It was around 1am on Saturday and I was rather inebriated and amongst some of my best friends when the above comment on my post about consent and the Julian Assange case hit my inbox. That perhaps accounts for my complete and utter failure to be upset by it, or take it as anything other than another badge of honour, following in the footsteps of the “fat and ugly” and “fuck off back home” comments that I occasionally receive on this blog and other parts of the Internet. We even had a dramatic reading!
The tragic reality, however, is that this is not even par for the course for women online – it’s remarkably mild and restrained compared to the kinds of things hurled at people like Anita Sarkeesian, Helen Lewis, or anyone who dares to play video games while female. Anonymous is not threatening to harm me directly, or even encouraging others to do so – merely speaking in hypotheticals, surmising that I may change my mind if I was subjected to what they regard as “proper” rape. Bless their little cotton socks, Anonymous cannot even imagine that I may already have experienced sexual assault and that my opinions may be coloured by that experience.
Statistically speaking, of course dear Anonymous, I am about as likely as not to have experienced a major incident of gender-based violence such as sexual assault (including, as you so eloquently put it, “penis in vagina rape”), domestic violence, or stalking. You on the other hand Anonymous, being almost certainly male, rather lack the frame of reference to even begin to imagine what it’s like to live in a world where everyone thinks they’re entitled to a piece of you. The fact that you feel entitled to make this kind of comment to me rather proves this point, but to be honest I don’t actually expect you to understand that – or spot irony if it bit you in arse for that matter.
When I asked Twitter for ideas on what to do with my thinly-veiled rape threat, a number of people suggested I report it to the police and get it traced (it did come with an IP address and what looks remarkably like a real email address). I must admit this had not occurred to me – partly because the comment is, after all, comparatively mild and does not constitute a direct threat; and partly because the bit of me that’s a digital rights activist really does not want to see restrictions on free speech and people arrested and jailed for mouthing off on the Internet. We have already had way too much of this kind of thing recently.
So I am putting it up here instead. I am doing this to raise awareness of the kind of harassment women experience online and the epidemic levels of gender-based violence in our society, but also as an intellectual exercise for digital rights folk. Or as @graphiclunarkid put it, “If you choose to publish a held-for-moderation threat against yourself are you guilty of s127 menacing, um, yourself?!”

