Rebecca Twatson Finds God

Well, it's more like Rebecca Watson was given free airtime to slander Richard Dawkins, who apparently doesn't want women involved in our atheist events.  But I'm not here to talk about that.

One of the first things you have to know about Rebecca Twatson is that she's a communications "major", if you can call it that. At any rate, she spent some time in a school studying how to say shit in such a way that the message gets across but it's not obvious what's she said.  To that end, and this works in pretty much everything I've seen her in when she's discussing how maligned women are in the atheist movement, making one point parceled out over a talk is helpful. She says things that charge the imagination, then there's filler conversation, new thing to charge the imagination and so on. It's highly effective. It's also very common churches and political rallies.
There's a bunch of meaningless words thrown around, and then the ramp up and let down and the ramp up and the let down. By the time they get to the conclusion, what you remember are the talking points you're supposed to - they're the charged areas.

The trick to it is listening to the beginning, the middle and near the end. The stuff in between is filler conversation which doesn't particularly bear on the point she's making.  Go ahead, try it with anything you'd like. Anyway, I've cut out the extraneous intervening spaces to focus on one belabored point she was addressing.  I didn't time it but these two contradictory points on the same thesis are separated by about half the interview in time. But by the time you get the second point which is contrary to the first, you've forgotten the thing that makes the first point stand in opposition. She says that most women, but then goes on to emphasize for no reason, stressful-like not ALL women.  This is what sticks out in the mind, as it should - it was stressed after all.


Anyway, here's the trick. 1 and 2 here are part of the same point

1.) most women complained to her, so many women but not ALL WOMEN (this you will remember, the other part you won't)
2.) if we want to attract more women "we" need to look at how we treat them. (now it's all personal, we're all on the same team here working for ALL WOMEN. Again, this sticks out in your mind, not the "many women" bit.)

Now we have the long, long skip in time where she comes onto the point that she wants to be clear it isn't just the men who aren't seeing the rampant sexism and objectification of women, but also the women too. Now, enough time has passed and she can bring up the second topic on the same thesis, which is actually contradictory to the first topic. The first topic, remember, is that we need to adjust how we handle women by paying attention to what they're telling us they want. This isn't trivial.

But listen carefully here as this is pivotal.  She says that she is being told by men (and she stresses not just the men, but the women too) and women that they're not seeing this problem.  The women will tell her they're flirted with and don't have a problem with it, or, they're not flirted with and don't have a problem with it. These women, one notes, are not only ignored, but told in essence they're just not smart enough to have figured it out yet.  Once you're hip to the linguistic tricks at play here, it's really easy to avoid being conned. Darren Brown even did an interview with Dawkins on how this works . . . and Rebecca Twatson is playing it for all its worth. And so many people are just eating it up - because suggestion is not to be trivialized.  Anyway, then she lands the coup de grâce . . .

She tells them:  I was once just like you are now . . . Yes, personal fucking revelation.  And just like any good religion, she follows it up with scare tactics saying how she once thought the community was "safe" . . .

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I'll edit the grammar on this one when I get up.

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