forum to avoid offending anyone else.  Please accept my apologies for making light of a serious topic.

<block>I guess I hadn’t heard that Rebecca Watson was raped, either.</block>

Ahhhhhh, disingenuousness.

Chet: That she wasn’t actually attacked is beside the point. She was approached in a way that many women find threatening (for many very valid reasons) after talking about how bad it is that women are frequently hit on by certain types of men, especially in certain circumstances—like at a skeptics convention—and got a lot of replies that blew off her own discomfort as being irrelevant.

The whole thing was basically an initiation ritual for the Guys Who Don’t Get It club.

(Looks at blockquote fail, goes to hide in corner.)

BrooklynWalker, you are an excellent example of privilege.  The privilege of not having to think about being raped in an elevator. 

More mundanely, assuming there was no threat and Rebecca didn’t perceive a threat, privilege still applies.  You have the privilege of not having to be nice but not too nice to clueless wankers who think that no means no to everyone else but yes ask again for them, and if you turn them down too nicely they don’t hear you, and if you turn them down too rudely they will call you a fucking bitch, and there may not be a position between these two.

If you are not a woman among men trying to score on you you just have no clue what this is like and how annoying, boring and offputting this is and how it can make you just decide not to attend any more because it’s not worth the hassle. 

This is the real bottom line for a lot of women.  Elevator dude apologists keep making elevatorgate “she’s afraid of all men and she’s pathologizing normal courting rituals as rape and therefore hopelessly hysterical.”

But the problem for many is not as much fear as it is a grinding othering sensation that you’re a prize that is constantly being competed for rather than a colleague who might have thoughts.  Interrupted by flashes of fear when your “no” doesn’t seem to be working and you realize no one’s nearby to help if this guy turns out to be another Ted Bundy.

No, usually it’s just some guy for whom inconvenient thoughts about how you want to be treated can be easily ignored.  The important thing is you have a pussy that’s not currently occupied by any other conference attendee!  It’s time to try to close the deal!

Anyway.

The discussion here is OPEN but your ears should be, too.  Getting all offended when someone else uses this OPEN forum to tell you you’re ignorant of the reality of women is ridiculous.  OPEN doesn’t mean you get no pushback when you say something dumb.

...asks her to his room for “coffee”, a well-known euphemism for sex.

This is why Seattle is such an AWESOME place.

The notion that scaring a woman, as long as you fall short of rape, is okay is one I quarrel with. Decent men do not exploit women’s inability to escape—-even for 2-3 minutes—-to put them in scary situations with the hope that fear will grease the wheels towards a yes.

As for the notion that it’s okay to scare women, so long as they technically have a fighting chance should you be a rapist, well, I dispute the notion that sexual assaults can’t happen in elevators. Seems many rapists choose them precisely because a) you can’t escape and b) rape apologists will claim that nothing can happen in 2 minutes.

See:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HE-poT8hfc

Even if it’s not possible to overcome a woman in 60 seconds (it is) and even if it weren’t possible to follow a woman to her room after exploiting the isolation of an elevator encounter (it is), decent men don’t use isolation to introduce fear of rape in hopes that a woman is more likely to say “yes” in hopes that it doesn’t get uglier. In fact, decent people generally avoid cornering people in isolated spaces for ANY reason.

By the way, while I haven’t been raped in enclosed spaces with few avenues for escape, I’ve had men use that opportunity to creep on me. Men think being creeped on is no big deal, but in reality, sexual violence is on a scale. Your average rapist rapes only about 6 women in a career, but they get cheap thrills by sexually harassing or creeping on women. The point is they find fear and non-consent arousing. So even if you’re not penetrated by a man who uses your fear to arouse himself, you’re still in a bad situation. It’s scary. You worry he’s going to follow you, because on occasion, they do.

Decent people simply don’t isolate and scare others for cheap thrills. Nor do they introduce fear in order to make others more submissive or compliant. That PUAs suggest doing this to get laid makes them icky people. It’s not acceptable.

Not even done to mere women.

I wonder, also, if the men defending the “isolate a woman and treat her like a target instead of a human being strategy” would argue that it’s okay to find a man walking alone the streets and start following him, acting like a mugger to get a rise out of him but never actually mugging him. Hey, as long as you don’t actually pull out a knife, scaring a guy half to death is just fun and games! If he throws money at you in hopes you’ll go away, bonus!

Decent men do not exploit women’s inability to escape—-even for 2-3 minutes

even for 2-3 minutes

    Apparently terrorizing a woman for two to three minutes is A-OK with Chet.  It’s good to know these things. Oh, and if he doesn’t agree or hasn’t seen such a thing himself, it doesn’t matter what you think. Chet is all-knowing and all-seeing.

BW, this guy had not even spoken to the person he was supposedly asking to come to his room for coffee prior.  It was not extending a date.  They had not even been introduced!  Seriously, if you have no idea what is being referenced (which I considered a slim possibility), do some research before commenting; if you did know and came up with that (which I admit I thought likely but not absolutely the case), don’t act so butthurt.  (I can’t believe I feel compelled to use that term, damn). 
The fact that YOU can’t imagine hasseling a woman for sex DOES NOT MEAN that it doesn’t/didn’t happen and that this is not actually a pretty common means of doing so (crowding; cold propositioning; following into a place that would be reasonably safe in a sane world, and typically is, for men anyway).  Your comment imlied a jest or joke, not a possibly serious and certainly annoying to threatening situation.
I travel alone, often, for work.  This shit is personal.

Chet, remember the reaction she did get from what you accurately described:

So to have my concerns – and more so the concerns of other women who have survived rape and sexual assault – dismissed thanks to a rich white man comparing them to the plight of women who are mutilated, is insulting to all of us. Feminists in the west have been staunch allies of the women being brutalized elsewhere, and they’ve done a hell of a lot more than Richard Dawkins when it comes to making a difference in their lives.

That wasn’t the end, of course. Dawkins went on to compare my experience with his frustration at riding in an elevator with a person chewing gum (presumably he was once accosted by such a person who rubbed Bubble Yum into his silky white hair). You can read all his comments to date at Shakesville or one of the other sites linked above.

But thanks for playing Concerned Guy Who Almost Gets Feminism.

Hector doesn’t believe that an enclosed space gives any attacker an advantage.

Yes, my privilege is showing, assuming you mean “my” hotel room, the one to which a guy might conceivably invite a woman to have no-name coffee with a cup of tap water on the side,  is the enclosed space that would give an attacker an advantage. (I’m not about to make strange women uncomfortable in elevators, so we don’t need to visit that situation.) Thanks for the heads-up. I would like to think it means I don’t think like an attacker, at least.

Really, Chet, that was your take-away from this, that Amanda made something up?:

Since the vast majority of women aren’t amendable to being propositioned by perfect strangers in enclosed spaces, and the vast majority of men know better than to do that (and, I’ll add, have no real interest in it, because a lot of men actually like women and enjoy the process of flirting and building up sexual tension so that the eventual sex is about more than crossing the daily ejaculation off the to-do list), this system seems unfair, because it puts the burden of monitoring the behavior of the slim minority of men who feel they’re too good for flirting onto women. I offer a counter-solution that puts the burden on those who are too good for ordinary social interactions: men who feel they can’t get laid without cold propositioning strangers. If you’re one of those men, I suggest walking around with your cock out, to signal that you’d like a lady to do something about it without having to go through that tedious process of introducing yourself and having a conversation with her to gauge her interest. Since there are supposedly a lot of women down with cold propositions from strangers, I’m sure that these guys will find lots of takers!

Next, Irish writer reveals cannibalistic side of his personality, developing…..........

claims that ... rape in hotel elevators is so common as to be reasonably feared by women, deserve skepticism for the very simple fact that they’re not true.

I hope Chet is similarly skeptical of claims advanced by people in support of the concealed carrying of handguns.

You broached the subject of fear you deemed unreasonable because of alleged low statistical incidence of the harm being feared.

Thank Goddess that women have guys like Chet to determine whether their fears of sexual assault are “reasonable” — to say nothing of his groundbreaking research into elevator topology that shatters the illusion of elevators as enclosed spaces.

Guys like Chet spend so frickin’ much time not listening to women so they can twist words and convince themselves that they’re clever.  I like the accusation that we’re the ones not listening to Watson.  “I know you are but what am I?” only works if ....that’s right, it doesn’t work.

