History is a male gig, huh? Oh well, I guess I'll just stop listening then.

It's the observer, not the object, that defines sexism. I have a nice shiny UK body of legislation here that says the exact opposite (of any discriminatory behaviour, not just sexism). Whereas, other than wishful thinking, you are basing your assertion on?...

It is amazing how our interpretations change when we don't pre-suppose someone is trying to hurt us or belittle us or scold us, even accidentally. OMG, I know! It's like, when someone says "guys, don't do that" and we don't assume they're trying to hurt us or belittle us or scold us, we might actually avoid blowing up the intrawebs for three weeks afterwards! Oh. It's not what you meant. Well, dang. Sally's silent corollary to phrases like "this is not important", "there are other issues", "why are you being provocative" etc. - which is "so stop talking about it" - is a much more likely one than yours. Why would anyone spend three weeks and thousands of computer man hours telling people that what they're talking about is wrong, unimportant, nonexistent or offensive, if the subtext of all this effort is a polite invitation to continue the discourse? Occam's Razor, buddy.

@Thomathy because there's nothing difficult about treating people as they expect. You've kind of hinting at the core of the issue there. The problem is not that there are people within the atheist community that think it's controversial to treat people with the same respect they themselves expect to be treated. The problem is that there are people - in the world, and in the atheist community too – don’t see “women” and “people” as overlapping categories. Men, from Freud onwards and probably for millennia before, have seen women as a mysterious Other to be deciphered; and once deciphered, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, they expect women to be consistent. There is "something women want". There is a magic button, and if you find it and push it then it will guarantee success. That's where the sarcastic questions of "so when is it OK to ask a woman for coffee?" are coming from: these people are contemptuous of the very notion that the answer to that is "no idea mate, they’re all bloody different". Because they should. Not. Be. Bloody different. Men - people - who see women as incomplete versions of human beings, think of them as maybe very intelligent dogs: with sufficient training, their behaviour can become predictable and easily explainable. It must be fantastically frightening for someone like that to be faced with the revelation that women are not like that at all: they are messy, unique individuals who defy systematising description and over whom you do not possess predictive power. Especially, I would say, for some men who consider themselves "rationalists", to be faced with the realisation that relationships with women are not rationalisable, must be terrifying; first, because it drops the bottom out of the only way they can think of to engage in human pair bonding (the transactional, "what women want" model); and second, because for many it simultaneously involves the unpleasant admission that they have heretofore failed to accord women full humanity. Which is not very rational. No wonder they get pissed. And I reluctantly - oh, so very reluctantly - have to agree with Greta Christina that we need to continue talking about this stuff for their benefit. Not because someday, one of our trudgingly repeated arguments will provide someone with a much needed epiphany, but because if we repeat the idea that women are people over and over and over again, eventually it will become more normative, and accepting the corollaries to it (no right way to approach, listen to what is said, respect boundaries, sometimes go down in unpredictable and humiliating flames, actually having more women around is good even if none of them wet your dick) will be less difficult. Or so I, you know, hope.

@Steve Vowels, I think that's one the best, clearest expositions of privilege I've ever seen.

@Lyra I truly hope that we are able to get to a point that if a woman says something on par to, "I don't like that, it makes me feel bad, don't do it," that the conversation doesn't collapse into assertions that she shouldn't have minded, or if she did, she should have just shut up and endured. Quoted for heart-rending truth. Sisterhood and sympathy to you, Lyra.

@Matt Hone Why don't we make more noise about FGM, which not only happens in deprived African countries but in the UK itself? There was an excellent event at the Watershed in Bristol about FGM last Saturday, with a film about FGM in the Congo and a discussion afterwards. Since you are such a champion of doing something about FGM, then I assume you were there?

@Connor Before I begin, just a note that though I was responding to you proximally, I was addressing the argument as a whole (a common one, that's been made several times in this thread already and ad nauseum elsewhere). So any sarcasm is not directed at you as a person, but at the large body of thought underpinning (perhaps unbeknownst to yourself) your points, and which ranges from benevolent sexism to MRA-style claims of widespread misandry and victimisation of men by feminists in Western society. But my mind is teetering between realizing these sex-specific boundaries and realizing that another name for these boundaries could be "extra-special care." I'm afraid the assertion that the boundaries are sex-specific is neither logically nor factually correct. Almost all men I can think of will instinctively be able grasp the threatening and unwelcome nature of a larger male approaching them in an isolated setting and propositioning them for sex. All prison shower block jokes, and the DODT Act, are based on the instinctive understanding of the unwelcome and unpleasant crossing of boundaries this entails. As does the widespread misogynist trope of large (read: fat), sexually aggressive women cornering reluctant (usually younger) men. The problem we have here is that grasping that boundaries that go "physically threatening $person1 propositioning smaller more vulnerable $person2 for sex in circumstances where the latter is isolated and/or threatened" are perfectly acceptable, when $person1 is male and $person1 is female seems to be a challenge, primarily for a subset of people who fit the profile of $person1. My contention[1] is that this failure of basic logic (extending a syllogism from in-group to out-group agents) is a fundamental feature of all bigotry. To say "I have the right to inflict on others treatment that I would not want inflicted on myself" is worryingly lacking in empathy, and a symptom of a society in which this logical breakdown is so pervasive it becomes invisible (read: patriarchy). To further say "those requesting that I do not inflict on them treatment that would be inimical to me are asking for special treatment" is a further level of irrationality. It's what the philosopher would call "un quéstion mal posée". The question is not "do women deserve special care?" but "is this level of care really special?". To refuse to acknowledge that[2] when it is rationally and repeatedly explained is paradigmatic sexism: a refusal to consider women as full human beings with the same subjectivity as one's self. tl;dr version: you try being propositioned by a larger, probably drunk dude in an elevator at 4am, and tell me how much of a delicate flower I am for not liking it. [1] Well, I say it is mine, but of course it's something that's been written about extensively by far greater minds than mine, and I'm just borrowing it. [2] Which I'm not saying you're doing, but the zombie-like persistence of these so called "concerns" hints that you and others are drawing on a larger body of thought here.

My concern is that this makes women out to be like victims. That, because they're women, they need to be treated with extra-special care. Your concern is misplaced. Victimisation is perpetuated by silence; never by open and productive discourse. It is also a bad faith argument to claim that by asking for courtesy and a decent sense of our (likely, socially "normal") boundaries, women are asking to be treated with extra-special care. In fact I would go as far as to say that to view courtesy and a decent respect for boundaries as extra-special care is inherently disrespectful towards women as beings deserving less courtesy and less respect for their boundaries. In the context of at least two women - Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina, in this case - openly and rationally expressing a desire to discuss and analyse and issue, professing a concern for their well-being from allowing them to engage in what they are clearly intellectually capable of engaging in (open and rational discourse) is disrespectful of them as beings less able to understand their own needs and desires. tl;dr version: all this "concern" about discussions of sexism and women's boundaries being "victimising" and "disempowering" is sexist fucking bullshit.