Thinking like a feminist

A couple of weeks ago, I got rather angry. This is not in itself a gripping news event, both because I am a relatively uninteresting young woman of no particular importance to the rest of the world and because I spend a significant amount of my life getting rather angry about things. I was an easily enraged person long before I identified as a feminist, and I hope to be one long after the patriarchy comes crashing down around our heads and feminist identification is no longer necessary (which is going to happen any day now, right?) However, this was the first time that getting angry led to my getting to speak at a conference right after the UN Deputy Secretary General, so in the context of my life it was a relatively important event.

What happened was, my school, who are not known for giving significant notice of important events at the best of times, decided to e-mail my class during the week when we were all busy working to a thesis deadline, asking for proposals for a two minute slot talking about China’s development in Colombia’s State of the Planet conference (there are various school related reasons about why this was a Thing which are very dull and irrelevant). The evening before the deadline- which just so happened to be a Saturday evening, just to add insult to injury- S. told me that he was preparing a proposal of majestic proportions. After reminding myself of what he was actually talking about (thesis deadlines are pretty all-consuming sometimes!), some remarks on bad timing and the importance of not being lame on a Saturday night ensued; then I jokingly suggested that, As A Feminist, I should write one about “teh Wimminz” to defeat his manly well thought out “triple bottom line” approach.

To which he told me that, if I wanted women’s concerns to be included in the Sustainable Development Goals, I could always write a paragraph that he could put in “in one form or another”, but he didn’t really see how I’d be able to write a whole proposal from my own perspective.* Development is about people, after all, not women. Needless to say (it is what I started the post with after all), this did not go down well in the Land of Adrienne. What followed was an incredibly lame Saturday evening of coffee, feminist inspired socially based sustainable development goals and a monologue of “I’ll show that twatbag, girly paragraph in his manly proposal is it, why don’t we see which other manly places I can stick this feminist paragraph, bloody wanking tosspot” &c. &c. By the end, I was too caffeinated and rage-addled to sleep and ended up sinking into a vague stupor of feminist developmental rage until the morning.

Upon rousing, I had another look and it turned out that my anger-induced views on sustainable development goals were actually not too bad, although to be fair they were nothing particularly groundbreaking either. I submitted and through various- largely luck-based- mechanisms, ended up landing the slot. Then, ironically, I ended up having to cut the thing down so heavily to fit into the time slot that I almost ended up losing the explicit references to gender-related targets entirely. As it is, to the casual observer, my feminism kind of does look like a paragraph in the middle of someone else’s socialist idealism. A fitting end to a misinterpreted joke, perhaps.

Except that’s not the right distinction. The ten seconds of my two minute speech where I explicitly make reference to breaking down stereotypes about female leadership in China through international goals about female representation do not represent my feminism hanging out in the middle of a bunch of totally objective other stuff about social development in general. The reason all of that other stuff is in there, is also because I’m a feminist. I could have just as easily written an hour long speech about the same subject, still from a feminist perspective, and it would have contained the same proportion of specifically gendered stuff. That’s why it’s so infuriating for people to mistake “being a feminist” for “having a narrow focus”- even beyond the fact that women are 50% of the human race, and therefore talking about women ought to cover half the relevant things about humankind, which is also about as much as you can cover by using “people” as a proxy for “men”.

No, it’s more than that. The day I signed up for my feminist license (totally a thing), I didn’t stand there and swear an oath that the only thing I would ever talk, write or think about from that day forth would directly involve uteruses, boobs, bras, Judy Blume, bell hooks, yoga, skimmed milk or a combination of the above. I just looked one final time at how the majority of the world likes to generalise from “men” to “people”, and to use the word “girly” like it’s some sort of degrading insult… and I decided to stop framing things that way. All of the things. Given a bit of knowledge on the subject, I could literally talk about everything from breakfast cereal to cartography to East Timorese politics using this lens- some of it would come out looking the same as if I’d framed it using the patriarchy, of course, but I would still be applying feminism to it and I wouldn’t have to just refer to women in order to do it. To bring out a ridiculously outdated and overused move reference, the day I started being a feminist was the day I took the red pill**. Now I am outside the Man-Matrix, looking in, and let me tell you it’s an interesting view.

Of course, putting this way makes the whole thing sound a bit edgier and more awesome than it is. Once one has taken the step- conscious or otherwise- to not look at things from a patriarchal perspective, there’s a sense of incredible freedom, but it comes at the price of nobody back in the Man-Matrix really understanding where you’re coming from any more. It’s particularly prevalent when talking about actual “women’s issues” like birth control and abortion, where discussions are too often characterised as feminists vs. other people (they’re not). Most of my information about this comes through the lens of listening to other people talk about US politics, which I have no more than a general interest in, but when blustering Tory moron Jeremy Hunt decided to weigh in on UK abortion law a few days ago, I had my feminist fury activated with the stupidity of the debate. How can they be talking about survival ages when the entire point is about not forcing human beings to use their bodies to support the lives of other organisms! And yet perhaps, without being outside the Man-Matrix, it really is just accepted that some humans will have to do this and some will not and the way we draw that distinction is of no interest to society. It’s what my old Philosophy tutor used to refer to as the War of Incredulous Glances- how can we get anywhere near a political debate when it’s not being held anywhere near our own terms?

So, are feminists really doomed to be the human equivalent of the 52 Hz whale, wandering the earth singing our high pitched lady songs whilst the rest of the whales hang out in different registers? Women and feminine people have been banging on about our own value and rights as more than just ornamentation for centuries, in one way or another and there’s been significant scholarship on the issue for a rather long time too; yet here we still are, being asked to be paragraphs in the books of men. I guess the only way forward is to keep demonstrating that we are talking about it. I’ve no great love for Australia’s Julia Gillard (because, did you know, it’s possible for different people to see things through a feminist lens and come to different political conclusions, another thing the rest of the world seems to struggle with at times- although maybe it’s just because it’s more entertaining to view disagreements between feminists as bitchy irrelevant catfights!), but like many women I was incredibly excited by her sustained attack on the misogyny of Tony Abbott, the leader of the opposition, simply because it forced a patriarchal institution to at least listen to a feminist criticism of a man’s*** behaviour in a realm which isn’t traditionally “female”. Because maybe then we teach people that feminism is relevant to that realm, and we can actually move on to talking about the real issues as a society, rather than whether or not women should just shut up and move back to the kitchen.

(Transcript here)

 It’s imperfect, of course. For every person who goes “wow that was an inspiring instance of behaviour”, there’s another one going “haha, stupid woman” and yet another going “but she opposes gay marriage and literally cut benefits to single parent families on the same day as this happened, which negates all value of this speech”. If you’re reading this at the time of writing and really want to appreciate how enormously diverse (and largely stupid) reactions to feminism are, try looking at the #sorryfeminists hashtag on Twitter- something which started as an in-joke mocking stereotypes about feminism which has now been co-opted to perpetuate stereotypes about feminism, mock feminists from an MRA perspective, give non-feminist women a space to vent vague confusion about feminism and give the occasional wit the space to make a blowjob joke to an unreceptive audience. To be fair, it was a vague joke to start with, but the speed and aplomb with which the majority of people have completely missed the point is pretty depressing from this standpoint. Especially talking over the internet, where people can express quickly and rudely about their point-missing, knowing that the only way forward is to talk to those who literally don’t have the mindset to interpret what you’re saying in the way you mean it is an extremely depressing thought.

Still, we keep going, largely because we all kind of have to. The point of the Matrix is that you don’t get to plug back in- that bad guy who tried to ended up getting horribly electrocuted, remember?- and, in the same way, once you start thinking about things from a feminist perspective, I don’t think it’s possible to ever go back to not caring (unless it really is about breakfast cereal in which case yeah I’m pretty sure I think about that in the same way as everybody else.) Tomorrow, I’ll give a feminist speech about sustainable development that nobody will really know is feminist, because it’s really not possible for me to write any other kind of speech without regarding it as an exercise in fiction. I’m sure plenty of people in the audience will automatically disagree with my being too idealistic, too socially focused, too uninterested in easily measured goals. That’s OK, they don’t understand why it’s important to me. Maybe one day they will.

(Want to watch me take Columbia University by storm? Go to http://stateoftheplanet.org on October 11 and watch the live webcast at about 9.40am New York Time. That’s 9.40pm Beijing time, 2.40pm British Summer time. If you live somewhere else, you do the maths!

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*I’m being a bit disingenuous, to be fair- the implication was that it would be impossible to write a comprehensive two-minute speech about the topic from a feminist perspective, rather than that I would be incapable of doing it. It’s still wrong, of course, but not actually a personal insult.

**It’s red because menstruation. Really.

*** Though if Australia’s parliamentary behaviour is anything like the UK’s, it should more strictly be “institution’s”. 

Guns, germs, steel and really poor casting decisions

Last week was the start of a new term* for me, and with the start of a new term comes that most wonderful event, the first classes. An entire week of unusually high attendance, earnest professors, self-introductions and my personal favourite, the mystical marking schemes and course outlines that appear once embedded in a PowerPoint and then are never referred to again. The sense of ennui that this whole process inspires was exacerbated by the fact that most of the people in most of my classes are people whose self-introductions (and more…) I have been subjected to for over a year now, so whilst we all continue to find each other fascinating in oh so many ways, hearing for the eighteenth time where somebody was born or went to university is not one of them.