I’m generally all for internet anonymity, but in this one case I find myself really wishing for a picture of Chet, simply so that I can avoid ever getting into an elevator with him, which would almost surely end up with him molesting me for several minutes, or at the very least flashing me.

Rebecca was right to call Dawkins out, because his comparison to the plight of women under Muslim cultures was execrable and offensive, but Dawkins was right to call out the incredibly overheated rhetoric being deployed by feminists

Straight-up, no-sarcasm question, Chet: are you trying to pull the NYT “okay, one side is wrong, so I must invent reasons the other side is equally wrong” meme, or are you just that much of a fan of Dawkins?

He was not “right"ly doing anything. He was not calling out overheated rhetoric. Remember how you were just pointing to Watson’s actual words? Well, guess what: so was Dawkins, and he decided the best response to that was to shit all over Watson, by pulling the old shut-up-bitch-other-people-have-it-worse meme. And he did so not to suggest that people employing overheated rhetoric attempt to dial it back a little, but because he was (and apparently is) a sexist asshole. Myers managed to figure that out; why can’t you?

As for the reaction of the skeptical community, I seriously doubt it has to do with any real misunderstanding of how women feel threatened when some guy creeps on them in an isolated place, or how it might be appropriate to see women at skeptic get-togethers as “great, more skeptics” rather than “hurray, easily-available fuckholes.” No, the anger is because of the barest suggestion to those guys that they voluntarily place the slightest restraint on their hitting on women because there are circumstances under which those sexual advances are unwelcome.

Look, you don’t even have the ‘think like an attacker’ to ask a question at the wrong time.  It happens.

What’s bad about it is not being honest and admitting it was an error when pointed out.  That we are having this argument shows that these guys didn’t bother to actually pay attention to the original request!  She didn’t name the guy, she merely pointed out the situation, said it was uncomfortable, why it was uncomfortable, and to not do it.  She even made no assumption that everyone would have known that it was an awkward situation.

And yet, here guys are, still defending idiocy.  Don’t defend it, you’re defending rapists.

A hotel room is an enclosed space.  An alley is an enclosed space.  A doorway is an enclosed space.  And elevator is even more enclosed.

It shouldn’t take much imagination to believe these could be used against someone to put them into a space they cannot escape from.  It shouldn’t take any imagination - you should blindly trust a person when they say something wasn’t appropriate.

There are rapists in the world.  They really do these things.  Don’t do the things rapists do, if it can be helped.

Watson brought up the elevator herself in her original video (“you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you”). Dawkins also seemed to think the elevator was a huge fucking issue, as he brought it up in his snipping about gum-chewers.

And this isn’t because the elevator was broken. It’s because a hotel elevator is an isolated space. As The Gift of Fear puts it, an elevator is a soundproof steel cage. It’s not all that hard for somebody bigger and stronger than you, particularly if they’re fine with using violence, to back you into a corner or simply stop you from getting off when you want to.

I invoke Stick Rule on Chet, and I invite everyone here to marvel that he purportedly has daughters. 

And, as Chet may not be aware, elevators have stop buttons.  So a man with bad intentions can get between a woman and the buttons and stop it, and, voila, trapped in broken elevator.

It IS possible to be sexually assaulted on a functioning elevator. I was once sharing an elevator ride with a guy who then started to masturbate in front of me. And I wasn’t his first victim, as I realized when I spoke to a neighbour about the incident.
That made me even more wary of sharing the elevator with strangers.

That has somewhere between 20-50 buttons that all open the door.

Where do you live, that these magic elevators exist? I’ve never seen such an elevator. The only ones I’ve seen have buttons that take the elevator to a particular floor, and shortly after arrival at said floor the door opens.

Se

See, the other thing about those buttons (whether you are in a magic elevator or a real, mundane one) is that they do not magically spring into action if somebody blocks you from using them. And if you do not get out at your chosen floor—perhaps because someone else is blocking you from getting out—the buttons do not sense something amiss and summon law enforcement.

