The 'me too' movement

[HAL]

Glad to see you, mr Richardson said while Whelan Browne mentioned she was seeing a therapist there was no evidence his client was doing the same .

[stui magpie]

[K]

[HAL]

It's good to meet someone who is accused of harassment you're screwed[quote] Not if you're rich and powerful.

[K]

< The recent news about celebrity astro guy Neil deGrasse Tyson [ http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1882192#1882192 , http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1882193#1882193 , http://magpies.net/nick/bb/viewtopic.php?p=1882207#1882207 ] follows news a month or so ago about Lawrence Krauss: >


Lawrence Krauss to Retire From Arizona State After Sexual Misconduct Accusations

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/22/science/lawrence-krauss-retires-sexual-harassment.html

"In announcing his departure, Dr. Krauss denounced the university’s investigation, which found that he grabbed a woman’s chest at an event in 2016, and claimed he had been treated unfairly. He has been on paid leave since March and the dean of his department recently recommended that the professor be dismissed from the university.
...

He will remain on paid leave, drawing a salary of $265,000, until his retirement in May, the university said. Dr. Krauss said the university had not allowed him to present his side of the story or let him “cross-examine witnesses.”

In response to his statement, a university spokesman said Dr. Krauss had mischaracterized what took place. “Dr. Krauss’ description of our review process is inaccurate,” the spokesman said, adding that he could have questioned witnesses at a hearing. “Dr. Krauss chose to retire rather than to move forward with that process.”
...

Respected in the so-called “skeptic” movement...

His retirement announcement capped a precipitous fall from prestige and power in recent months. It started after Buzzfeed reported in February that several women had made sexual misconduct allegations against him that spanned a decade, including accusations of fondling and making sexist remarks. Arizona State opened an investigation, which concluded in June that he had groped a woman during a photo at a function in Australia in 2016, and moved to strip some of his positions from him.

The woman told investigators that he grabbed her chest after they took a photo together at a conference gala and then told her not to post their photo on Facebook. The image, which she showed to investigators, did not capture the alleged assault but showed Dr. Krauss’ arm over her shoulder with his hand in the air.

When investigators asked him about the photo, Dr. Krauss said his hand might have been out to catch her after she lost balance or maybe his hand was extended to block the camera’s flash, according to the university’s report.*"


* The report is here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4639188/ASU-Findings-on-Lawrence-Krauss.pdf

The BuzzFeed article is here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/peteraldhous/lawrence-krauss-sexual-harassment-allegations

The photo incident "happened at a dinner held at the Melbourne Zoo as part of the Australian skeptics national convention, where Krauss was a featured speaker. Shortly before the conference, said Melanie Thomson, a microbiologist from Melbourne and another invited speaker, she was warned about Krauss’s reputation by Michael Brown, an astronomer at Monash University in Melbourne."

[K]

WaPo, September 6:

"Organized secularism — which includes atheist, humanist, skeptic and other reason-focused groups — is now grappling with issues of misogyny, sexual harassment and safety for women and minorities.
...

Organized secularism has been struggling with charges of misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment for almost a decade. The problem went public in 2011 when a then-little-known atheist blogger, Rebecca Watson, described unwanted sexual advances from a man at an atheist conference who followed her into an elevator and to her hotel room.

She was flooded with both supportive and haranguing comments. World-renowned atheist Richard Dawkins told her to “stop whining” and “grow up.” Dawkins — whose appearances at secularist gatherings can make or break attendance — has been called out multiple times for sexist statements but remains much in demand as a speaker.

Richard Carrier, a science historian and popular secularist speaker, has both apologized for and denied accusations of unwanted sexual advances at secularist and atheist events. He has been banned from at least one conference.

Michael Shermer, who has denied allegations of sexual harassment and assault from several women, remains editor of Skeptic magazine and a top speaker at secularist events.

Most recently, cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, another star speaker and best-selling author, was suspended in the spring by Arizona State University for what it described as a decade of inappropriate behavior, some of it at secularist events."

