The 'me too' movement

[K]

BuzzFeed News, October 23, 2018:

Documents Show That Arizona State Investigated A Slew Of Allegations Against Physicist Lawrence Krauss

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/lawrence-krauss-sexual-harassment-report

"He propositioned a prospective employee, suggesting a threesome. He told one employee that she should “take one for the team” and date a donor who was attracted to her. He discussed strip clubs with his staff. And when challenged on his actions, he tried to pass it all off as a joke.
...

The probe was restarted after we approached the university for comment on our reporting, published in February, detailing more than a decade of allegations of sexual misconduct against Krauss.

Mark Searle, Arizona State’s provost, agreed that the evidence supported several specific allegations made in the BuzzFeed News article, including the charges that Krauss grabbed a woman’s breast at a meeting in Australia in 2016, that he made negative comments about pregnancy and parental leave in the workplace, and that he upset a student worker at a university event by looking her up and down and commenting suggestively on her attire.
...

The report also substantiates multiple allegations against Krauss made after the BuzzFeed News article appeared. The most significant, according to Searle, are the charges that Krauss suggested a threesome to a woman discussing employment at the Origins Project, and that he touched the thigh of a woman at a meeting in Switzerland in 2011.
...

Commenting on these incidents, Searle wrote, “It is inconceivable how a faculty member in the course of carrying out his work responsibilities could believe that the conduct would ever be appropriate.”

Searle described how Krauss discussed strip clubs with employees, encouraged staff to view fan mail including nude photos, and showed them a cartoon of a person bent over with their pants down, revealing their bare buttocks."


The university's determinations (33 scanned pages):
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/5015756-Krauss-Determinations.html

[David]

^ It does make me uncomfortable when potentially minor things are conflated so as to provide a bigger rap sheet. Like, “discussing strip clubs with staff” (???) may or may not be appropriate workplace behaviour, but either way it’s a world away from groping someone.

[K]

^ I think the bigger concern related to that is if different people get grouped together when their offences are vastly different in degree and number.

If one person has a long rap sheet, and the employers order it to emphasize the most serious offences, then that's different.

[Skids]

....already in another thread.

[K]

^ Huh?

[HAL]

Yup. My brain does not have a response for that.

[K]

From 2014:

"Richard Dawkins has involved himself in some of these controversies, and rarely for the better – as with his infamous “Dear Muslima” letter in 2011... There was also his sneer at women who advocate anti-sexual harassment policies.
...

Then another prominent male atheist, Sam Harris, crammed his foot in his mouth and said that atheist activism lacks an “estrogen vibe” and was “to some degree intrinsically male”. And, just like that, the brief Dawkins Spring was over.

On Twitter these last few days, Dawkins has reverted to his old, sexist ways and then some. He’s been very busy snarling about how feminists are shrill harridans who just want an excuse to take offense, and how Harris’s critics (and his own) are not unlike thought police witch-hunter lynch mobs. Dawkins claimed that his critics are engaged in “clickbait for profit”, that they “fake outrage”, and that he wished there were some way to penalize them.

For good measure, Dawkins argued that rape victims shouldn’t be considered trustworthy if they were drinking."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/richard-dawkins-sexist-atheists-bad-name


"Remarks he made on Twitter and elsewhere on subjects ranging from sexual harassment (”stop whining”) to Down syndrome fetuses (”abort and try again”) have sparked suggestions from some fellow nonbelievers that he would serve atheism better by keeping quiet.

When Religion News Service reported on his controversial July tweets on pedophilia — Dawkins opined that some attacks on children are “worse” than others — the 73-year-old British evolutionary biologist and best-selling New York Times author declined to be interviewed.
...

... He stands by everything he has said — including comments that one form of rape or pedophilia is “worse” than another, and that a drunken woman who is raped might be responsible for her fate.
...

“I feel muzzled, and a lot of other people do as well,” he continued. “There is a climate of bullying, a climate of intransigent thought police which is highly influential in the sense that it suppresses people like me.” "

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/richard-dawkins-stands-by-remarks-on-sexism-pedophilia-down-syndrome/2014/11/18/a2915cd8-6f64-11e4-a2c2-478179fd0489_story.html

[K]

Some twitter comments referred to above:

https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/494012589828218881
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/494012678432894976
https://twitter.com/RichardDawkins/status/510656024169447424

His defence of paedophilia seems to be that he was a victim but it was a "harmless experience".

