Thoughts on Akin and Assange

It has been a grim week for those of us with a uterus.

Here in the UK, Julian Assange gave an Evita Peron-style address from the balcony of the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he is holed up in a bid to fight his extradition to Sweden to face charges of rape, sexual molestation and sexual assault. Assange has many supporters both in the UK and globally, both high-profile and not, and boy howdy have they been at work both outside the embassy and in the press and social media sites. Some of my favourite arguments in support of Assange are as follows:

• that the case against him is a "witch hunt" (various places but in one of the first few comments under Owen Jones's excellent comment piece in the Independent )
• that once a woman consents to sex with a man, any occasion following that is essentially fair game (this is the gist of George Galloway's argument)
• That extradition to Sweden somehow = extradition to the USA, which in turn = execution. Yeah, that one is pretty fruity so it's perhaps not entirely surprising to see Michael Moore and Oliver Stone endorsing it.

Over in God's Own Country, otherwise known as the USA, things are gearing up for a Presidential election. This often brings the mind-bogglingly stupid out of the woodwork, and this week was no exception, only this time the candidate in question wasn't a screaming fanatic waving a God Hates Fags sign on an abortion clinic picket line somewhere in deepest Nowheresville but the Missouri District Congressman Todd Akin. I think Todd must have fallen asleep in his high school biology lesson* because he seems to be confusing the reproductive organs of genetically female humans with those of ducks. Yup...ducks. There are takedowns of this stupidity all over the internet so I won't labour it, other than to highlight the important points from that particular canard (sorry):

• According to Akin, rape victims can't get pregnant, because, and I stress to you that this is a direct, in-context quote: "the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down".
• While you are reeling from that stunner, I am going to hit you with another hook - the above mangling of a basic human physiology lesson was based on aforesaid rape being a legitimate rape (again I am quoting). Imma let that one sink in for you.

So, another week, another fuckton of garbage lies and rape apologia. But I want to say something about it all because there is a massive fucking Venn diagram in the middle of all this (you might call it Occupy Misogyny ha ha GEDDIT) and it is the colour of rape.

There is much online whining about feminists and feminism being obsessed with rape, and it is absolutely true that some of the most important and powerful work being done in the name of the feminist cause, especially on the interwebz, is to do with debunking rape myths and calling out the rape culture. My peoples, THERE IS A REASON FOR THIS. Rape is a crux issue for feminism, not because it is an often violent crime which is hugely skewed towards one gender perpetuating violence against another** (this is what makes it an issue for humanity), but because it crystallises a central feminist argument - that one of the things that patriarchy has done is to legitimise rape (ha ha no Todd, I don't mean it the way you do).

While there is much huffing and puffing that OF COURSE we take rape seriously! Rapists are vile! Ewww are you trying to suggest that we SUPPORT rape?! the events of this week just do not bear that out. A man who is a suspect in a rape trial garners support essentially for running away. A high profile politican suggests that if you are penetrated in your sleep by someone not wearing a condom, who carries on thrusting regardless even after you have asked him to stop and put one on, you have not been raped - you've just been a victim of "bad sexual etiquette". Another politician suggests, on television, that the female anatomy can reject the sperm of a rapist - but only if he's a real rapist, you know, the kind that jumps out from behind a bush in a dirty hoodie. On a popular and serious political programme in the UK, the accuser of a suspected rapist is named, then criticised for not being a good enough victim. You think we don't live in a rape culture? This shit is from one goddamn week.

Rape is a crux issue because the propagating of myths and lies about it is ABSOLUTELY FUCKING EVERYWHERE. For every person tweeting their disgust for all the apologetic rubbish and handwringing WHAT ABOUT THE MENZZZ!! there is another person commenting that 'spousal rape is nonsense' (this was an actual comment on the Owen Jones piece but it appears to mercifully have been removed). And my peoples, I am tired, so very fucking tired of it. There are good things that have come out of this week, like the massive outcry against Assange's speech and Galloway's video, the hashtag #menagainstrape trending on Twitter, and a gathering call for Akin to step down. But I am still unwise enough to read the comments on Op Ed pieces and I fear the worst - that we are nowhere near destroying rape culture. I suspect we have only just begun a very long fight.





* although this comes with the caveat that as Missouri is located firmly under the tight squeeze of the Bible belt, he may well not have had any high school biology lessons. This would be hilarious, if it weren't entirely possible.
** I want to acknowledge here that this is a limiting use of the word gender - I realise I am simplifying. What I mean is that rape is statistically a crime carried out in the vast majority by male-identifying humans against female-identifying humans. Statistics are reductionist and gender is complex, yo. What this doesn't also illustrate is the fact that victims of rape are overwhelmingly 'othered' peoples - sex workers, transgender people, people in jail, children, the physically and/or mentally disabled, gay people and the elderly (NB NOT a comprehensive list by any means, well the fuck done, humanity).