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/09/06/americas-leading-atheist-accused-of-sexual-misconduct-speaks-out/

[K]

Some of those issues were reported by the media years ago.
e.g. September 12, 2014, BuzzFeed:

Will Misogyny Bring Down The Atheist Movement?

https://www.buzzfeed.com/markoppenheimer/will-misogyny-bring-down-the-atheist-movement

" “TAM” ... was started by the foundation in 2003 and is a four-day annual convention of what’s loosely called the freethought movement, comprising atheists, agnostics, debunkers of pseudoscience, and others promoting rationalism over superstition, and reason over religion.
...

The featured speaker in 2008 was astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson... Christopher Hitchens spoke that year... Yet one of the biggest draws was Michael Shermer, ... who, after an earlier career as an ultra-long-distance bicyclist, founded Skeptic magazine. He now contributes columns to Scientific American, speaks all over the world, and writes popular books ... He is a freethought celebrity...
...

At the party, they began downing drinks. “At some point,” Smith said, “I realized he wasn’t drinking them; he was hiding them underneath the table and pretending to drink them. I was drunk. After that, it all gets kind of blurry. I started to walk back to my hotel room, and he followed me and caught up with me.”
...

“He offered to walk me back to my room, but walked me to his instead. I don’t have a clear memory of what happened after that. I know we had sex.” She remembers calling a friend from an elevator after leaving his room.
...

Shermer went into damage-control mode. He called the friend Smith had spoken with during their walk “and lied to him about everything,” Smith said. She heard later from “a couple other people” whom Shermer had called to intercept the rumors. Finally, Shermer sent an email, which I have obtained, to a fellow skeptic, who was one of the conference organizers, and, as it happens, the friend Smith called from her mobile phone the night before. The email is worth reading in its entirety, right down to its conclusion — a sly, Clintonian diminishment of Smith.
...

It’s unclear what the “vicious … gossip” was: that they’d had sex, or that Shermer had been conspicuously trying to get her drunk in order to have sex. Either way, the encounter became common knowledge in the upper echelons of freethought. Smith worked for a leading organization, and Shermer was widely thought of as not only a freethought capo, but an infamous womanizer. Yet for years, the incident stayed sealed off from the wider freethought community and the public.
...

Then, without naming Smith, he quoted an email from her:
'... Ever since, I’ve heard stories about him doing things (5 different people have directly told me they did the same to them) and wanted to just say something and warn people, and I didn’t know how.'
...

But among some women, since Myers' post, there has been a sense of relief that somebody had finally spoken out. Several women told me that women new to the movement were often warned about the intentions of certain older men, especially Shermer. Two more women agreed to go on the record, by name, with their Shermer stories.
...

Yet Shermer remains a leader in freethought — arguably the leader. And in his attitudes, he is hardly an exception. Hitchens, the best-selling author of God Is Not Great, who died in 2011, wrote a notorious Vanity Fair article called “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” Richard Dawkins, another author whose books have brought atheism to the masses, has alienated many women — and men — by belittling accusations of sexism in the movement; he seems to go out of his way to antagonize feminists generally, and just this past July 29 he tweeted, “Date rape is bad. Stranger rape at knifepoint is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of date rape, go away and learn how to think.”
...

To those outside the community, freethought would seem an unlikely candidate for this sort of internal strife. Aren’t atheists and agnostics supposed to be liberal, forward-thinking types? But from the beginning, there has been a division in freethought between the humanists, who see atheism as one part of a larger progressive vision for society, and the libertarians, for whom the banishment of God sits comfortably with capitalism, gun rights, and free-speech absolutism. One group sees men like Michael Shermer as freethought’s big problem, while the other sees defending them as crucial to freethought’s mission.
...


PZ Myers reposted Watson’s video in early July, and soon thereafter, in Myers’ comments section, Richard Dawkins posted a satirical letter, addressed to a generic Muslim woman. “Dear Muslima,” Dawkins began, “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 … But stop whining, will you. Think of the suffering your poor American sisters have to put up with.” Then Dawkins gets personal: “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 … And you, Muslima, think you have misogyny to complain about!”