Today is Ada Lovelace Day. Today we blog about great women in science, engineering, technology and maths – women who have inspired us, women who can act as role models to a whole generation of girls and show them that a successful career in a male-dominated area is not only possible but also fulfilling. Today is when I tell you about my mother.
My mother was born in the 1950s and grew up in Communist Bulgaria. She wanted to be a doctor. At the time, trainee doctors were shipped off all over the country, and you had no control over where you would be sent – my grandparents were not happy about this, and as far as I know the story, my grandfather put his foot down and told my mother that she wasn’t allowed to study medicine. They made a deal: if she agreed to study something more acceptable, like chemistry, he would enable her to go on exchange to Moscow. My mother kept her end of the bargain but for reasons I don’t know she never went to Moscow.
Once she graduated, my mother had a successful, decade-long career as a research chemist. She had specialised in organic chemistry and surfactants – things that you find, for instance, in washing powder. What she actually worked on were better, foam-based fire extinguishing chemicals.
Fairly early on in her career, my mother decided to have me. She got married at 23 and had me when she was 25. In some ways, having children young was easier in Communist Bulgaria. Maternity leave provisions were extremely generous with a paid period and up to three years unpaid. Childcare was affordable and pretty much universally available. In some ways, it was tougher – my parents lived with my grandparents until I was four years old.
My mother wanted to put me in nursery when I was six months old and return to work. I’m afraid I was having none of it, and in the end, she took the full three-year maternity leave. I’m not sure I can really regret something I did when I was six months old, but this one I do. Once she did return to work, she continued to work on fire extinguishing foams, and her career progressed pretty well.
I have a very vivid memory – I must have been eight or nine – of my mother taking me into work. It may have been during the school holidays, or school may have been closed for some reason – I’m not sure. I got to watch one of her experiments – I got to watch her set things on fire! That was exciting! Very shortly after that, like so many women in so many different circumstances, my mother sacrificed her career for our family.
When Communism collapsed in 1989, things took a turn for the worse very quickly. By early 1990, there was quite literally no food. There was food rationing. I remember booklets of yellow vouchers – this many for sugar, that many for flour, that many for oil. I remember – aged nine – fighting in a supermarket with a middle-aged woman over a bar of soap. I remember one bitterly cold January day standing with my mother in a queue at the butcher’s only to watch as they ran out of everything just before it was our turn. The butcher had put aside some meat for his own family, and when he saw me, he decided to share it with us. By mid-1990, my father had decided that we were leaving the country.
How exactly we ended up in Austria is a different story entirely, but while my father was fluent in German, neither my mother nor I spoke a word. I was thrown in at the deep end, sent to school, and within a few months, I was fluent. My mother had a much tougher deal. While I was at school and my father was at work, she was home alone with a pile of textbooks. She didn’t have the confidence, nor really the opportunity, to go out and speak. On top of that, my father insisted that at home we spoke Bulgarian – and while in the long run that was the right decision for me and the whole family, in the short run it made my mother’s life even more difficult.
By the time my mother’s German was good enough to work and she managed to wrangle a work permit, she’d been out of chemistry for four years. She was in a foreign country which hardly had any industry at all – certainly not in the part of the country where we were – and had very little of a social network. Would she have liked to return to science? I think so, but I don’t know for certain. In the end, though, she looked at which of her skills she could market and began first to teach German to refugees from the various Yugoslav wars and then to translate for an insurance company. She has changed career twice since then and now works in back office in an investment bank.
Here are some of the things my mother taught me:
Women work. For as long as I remember, my mother has had a job and most of the time a career. The short periods between jobs or careers were the times when she was truly miserable. She always wanted to work. There were – as far as I’m aware – never any questions about “having it all”, about combining motherhood with a career. My father pulled his weight around the house, and my mother worked outside the home. This was normality. I distinctly remember, when we moved to Austria, finding out that there were women who were “housewives”. I did not understand that concept. Women worked.
Not only do women work, but women can be anything they like. My mother was a research chemist, after all. When I was still in kindergarten, I actually thought she was a firefighter, because she worked in the research division of the national fire service. When I told the other kids this, they told me that women couldn’t be firefighters. I never believed it for a second – my mother was one, after all. When I was growing up and considering various career options, at no point did I ever think “I can’t do that because I’m a woman” or “It’ll be more difficult for me to do that because I’m a woman”.
These two very basic assumptions – that women work and that women can do whatever they like – are incredibly deeply ingrained in my approach to life. They give me what I’m sure looks from the outside like a huge sense of entitlement: as long as I work hard and bring the right skills to the table, I have a right to be in any workplace and any profession I choose. Yet this sense of entitlement is tempered by the third thing that my mother taught me – that sometimes we have to make choices and adapt.
In her fifties now and on her fourth career, my mother’s done her fair share of adapting. She’s adapted to changing priorities, to external catastrophes, to circumstances beyond her control. It is that adaptation that for me has enabled those first two basic assumptions to survive contact with western capitalist society. I’m nothing like as good at this as my mother – or possibly my priorities lie elsewhere and I have made different choices – but I greatly admire her for it, and for everything else she’s achieved.

Every few months, Julian Assange’s ongoing struggle to evade facing allegations of sexual assault and rape in Sweden makes the news and Twitter is flooded with fanboys (and the occasional fangirl) explaining how it was all consensual really and this is a huge conspiracy to get Assange ultimately extradited to the US. Today is no exception. Consent does not work the way these people think it does. So let’s talk about consent, because maybe if Mr Assange and his supporters understood it, they might not rape people in future.

Consent should be enthusiastic
Enthusiastic consent is not something I’ve just made up – google it. Basically, it means that at any point during a sexual encounter all partners should be happily and enthusiastically into it. Not “Um, this is alright”, not “Thinking of England here”, but “YES, YES, fucking YES!!” kind of enthusiastic.

Let me add that this enthusiasm should not just be based on physical arousal or the “quality” of the sex you’re having. Your partner may be incredibly turned on, really wet or hard for you, and they may still not want to have sex with you at that point in time. They might have to get up early the next morning, they might fear getting cystitis, they might find you physically hot but think you’re a creep – it doesn’t matter. Consent is a thing of the mind as well as the body. “You want me, really” is one of the most hurtful, damaging things you can say to a partner who’s trying to withdraw consent or not give it in the first place. If you find yourself saying that (other than in carefully negotiated BDSM situations where withdrawal of consent may happen through a safeword), you’re probably in the process of raping somebody.

So how do you establish enthusiastic consent? Here’s clue: getting them to sign a contract doesn’t do the trick. Understand your partner. Read their body language. Pay attention to and respect their needs, desires and boundaries. Talk to them. “Do you like what I’m doing?” “Do you want to keep going?” “What would you like to do?” It’s really not rocket science.
Which neatly leads us to one of the allegations in the Assange case: that he had sex with somebody who was asleep. I hate to break this to you but somebody who’s unconscious cannot give you any kind of consent, let alone the enthusiastic variety. And yes, this also applies to people who are drunk. Even if your drunk friend is really coming onto you, you’re better off letting them sleep it off. If once they’ve recovered from their hangover they’re still up for it, good for you; else, at least you haven’t raped anyone.

Consent may come with conditions
This should be a no-brainer, but apparently some people struggle with it in the Assange case. If I have given enthusiastic consent to sleep with you provided you use a condom, that does not mean that I have given consent to sleep with you without one. If you have consented to having penis-in-vagina sex with me, that does not mean you’ve consented to me fucking you up the arse with a strap-on.
It’s not that “not using a condom is considered rape in Sweden”. Swedish people still exist after all. Rather, not using a condom when the use of one has been negotiated as a condition for consent is considered rape by civilised people.

Finally, consent can be withdrawn at any time
Also see “talk to your partner” and “getting them to sign a contract isn’t enough” above. At any point during a sexual encounter any party involved is perfectly entitled to withdraw consent. The other party or parties involved are obliged to stop. If they do not stop, then this is rape or sexual assault (depending on what exactly you’re doing). So if, in the words of Roger Helmer, MEP, you find yourself “in the heat of the moment, […] unable to restrain [your]self” and carry on, then yes, you are probably a rapist.

Seriously, if someone withdraws consent, in the heat of the moment, go take a cold shower. Or even just go take a shower. It will afford you the privacy to use your hand. You do not need to get your rocks off enough to warrant raping somebody. You will not suffer lasting physical and mental damage from having to wank.

Now go forth and multiply. Enthusiastically consensually.

So Lara Croft is a rape survivor^[1]. Guess what – so is one in every four women in the UK. If you put sexual assault (including rape), domestic violence and stalking together, almost one in two women in the UK^[2] has experienced this kind of gender-based violence.

There has been a lot of outrage in the feminist community about this new twist in Lara’s story, and some of the points made are valid. The game developers want players to feel protective of Lara – not something they would ever dream of in a male character. Rape is a cheap way of establishing a female character’s vulnerability. It plays to stereotypes and male fantasies, reinforces the rape culture we live in. Yes, to an extent these are all true. The one that struck me though was the argument that we don’t feel the need to show back stories of tough male characters that portray them as vulnerable and depict their journey to becoming the strong, badass characters we know them as. This is problematic in many ways.

My main bone of contention is that we don’t show men as survivors of sexual violence because, unlike women, the vast majority of them aren’t. When a problem affects nearly half the people of one gender but a much smaller proportion of the other, I don’t think a differentiated portrayal is inherently sexist. How those experiences are depicted and treated by any work of art is a separate question and there the developers behind Lara Croft may well have a case to answer. We haven’t actually seen the new game yet. Does it glorify rape and violence against women? Does it reinforce stereotypes and clichés about the experience and the victims of rape? Does it fail to challenge rape culture? Yes, it probably does some of these things – but right now we don’t know yet.

Another issue I have is that the reaction from the feminist community implies that by making Lara Croft a survivor of sexual violence, her character is somehow diminished. She was strong and badass and now we see this part of her past she is somehow “ruined” for us as a potential role model. To the 45% of us who’ve been through gender-based violence and come out the other side this is, frankly, insulting. Has my experience of sexual abuse changed me and shaped me? Absolutely. Has it diminished me? Hell no! If anything, it has made me stronger, fiercer and more passionate when it comes to fighting violence against women.

Realistic and challenging portrayals of gender-based violence in culture are badly needed. Every time I speak out about being a survivor of sexual abuse I get more and more women coming forward to share their own stories. It’s as if one of us speaking openly about it frees others to do the same. Where previously we felt isolated and ashamed, we gain strength from the knowledge that we are far from alone, that it happened to others too; not just one or two others, but half the women we know.

All the stories I hear are different from one another. What’s more, they’re often radically different from the accepted narrative of rape and gender-based violence portrayed in the media and popular culture. Stranger with a knife jumping out of the bushes? Hardly. Father? Husband? Best friend? Boyfriend? Much more likely. Yet those are not the stories we see, which makes us feel we’re alone, makes us doubt the validity of our own experiences and feelings, makes it much easier to internalise blame, to feel we will never be believed and therefore to let the bastards get away with it.

Rather than jump on creators every time they portray gender-based violence for doing it all, we should be challenging them in subtler, more nuanced ways. Was the attacker a stranger who jumped out of the bushes with a knife? Was the victim beaten black and blue? Was she white and blond? Did she break down crying in court? Yes, all of these things occur in real life, but rarely do they all happen on the same case, except in fiction. To tackle the epidemic of gender-based violence we are facing, we will need much more candid, realistic and varied portrayals of the issues in art and media than we currently have. So by all means, let’s call out Crystal Dynamics, but let’s do it for depicting sexual violence badly, not for doing it at all.

[1] Attempted rape actually, maybe.

[2] 45%, source: the British Crime Survey via the White Ribbon Campaign

Monday’s Twitterstorm revolved around ASUS’s Computex 2012 coverage on Twitter. Among a bunch of pictures from the show, this one turned up, along with the Neanderthal comment. The outrage was immediate and came from men and women alike, though there was the odd troll who thought it was funny. For their benefit let me briefly summarise why this comment was a bad idea.
The use of “booth babes” at tech trade shows is a pretty questionable practice to start with. But okay, everyone does it, and I’m sure if everyone jumped off the roof ASUS would follow, so we may perhaps forgive them for that. And if you use booth babes at a trade show a couple of thousand people will see them, but the vast majority of your potential consumers – like me – will continue to be blissfully unaware. If you, however, tweet about your booth babes, you send a number of messages to everyone on the Internet. They are messages like:

• Women are decoration.
• We do not value women as people.
• We do not value women as customers.
• We do not value women for what they may have to bring to our business other than tits and arse.

