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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34999 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Then came Elevatorgate, and suddenly "Do you want to come to my room for coffee?" simply meant an offer of coffee and how could anyone imagine it was an offer of sex?

I've never personally seen anyone defend the coffee-propositioner by saying "he just meant coffee, not sex". I've always seen people saying that of course he meant sex. But that it's no excuse for Watson to act like she was in danger or anything. I've seen people saying that "do you want to come back to my room for coffee" is the civil way of propositioning sex in polite society, and that if women are going to shame men for saying that, then there's basically nothing women won't blame men for.

Also, I've never seen anyone remotely saying that consenting to coffee means that you're consenting to sex. Yes, it's a coded suggestion of sex, but no one thinks that that is enough to say it's a done deal.

I haven't any bookmarks but I do remember reading comments about "he only meant coffee, not sex, how could she blow this up about that kind of misunderstanding?"

Well, I'm not saying you're wrong that some people somewhere, possibly even many people, have made that argument. I'm sure some people have. But I don't think it's representative of the discourse that I saw around it during the time. I saw no arguments myself from a lot of the popular online anti atheism+ folks, Thunderfoot and The Amazing Atheist for example, and even Dawkins, that hinged around the idea that the man in question could have meant anything else other than trying to nicely proposition sex. And I think most of those people made great cases for why Rebecca Watson and atheism+ in general were completely out of line and antithetical to the values of atheism, even if the guy was actually asking her to have sex.

No bookmarks either, but I'll back you up on this. I do remember some blog post where "he could have just meant coffee" was used as an argument, but it was more of a cherry on top, than the core argument. And to be fair to whoever made that argument, there was something about the way he asked her out (as quoted by Watson herself), that made me go "Jesus, the guy sounds autistic enough that he could have actually just meant coffee".

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