At first, readers of Myers’ blog wondered whether this was really the famous English biologist. Had the man who coined the word “meme” really descended from Olympus to attack a young American writer? Once it was clear that this was indeed Dawkins, it was on: a fight between the world’s leading atheist and a female activist half his age.
...


Nevertheless, the liberties that Michael Shermer took at conferences — despite complaints reaching organizers and movement leaders — suggest that the freethought world still has a problem. It can be simultaneously true that Rebecca Watson’s following is growing at the same time that Richard Dawkins continues to derail himself publicly, and that powerful men’s behavior is still winked at.
...

“I went to his table, and he started hitting on me,” said Miller, who had never heard of Shermer before that day. “It was mildly creepy, but it happens. But then he started playing with his crotch while he was talking with me. Basically trying to get my eye to look at his penis through his jeans, just rubbing himself for three or four minutes until I finally extricated myself.”

Pamela Gay, 40, an astronomer at Southern Illinois University, told me about a time in 2008, at Dragon Con, a major sci-fi/fantasy/comics/geek/nerd/skeptic conference in Atlanta, when she was walking along with several prominent skeptics. “One of them spotted Michael Shermer, who I didn’t know, and wanted to introduce me,” Gay said. “When the introduction was made, he turned around, and instead of trying to shake my hand, he tried to shake parts of me I was less interested in him shaking” — she was sure that he was going for her breasts, although he never touched her."

[pietillidie]

Well, the very topic is the stuff of the musty halls of Western theology and philosophy, so this is no surprise. Self-awaredness was never a strong suit of those so educated.

The desperate need to uphold the rational self in the face of obvious limitations (so Descarte's cogito ergo sum), including a gendered world experience, is why a critical social science was needed. When the latter collapses into nihilism, perhaps something saner will emerge for a bit (so the Hegelian dialectic).

[David]

This same story is cropping up in so many diverse realms, though, that I'm starting to wonder if the problem here is as straightforward as men (or masculine gender socialisation, or whatever) + power*. For me, the most startling revelation of #MeToo is not just how many women have been victimised in this way – the original purpose of the exercise – but how many men have been perpetrators in one way or another. Perhaps the radical feminists of the 1970s and 1980s were onto something when they spoke of a nearly universal male sexual oppression.

*Of course it remains true that some organisational structures are more hierarchical than others and offer less transparency and accountability – and, accordingly, tend to permit more abuse of power than others – so I guess I'm not necessarily contradicting anything you're saying here.

[pietillidie]

^You wouldn't doubt it. Ironically, stability can signify an oppression so pervasive it is (virtually) perfectly normalised (Chomsky always says this about slavery).

It's not easy to strike the balance between ease and dis-ease whereby we can have a strong sense of self-efficacy, yet observe our own horrors without collapsing into a mournful heap. Some would say the ability to walk this fine line is what defines psychological maturity.

[K]

[HAL]

How much more could it be?

[David]

I think there's often been a distinction between an industry "open secret" and something that's actually public knowledge. Weinstein's litany of abuses, which were apparently whispered about for years in industry corridors and Hollywood cocktail parties, were more or less hidden from the general public. Same goes for child abuse in the Catholic Church, etc.: everyone knew, and yet nobody knew. There was, in the midst of all of the rumours and gossip, a clear culture of silence.

I suspect that the real enabling lies in that paradox: enough people know for systemic abuse to be enabled and covered up, but not enough people know for the offending to be exposed and for the offender/s to face justice. That kind of process couldn't happen in a more transparent and accountable regime, almost by definition. Denial is a powerful impulse, but even it crumbles in broad daylight; and, indeed, what we're seeing now in the cases of Hollywood, the Catholic Church and so on is a result of that broad daylight in action.

[K]

A news aside:

"The letter surfaced in 2008. ... And it rocketed into the universe of big-money auctions, selling for $US404,000 ($549,000) in London.

The buyer was not identified. The Guardian said that ... Richard Dawkins ... was one of the bidders who lost out.

Now the letter is on the market again. It will go on the block at Christie's on Tuesday, New York time. Christie's set a pre sale estimate of $US1 million to $US1.5 million."

Some people have too much money...

[HAL]

He will be interested I am sure.