This is business suicide on several levels. For those who haven’t dragged themselves out of the 1950s it might be news that women not only influence major household purchasing decisions (such as those on computers) but have disposable incomes of their own. That’s therefore 50% of your consumer base that you have just told you do not value. If I held any shares in ASUS I’d be selling them about now.
What’s worse is the message this sends to any female ASUS employees or women considering working for the company. The technology industry has a well-deserved reputation for being male-dominated and infantile. I occasionally speak to female Computing Science students. Provided they’ve managed to fight through years of teachers and the media telling them that they shouldn’t do maths and science because those are not feminine subjects, and they get to university, I find it’s around the tail-end of their first year that reality hits them in the face. In terms of ability they’re often top of the class. Yet they’ve now spent a few months being shut in windowless labs with their predominantly male colleagues, probably done most of their homework for them, and are beginning to wonder if that’s what the rest of their life will be like. What ASUS has just told these kids is that not only will you have to put up with that, but we will not value you at all beyond your tits and arse.
This is generally the point at which I can offer these kids a career path that may suit them better in an environment that is proactively inclusive and diverse. Which is great for me, but not so great for companies like ASUS. Because here’s the thing: diverse teams consistently outperform homogenous teams, and companies which value diversity and inclusion financially outperform companies that don’t.
It took ASUS over an hour to take the tweet down (by which point of course there were a number of screengrabs of it), and several more before they apologised, promising to “take steps to ensure this doesn’t happen again”. The fact that it happened in the first place doesn’t fill me with confidence in their ability to take the right steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again. So here is some free advice for ASUS – and I’m happy to talk about my consultancy rates if they’d like more.
Often when a company makes this kind of gaffe, this is indicative of a wider cultural problem. I can guarantee you that if you had a company culture that valued diversity and inclusion this sort of thing would not happen. If one of your employees thought it was acceptable to be misogynist in public, on the Internet, and put the ASUS brand on it, chances are lots of your employees think misogyny is okay, both towards their female colleagues and towards potential customers. Sacking the PR intern in question isn’t going to do the trick.
I would start by having a look at the data. How many of your employees are female? From ethnic minority backgrounds? Lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender? Disabled? Now, say you manage to hire a representative work force at entry level, how does that look once people start getting promoted? Do you find that once you’re two or three levels up in the organisation you’ve lost everyone who’s not straight, white and male (or perhaps straight, Asian and male in your case)? Here’s a tip: that’s not because all the women have gone off to have kids and all the gay people have decided to go into hair dressing. It’s because somewhere along the way you as a company have treated them badly.
Start looking at your systems. How do you handle pay rises and promotions? How do you measure success? Do your promotion criteria say something like “demonstrates great leadership”? What does your model of leadership look like? Is it all command and control, being assertive, telling people what to do? Well, guess what: on average non-straight-white-male people do not lead that way. That doesn’t mean they don’t lead, it means they do it differently and you’re not recognising it. What other systems do you have in place that may act as indirect barriers to people who do not fit your default stereotype? Ask your employees. Support the start-up of affinity groups and consult them on policies, systems, and what their experience of working at ASUS is like. Start celebrating diversity and inclusion – let all your staff know that this is something you believe in as a company. Start proactively reaching out, recruiting and supporting diverse top talent.
Once you’ve truly embedded diversity and inclusion in your corporate culture, come out and tell the rest of us. Start by not using booth babes at your next trade show. If your products are that good, you don’t need tits and arse to go with them. By all means do use competent qualified employees from diverse backgrounds at your stand to draw customers in and talk passionately about your products. Go out and work with schools and colleges to get women into technology by inspiring them, showing them what an inclusive workplace looks like and presenting them with some awesome role models. Reach out to female consumers in a way that is respectful and engaging without being patronising and stereotyping. Show some of the humility, integrity, diligence, agility and courage that are part of your cororate “virtues” – because what you did on Monday displayed none of these. Oh, and do apologise in public, in more than 140 characters.

