So yesterday I hopped a couple of time zones to get back to
my termtime home in charming Beijing. I’ve got a half-unpacked suitcase staring
me in the face, my jetlag coping mechanism is frankly bordering on narcolepsy,
and many of the things I wanted to write about are becoming progressively less
and less relevant as time continues its tyrannical march forwards. A perfect
time, in other words, to write about the timelessly tiring case of Julian
Assange.
Now I’m aware that this blog has, thus far, not exactly been
a multimedia experience. And that also, although I may spend several hours
every day meditating on the feminist puzzles presented by Assange and his like,
others may be less clear on who this man dude is and what he has got up to
recently. In order to kill two birds with one stone, therefore, I present a mood board
which should refresh your memory on everything Assange in one easy visual step:
This hopefully absolves me of having to actually go through
all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of What’s Up With That Wikileaks Guy
(transcontinental edition!), because frankly I’ve been going over the whole
thing for hours and I still have no idea how to make a coherent story of this
whole case. The basic tale is that Australian “Rockstar
Journalist” Julian Assange, head of controversial news agency Wikileaks
(which famously got hold of a whole load of US diplomatic cables a few years
back thanks to a certain B. Manning- the USA was not pleased), went off to
Sweden in 2010 and found himself in bed with a couple of women. Said women then
went to the police, initially to force Assange to take a HIV test, but processes
led to charges of rape being filed. Sweden filed extradition requests with the
UK, who complied; Assange, however, had other ideas- fearing extradition to the
USA, where he might face the death penalty for treason (or whatever Americans have
that is treason but different, I can’t be bilexical all the time), he goes
through various appeals against extradition, during which time he was placed
under house arrest. Appeals fail, man takes logical next step and goes to Ecuador.
Or, at least, the next best thing in London city centre, which is the
Ecuadorian embassy. Ecuador, for its part, gets to be a paragon of upholding
the values of human liberty, at least among certain circles. How novel.
It’s all a bit murky, even before one gets into the sex bit.
For instance, there have not yet been any formal charges by Sweden against Assange,
because these can’t be filed before a second round of questioning with the man,
and prosecutor Marianne Ny refuses to do this until Assange is extradited. Fair
enough, but Assange doesn’t need to be extradited for these interviews
to take place, as arrangements between the UK and Sweden are in place to allow
the whole thing to take place in Britain- but for reasons of her own, Ny hasn’t.
Meaning the case drags on, Assange remains in “Ecuador” and the Wikileaks website gets to put up the number of
days Assange has been arrested without charge in angry black letters at the top
of its homepage. And the whole business
regarding potential extradition “onwards” also seems weird, given that Sweden
does not habitually send people to countries where they face the death penalty.
The part of the story where Ecuador- a country currently trying
to outlaw protest so the state can acquire resource-rich land with less social
uproar- becomes the chosen land of diplomatic freedom is probably more
darkly amusing than confusing, although it does give me a fabulous reason to
hate Rafael Correa, who publically sympathised with Assange’s plight by
basically saying “that’s
not rape in Ecuador”.
Yes, here we
go, onto what you knew was going to be the subject of this Most Feminist
Inquiry into the Life And Sexytimes of Julian Assange. I mean, we’re hundreds
of words in and yet I’ve only mentioned three or four women, right?* So let’s
move on to the murkiest, and most disturbing, and, As A Feminist, most
depressing, part of this story: rape. Or “surprise sex”. Or “sexual assault”,
or “harassment”, or “molestation”, or whatever words we want to use to get out
of applying that rather unpleasant r-word to a case which, really, we’d rather
just be about the politics.
Because that
word is scary, and we therefore want it to be narrow. If anything, I’d say that
the vague obsession with talking about Swedish rape law as “surprise sex” is
because whatever happened in two Swedish apartments in 2010**** was
emphatically not, to throw another silly descriptor into the mix, “attack sex”.
It wasn’t a Bad Man standing in a dark alley waiting to attack an innocent
virgin girl; it was a meeting between two adults that turned bad. The women
even wanted him there to begin with, and say that they engaged in consensual
sexual acts before the non-consensual ones. In other words, this was the kind
of sex that Republicans
think you can become pregnant from (for the record, just typing that hurt
me a little). Throwing a rape allegation into a case about freedom of
information and the legitimacy of secret intelligence networks is extremely
discomfiting, so we are offered all these “softeners” to help it go down
easier. It wasn’t really rape, it was surprise
sex- and what an odd law that is, eh?
