Here's the money shot:
... Assange's status as embattled warrior for free speech is taken as giving permission – by those on the left as well as right – to indulge in the basest slut-shaming and misogyny. It's terrifying to witness how swiftly rape orthodoxies reassert themselves: that impugning a man's sexual propriety is a political act, that sexual assault complainants are prone to a level of mendacity others are not (and, in this case, deserving of the same crowd-sourced scrutiny afforded leaked diplomatic cables), that not all forms of non-consensual sex count as "rape-rape".
... It also underlies the assumption that a man's good behaviour in public life somehow neutralises bad behaviour in private ... By this measure, rape allegations against a maverick internet provocateur are diminished in the context of his crusade for truth instead of, albeit unpalatably, being capable of existing alongside it.
Pav that link is not working. But I've read it and it is very good.
ReplyDeleteFixed!
ReplyDeleteThank you.
The Victims socialised with The Accused after the alleged crime, and one of them said on Twitter how good it was to be with him. These two doubt-creating facts are documented.
ReplyDeleteOne of the mysogynous reports at Taki's Magazine.com -
'By the 18th or 19th Wilen had grown frustrated that Assange wasn’t returning her calls, so she phoned that nice organizer lady she met at the seminar—Anna Ardin— inquiring about Assange’s whereabouts.
As the conversation took the sort of turns that conversations between ladies usually take, both Ardin and Wilen realized they’d both had sex with their Hacker Heartthrob during the previous week.
In these sort of situations, one of two things typically happens: The women will claw out each other’s eyeballs to win the man, or they’ll team together to destroy him.
At around 2 p.m. on August 20th, Wilen and Ardin walked together into a Stockholm police station.'
It has also been documented widely that Assange is a bit of a creep.
I am grateful to him for being able to read that PM Rudd was privately making the kind of statements that I wished he had made publicly at the time, ie that Afghanistan is a terrifying hopeless mess, and folk-dance days won't solve a war.
I do wish we had a world where people could handle The Truth.