It all started with a video blog from Rebecca Watson, founder of Skepchick, about her experience at an atheist conference last month in Dublin. She participated in a panel in which she talked about the problem of sexism among atheists, and the rape threats she had received from men in the community who don’t agree with her. Importantly, Dawkins was on the panel and the guy who went on to hit on her was in the audience. Afterward, she went to the hotel bar with conference-goers until 4 a.m., when she told everyone that she was tired and wanted to go to bed. A male attendee followed her out of the bar and into the elevator, where he said, “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I find you very interesting and I would like to talk more. Would you like to come to my hotel room for coffee?” This is what she had to say about the encounter:

Um, just a word to wise here, guys, uh, don’t do that. You know, I don’t really know how else to explain how this makes me incredibly uncomfortable, but I’ll just sort of lay it out that I was a single woman, you know, in a foreign country, at 4:00 am, in a hotel elevator, with you, just you, and — don’t invite me back to your hotel room right after I finish talking about how it creeps me out and makes me uncomfortable when men sexualize me in that manner.

That’s all. It took up just over a minute of an 8-minute-long video. She didn’t call for the man to be castrated or claim to be a victim of great injustice; all she expressed was that his overture made her feel “incredibly uncomfortable,” and that guys should generally avoid doing that. “That” being 1) hitting on a woman after she has gone to great lengths to explain why she doesn’t want to be sexualized within the atheist community, and 2) ignoring her remark that she is tired and just wants to go to bed. PZ Myers, a biologist who pens the bookmark-worthy skeptics blog Pharyngula, wrote a post about it and then Dawkins himself — the rock star of atheism — waded into the comments thread with a satirical letter addressed to a Muslim woman:

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…

Who knew Dawkins had such flair for creative writing — and for being a dick? OK, so, many people had already concluded the latter from his atheistic pomp — but, being an arrogant nonbeliever myself, I resisted such a reading of him until now. He’s of course correct that there are much worse things going on in the world, but that’s a crap rhetorical move meant to belittle and silence. It’s an argument that could be easily made against Dawkins’ own work: Why are you arguing over whether God exists while children are starving in Africa.

When this was pointed out to Dawkins, he responded again on Pharyngula to insist that wasn’t the argument he was making but rather that she experienced no physical violation: “She was probably offended to about the same extent as I am offended if a man gets into an elevator with me chewing gum. But he does me no physical damage and I simply grin and bear it until either I or he gets out of the elevator.” Later, he attempted to clarify his point: ”The ‘slightly bad thing’ suffered by Rebecca was not even slightly bad, it was zero bad. A man asked her back to his room for coffee. She said no. End of story.” He went on to make fun of Watson’s defenders who have pointed out that she was “stuck” in the elevator with the man, whom she hasn’t directly spoken with until then: “No escape? I am now really puzzled. Here’s how you escape from an elevator. You press any one of the buttons conveniently provided.”