DragonChild wrote:Now, would you like to back up your claim that Watson specifically named the guy, and specifically called him a rapist?
I may actually be misremembering about whether she specifically named him or not. It was two years ago, and frankly the guy on the elevator isn't terribly important in the grand scheme of things either way. But I think one way or the other his name is actually known, though I can't remember what it is and never really knew what channels that came out through. Maybe he even named himself, stranger things have happened.
Her saying he could be a rapist is actually the
entire basis of her
entire argument. Especially her later videos on the subject where she says socially awkward men should fuck dolls, it gets into deeply offensive territory. Her entire claim is that men need to modulate their behavior
because they could be rapists. That's it. That's the whole thing.
It's exactly equivalent to telling young black men that they need to cross the street to avoid you so you don't have to cross the street them
because they could be muggers. Or any other substitution you care to name. The structure of the argument is that
she is going to treat you like you're a heinous criminal, and therefore
you should not do things that are well within your rights but might be consistent with future actions that are criminal and also not within your rights. So, no reaching into your pockets (there might be a weapon!), no sitting next to her on the bus (you might be a molester), and so on and so forth.
Without the "you might be a rapist" part of her argument (which
is explicit, and was from the beginning), there's no argument worth talking about. The rest of it is just "you should use your psychic powers to know whether I'm interested in you and not bother me by hitting on me if I'm not," which is simply retarded. People
don't have psychic powers, and they do not always know if you are interested or not, and cannot possibly be certain if they don't ask.
With the "you might be a rapist" part of her argument, it's offensive
and stupid. She's asking people to avoid human contact on the grounds that they might perform heinous crimes if they got human contact. This is ridiculous on many levels. It's ridiculous and offensive to treat innocent people as if they were about to commit heinous crimes that they have shown no particular interest in committing. But it's also patently absurd to think that getting men to not talk to women would somehow
reduce rape. We have a natural experiment, a country where men literally are not allowed to share elevators with or speak to women. It's called
Saudi Arabia, and the reality is that these measures have in no way provided for safety of women from sexual assault.
Rebecca Watson's original piece was stupid and offensive. But it was also minor. She could have walked it back or even just lived it down. However, when people called her out on the fundamental flaws in her argument, she doubled down and got way more offensive. That doesn't excuse the rape and death threats she received, but it does make her
wrong. And when she called for a boycott of the books of people who simply said she was wrong (and had not, for example, threatened her in any way), that made her
in the wrong.
-Username17