When the women's studies professor offers to push the elevator button for you and you ask for the "women's lingerie department."

This really happened in an elevator at a San Francisco Hilton where an academic conference was going on. And the man who thought he could blurt out what is an old wisecrack was a political theory professor. He did not get shrugged off as pathetically old and out of step. He got taken to task, The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, and it was so brutal that he's provoked to fight back:

[Richard Ned] Lebow was told to write an "unequivocal apology" to [Simona] Sharoni and submit a written copy by May 15 to the... executive committee [of the International Studies Association]. The apology should focus on Lebow’s actions, rather than Sharoni’s perceptions of them, it said, adding that if he failed to comply, the executive committee would consider appropriate sanctions.

Lebow refused. He also sent an email to colleagues calling his treatment "a horrifying and chilling example of political correctness" that "encourages others to censor their remarks for fear of retribution." In an email to The Chronicle on Sunday, Lebow said he made the joke "to relieve the slight claustrophobia I felt in such a crowded lift."

Another creepy elevator guy, another feminist.

We've seen the Rebecca Watson incident — with the elevator guy who asked her (at 4 a.m.) if she'd like to have coffee and her response, coming days later, in the form of a vlog dinging him for sexualizing her.

Now, for something completely different. A really creepy guy and a really kick-ass feminist:


Little Woman Owns Creepy Elevator Guy - Watch more Funny Videos

Rebecca Watson says she had "a weird time on Bloggingheads" with me.

I enjoyed the conversation and tried to keep it interesting and enjoyable, and I had the impression that she was enjoying talking too. We went 10 minutes over an hour, and afterwards we talked, and she said she enjoyed it. So it's weird for me to read this.

Things didn’t go as I planned, though. While Althouse agreed with me that Dawkins was out of line and my sentiments were fair, she kept saying things that required me to unpack a lot of stuff before moving on. 

Wow! That sounds like good conversation to me. I would love it if someone would talk to me in a way that invited me to go places where I hadn't planned.

For instance, she agreed that Dawkins was smug, but aren’t all atheists smug and that’s kind of the problem? 

Actually, the discussion of the smugness of atheists came long before there was anything about Dawkins. And I never said Dawkins was smug. I was interested in talking about the way Dawkins turned something relatively minor and light into an viral internet event. It was, in fact, Rebecca who introduced the idea that atheists are smug. It was in response to my question why atheists congregate:



See? I just laughed when she said it. A little later, when she's talking about wanting to teach the convention atheists about their sexism, I asked a somewhat elaborate question that includes a reference to the smugness she had mentioned. That was in the context of saying that maybe atheists feel particularly advanced intellectually and might imagine that they can be a little edgy on the subject of gender without deserving (like lesser folk) to be thought of as sexist:



Her response, as you can hear in that clip is to switch to attacking religious people as more smug. As she says at her blog post:

So I had to back up and explain that no, atheists are not all smug just because they think they know the truth. Religious people, I tried to explain, think they know the truth and further many think that others who don’t know the truth are going to burn in Hell when they die. I would have gone on to explain how these same people believe this entire Universe was created especially for them, and what’s more smug than that, but Althouse kept interrupting me.

Okay, I do cut in, but I think I do it gently, trying to bring her back to the question, which wasn't who's smugger, atheists or religious folk, but whether possibly atheists feel less constrained in talking about gender matters. I could have been much more forceful in pointing out that she changed the subject and ran away from looking deeply into the minds of the atheists, instead preferring to drag in a convenient punching bag: those terrible religionists who think other people are going to hell. But I thought I was serving up pretty rich opportunities for her to show her stuff as an excellent spontaneous thinker and speaker (which is what I'm always trying to find for Bloggingheads).

This reminds me. I forgot to ask her a question I wanted to ask about the atheist in the elevator — the man who asked her if she'd like to come to his room for coffee. I wanted to know what she said to him at the time. We know that later, she slammed him in a blog post. And now, here I am, slammed in a blog post of hers days after the encounter. So I'm kind of empathizing with the elevator guy.

Email me, elevator guy!

"And if the elevator tries to bring you down/Go crazy (Punch a higher floor!)."

Prince lyric, which just occurred to me in the context of the feminist-in-the-elevator-at-the-atheist-convention incident. Prince was telling us to live now, because we're all going to die, which he sometimes said clearly — "You better live now/Before the grim reaper come knocking on your door" — and sometimes said absurdly — "Let's look for the purple banana/Until they put us in the truck." He also expressed a clear belief in the afterlife. ("In this life/Things are much harder than in the afterworld/In this life/You're on your own.") He's no atheist. How he behaves in an actual in-this-life elevator, as opposed to a metaphorical elevator, I have no idea. I bet he silently occupies his corner and avoids eye contact, in classic elevator etiquette, and waits for his floor.

Sorry I can't link to a Prince "Let's Go Crazy" video. Prince is super-possessive about his songs and doesn't appreciate the value of letting people like Althouse win him new fans. So here's 1. Beck, "Elevator Music" and 2. Eminem, "Elevator." Beck says:

All the dudes with banjos
Chicks with wicks
Animals with bananas...

Eminem says:

That’s a no no who even she knows dada’s f-cking crazy
Fucking animal, cookoo, bananas, fucking AP

Whether those are purple bananas, I don't know.

ADDED: Actually, for now, at least, here's Prince, "Let's Go Crazy."

AND: For the sake of completeness, there is at least one more elevator/banana song.

"Ann Althouse comes out as a capitalist."

A clip excised by Bloggingheads commenter chamblee54.

If you can't see the problem with asking a woman in an elevator at 4 a.m. if she'd like to come to your hotel room for coffee...

... then you probably can't get laid, says Rebecca Watson, who has some advice for you anyway, advice that includes sex dolls, or — for the poor — fleshlights and watermelons:



Note that Watson posted that video the day after recording the Bloggingheads with me, in which I prodded her a few times about how a man might go about successfully launching a sexual interlude with a female at an atheist convention. Here's my first effort:



And: "So these are socially awkward men. What about their problems?"

"Why don't atheists just move on? Okay, there's no God. Do something else!"

"Why do you have to congregate over being an atheist?"



I talk to "Skepchick" Rebecca Watson, whose story of getting hit on in an elevator at an atheist convention went viral on the internet. The short clip above is me setting up the story. Click continue to the whole discussion.

ADDED: Here's the description of the elevator incident and the discussion that follows: