In order to highlight how extremely unedifying some of the commentary on the Assange case has been, I’ll start by linking to a post by Richard Seymour who refuses to ‘participate in typical patriarchal denigration of women reporting rape’ and goes on to deplore those who do:
Last year, there was an unbelievable spectacle: a very large number of people on the Left who said that the rape allegations were not serious – that is, the allegations were about consensual sex and were only regarded as rape in Sweden’s kooky local culture.
Even if you don’t agree with the rest of his analysis, his wish to compartmentalise the different issues seems a perfectly reasonable one.
Socialist Unity by contrast is just ghastly. Their latest post is the one from ‘Women against Rape’ which was discussed here too. We are not allowed to violate their site by linking directly so you’ll have to cut and paste this.
http://www.socialistunity.com/we-are-women-against-rape-but-do-not-want-julian-assange-extradited/
A woman who ventures to criticise this post is attacked in the comments as a ‘right wing extreme feminist’. http://www.socialistunity.com/we-are-women-against-rape-but-do-not-want-julian-assange-extradited/#comment-616490
One of their recent posts seems – to coin a phrase – to represent an attempt to ‘feminist-wash’ the blog. It’s taken from a book published by Laurie Penny over a year ago.
http://www.socialistunity.com/branded-bodies-by-laurie-penny/
Meanwhile Socialist Unity’s John Wight has been branching out to the HuffPo – a piece called ‘In Defence of George Galloway’. Here’s a typical passage:
The truth is that rape has become such a politically loaded issue in this country it is impossible to have an honest discussion about it without feeling like you’re walking through a minefield of hysteria and semantic traps, designed to trip you up if you dare deviate from the path of an unwritten but no less rigid consensus, which is that any man accused of rape under any circumstances is guilty until proven innocent – with anyone who suggests it should be the other way round no better than a rapist him or herself.
‘Minefield of hysteria and semantic traps’ is an interesting image – are they honey traps? The mind boggles.
At least Wight shows some independent-mindedness in not simply going along with the Assange line on everything. He does not, for example, seem particularly to share Assange’s concern for Pussy Riot, tweeting a couple of days ago:
I wonder if the liberal chorus of support for Pussy Riot wd be as supportive if they’d danced on altar of a synagogue in London
I wouldn’t want to come down too hard on someone for using the word ‘hysteria’ (considered sexist by some). But whereas Wight’s single usage could be regarded as a misfortune, Luke Samuel’s repeated use of the word looks like more than carelessness, particularly when the subheading for his article on Spiked is:
“Ignore feminists’ shrill attempts to demonise critics – we need an honest debate about the meaning of rape”
Somewhere, buried in his contrarian windup, are some points I might think worth engaging with. But if you are going to come out with statements like this:
For as long as we continue placidly to insist that all non-consensual penetration with a penis is rape, we avoid the more difficult question of what kinds of behaviour are and are not worthy of punishment.
you really have to gloss what you mean by non-consensual very carefully indeed.
Obviously, and thankfully, not all (supposedly) on the left, are bonkers. Bob from Brockley reminds us just why people on the left (well, just people in fact) should have no truck with Assange. James Bloodworth has an excellent post in the Independent. He picks up on the fact that Galloway uses the word ‘sordid and disgusting’ to refer to the unquestioned facts about Assange’s love life rather than the allegations:
“Unfortunately Mr Galloway is not the first man whose reactionary attitude towards promiscuity bleeds into an unwillingness to grant a woman the right to say no once she has climbed between the sheets.”
Sunny Hundal has posted several good pieces on the topic on Liberal Conspiracy, most recently a painful guest post by a woman who describes her own experience of rape, and a telling little piece about the kind of people who admire Galloway. This nasty tweet was apparently sent by the producer of GG’s podcast:
There’s plenty of sensible coverage at Shiraz – for example this piece by Jackie Mcdonough.
Finally, I strongly recommend this article by Laurie Penny. If she turned up on SU she’d probably get vilified as an ‘extreme right wing feminist’. She describes her own experience of being raped by someone she knew, her feelings of shame, and her friends’ failure to sympathise. This paragraph is particularly strong, I think – and I like the way she sympathises with the confusions of boys and men as well as women:
The idea that fucking a woman in her sleep, without a condom, or holding a woman down and shoving your cock inside her after a previous instance of consensual sex, is just “bad bedroom etiquette” – thanks again, George – the idea that good guys don’t rape, that idea has two effects. One: it fosters the fantasy that there’s only one kind of rape, and it happens in the proverbial alley with the perennial knife and certainly not to anyone you know. That’s what’s most disturbing about the discussion going on right now. There are millions of men, some of them very young, most of them extremely well-meaning, all of them with their own unique sexual histories trying to figure out a way to negotiate boundaries without hurting themselves or others, and those men are being told that sometimes women say things are rape when they aren’t really. That people who say that consent is really very important indeed are probably on the same side as conniving governments who want to suppress freedom of speech and punish whistleblowers and truth-seekers.
Well said.
Update: I thought this piece from Cath Elliott should be added to the post – she makes some important points forcefully.
