Obvious trigger warning is obvious.
The blessed gift that is the Shit My Clueless Granddad Says Richard Dawkins Twitter account just keeps on giving. In the past several years, Dawkins has smoothly transitioned from being a fairly well-respected science communicator and public intellectual into being a raving sideshow act, on par with the Tweets of luminaries like Jaden Smith and Jose Canseco.
Previously, Dawkins coined the phrase “mild paedophilia” to describe his experience at a boarding school with a molesting master. It’s a strange phrase, and problematic in how it seems to minimize an already too-accepted crime, but obviously he can contextualize his own sexual assault in whatever way he wishes. The primary problem was that he extended that not just to what the master did to him but what the master did throughout his career to his schoolmates, as well: “I don’t think he did any of us lasting harm.”
He then suddenly seemed to reject his previous decades of rhetoric in order to became a cultural relativist, saying that “you can’t condemn people of an earlier era by the standards of ours.” That is, of course, utter bullshit. Billions of people made it through recorded history and well through the 1950s knowing that adults shouldn’t be sexually assaulting children.
Dawkins’ insistence on ranking sexual assault means that he continually brings it up, again and again, with no change to his own self awareness or to his understanding of the context of his remarks. Here are today’s examples:
Mild pedophilia is bad. Violent pedophilia is worse. If you think that's an endorsement of mild pedophilia, go away and learn how to think.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
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.
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
"Mild date rape is bad. Violent date rape is worse." Is it really so hard to understand that that doesn't constitute endorsement of either?
— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) July 29, 2014
He seems to genuinely believe that people only have a problem with his remarks because they think you can’t compare any two bad things without condemning both of them. Dawkins tries a number of different forms of “X is worse than Y” but misses any that are actually educational. How about this one:
Subprime lending is bad. Getting robbed at gunpoint is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of subprime lending, go away and learn how to think.
Here are a few reasons why this form of “logic” is ridiculous:
1. What is the purpose of comparing and ranking different forms of sexual assault? Is there someone who had their butt grabbed once who is loudly insisting that they were equally harmed as a person who was violently raped and left for dead? Is he defending the victim of the violent rape from the insult of having their own assault minimized? I honestly cannot find any evidence that this, or anything similar, is happening. On the contrary, sexual assault that doesn’t match our preconceived notions of what a rape “should” look like (generally the stereotype is that of a violent stranger rape where the victim fights back valiantly and which exclusively involves penis-in-vagina penetration) is minimized, ignored, laughed about, and rarely prosecuted.
To bring that back to my analogy, yes, getting robbed at gunpoint may be more psychologically damaging. But we already live in a society where subprime lenders get away with horrific tactics and leave people severely hurt. What’s the point of comparing the two in this way?
2. What expertise do you have to rank various crimes? The best the average person can do is to contextualize their own experiences. When it comes to the experiences of others, we can look at what research exists and try to judge the quality of that research and put the results into context. For child sexual assault, there have been some studies of the long-term effects but absolutely not enough to come up with some specific ranking of each form. For instance, we can say that most likely use of force has a greater long-term negative effect, but the threat of force may be similar. Women may be more traumatized than men. or maybe we just don’t have enough reporting for men. Children subjected to very similar kinds of abuse can have very different outcomes, meaning that Dawkins’ classmates may not all agree with his statement that there was no lasting harm. Unfortunately, they don’t get interviewed by the Guardian.
3. What the hell is “mild paedophila” and “mild date rape”? These are not scientific terms – they are phrases that Dawkins made up, with no real information on what they encompass. As the research makes clear, there are many different kinds of sexual assault that differ wildly from the stereotypical “legitimate rape.” There are different body parts involved, different kinds of penetration, different durations, different relationships between rapist and victim, different age of abuse, and different underlying physical and psychological conditions in the victim, all of which can affect the lasting harm. There is no way to conveniently classify a particular type of sexual assault as “mild.”
It’s worth noting that the language Dawkins has chosen to label this nebulous grouping of sexual assault has resulted in a tautology. In other words, he wants to say “this kind of sexual assault is not as bad as this other kind of sexual assault,” and then to make sure that he’s right, he names those two groups with labels that directly state that one is not as bad as the other kind. He may as well have Tweeted this:
Bad rape is bad. Worse rape is worse. If you think that’s an endorsement of bad rape, go away and learn how to think.
To conclude, a number of people on Twitter have suggested that Dawkins not stop at two types of sexual assault, and instead that he should rank a top ten. Here is my best guess as to what such a list might look like, in order from least worst to most worst: