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Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks, is back in court for a second day today, appealing an order that he be extradited to Sweden to face questioning on rape charges. As I noted yesterday, his defense team has shifted tactics in this latest round of argument, and they now claim that the charges against Assange, even if proven, don’t amount to rape. However “disturbing” or “disrespectful” his actions may have been, they say, however much he “push[ed] at the boundaries” of the complainants’ wishes, the two women ultimately consented to the acts in question.
Today Clare Montgomery, a representative of the Swedish prosecutors, is rebutting those arguments, and she’s pushing back hard.
The fact that the two women eventually acquiesced to advances they had originally rejected, Montgomery argues, is evidence not of consent but of coercion. In their statements to police, she says, the complainants describe “circumstances in which … they were coerced by physical force or were trapped.” In two cases — one in which Assange is alleged to have ripped a condom, and another in which he is accused of penetrating a complainant without a condom while she slept — “the complaint is unprotected sexual intercourse where consent had only been given to protected intercourse.” In the latter of these instances, she notes, “nobody suggests she was positively consenting.”
What is at stake here is the fundamental question of what constitutes consent in a sexual encounter. Yesterday Assange’s attorneys suggested that an encounter that begins non-consensually may become consensual if the passive party eventually agrees to the other’s advances, while today Clare Montgomery is arguing that such grudging consent is no consent at all.
The two complainants “let him continue,” she said this morning, but that did not make his actions legal. In fact, that construction is itself evidence of coercion, and thus of rape. “This is non-consensual,” she argued. “It is coerced, and the words used — ‘I let him’ — means non-consent.”
The hearing has just resumed for the afternoon session. More later if events warrant.
Update | More from Clare Montgomery on the incident in which Assange is alleged to have penetrated a complainant while she slept:
“The evidence is absolutely clear that this complainant may be legitimately described as given evidence that she had been penetrated whilst asleep. Furthermore, being penetrated in a way which [it] is absolutely clear … she had not consented to, namely unprotected. It is doubly clear there is no consent. She may later have acquiesced. That didn’t make the initial penetration anything other than an act of rape.”
Montgomery went on to say that the complainant had, by her own account, been “shocked and paralyzed” when she realized what Assange was doing, in part because she had never had unprotected sex before in her life.
Second Update | Montgomery has accused Assange attorney Ben Emmerson of “winding the law of consent back to the 19th century” with yesterday’s arguments.
Adapted from a comment I just left at Feministe.
You probably can’t make yourself non-racist, but you can make yourself anti-racist. And in the end, being anti-racist is actually more important.
And no, you can’t ever rid yourself of privilege completely. But you can go a long way to rid yourself of ignorance of that privilege.
More to the point, you can make yourself into an opponent of privilege as it exists in the world, rather than just as it exists in you.
Jill hit the nail on the head when she said that the struggle to be — and to be seen as — “one of the good ones” can be a distraction from the real work of the activist. When you find stuff that needs doing, figure out how to help, and get to work on helping, that’s activism. Checking your privilege isn’t activism. It’s a part (and an ongoing part) of the process, but it’s not an end in itself.
And one last thing: As a person with privilege, if you spend time in progressive spaces, you’re going to get yelled at every once in a while. Sometimes people will be right to yell at you. Sometimes they’ll be out of line. Staying open to both possibilities is important, but it’s even more important to learn how to distinguish between them — and to figure out how to respond to each in a productive and self-caring way.
A few years back, columnist David Brooks (who will, as it happens, be the commencement speaker at Brandeis University this year) wrote a piece about campus rape in which he suggested that the best approach to preventing such incidents was the approach that colleges took prior to the sexual revolution.
Back in the good old days, Brooks wrote,
educators … understood that when you concentrate young men, they have a tropism toward barbarism. That’s why these educators cared less about academics than about instilling a formula for character building. The formula, then called chivalry, consisted first of manners, habits and self-imposed restraints to prevent the downward slide.