Fortunately, to counter this, many of my professors have apparently decided to be “hip” this term and punctuate their teaching with multimedia experiences! And so it was that at 4.00 on a Friday afternoon, after sitting through a couple of hours of questions about our lives and preferences which nobody should be asked an hour before the weekend, we all got to watch the first part of Jared Diamond’s “Guns,Germs and Steel”. The documentary is all online, so here's a link in case you have an hour to kill watching National Geographic adaptations of development classics.

This isn’t a development blog, so I won’t go into too much detail about Diamond’s theories**, but the basic premise is that all of human inequality can be explained by recourse to- yes, you guessed it- guns, germs and “steel”, i.e. technology. The part of it we were watching concerned the initial development of humankind, and how the development of wheat and barley farming and the domestication of goats in the Middle East, technologies which then spread across Eurasia, led to Europeans becoming colonising douchebags thousands of years later and screwing every other continent over despite only being superior by geographical accident. In other continents, where there weren’t good animals to domesticate or nutritionally balanced crops to exploit, communities didn’t have the people to spare to become technological specialists rather than food producers and technology therefore went nowhere.

It’s an interesting theory which makes good intuitive sense right up until one asks oneself why, if both Europe and Asia benefited from the same favourable conditions, it was specifically Europe who became the colonising douchebags and not East Asia. China was, after all, technologically superior for most of human history!*** I honestly don’t know if Diamond has an answer to this or not in the rest of the TV show or the book (although it’s a pretty glaring oversight if he’s not thought about it at all), but it does seem to me the book ought to be called “Guns, Germs, Steel and Poor Life Choices Made By Western Europe”, for accuracy’s sake. Although, to be fair, Jared Diamond is a published author and I am writing feminist tirades on Blogspot, so perhaps I should defer to him on the subject of book titles. He seems to know what he’s doing.

I’m getting severely sidetracked here. The point is, I watched the video with my classmates, and it was very interesting, even though it is narrated by an American and therefore very hard to take seriously. But it also made me extremely mad, in a way that has nothing to do with half-baked oversimplified approaches to history and development. In order to help us understand global inequalities, the movie regularly juxtaposed scenes from modern Papua New Guinea, where being asked a question about inequality by an angry man one day provided the inspiration for Diamond’s search for truth, and acted-out scenes from Back In The Day, when mankind was first learning to farm and building settlements in the Fertile Crescent. And yes, I used mankind deliberately just then, because the makers of this video (or, at least, their casting directors!) seemed pretty clear on the fact that it was mankind who made these great initial leaps in human history.

To make my point, I decided to take a foray into the world of screencaps. I learned two things from this little endeavour: the first is that taking screencaps is quite hard, and everything seems to be blurry; but unfortunately we’ll all just have to live with that. The second thing is that National Geographic needs to have a serious think about its casting directors, because these things do not line up.

So the video starts off with hunter-gatherers doing hunting and gathering, both in modern Papua New Guinea and in Cinematic Prehistory. These dudes are all men, which makes sense because I suspect it’s quite hard to be a hunter whilst pregnant (though having never tried either, I would welcome evidence to the contrary). Then we’re told that hunting doesn’t really provide enough food, so pre-agricultural communities also had to rely a lot on gathering! Here are the modern gatherers of Papua New Guinea, felling and processing a sago tree:

Women and axes!

Women carrying stuff!

Women and a stick!

            This all looks very difficult and time consuming, and we therefore get a shot of Diamond sitting in a swamp pontificating on the scarcity of these trees and their nutritional inadequacy. Whilst he is doing this, he is surrounded by hard-working New Guinean women, because as the voice over explicitly points out, it is women who do this work.

Meanwhile, in Cinematic Prehistory, the gatherers of the Fertile Crescent had easier and better things to gather, namely wheat and barley. Here are the people of Cinematic Prehistory gathering wheat and barley.

Hey guys, I lost my wedding ring!

Face shots are for posers.

Prehistoric silhouette dude

The video is more coy than I remember about actually showing these people clearly, but it's my contention that over 50% of the actors, and all of the prominently featured ones, are men. Which is interesting, because it was also the men of Cinematic Prehistory who were chasing that deer through the forest earlier. Our cinematic male antecedents must have been extraordinarily resourceful people if they were able to find more than twice the necessary calories for their individual survival, just so they could keep their women and children alive whilst said women sat around looking photogenic on a rock somewhere.

(I’m joking, of course, because standing around looking photogenic on a rock was a non gender-specific activity in Cinematic Prehistory.)

This difference continues into the discussion of agriculture. You see, the real reason that the people of Cinematic Prehistory were on that rock was to survey the terrible effects of Cinematic Prehistoric Climate Change. It turns out that existing so temporally close to an ice age really wreaks havoc on one’s Cinematic Prehistoric life plans! But we must remember that Cinematic Prehistory is very full of resourceful people men, and these men are about to do something amazing, i.e. farm those grasses from earlier! Here is Cinematic Prehistoric Man learning to farm.

