Does Atheism Have a Misogyny Problem?

[rug]

Nighttime shows in Las Vegas feature all sorts of large mammals: lions, tigers, bears, and the rest. So if you had happened to poke your head into The Amazing Meeting, a 1,600-strong skeptic and atheist conference last month, you might be excused for assuming that the giant elephant in the room had escaped from some circus on the Strip. But you’d be wrong. That elephant in the room with us was our own. There’s no pachyderm in Vegas—or on Earth—that big, or that ugly.

This elephant was born in July, when a well-known skeptic blogger named Rebecca Watson, who maintains the “Skepchick” website, complained in a video about something that had happened to her at an atheist conference in Dublin. She had been out with a large group of conference guests at the hotel bar, and finally at four in the morning announced that she was exhausted and headed up to bed. One of the men from the group followed her into the elevator, 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?” Watson declined and went off to bed as planned.

In her video, she described the encounter as an example of the kind of insensitivity toward women that drives them out of the skeptic and atheist communities. The unnamed Elevator Guy should have known better than to proposition her after she had just announced she wanted to go to bed, she said. In a panel discussion earlier that day—which he had attended—she had even spoken about misogyny in the atheist community and about her distaste for being objectified. It’s understandable, she added, that a woman might feel nervous at being propositioned by a stranger in an enclosed space where she can’t escape if need be.

“Guys, don’t do that,” she urged.

http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/atheologies/4978/does_atheism_have_a_misogyny_problem/