[David]

Anyone can see it’s not a defence of child abuse but rather a point about gradation of harm – and surely, a victim’s at least as entitled to make that point as anyone. Dawkins may have been a bit of a dick about it (as he is so often about things), but you’re clearly misrepresenting what he’s saying.

[K]

You mean about the paedophilia? I guess you must, since that's the only statement in my last post.

How is that a misrepresentation? My sentence indicates that he was a victim. It's all rather sad, really. "Harmless experience" is a direct quote (if you believe the newspaper articles). What would you prefer me to say?

As I said, it's sad that as a victim he seems to have accepted, or at least downplayed, what he calls "mild" paedophilia. Just being a victim does not give you moral authority to minimize the suffering of fellow victims. Just thinking it didn't harm you does not necessarily mean it didn't harm you, either.

You can apply this "gradation" argument to everything and everyone. People generally avoid doing that. There's a good reason why. It's a childish and dangerous game he plays when he does that. There are extrinsic imputations attached to such statements, which is of course exactly why he makes them. Pathetic.

[David]

What would you prefer him to say? He's someone who was abused as a child and he is, presumably honestly, describing his experience of it. Should he lie about it? Or not speak up at all lest he break any taboos?

Of course it's true that a claim about one's own experiences can be extrapolated and used as a way to dismiss those of others, and we need to be aware of that. But that can work both ways: just because one person experiences something as traumatic does not mean that every person in the same situation will. To claim otherwise ultimately just becomes another way to silence victims – in this case, victims who have managed to process what happened to them in a way that works for them and who have not necessarily been psychologically damaged. (And undermining them by telling them that they're just suppressing, and that they really feel something else deep down, is a fairly presumptuous and shitty thing to do.) I tend to think it causes more harm than good to enforce a victim narrative on people who don't identify with it. For all you know, by further stigmatising their experience, you may actually be harming them further.

(this is a discussion we've had here previously on Nick's, incidentally, if you want to check it out: http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?t=78968 ).

Otherwise, what Dawkins is saying shouldn't be controversial, and I'm perplexed as to why some people consider it to be so: of course some rapes are worse than other rapes, and some forms of sexual abuse are worse than others. The law recognises that, basic human psychology recognises that, so why can't the rest of us? Dawkins may be an unpleasant person, but I do understand why he gets so frustrated in situations like this.

[K]

He's not talking about his own experiences in his general tweeting. When he dismisses drunken women, do you think he's talking about his own experience as a drunken woman? When he talks about aborting the disabled, is he talking about his own experience of aborting or being aborted for his disabilities?

He has a completely undeserved soapbox, and yet he thinks he's somehow being censored, that he's the victim. Absurd.


And stop talking about presumption. Look at the word "necessarily". I neither presume nor care about his life story. Nor does he in his tweets. Nor do the media in asking him about his tweets.

[David]

The thread is effectively framed around the same discussion as the previous two posts of yours, and while it meanders across several topics, see in particular the posts about Samantha Geimer and Roman Polanski on page 4. This blog post on the Psychology Today website explores similar territory and serves as a direct response to Dawkins' claims (and those who criticised him):

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-dawn/201309/can-pedophilia-ever-be-mild

Otherwise, Dawkins' second tweet that you quoted is a (perhaps clumsy) attempt to make a basic point about gradations of harm – likely a consequence of the backlash over his initial comments about his own experience of abuse – and his third tweet is about victim-blaming (specifically, the political paradigm that assigning agency to victims is the same as assigning culpability to them), and thus, I think, unrelated to the immediate discussion we're having here.

[K]

Well, the main topic of that thread appears at casual glance to be about the age of consent, not about unwilling victims, and (presumably) no one was suggesting that age of consent should be a single-figure age. I'm conscious that this discussion may also have drifted or be drifting a little off this thread's main topic, though.

As for that man's defence of paedophilia, it seems to have had nothing to do with a victim wanting to share his experience, or a victim wanting to be free from victimhood. It seems to have first come up in one of his trashy books (not an autobiography), in 2006. If you look at the passage, all he's doing is invoking the old, tired, feeble argument
"It happened to us, and it didn't do us any harm". You frequently hear uneducated, unthinking dinosaurs saying this, along with claims that everything was better in the old days.

[Skids]