Dawkins sounds off. Lots of atheists upset.

Sorry for dropping in on this conversation/discussion, one that has been going on for some time.
It seems to me that there is a fundamental disconnect between the way men and women feel threat and the situations that make them feel this way.
This leads to men finding women in threat outside their experience and women finding men heartless for callous for not being tuned in to a reality for many of their sex.
I am a male, working in a female dominated environment, and I can understand the disconnect and how a situation, a proposition in an elevator in Dublin can be so casual for a male and so threatening for a female.
I can also see how an intelligent man like Dawkins can get things so wrong in his comments, but remain a good man, simply ignorant to the female mindset, as familiar as he is with the male one.
What also tells me that this is core issue, is how the argument degraded quickly into a war of sides, a war of intellectuals throwing forum comments at each other, as seen on Skepchicks own site as well as others.

A man, hammered in a lift, with an attractive woman he has probably had his eye on for a hour or more, thinks in his mind "the thing to do now is propose sex, what a good idea"

He makes the statement.

The woman on the other hand is frightened, she doesn't know this guy, even if she made his acquaintance their is no reason there was a sexual component to it, and then here is a man making such a request.
Recent female media behaviour might suggest that women are behaving more and more like men, but is this seems to be more a construct to create a demographic of young women who drink to excess and treat sex casually.
The truth is, as much as some men may wish it to be so, most women take a completely different approach to sex.

And so, back in the lift.
The woman is appalled but conceals her anxiety until she gets out of the situation.

Remember this took place in a confined elevator, a place that causes anxiety for many to begin with, although a woman alone in any situation may feel similarly threatened,
I have had female friends threatened sexually by certain behaviours in crowed spaces.

Ultimately many men fail to see what went wrong here, why did the woman over react to a proposition that had mo mal intent, but what the men don't recognise is, how on earth is the woman supposed to know what the mans intent is?

Truth of it is that behaviour is often shaped by past experience, reinforced again and again by results that conform to expectations.
When a man makes a sexual proposition to a woman the womans past experience is that of the aggression and threatening behaviour that a rejection results in.
I have had enough female friends who have experienced this, especially during my college days.
So, is it any wonder that, in a confined elevator space a woman does not really know what she is potentially in store for when she turns a man down?
She wonders, has he waitied to get me here, alone, to ask me?

The man, on the other hand, has no idea, or at least in this situation he had no idea.
Too often men know damn well what they are doing and machismo demands that they at least make some protest or comment to cope with the rejection.
This common in pubs and clubs and is a pain to see in a public place.
Imagine it, once again, in a small confined space like an elevator...

That's my take on it anyway.

I think Dawkins just doesn't get it, which is a pity, but then that is always the ways with heroes, they turn out to have feet of clay after all and the pedestal is, perhaps, ill deserved in this instance.