The lowest common denominator

(TW for discussions of rape)

Sexism has had quite the run over the past few days. For example, there’s been FHM’s lad-to-lad exhortation to not wear your “victim’s” socks,

Virgin Media’s “rape or present” Christmas advertising campaign,

and ruminations by Australian Zoo readers on which half of a woman’s body can be dehumanised more.

Because the top can make you a sandwich but the bottom won't answer back! What wit.

Plus, Michigan’s abortion super bill passed, the global labour gender gap has increased since the financial crisis, and Republican opposition means like the USA’s new secretary of state will probably be John Kerry and definitely not  Susan Rice*. Add this to the normal background noise of oppression that goes on- largely unreported- everywhere else in the world and it’s not looking like we feminists will have the war over by Christmas, so to speak.

Perhaps the most explosive debate that’s been going on over the last two weeks, however, is the spectacular and continuing fail of ostensible feminist allies “The Good Men Project” over some utterly disastrous rape articles. I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know a huge amount about the GMP- I’d been to the website a few times prior to the incident but I don’t remember reading anything particularly insightful or particularly offensive at any point, so I assumed they were a mediocre incarnation of a potentially good idea and decided to continue life as normal. Apparently in doing so I missed some grand decay into one-step-above-legit-MRA-craziness but hey, I’m a development student, I only have a limited amount of time available for watching the self-conscious cogitations of white western men. Anyway, what brought the GMP crashing back into my consciousness, and into full-blown notoriety, was this article from Alyssa Royce on her nice guy rapist friend.

For those who haven’t heard about the case and don’t want to wade through the article itself, I’ll summarise: Alyssa Royce’s friend was flirting with a woman at a party. She passed out in the same room as him, and so he raped her. According to the article, this is a very insightful case of how complicated the real world is and how those complications can tragically lead to wonderful men raping women. We are told that because before she was unconscious, said woman was “[walking] like a fuck and [talking] like a fuck”** and therefore all valid logical inference pointed towards fucking, and this poor nice logical guy is for some reason exempted from also processing “flirtation partner is now unconscious” and making the logical inference to, uh, not fucking. Or, rather, he’s not, because in the moments when the article isn’t excusing rape it’s blathering on about “I know it’s rape guys, it’s totally not OK, but no this guy is so nice so here are more reasons no not justifications or excuses why would I do that Rape Is Bad but seriously NICE GUY OH GOSH”, but.. well, yes. If it walks like an excuse and it talks like an excuse, it’s probably an excuse.

The article is horrible on several levels, but it’s followed by something that people have taken even more offense to: ananonymous piece by an actual rapist about how having a party lifestyle justifies a bit of rape (presented here with Jill Filipovic's excellent commentary). He was once drunk at a party and took a kiss from a woman as a sign to push her up against a wall in full view of the rest of the party and rape her. He also believes he has been raped at parties, which is presented as an additional complicating factor in how we should view his own raping. Again, this is all against a backdrop of “goodness, isn’t the world so darn confusing, how will we ever get consent at all?” which initially seems to be played completely straight by GMP as well, although they’ve since stressed that clearly this guy has some deep psychological issues that it’s probably best for them to distance themselves from. Both articles have since been accompanied by editorial responses justifying the decision to publish these in the name of good intellectual discussion, because these are clearly the insights we need in order to combat rape and rape culture. If we don’t understand how confusing the world is for these poor rapists, how will we ever be able to give them the love and support and easily obtained consensual sex they need to stop raping?

I’m not going to wade in any further on the actual cases presented here, besides hoping that both (especially Royce’s nice guy friend, admittedly the other one is a little less well-described) seem far too insultingly clear-cut to be the catalysts for a frank discussion about the apparent deep complexities of rape and consent. If any friend of mine, no matter how close or nice (and regardless of gender!) told me they’d had sex with a sleeping stranger, I would be deeply, deeply angry with them, because there is absolutely no excuse for what a fucked up thing that is to do***. And yes, I would also be deeply angry at culture, but not in the way GMP seem to want me to be. I would be deeply, deeply frustrated not at the tragic lack of discussion about rape and consent and why rapists rape, but at the fact these discussions do exist, and it’s their very existence that stops us from being able to enshrine some of these super simple facts and actually getting on to discussing some real grey areas.

If you want to read well informed, rigorously researched, interesting articles about the composition and mindset of rapists, they exist. They’re out there. The original studies are admittedly shut off in academic journals which aren’t universally accessible, but they’ve then been reported on by other people and that means pretty much all facts are out there in free form for anybody with five minutes and an internet connection. The question “why do men rape” has been asked, and people have already spent significant amounts of time and energy trying to answer this question as thoroughly and insightfully as possible. This is the point at which we were at when GMP decided to present “my friend raped a woman once” as an aspect of the discussion which we should take seriously. Royce’s response to being told by other women that she was missing a lot of really fundamental facts was to suggest that the existence of said facts has stifled debate and atomistic anecdotal posturing is therefore justified in rekindling that.

But this isn’t what research is for. Yes, having rigorous studies which state that a tiny number of men carry out a large number of rapes does stifle potential lay speculation about a large number of men all occasionally raping, or a rape-amount pyramid dependent on wealth and social status, or a top secret sect of twenty four men and a non-binary identified person with a penis who co-ordinate global sexual assault from a hidden base on Easter Island. It also lets us move forward from having to endlessly debate that point. Want to have a productive discussion about rape and consent? Here’s the facts, let’s take it from here! Said facts are almost certainly missing some nuances- from a development perspective, what jumps out at me is that discussing who rapes in the USA may not be directly applicable to who rapes elsewhere, particularly in conflict zones- and it is important that findings are demonstrated to be repeatable and generalisable, so the existence of a few academic studies certainly doesn’t mean closing the door on a subject forever. However, they do have important implications for where we take our rape and consent discussion next.

For example: we know from facts that consent is actually not this enormous complicated nebulous issue that poor men are on the wrong side of misunderstandings about all the time, because to the vast majority of everybody these things are already utterly crystal clear. Evidence: 94% of men are not rapists. So why are we still pretending that it is hard and stressful and oh maybe we know somebody who was once confused by it and accidentally raped, poor thing- pretending that this is a point that a debate should start from!- when the majority of people this actually protects are serial rapists, whose behaviour we generalise at the expense of our own moral integrity? That is a discussion worth having, but we only get there when we actually use the knowledge we already have to inform where we’re going, instead of just wandering around in little discursive circles all the time and pretending it’s for the sake of debate.

It is, I suppose, an unfortunate byproduct of how much brilliant feminism goes on in blogs and open online communities, that for every discussion we’re constantly open to the noisy, stupid opinions of the lowest common denominator. Sometimes it’s high level stuff like the protracted GMP fail, more usually it’s comments and responses from people who seem utterly devoted to their opinions on subjects on which they know nothing and are committed to learning nothing about.

For one tiny example among millions: A good friend of mine wrote a fantastic letter to FHM and Bauer News Media about their little victim socks “joke”, whose comment section was entirely co-opted by some very concerned gentleman who insisted that a call for a magazine to respect the ethical reasons for not publishing damaging offensive jokes about men having victims was equivalent to us asking for legal censorship on all jokes that could be construed as offensive by any person ever- painting a picture of a dystopian future where the price of women not being assaulted would be the non-existence of “Family Guy”.

Discussing the things that might actually have been interesting about the letter was therefore subsumed by beating our collective heads against the immovable wall of this guy’s ignorance. None of us learned anything, because the “debate” was beneath the level where anything interesting could be learned. There’s actually a word used by some of the race blogs I follow, whose owners are also too often trapped going around in circles with the obnoxiously ignorant (including, unfortunately, some white feminists), which describes these sorts of people perfectly: “basic”. People who are not on the right level to be debating topics, and who are completely unwilling to get there. Unfortunately, the more open we are to everyone’s “opinions”, the more we run the risk of simply rehashing the most basic of debates with the most basic of people. In doing so, we leave less time and energy for actual progression to non-basic topics.

I’m aware that this might sound horribly elitist, and that’s not my intention at all. One of the most vital points of feminism is in changing and diversifying the voices we hear in our societies, and providing platforms for people to speak is the most important part of this. We also live in a world where intellectual capital is not equally accessible to all people, and where women are far more likely to underestimate and undervalue their own expertise than men are, meaning that the terms of participation for these platforms can’t be academic or elitist in nature and still meaningfully achieve their goals. But listening to more voices is not the same as legitimising everyone, and it’s an insult to the entire concept to suggest that the voice of an unrepentant rapist needs as much (or more!) of our time as rape victims, or women who can’t leave their houses after dark for fear of rape, or even of repentant rapists. It’s impossible to cut out nonsense entirely of course, or even for any one person or group of people to objectively say what is and isn’t listening to. But at the very least, trying to provoke or lead a debate about rape or any other feminist topic carries with it a responsibility about knowing the point of having that debate- what came before and what it teaches us, and what gaps in our knowledge we still need to explore. Similarly, participating requires having insights and being willing to be educated when our own knowledge is incomplete.

This requires creating the right spaces, making information accessible and readable to as many people as possible, and these are definitely areas to work on. It may also involve denying access to debate for people who have proven themselves utterly unwilling to learn. However, it does not involve saying controversial, incorrect things and then stating that “provoking discussion” justifies their existence. Doing that, as GMP have proved, just leaves us stuck in the realms of the lowest common denominator, and that’s not a discussion that’s truly worth our time.

(P.S. For a better discussion of the actual case, this is amazing. That is all.)

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*Just to clarify, feminism doesn’t mean I automatically support all female candidacies above all male ones, but all else being equal I do think putting people who aren’t white men into visible political positions (especially ones with such international weight) sends out a much better signal than business as usual. China, take note.

**I’ve made you scroll all the way down here just to meditate some more on how horribly regressive and objectifying that statement is. “It” is not a “fuck”. She is a woman. Good grief. Anyway, yes, carry on.

***Related: George Galloway just won a sexist of the year award for calling previously discussed scuzzbucket Julian Assange’s use of this tactic “bad sexual etiquette”- even beating Assange himself, apparently.

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.