Imagine you’re at a party with someone. They’re someone you admire, someone a lot of people around the world admire. You’ve been talking all night, flirting a little maybe. You both have had a drink or two. You’re having so much fun, you feel like telling the world about it. Thank fuck for Twitter!
You get this feeling that they might be, you know, interested. It might be quite fun to sleep with them actually, you think. Maybe you even hope for more than just sex.
They kiss you and you kiss them back. Things go a little further. You’re having fun. At some point you fish a condom out of your pocket and hand it to them. They agree to use it. It’s common sense, right? Right. You’re still having fun. It’s all good.
But at some point something changes. Maybe it hurts when they penetrate you. (You do not need a vagina to play along with this game. Go on, try to imagine.) Maybe they’re simply not that good in bed, and you’re not having fun anymore. Maybe they’re not using that condom you handed them and you’re worried about your health. It doesn’t matter what it is. You’re not having fun, you don’t want to do this anymore, you ask them to stop.
And they don’t. They keep, you know, fucking you. There is a foreign object inside your body, moving in and out. There is another person on top of you, clearly enjoying themselves, while you may be in physical pain, and even if not, by this point you’re alomst certainly emotionally traumatised. They finish, roll off you and go to sleep.
You, on the other hand, lie awake wondering what you did wrong. Were you not clear enough when you asked them to stop? Should you have struggled? Maybe it was a misunderstanding? You know, they’re from a long way away, you’re speaking to them in a language foreign to you. You feel violated; you feel ashamed. And they’re this incredibly cool person everybody likes, so it must have been you doing something wrong, right?
You wake up next to them the next morning. They’re staying at your house for a couple of days which makes things awkward. You don’t feel that same happiness and elation being around them anymore. You remember you told the world how awesome it all was? You’re not quite sure anymore, you’d like to take that back actually. So you delete your tweets.
A few days later you meet someone who’s also slept with your partner. You talk to them for a while and a picture begins to emerge. Their story is a little different, but there are enough similarities that suddenly you don’t feel quite so alone and isolated anymore. Maybe if there’s two of you it’s not you who did something wrong. Maybe this incredibly cool person whom all the cool kids like is actually at fault. An ugly word enters your brain. Were you raped?
It takes another couple of days for your mind to wrap itself around this. The sense of shame and self-blame don’t exactly subside. You’re this strong person, you’re a public figure, you’re well known for your work on gender equality. How did you let yourself be raped? What did you do wrong? But a few days later you eventually gather all your courage, hold you head high, repeat to yourself three times “It was not my fault”, and walk into the police station.
At which point the entire internet turns on you.
***
Point being this: I don’t care if you’re a left-wing feminist man who’s struggling with the idea of a freedom of information campaigner not being pure and perfect, or if you’re simply an Assange fanboy who’s never even considered how a woman might feel about sex. Please try to remember that there are two sides to every story. Oh yes, she might once have met someone who met someone who had a second cousin twice removed who worked for the CIA. She might be a public figure and an outspoken feminist. She might have been a groupie, she might have been drunk, she might have slept with all of Sweden before she slept with Assange, and she might have deleted those Tweets. And almost certainly, her case is being used by Assange’s enemies to discredit him and make his life difficult. None of that matters. What matters is what happened between Julian Assange and those two women, and none of us know any of it. Maybe one day it will all come out in court, maybe it won’t. But smearing an alleged rape victim because you can’t cope with the moral ambiguity of someone who does good work in one area also having committed a crime in another area is not the way to make either yourself or the person you’re trying to defend terribly popular.
Support WikiLieaks. Even donate to the Assange defence fund – he, like anyone else, has the right to a fair trial. Make your voice heard to ensure that any trial will be fair and transparent. But whatever you do, do not blame the alleged victim. Do not seek to smear the alleged victim. Even if it’s just for one minute, consider how she might feel, why she might have done the things you accuse her of having done, how this looks from her point of view and what impact it’s having on her life.
PS This is a direct response to this article, which someone on my Twitter feed called a brilliant piece of investigative internet journalism.
Thanks so much for this.
Or she might simply be a liar!
Might, yes. She’s just as likely to be telling the truth though. If she is, can you imagine how traumatic this whole thing must be?
Stupid question – of course you can’t and neither can I.
I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who might be lying, than join in the public abuse of someone who might not be.
PJW
PJW: “I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who might be lying, than join in the public abuse of someone who might not be.”
And by extension condemning Assange based on nothing but unproven claims. By law he is entitled to the benefit of the doubt, not his accuser. It’s called “innocent until proven guilty.” The whole affair is dreadful and the more that is writing opining about it, the worse it gets. Facts are all that matter and we don’t have those yet.
You’ll notice that I’m condemning no-one and that my quoted sentence could just as easily apply to Assange.
What I (and Milena) am talking against is some people’s quick apportionment of blame one side or the other, without all the facts, which it sounds like you are as well.
I imagine that this case will end up in the deep well of “Not Proven” and both sides will get smeared with PossibleRapist and PossibleRapeLiar, which is deeply sad.
PJW
The problem is, and that’s what I read back in Anon’s reaction, is that to many people live in a black and white world. It’s either this or that. And that’s rarely the case. That’s what we see in the Wikileaks case as well. It’s not that some aspects of an countries behavior isn’t all that, the country is either all good or evil. No country and no individual can live up to the standards that are set by these people. For instance Assange can’t live up to his own moral standards because in is hunt for absolute transparancy he’s hurting a huge amount of people. 1.300 people where killed when Wikileaks ‘exposed’ one of the president candidates as fraudulent. some 350.000 where forced to leave their homes due to other all to righteous people like Assant and to many of his followers that have the same attitude in life. In his presumed hunt for human rights by absolute openess he’s destroying exactly that. Absolute openess can’t be a goal on itself because there is not such thing, as there is no such thing as the truth. I would hope people would be more aware of that.
Sorry for some typos and so on. English is not my native.
You explain this very well, and you are absolutely right. Thank you. -WikiLeaks supporter, USA
She arranged a party for him the next day.
She boasted “with the world’s coolest smartest people, it’s amazing!”
The day AFTER the incident.
I’ve been raped. Once by a friend and once by a violent stranger. You don’t boast in either scenario.
She blogged about the need for vengeance after being jilted. Later, after finding out Assange had slept with another women the same week as her, she filed rape charges against him.
It’s suspicious but I don’t know what happened.
Should he be found innocent in a free and fair trial, she should be severely punished for undermining the importance and power of the legal protection of women by using it as a weapon of petty vengeance.
Just as Wikileaks is splitting the left and Anonymous is splitting the Hacker community, Assange is splitting feminists – with some, like Naomia Wolf, Naomi Klein, Women Against Rape (writing in the Guardian) – opposing the view above with the same rhetoric that in other circles is accused of being misogynistic.
It’s a challenging area because if you want to smear a pop-hero, these accusations do just that. And it’s true that its very rare for Interpol to get involved with the lesser of Sweden’s ‘three types of rape’, especially after the charges were first dropped. And for this reason I sided with the cynics until I saw on another site that these women had names, and lives as activists and blogs and Twitter accounts – ie they became real – and I thought, God how awful for them. If you google either of their names you see that all the top results are insulting them.
So if something nonconsensual did indeed happen to them, then on top of that ordeal, and the courage it took them to go to the police (which most people don’t) they have to deal with the most terrible online backlash and insults.
But it does require cognitive dissonance – Assange has not been proven guilty any more than they have been proven wronged. So right now, the big story really should be the contents of those leaks (where the news that a US defence contractor employed child sex slaves for local Afghan police – for instance – seems to have been missed in all the chat about Assange’s arrest).
This is a hugely powerful piece, and I’ve wanted to comment on it since first reading it. I’m not posting anonymously because I stand behind what I say, but this is a pseudonym.
My heart goes out to anyone who is a rape survivor, however – one can not generalise from one’s own personal experience to how one expects victims or rape (or indeed any other violence) *SHOULD* respond, from one’s own personal experience.
This piece brought up huge chunks of mine own experiences – I was in an abusive relationship for nearly a year. Yes, me, a feminist, an ex riot grrrl, an educated liberal woman who “should have known better”. I spent most of that year excusing my partner, blaming myself for every incident, in this deep fog of denial about what was happening – about what was being *done* – to me.
I spent a lot of time praising my partner (who was well known and respected within the music scene) and presenting the image of a happy household, out of a need to deal with the cognitive dissonance. You might even call this “boasting”.
One of the biggest triggers that enabled me to actually *see* and *name* what was being done to me, was his ex-partner getting in touch with me (cautiously, as she, who had been presented by him as a monster, was terrified for my safety.) When we “compared notes” – when she told me the story of what he had done to her – and I was struck by how *similar* it was to mine. As if he were following a script of “how to dominate and shame women into compliance.” When I saw that every single incident, every lie, every attack was *not* actually an excusable aberration, but a carefully planned stratagem – WHICH HE HAD DONE BEFORE to another women – only then was I able to realise these things I had taken for accidents or “my fault” were actually a *Thing* with him.
I do not know what happened between Assange and those women. I am not trying to compare the experiences. But when people say things like “OMG, how can a woman socialise with a man who victimised her, that’s not how victims behave, ergo, she is not a victim!” and “those women only cried rape after discovering they were not his only lover” I call utter BULLSHIT on that.
The fact that Wikileaks does good work is *totally* separate from the accusations against Assange. Neither precludes the other.
But the haste with which many people I *thought* to be liberals, lefties, even feminists, rushed to smear, victim blame and dispense rape apologias left and right truly sickened me.
(And yes, I am certainly aware that the speed and care with which Assange has been arrested is unusual. But my response to that is *NOT* “OMG, clearly we must not prosecute this man because he is a liberal cause celebre” but “OMG, wouldn’t it be amazing if *all* rape allegations – yes, including mine – had been dealt with this seriously and thoroughly?”)
Anon: No one is condemning Assange. But I would like the same courtesy of “innocent until proven guilty” to be extended to the alleged victims as to the alleged perpetrator.
And I’ll tell you a secret: I desperately, desperately want Assange to be innocent. Firstly because that would mean two fewer women raped, and secondly because I, too, like my heroes pure, innocent and unsullied. But I can hack living in an uncertain world full of shades of grey. Can you?
Not everyone reacts the same to similar experiences. I’m sorry you had to go through this, but please don’t judge other people by how you reacted. I know a lot of women who’ve taken not days but years to admit to themselves that what happened to them was actually rape. I know that I took years to admit to myself that I get the occasional flashbacks as a result of the violence I was subjected to. Flashbacks were things that happened to other people. Those things I had, well, they were just memories and I was in total control of them, wasn’t I? We come up with all sorts of rationalisations and justifications when the truth hurts too much.
I don’t know about Swedish law; in the UK a false rape accusation would be a criminal offence and would potentially get prosecuted.
Thank you for sharing. I’m sorry if my writing brought back bad memories.
It’s not your blog that brought back bad memories; it’s exactly the response you describe of Assange Fanboys. Your blog has been a great help in terms of dealing.
“I’m willing to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who might be lying, than join in the public abuse of someone who might not be”.
Ah, PJW, I can’t thinking you’ve missed out a word or two there.
Can you elucidate for me the exact difference between a person who might be lying and a person who might not be lying? In the interests of logic.
Love your post, making things and building projects is the most effective way to spend the holidays!
“Can you elucidate for me the exact difference between a person who might be lying and a person who might not be lying? In the interests of logic.”
I think you’ve missed the thrust of what I was saying. I was advocating not jumping to a conclusion, and judging on that conclusion, when there’s no proof one way or the other.
Therefore I would rather be too lenient and not damage someone who may be lying, rather than assume that they are and lay into them. Innocent until proven guilty flies on both sides.
PJW