The inappropriate behaviour delusion?

For those interested in such things, Richard Dawkins is stirring up a bit of a shit storm over at Pharyngula (like he needs the traffic..)

It all started after Rebecca Watson of Skepchick  posted a little video recounting an "incident" at a recent atheist conference in Dublin. She says that at around 4am after a long session of setting the world to rights at the bar of the hotel she decided to retire to bed, apparently a male conference attendee sharing the lift with her asked if she would like to continue the conversation over coffee in his room. Now, for those of us that have been around on this planet for a while and understand a few things about male-female interaction (especially in hotels) this kind of thing happens a lot with varying degrees of subtlety, ranging from zero through to highly elaborate involving food, drink, helpers and sometimes audio-visual aids. In terms of where this particular effort fits you could say it seems more toward the "hopelessly unsubtle" end of the spectrum, but then I wasn't there and context is king in these things. In her video Watson complains about this behaviour, calling it "creepy", although she doesn't name the person nor did she claim that anything illegal or unsavoury happened, broadly she made a case that the behaviour was "inappropriate". Enter Dawkins, who posted the following comment on the Pharyngula site in the discussion of the aforementioned video:

Dear Muslima,

Stop whining, will you. Yes, yes, I know you had your genitals mutilated with a razor blade, and . . . yawn . . . don't tell me yet again, I know you aren't allowed to drive a car, and you can't leave the house without a male relative, and your husband is allowed to beat you, and you'll be stoned to death if you commit adultery. But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.

Only this week I heard of one, she calls herself Skep"chick", and do you know what happened to her? A man in a hotel elevator invited her back to his room for coffee. I am not exaggerating. He really did. He invited her back to his room for coffee. Of course she said no, and of course he didn't lay a finger on her, but even so . . .

And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about! For goodness sake grow up, or at least grow a thicker skin.

Richard

The sentiment is clear, Dawkins thinks the whole thing is a storm in a teacup especially within the context of some rather nastier physical and mental abuse of women in other cultures and religious systems etc. This comment caused a surge of both criticism and support necessitating new posts being created on the site just to handle the volume of comments, clearly nerves were touched. I can see both sides of it, I understand what Dawkins is trying to say, and in his usual style he is being ultra-precise filling in no gaps, i.e. if the guy was asking for a coffee then we assume that's all he wanted. I suspect most people wouldn't be like that; they would take a more "organic" view and slant their comments one way or another, at least read between the gaps according to their preconceived views, i.e. if the guy is asking a women for coffee at 4am in a hotel lift then he's really asking for sex. There is also something about the fact that the elevator is a confined space from which it's hard to escape, I suppose so but for me that says more about the insecurities of the woman than the insensitivities of the man, maybe I'm missing something there.

If I knew how to do one of those on-line poll widgets then this would be a good one, i.e. "Is it OK for a man to ask a women he doesn't know back to his room for coffee in a hotel elevator or not?" As always with matters pertaining to sexuality, I suspect the answer is "it depends" but then there are plenty of people commenting, male and female, that feel the answer is more clear cut.

My own approach is more basic, just don't talk to strangers in trains, planes or lifts, and if possible don't even make eye contact with them, life is so much simpler that way...