PLAYBOY INTERVIEW: RICHARD DAWKINS

[katemary]

59. Agreed the rest of the magazine IS a problem that RD should have been aware of.

Hi this is my first time on this site after trying to find out if Richard Dawkins really had appeared in playboy. I would agree with you 100%. The magazine is not a liberal place for women, in it they have one place and one purpose - to be young dollies to be looked at. Lets face it Richard Dawkins is 50 years older than the women in the magazine and for that reason only would not have been in it were he female - that alone should have been grounds for his not appearing. But there are many other reasons to.

Atheism is now being associated with sexism in a way which it really shouldn't. Part of that is a tendency for some male atheists to sexualise women way out of context without being taken to task at all. His own website has in the past been an old boys school where women were discussed in terms of their sexiness or otherwise regardless of what the issue was or what they had to say. I recall it linking to an interview with him and a female scientific presenter on the evolution of the eye. Less than half way down the comments section the men were saying how sexy she was etc, culminating in one imagining christians masturbating over her and how that would be a good route into atheism. And just guess what this scientist was wearing? Jeans and a jumper, Richard Dawkins was showing more flesh.

Appearing in playboy set them all off again and brought casual sexism back to his site. He should have had more sense, it didn't improve his standing with men at all and damaged it with a lot of women.

The recent olympics was the first in which all countries had to include women athletes, meaning that for the first time women from Afghanistan, Saudi etc were braving real dangers at home to compete. In that same week the parents of a muslim woman in the UK were jailed for her murder for standing up for her rights and Pussy Riot were in court. There was no reason for his website to include those facts, it isn't a feminist site after all, and it didn't disappoint in that it didn't. BUT in that same week Richard Dawkins linked to a protest on you tube where some youngish women had taken their tops off painted sharia on their breasts and had run past the olympic arena. An event of such undewhelming insignificance it appeared nowhere else. So why bother with that if not the others? Other than they were topless and it gave some of the men there another chance to comment on their looks. If he'd wanted protests against sharia he only needed to look in the stadium where there were women doing things other than titillating. Again alone that was not an issue, alongside everything else it was. And again should have alerted him to the problems with appearing in playboy.

Of course fully dressed women do appear on his website, but preferably in burkhas as victims of oppresion. Other than that they only seem to feature when they become impossible to ignore. Like Malala Yousafzei, who incicdently didn't appear till she was shot despite having been blogging about girls education in Pakistan for ages.

I think he may well be the problem. I don't know if its correct but he is now seriously giving the impression that he thinks women should be either jolly totty with their tits out for men to ogle or victims of religious oppression - and that is a bit of an anachronism in this day and age - or should be. He may be sexist or just too arrogant to admit he's in the wrong ever but I wish he weren't the spokesperson for atheism anymore. He has become atheisms sacred cow and just I wish someone with a more up to date attitude to women and far less arrogance could take those reins. Like PZ Myers for example.