No. Hell no. It
seems that this is a point where my feminist goggles truly do make me different
from quite a lot of the world, because despite the apparent prevalence of the
above opinion I cannot fathom how any intelligent, humanity-respecting
individual can’t process something as simple as “no consent = rape”. We’re not
in caricatured feudal Europe here, where roving castle lords get to take lusty
maidens whenever and wherever they want. Women are not “asking for it” every
time they wear an outfit that reminds men that they are a woman. Sex slavery might
still an awful reality, but it’s not legal. I’m sorry to say- and I really,
truly hope that this is not coming as news to you- that you cannot buy a season
ticket to a vagina. Not even a full-day pass. Consent is a moment to moment
thing, and without consent, sex is rape.*****
It’s really,
truly, not rocket science. After all, in this day and age sex is supposed to be
fun! Many women have freed themselves from semi-compulsory babies and
semi-compulsory marriage, and whilst it’s still not an equal playing field out
there in terms of gendered social stigma, things have got better for women who
like shagging. If sex isn’t fun, then the prevailing opinion is that you’re
doing it wrong. People who advocate consent aren’t suggesting that sex partners
sit down beforehand and thrash out a legal contract- just to be crystal clear
on what is no (the word “no” is a good start) and what is yes (again, the word “yes”
works wonders, at least in the English speaking world), and to have enough
respect for the other person (or people) to ask what’s going on if the signals
aren’t clear. So why are we not automatically, as humans, condemning people who
are fully aware that their partners don’t want to have sex, but are carrying on
regardless (or even enjoying the lack of enjoyment)? How can that be anything,
ever, except rape? Why are we trying to turn it into something decent- not how
we’d want sex, of course, but if that’s what they’re into, and if person B didn’t
like it then they shouldn’t have let person A into their house in the first
place, and so on? After all, men
aren’t werewolves (and nor are women)- no amount of horniness in a impairs
judgement to the point where one “cannot stop”. We can all stop, if we’re
decent human beings. Rapists choose not to.
None of this
has anything specificity to Julian Assange. If he did what his two accusers
said he did- use his body weight to pin down a woman so he could have sex with her
after she’d asked him to stop, or initiate condomless sex with a sleeping woman
he’d only known for a day (after she’d been arguing with him the entire
previous night about using condoms every time, because STIs are kind of a thing Assange, and so are babies)- then under Swedish law and under what I truly wish were
commonly held standards of interpersonal decency, he raped them. If that’s not
true, he didn’t. Unfortunately, there’s a whole deeper level of murkiness which
throws doubt on whether this will ever play out in a court of law. Naomi Wolf
(more on her later!) made
the feminist world cringe with a lot of her
reaction to the rape allegations, but her remarks
about the weirdness of the case are pretty insightful. The depressing
take-home message is that the case isn’t being prosecuted like a rape, because on
some levels it’s being taken seriously, and even in “feminist paradise” Sweden
that’s not a normal state of affairs for a non Bad-Man-In-Dark-Alley rape.
Maybe that’s a necessary evil in a realm of law which is so tied up in people’s
most private lives, where almost every case is going to be one person’s word
against another. The percentages of deliberately misreported rape- these “honey
pots” that various men in power just tragically
seem to fall into on occasion, pretty women put there just to tempt weak silly
men, poor things- are on a par with other misreported crimes, at around 2-4%,
but it’s always going to be hard to prove things that happen (usually) between
two people in very intimate settings. But surely that just makes it more
important to stress what consent is and how we can police ourselves.
And that’s why
Assange’s case is so depressing. Because behind the murk and the politics,
there’s just a whole lot of doubt about these rape charges and why they’re
around. Maybe this individual instance really is a honey trap, a cunning ploy
by a CIA agent to get Assange double-extradited to the USA where he can sit in
a jail cell for revealing what the world’s dictators eat for breakfast. But
that wouldn’t change what they would mean if they were true. Focusing on Sweden’s
“odd” rape laws rather misses the point of what they are trying to achieve-
even if Swedish authorities have little interest in enforcing them. Whatever happens
here, we’ve tied up what should be a progressive definition of rape into a web
of skulduggery and intrigue that throws scepticism on the entire process. And
unfortunately that means, whatever happens to Assange, women lose.
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*Although I’ve
also only mentioned two or three men**, so my closet misandrist ratios aren’t
suffering too much. Plus an excellent picture of William Hague on a waterslide!
His throwing of that little diplomatic wobbly where he threatened to revoke the
sovereignty of the Ecuadorian embassy didn’t make it into my earlier summary,
which is a very tragic state of affairs. I hope you are nobody is relying on
this blog as a sole news source***, you would be missing out on a fair bit of important contextualisation…
**If my
counting is confusing you, this
may be of interest.
*** Related: I’d
just like to extend a very special welcome to the six visitors who apparently
found their way here through a Russian sex site earlier today. It’s great to
see my audience getting so cosmopolitan this early in the blogging process.
****And I’d
just like to stress at this point that we
don’t know what happened, Assange is not a convicted rapist or even a charged
one. He is, however, a man taking a lot of pains to avoid being charged and
brought to trial.
***** This goes
for people of all genders, but I think bias towards rape as a women’s issue is somewhat
justified both in terms of statistics (i.e who gets raped) and through the simple
fact that there are fewer men who find themselves in bed with women who can physically
coerce them. But of course it happens, and we should take it just as seriously.
