Serious Post

There are a number of posts that I have been meaning to write, and most of them are based on blog posts that my friends have been writing. One of them in particular is going to have to wait until the final HP movie arrives in Grahamstown and I get to relive the 11 years of HP love by going to watch it.

In the meantime, however, I thought that I would write a blog that is hopefully not going to be too long or too bitchy. This one is inspired by two posts that I find are pretty connected. The first blog post was mentioned to me a couple of weeks ago by my boyfriend. It was a video posted by Skepchick blogget, Rebecca Watson. The video, which can be found here, mentioned very briefly an encounter that Rebecca had within an elevator. The video is long, the mention is brief (if you want to listen to it, you can jump ahead to 4:30 and it ends at 5:50), but I thought I would summarise the situation for anyone who might be reading this.

Rebecca was a speaker at a conference in Dublin, and she was on a panel where she spoke about sexism in the Atheist community. After the panel was over, she spent a good deal of time with people at the bar and ended up announcing that she was tired and leaving. A man then followed her from the bar to the elevator and, once inside, said that he found her interesting and wanted her to have coffee with him in his room. Rebecca explains that this made her uncomfortable and is not something that men should do. And I completely agree. Even if he had the best intentions at heart, it is just plain creepy. There are better ways to go about asking people to have coffee with you - invite them to have coffee somewhere public the next day, for example. But approaching a single foreign woman at 4am in an elevator where she cannot walk away is not a good plan.

Now, I am not a Skepchick follower, and probably never would have heard about any of this if Grant hadn't told me. See, Grant is an awesome awesome boyfriend and a feminist supporter, and got incredibly upset about the reactions to the video, including a rather sexist approach from Richard Dawkins, someone who Grant greatly admires. In any case, I heard about it, it pissed me off a little, and then I carried on with my everyday life, grateful for the fact that I have an amazing boyfriend who cares about feminist issues.

A couple of days later, Amy posted a blog about the Slut Walk in Seoul, and she posted a picture on the top of her article which I found to be incredibly appropriate and which reminded me a lot of the Rebecca Watson scenario.



I absolutely love this poster. I think that it takes a completely different approach to assault, and I think that it is something that needs to be said. A lot of the comments that Rebecca got from her video were people saying that she shouldn't have been out until 4am, that she was in the wrong somehow, that her behaviour (or previous behaviour) led him to believe that he might have had a chance. It reminds me of the "men" who says that women who wear short skirts are asking to be raped or that a women who stays after having sex and asks for breakfast and taxi money must have had a good time and therefore cannot have been raped. The onus is always put on the woman to be careful, to be demure, to make sure that their integrity is kept in check so that they do not get raped, but what about the men who do the raping? Why aren't they being targeted? Why aren't people telling them how to behave to ensure that they do not rape or assault or harass someone?

Now, as I said earlier, the guy in the elevator could have had completely harmless intentions. He really might have found her opinions interesting and wanted to sit up and chat with her for a bit. And there is nothing wrong with that. But there are ways to approach people, and approaching someone who just from a conference where she discussed sexism and is clearly aware of her sex and how it affects peoples perceptions of her, in an elevator, alone, at 4am and then asking her to come back to your room for coffee is not a good way to do it. Hell, approaching anyone alone in an elevator and asking them to come back to your room for coffee is not a good plan. Especially if you do not know that person and have never spoken to them before. It is creepy as all hell, and whether his intentions were good or not, that doesn't take away from the creepiness!!!

Anyway, that is my ranting done. Hopefully HP will be coming out in Grahamstown this weekend (I am holding my thumbs so hard that they hurt) and I will be able to post my HP love post very very soon. Until then, I will be trying my hardest to stay awake.