On the other hand...

Gawker has a story about Richard Dawkins weighing in rather unpopularly on a bit of behavior within the skeptic community.  A man, at the end of a long conference party, slipped into the same elevator as a woman and invited her to come back for coffee.  The woman was married, had given a talk about sexist behaviour in the 'skeptical community'.  She rebuffed him and he went away.  Then her mild complaint was taken up by a horrified geek chorus, and then the Dawk weighed in, trying (very clumsily) to make the point that there probably needs to be space in the skeptical community for bad manners to be practiced without them causing injuries. Society is a rough and tumble place, he could have said.  This man might be a creep, but unless you want him to ask your father, husband or older brother first, this kind of experience might be the price of sexual freedom, and its impact depends entirely on your willingness to accept that you are powerful enough.  If you are seeing yourself primarily as vulnerable, then this sort of thing is going to be terrible.  If you're not, then this sort of thing is yet another reminder that you're better.

This, I suspect, is at the bottom of a lot of men's worries about feminism.  If a man thinks he's equal to another man, he doesn't set up a lot of special conditions for his entry into the contest.  He's equal. If women are so equal, why all the special pleading?  Go for it - compete and win.  Do excellent work, share solidarity with each other.  Axiom of this position: Power cannot be given, only taken. Power given is power that can be rescinded.  (I think this is the reason that Bob Ellis and Scott Adams both seem to react to societal expectation of respectful sexual behaviour as if it required cutting their johnsons off.)

No one can look at the vulnerability of women and think it is the same as that of men. A woman and a man in an elevator are not equal.  The woman is probably not as strong as the man.  They can be equal in Adorno's 'bios' political life, but not in physical 'zoe' existence.  (The man, of course, can't bear children or inspire 4am sex pleas, and is vulnerable to all kinds of manipulation and social pressures, to karoushi (working to death)).  It's like saying Rock and Paper are equal.

The other problem, of course, is that there are no agreed standards of behaviour.  This strategy might have worked several times before.  It might work in a less defensive community than the skeptical community, which is defensive from the ground up.  (These are folks forming a huddle to beat the intellectual stuffing out of astrology together. They will spend days at it.)  If this was a well-defined solecism, it might be easier to get a conviction, but if you're going to define that as a solecism it might be difficult to maintain properly casual sex for the young atheist.