One in five abortion clinics breaks the law, screams the Telegraph today. The Health Secretary declares himself “shocked” and promptly announces further inspections of abortion clinics. For a thorough debunking of the hype I’ll point you at @stavvers who does a great job of asking difficult questions and trying to get back to the primary source only to find there isn’t actually a published report from the Care Quality Commission on this subject. I, in the meantime, would like to ask some other questions.
How, exactly, is the current UK law on abortion fit for purpose? Why do two doctors have to certify that I will go nuts if I don’t have an abortion, in order for me to be able to access medical care? And when are the women of Northern Ireland going to stop being treated as second-class citizens? The question we should be asking is not why are doctors pre-signing forms, but why are women and their physicians made to jump through hoops to access and provide basic and essential medical care?
Let’s get one thing straight. What this government, and the Conservative Party in particular, is trying to do is limit access to abortion. From Nadine Dorries’ mandatory “independent” counselling proposals to Andrew Lansley’s additional inspections of abortion clinics, these are measures designed to chip away if not at the right to an abortion then at the practical access to one. We have seen where this road leads. It leads to women whose foetus has been diagnosed with severe abnormalities being forced to listen to a doctor describe it. It leads to 42 US states having more than 50% of counties with no abortion provider, and 26 states having abortion providers in less than 10% of counties. It leads to state-mandated rape.
Let’s also not forget where we are right now, right here. Let’s not forget that the 800,000 women of Northern Ireland currently have no access to abortion except in a few very specific circumstances. A brief look at The Abortion Support Networks’s newsletter will give you an immediate insight into the suffering this causes to women and their families. These are some of the women ASN hears from:

A young woman who, before she contacted us, had researched the cheapest possible travel options for the appointment she’d booked. This included her flying to Liverpool, taking the train to Birmingham, having the procedure in Birmingham and then taking the (5.30 am!!) train the next morning to Manchester to fly back.
A single mother and student just back on her feet. Only just realised she was pregnant after a rape that occurred in September. She immediately knew that an abortion was her only option, but then saw the price for abortion at her gestation and panicked. Was unable to tell her family or anyone else because she lives in a very small and very conservative town. Due to her location (nowhere near an airport) and gestation (almost at the legal limit), the most difficult obstacle was finding a way to get her to England and back.
The mother of a teenage girl so upset about the pregnancy that she became suicidal.

Finally, let’s also not forget that restricting access to abortion doesn’t lead to fewer abortions. Making women wait longer and jump through hoops before they can have an abortion doesn’t lead to fewer abortions. What these things lead to are medical complications and, ultimately, dead women.
So when the Health Secretary is shocked and outraged that doctors provide basic medical care to women, let’s make sure he understands we’re outraged too. We’re outraged that we are not trusted to make our own decisions about our own bodies. We’re outraged that, instead of bringing UK abortion law into the 21st century, he and his party are looking to put more obstacles in the way of women seeking an abortion. And we’re outraged that the lives of the women of Northern Ireland continue to be put at risk as they are denied access to basic medical care.

“I was a child! I was in love! It was wrong and you knew it!”
Replace the “I was in love!” bit with “I had trusted you my entire childhood!”, and these are words I have nightmares about hurling at the uncle who sexually abused me when I was 15.
Now guess which character says these words, to whom, in which movie. Here’s a hint: the person they’re said to is described by the story writer of the film as “a role model for little kids”.
The speaker is Marion Ravenwood, and she is speaking to Henry Jones, Jr., better known as Indiana, in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The story writer is George Lucas. The director Steven Spielberg. The screen writer is Lawrence Kasdan.
Picture this. The year is 1978. It’s about four months since Roman Polanski has fled the United States to avoid sentencing for “unlawful sexual intercourse” – something he pleaded guilty to in order to avoid a trial for, basically, raping a child.
So in June 1978, Messrs Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan got together for a story conference on their next blockbuster, Raiders of the Lost Ark. This is allegedly a 126-page transcript of the whole 5-day thing. The file seems to have been making the rounds for about three years, and while I have yet to find anyone actually vouching for its authenticity, it would be a damn elaborate hoax if it was one.
This early quote from Spielberg (page 3), talking about Indy’s use of his bullwhip, may give you an indication of how the three gentlemen viewed women:

S — At some point in the movie he must use it to get a girl back who’s walking out of the room. Wrap her up and she twirls as he pulls her back. She spins into his arms. You have to use it for more things than just saving himself.

