“____ was not the first time I heard about ____”

I think this is a big part of why so many non-misogynists* are struggling with this whole issue. For many insiders, this is the culmination of something that’s been brewing for years. For most outsiders, it’s seemed to come out of nowhere. Yeah there’ve been ripples, but nothing on this scale, so they were easy to ignore or treat as outliers rather than part of a larger pattern. So now they’re effectively having to deal with it all at once.

DJ Grothe is threatening a defamation suit against the org I founded bc @SashaPixlee said he sucks at rape jokes...

The Women Thinking partnered up with the JREF in December of 2010 to do vaccine outreach research as part of the Hug Me, I’m Vaccinated campaign. Since we were and are a small organization without the resources to take on such a project, we asked the JREF to fund it. They agreed, and gave us ~$5,000 to travel and conduct surveys around the country and for that, they would publish and promote the research for us. Now, almost three years later the research is finished. The report is complete thanks to a tireless effort by the WTinc board, especially Jamie Bernstein. The research has been delivered to the JREF and peer reviewed. Today, it is essentially ready to be published, and has been for over a year. But right now, Grothe is using a blog post about being bad at jokes as a reason to hold up publishing this work that we were planning on using to save lives.

[Dawkins] said that he could not condemn the “mild paedophilia” he experienced at boarding school. “I am very conscious that you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours,” he says in an interview published today in The Times Magazine.

“Just as we don’t look back at the 18th and 19th centuries and condemn people for racism in the same way as we would condemn a modern person for racism, I look back a few decades to my childhood and see things like caning, like mild paedophilia, and can’t find it in me to condemn it by the same standards as I or anyone would today.”

Professor Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, describes in a new autobiography how a master at his Salisbury prep school “pulled me on to his knee and put his hand inside my shorts”. He writes that the episode was “extremely disagreeable” and that other boys were molested by the same teacher, but concludes: “I don’t think he did any of us any lasting damage.”

It sickens me to think of how statements like this contribute to the shaming and silencing of sexual abuse victims — especially the victims of sexual abuse in childhood. Dawkins is entirely entitled to express his own experience with sexual abuse however he experienced it — but he is absolutely not entitled to tell other victims that their abuse “didn’t do any lasting damage.”

And it appalls me to think that the world will see this as representative of the atheist community — and will use it as yet another example of how atheists have no morality. (The story is already up at the Washington Post as well as the Times of London.)

We, the undersigned atheists, agnostics, humanists, freethinkers, and other non-believers, hereby condemn Richard Dawkins' continued comments trivializing what he termed 'mild' sexual abuse of children. Dr. Dawkins is seen by many as a representative of the atheist community -- but when it comes to his dismissive comments on the incredibly serious topic of sexual abuse, the atheist community emphatically does not stand with him.

It’s one thing being reckless, unguarded or imprecise, as all of us occasionally are; it’s another thought entirely, and frankly skull-jangling, that someone paid for years as a communicator with the public, since then a bestselling global author and media fixture, could put their foot so absolutely firmly in their mouth. No doubt this too will end in an extensive, hyperdefensive explanatory blog post – but how could anyone make these remarks and not foresee a PR storm?

Just when did it stop being OK for acquaintances to put their hands inside Richard Dawkins shorts? I presume it would be an utterly intolerable act now, of course — at what age do the contents of childrens’ pants stop being public property?