I’m not understanding, Chet, why you have so much trouble grasping the idea that having a creep follow you into an elevator, and being alone in that elevator, is an uncomfortable situation - so uncomfortable that Watson specifically brought it up in her comment about the incident. Is it that hard for you to fathom the idea that, in an elevator, one is in a small room, isolated from others, with only one exit that you can’t open until the mechanism takes you to the right floor? If you have never had somebody bigger, stronger and less nice than you block you from getting away from them, I’m genuinely happy for you, but is it truly that fantastical a situation to imagine?

It’s rather telling that you fixate on whether or not Watson was “trapped” or “terrorized” and to bolster that fixation, extoll how silly it is for a woman ever to be concerned when a guy with blatant boundary issues get into an elevator with her, alone, at 4 am and hits on her.

Chet, ffs. If you are in an elevator with someone considerably stronger than you, then if that person wants you trapped, you are trapped because they can STOP YOU pushing the buttons. This is something women are aware of that you may not have to be. (Not constantly living in fear of, but aware of, the way you check nobody’s reading your PIN over your shoulder at an ATM.)

Chet, it’s way too late for you to be feigning intellectual honesty. You should have tried that before your obnoxiously repetitive “oh I didn’t realize the elevator was broken” shtick.

  And, as Chet may not be aware, elevators have stop buttons.

Actually, they frequently do not - or have stop switches that are only key-activated. And if they do have stop buttons that anyone can use, the function of the stop button is to immediately move to the nearest floor and hold the doors open.
Comment #79: Chet on 01/02 at 04:18 PM

No, the function of the stop button is to stop the elevator where it is.  You’re thinking of the EFS switch which is a different key switch.

As to the stop button, some locations use a pullout lock and others require it to be a key switch.  Care to guess why?

http://www.otis.com/site/us/Pages/KeyOperatedStopSwitch.aspx?menuID=5

“KEY-OPERATED STOP SWITCH
Otis’ Key-Operated Stop Switch package provides a means to comply with national elevator safety codes, which require an in-car stop switch to be key operated. This eliminates the potential of one passenger activating the emergency stop switch and trapping another passenger in the car while the elevator is traveling between floors. “

It looks like even Otis Elevator has been co-opted into hysteria by Elevatorgate!

Chet - Do you travel much?  I have been in elevators in hotels where the elevator will not take you to any non-public floor if you do not have a key card (e.g. Double Tree in Jersey City, NJ; Holiday Inn Atrium, Singapore).  Some of them will only open the door on the public floors and those for which the key card is set (you can only get to your own floor or the floor of someone else on the elevator).  Try not to sound even more clueless than usual re this subject.
Yes, Alex, it makes the assholes trying to excuse this crap as social cluelessness assholes a second time, though really to a lesser degree than excusing people being threatening.

Why?  It’s not like people with actual disabilities don’t get shit on enough without being consciously scapegoated for every instance of premeditated or reckless behavior driven by unexamined privilege and a sense of entitlement not terribly unlike the unexamined privilege and sense of entitlement that drives otherwise reasonable people to scapegoat the disabled in the first place.

I’m willing to accept the possibility of a person having social issues up until the point of the other person saying “This is making me uncomfortable.” If the answer is anything other than “I’m sorry, I won’t do that again,” then you’re dealing with an asshole.

Also lots of elevators have a set-up where if you don’t hit the floor key before it starts moving, the elevator won’t stop there.  I’ve been on elevators in 50-floor buildings where if you missed the golden moment to hit your button, you were stuck on the elevator until it started moving in the opposite direction.  It actually passes the floor you selected because you didn’t select it in time for the mechanism to work. But I guess that would be my fault for not anticipating that the dude getting on would begin creeping on me.  I should just pull an Elf and hit every button just in case.

And Chet rushes bravely to the defense of the socially inept because it is the duty of all woman to make certain that no man ever be treated like a dork or made to feel like a creep, no matter how dorky or creepy he acts.

nice typo.  sorry.

Well, here’s a hint. If your takeaway from Rebecca Watson’s account of her experience and the controversy is that she was trapped in an elevator with a rapist, you’re not listening to Watson. You’re making things up.

  It takes gall for a liar like this to accuse somebody who’s been one of many trying to correct his bullshit….of lying.  Does stick rule mean this jerkweed finally gets banned?