Important men doing important manly activities. Like progress.

Manly man sowing. Not sewing, that's for girls.

... Women? Is that you?

Someday, son, you too will have an awesome Cinematic Prehistory beard.

SO HARDCORE.

Yes, I accept those people at the back of a couple of shots might be women, and that child with the goats may in fact be Arya Stark. I spent a long time looking at these scenes and I played a lot of “spot the female”, and I accept that they probably do exist in these shots. But they are not foreground in any of them. Sure, Prehistoric Cinematic Woman helped out a bit in the most revolutionary lifestyle change in human history, but there’s no way she was the main event!

For comparison, here’s modern Papua New Guineans farming.

Women! There you are!

A man is helping here. Good on you, man.

A man in a tree. Yep.

Pigs are not helpful livestock, alas.

            The roles are literally reversed. Apart from the man in the banana tree, who I will admit is pretty prominent, these are “spot the male” photos. Women are getting this stuff done in this society which is supposed to be parallel to Cinematic Prehistory in every way but the type of plants and animals being used.

            What does this say about how we think about human development? I’m sure that when National Geographic were thinking about how to present Cinematic Prehistory, they weren’t sitting in a board room going “well we all know women didn’t do anything, so we don’t need to show any of them prominently”. But, apparently, despite probably knowing how things were done in Papua New Guinea, it made perfect intuitive sense that the people to depict as innovators of the human race should all be male. Because Papua New Guinea is, the video takes pains to tell us, stagnant.  It produces no “cargo” (the New Guinean word for “cool stuff from abroad”, apparently). And maybe, on some level, it makes sense to us that this stagnant society is one that relies so heavily on womanpower, and that this aspect of its agriculture could not possibly be one of the hallmarks of a society that innovates. I mean, we live in a society where it is apparently not insane to believe that the entire of human civilisation was built by men so thatsexy women could sit around looking pretty and getting adored***! How could a society where women were playing these roles have the same level of progress?

            I sincerely hope that to most of my readers, the above looks like bullshit- if you’ll pardon my French. Certainly the little I know about prehistoric innovation (which basically comes from this one article that doesn’t cite its sources) suggests that this view of prehistoric human history is bullshit. But I also suspect that to a lot of people, this also looks like a total non-issue. Cinematic Prehistory is not real prehistory, after all, so does it really matter what gender the actors in it are?

            Perhaps not, as an individual case. But one of the strangest things about being A Feminist is how regularly things start to look this way- designed by people who almost certainly had the best intentions, but for some reason just couldn’t avoid unconsciously making these incredibly stupid decisions. Doctor Who is like that, these days, and for all it is still my favourite television show ever and I will love it, and Amy Pond, until the day I die, it still hurts that it’s apparently being helmed by people who just won’t think. My previously mentioned Favourite Writer Ever, Caitlin Moran, has a chapter in which she mentions how women have never ever done anything of artistic or technological worth, complete with a “feminists will try to tell you this isn’t true but think about it ladies, you know it is”, which just goes to show how I couldn’t even cover half the nonsense that got through the editing process in that book. We live in a world now where most of us know beyond a shadow of a doubt that women are supercool awesome powerful terrifying people capable of moving mountains (and, most importantly, for reasons other than babies), and yet when we retreat into culture, or start making culture of our own, we come up against all of these odd tropes and prejudices that too often have nothing to do with reality or how we experience it.

Like Diamond, I carry my own set of “statements made by [sometimes] angry men” which spur me on to figuring out what the truth about our human world and the people in it actually is. One of them is the assertion by a classmate, R., that he will never be a feminist because “feminism is a reaction, and women deserve better”. He is right on both counts, though obviously I don’t agree with his implied causality or his conclusion. I would love to live in a world where I can watch a stupid development video on Friday afternoon without going into a blinding feminist rage; my feminism will be pretty much useless when these unconsciously depressing gendered decisions stop being made. I very much look forward to that moment. Until then, annoying people like me are going to keep reacting to and pointing out these things, hoping that someday we might not have anything left to react to.

"History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men. What is history? History is women following behind. With the bucket."

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*They’re technically “semesters” but as I am British (and so are the vast majority of my readership), I refuse to bastardise my language any more than is necessary in a world which mostly doesn’t know what a “chip” is. So let’s stick with “terms”.

**I also haven’t read the book or seen the rest of the TV show. So please direct all your sophisticated Jared Diamond-related questions elsewhere.

*** There are loads of fascinating theories about why this pre-modern superiority didn’t lead to an Asian industrial revolution which might have at least prevented China from its own nasty experiences with colonisation. Unfortunately they’re completely off-topic for this blog, so I’ll keep myself in check.

Murky musings on Julian Assange

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.