Blurred Lines? Assange, Rape Culture and Progressive Politics
With Britain in the midst of an election campaign and Donald Trump on a mission to piss off anyone who might still be able to just about tolerate him, the latest turn in the case of Julian Assange, Enlightenment hero and alleged sex offender, has received comparatively lukewarm media attention. But that doesn’t mean that it hasn’t stirred up tempers.
In case you missed it entirely, Swedish chief prosecutor Marianne Ny announced on Friday that she and her colleagues had decided to drop the case brought against Assange in 2010, and which saw him face trial for rape. Assange has evaded arrest by seeking refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy in London in 2012, where he has spent the last five years. This might seem like an awfully long time to spend holed up in a building simply to avoid trial for a crime that would be very unlikely to result in conviction, partly because of Sweden’s poor track record in bringing sex offenders to justice, and partly because it’s essentially a “he said-she said” situation. However, Assange has held that if he were to give himself up and face the rape charges, he would barely touch the ground in Sweden before being extradited to the US, where he would face far more severe treatment for a crime that is — duh — far more severe than raping some silly woman who was mostly likely gagging for it (she just didn’t realise it herself since she was, you know, asleep).
What I find most interesting about how people have reacted to the news is how the case divides progressive opinion. On the one hand, the Swedish court’s decision to drop the rape charges against Assange is celebrated as a victory for free speech, against a corrupt political establishment that imprisoned Chelsea Manning and which sees a dangerous enemy in Assange and WikiLeaks. On the other hand, some feminists have expressed outrage at the fact that an alleged rapist has successfully evaded prosecution, arguing that this is another victory for a patriarchal rape culture in which women are second class humans whose bodies exist to serve and please heterosexual men.
The problem with both of these perspectives is that they want things to be black and white, either or. Either Assange is a champion of free speech or he is a rapist. But this is so very far from a black and white issue, it’s a grey mess. These two perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Both positions are valid, both points of view are true. We live in a society where free expression and critique of authority are increasingly clamped down upon and where WikiLeaks fills an absolutely crucial function, and where Assange should absolutely be defended against a corrupt and dishonest US government. We also live in a society where women are objectified, hypersexualised, harrassed and assaulted, where rape is normative and women are equally punished for being too sexually “available” or not available enough.
If you’ve read the interview transcript of the woman who accused Assange of raping her (there were initially two accusations, from two women), you know that it’s one of those so-called “grey areas”. First she was upset that he got tired and wanted to sleep instead of having sex, and later when they did have sex she was upset that he was a bit of an insensitive prick during the act, and even later, when she woke up and found that he had penetrated her while she was sleeping, she was upset that he wasn’t wearing a condom when she had previously asked that he wear one, though, in her own words, she couldn’t be bothered making a fuss about it.
Reading this I think many women can recognise themselves — no matter how independent, kick-arse feminist we might be most of the time, we’ve all been there — feeling insecure and eager to please while at the same time feeling uncomfortable, scared, and violated.
And it’s no accident that countless women can relate to this scenario — from way before we’re old enough to understand what’s going on, we learn that we exist on this planet primarily in relation to men. Our value as subjects is dependent upon how fuckable we are. Every time we step out into the world we have to be prepared to be appraised, judged, interpellated. Our bodies are policed, scrutinised, objectified. We are told to cover up, to undress, to shut up, to smile. To appeal to heterosexual men we have to toe the line between being boring and unlikable and being whores. Feminism has taught us to take control, to be in charge of our bodies and our sexuality, but most of us know (often from experience) that there’s such a thing as being too much in charge — before you know it, you’re a bitch, a predator, a threat. So we hold back, we lose confidence, we shrink.
There are many things I wish that men could understand, but at the end of the day, what it comes down to is this: existing in our present reality as a woman (and I include anyone who lives as a woman in this category, irrespective of what the doctor told your parents when you were born) is, most of the time, a total mindfuck. And in some ways, the more we learn to critique, to analyse, to scrutinise, to deconstruct patriarchal hegemony and everything that comes with it, the harder it becomes to exist within its structures.