It gets worse. Much worse. Here’s an exchange the three had over those five days. (Page 36-37, G – George, S – Steven, L – Lawrence, emphasis and comments in parentheses mine.)

G — I was thinking that this old guy could have been his mentor. He could have known this little girl when she was just a kid. Had an affair with her when she was eleven.
L — And he was forty-two.
G — He hasn’t seen her in twelve years. Now she’s twenty-two. It’s a real strange relationship. (You don’t say, George.)
S — She had better be older than twenty-two. (Thank you, Steven.)
G — He’s thirty-five, and he knew her ten years ago when he was twenty-five and she was only twelve. It would be amusing to make her slightly young at the time. (Amusing is not the word I would have picked, but hey, you’re the professional writer, George!)
S — And promiscuous. She came onto him. (Ah, Steven’s getting going.)
G — Fifteen is right on the edge. (I was fifteen when I was abused. Good to know you think that was almost okay.) I know it’s an outrageous idea (You don’t say, George.), but it is interesting. Once she’s sixteen or seventeen it’s not interesting anymore. But if she was fifteen and he was twenty-five and they actually had an affair the last time they met. And she was madly in love with him and he…
S — She has pictures of him. (Thank you, Steven, for interrupting that train of thought.)

Mystery Man on Film, an anonymous film blogger, thinks this a great lesson on screen writing – “a racy backstory can keep a plot moving”.
Well, Mystery Man, well Messrs Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan, let me educate you.
An eleven-year-old girl can’t have an “affair” with a 42-year-old man. It isn’t even “a real strange relationship”. She is a child who can be raped by him. “Amusing” and “interesting” are really not words I would choose to describe this situation.
A twelve-year-old girl is not “promiscuous”; she doesn’t “come onto” anyone. Let me repeat this for you. She is a child. Pretty much the only country in the world where she’d be legal at twelve is the Vatican.
A fifteen-year-old girl in US law is still incapable of consent. Yes, George, what you just said is that if the main character slept with a woman who is actually capable of consenting, that would make your story less “interesting”. I might give you that if you were tying to portray a child rapist. But in your own words (page 60), you’re “doing a role model for little kids”.
Let me tell you what it would have felt like to that fifteen-year-old, this “affair” you’re describing. There’s this friend of the family. He’s really cool, everyone calls him Indy. He spends time with your dad in the library, he brings you sweets, sometimes he takes you to the museum and shows you things your dad never has time to explain.
He tickles you, and you get goosebumps. He raises an eyebrow at you. One day, after a trip to the museum, he’s dropping you off at home. You’re waiting for your dad to open the door when out of the blue he bends down and kisses you on the lips. Before you have time to react, the door opens and you hurry inside.
The next time you see Indy, there is more kissing, and then the kissing becomes touching. You have no idea how to react to this. There is no one you can tell – they would probably tell you you made it all up. You tell him you don’t want this, you try to threaten him, but he only laughs; says if you really don’t want it you should slap him and he’ll stop. You’ve never slapped anyone in your life. So the touching continues. He undresses you; he pushes your legs apart; he makes you touch him. I’ll let your imagination take over from there.
Have I just turned Indiana Jones into a child rapist? No, it was Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan who did that. Unless of course the whole 126-page meeting transcript is a very sick hoax.
So here’s the challenge, Messrs Lucas, Spielberg and Kasdan. Either disprove the authenticity of the document. Or stand up, explain yourselves and apologise. Explain to young girls that you don’t think they are promiscuous sluts asking to be raped just by existing; explain to young boys and grown men alike what consent means. Explain that you were wrong. Until one of those two things happens, Indiana Jones remains a child rapist.