Assange’s alleged victim didn’t experience herself as raped until she spoke to her friends about what happened. Because many of us still have programmed into us the idea that if we don’t vocally object, if there’s no fight involved, well, then it’s just the kind of uncomfortable, unpleasant sex that we’ve come to accept as an occasional part of life, where you know that it wasn’t right, you feel like complete and utter shit after the event, you feel empty, violated, hurt, but you didn’t scream no from the top of your lungs, so….. The reason consent is not as simple as many critics of rape culture want to suggest, is because society has taught us that our consent isn’t required. And even if we might be (or become) intellectually aware that it is, emotionally unlearning a lifetime of socio-cultural coding is no easy feat.
Therefore, rape is a grey area — it absolutely shouldn’t be, but sometimes it is. Not because non-consensual sex isn’t always rape, but because calling it rape and experiencing it as rape often goes against what we’re used to. It follows from this that the failure to prosecute Assange is not so much a problem because a “rapist” is allowed to go free, but because we have once again failed to talk about what’s actually at stake when sexual assault is normalised or overlooked. Moreover, the celebratory reaction of many progressives highlights how feminist concerns continue to remain marginalised or secondary to other, more “serious” issues in liberal/left political movements.
Another prime example of this is the way a rape charge was handled by the leadership of the Socialist Workers’ Party a few years ago, and how people responsible for the atrocious treatment of the alleged rape survivor continue to command positions of authority and even appearing alongside, and thus being tacitly endorsed by, prominent leaders of the left such as Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott. This has resulted in a situation where some people and organisations on the British left are boycotting newer initiatives such as Stand Up To Racism for their links to and endorsement of key SWP figures, while others are arguing that the greater fight against racism and conservatism takes precedence and while the SWPs conduct was appalling, we can not let that tarnish a wider movement that is essentially a force for good.
But just like with the split of opinion in the Assange case, the choice is not — or should not be, rather — between one or the other. Incredible as it may sound, we can actually fight racism and corrupt and quasi-fascist governance AND fight misogyny and rape culture at the same time. We can acknowledge that this is a complex and in many ways grey mess, and that we need to address it with intelligence and nuance, but at the same time without fear of asking difficult questions and speaking up in defence of all women and non-binary people and of their right to be in charge of what happens to their bodies, at all times. And at the same time as it is a complex issue (or set of issues) it is also really fucking simple. Equality and freedom means equality and freedom for all. All liberation movements are, or should be, interlinked, all struggles for a fair society should be intersectional — if they are not, they will fail.
Feminist concerns regarding rape culture and consent are not secondary issues, they are not less important than defending free speech or fighting racism or capitalism. On the contrary, these struggles are inextricably intertwined, as we know: the patriarchy, capitalism, and white hegemony exist in a mutually fruitful relationship, they prop each other up and can, for the most part, not be separated or critiqued in isolation. Of course the task becomes more difficult when someone who fights against one of them endorses, embodies, or profits from the other, but when that happens — as in the case of Assange — the right course of action is not to choose which oppression to overlook, which violation to accept as collateral damage, because if we do that, we start down a slippery slope that leads to all kinds of hell and most definitely not to a world where we are all truly equal and truly free.
P.S. 1
After posting this on Twitter, Liberté-info rightly responded that far from all feminists object to the Assange case being dropped, so I should clarify that when referring to “some feminists” I was talking specifically about those (esp in the Swedish media) who did vocally object. Feminists do not speak with one voice (as I hope is illustrated by this very post!), nor do other liberation movements. For an example of a feminist perspective different from the one referred to here, see this article (link kindly provided by Liberté-info).
P.S. 2
I deliberately didn’t address the argument that the whole thing is a US conspiracy — based on what I’ve read about the case over the years (esp in the Swedish media) it appears that Assange’s enemies simply “got lucky” and that the Swedish authorities have been more than happy to oblige their American Big brother and deal with the case differently than they might’ve otherwise done (refuse to question him in the UK etc). And it appears that the reason they got lucky is because it sadly seems that Assange is, like so many other progressive male heroes in history, also a misogynist prick.