There’s a lot to object to in this, starting with the suggestion that all men have the impulse to rape, and that the best of us are merely taught to restrain it. But there’s one bit that I’d like to address as a historian of American higher education.
As it happens, I recently acquired a copy of the Berry College Handbook for Women, published by the college’s women’s student government in 1956. Berry was (and is) a co-ed private college in rural Georgia, exactly the kind of place that you’d expect to find Brooks’ “formula for character building” in action.
And what does that handbook say about dating? It says this:
DATES — Girls may have dates on Sunday afternoons from 2:45 to 5:00 PM, at parties, movies, and other social events and also at the college store between classes. When girls are coming from the college campus, boys do not escort them farther than the ‘parting of the ways’ which is on the road between the Recitation Hall and Mother’s Building. There must be no dating in out of the way places. Petting is not permitted.
Self-imposed restraints? Hardly. This was a world of strict gender segregation. At Berry College in the fifties, male and female students weren’t permitted to be alone together. Ever.
On today’s campus, students are given near-total freedom to socialize in private. That freedom is grounded in the belief that college students have sufficient character to use that freedom responsibly. It is also grounded in the belief that people best learn how to regulate their behavior when they are given the opportunity to regulate their behavior.
On the typical American campus of the fifties, students were not taught self-restraint — they were restrained, and they were punished when they were caught circumventing those restraints. If they learned anything about how to behave behind closed doors, it was at great risk, and in defiance of the mechanisms employed to keep them apart. If a female student at Berry College in 1956 consented to be alone with a guy in circumstances that made sex possible, she was in violation of school rules. She was in danger of expulsion. Every man on campus knew this, and that knowledge gave the worst of them great power.
If a woman was treated badly in such circumstances — if she was raped, if she was coerced, if she was abused, if she was humiliated — she was vanishingly unlikely to speak out. And there wasn’t even any way to have an open discussion about what it meant to be “treated badly” — the campus rules permitted no public dialogue about sexual ethics, no opportunity to arrive at communal understanding about how to behave and how to expect your partner to behave, no space in which to forthrightly compare expectations and experiences.
This world that Brooks pines for is a world of stifling rules and unequal punishments. It’s a world of shame and exploitation. It’s a world of ignorance and silence.
It is a world that generations of students heroically fought to be freed from.
The Good Men Project is something I’ve been vaguely meaning to learn more about recently. Some prominent feminist men (and women) have been writing for them, and they’ve gotten some good buzz from other folks I respect. So I followed them on Twitter a few days ago, and recently clicked through to a piece on their site for the first time.
Um, wow.
It’s a map of the countries of the world, color-coded by penis size, under the headline “Who Has the Biggest Penises in the World?”
A few things about this map.
First, it’s bullshit. I’ve done a spot check on about a dozen of the (vaguely identified) national data sources, and literally none of them have panned out. Some are completely fictitious, others are real people or organizations with no connection to this kind of work, still others combine the names of actual studies with made-up data. (None of this should be surprising, by the way, as the original compiler of the stats makes his living selling penis enlargement equipment and home laser hair restoration devices.)
Second, it’s racist bullshit. The map’s “data” portrays Africans and Latins as big, Asians as small, and white folks are somewhere in between. This isn’t necessarily racist in and of itself — some stereotypes are true, after all, and this may be one of them — but remember that the numbers in this map are made up. The folks who compiled it aren’t testing racial stereotypes against scientific research, they’re propagating them via fiction that masquerades as fact. And the implicit racism in the map is made explicit in the article it cites as the source for its data, which claims that “in Africa, where the temperature reaches high levels, people adapt to the conditions and their limbs are more slender, elongated, their outward growths have a greater area, and this applies to their lips, nose, ears, fingers, palms, soles, and also for men [sic] penis.”
That’s right. Black guys — according to the Good Men Project’s source — have big lips and big schlongs because they come from the steamy tropics. (Never mind that the site’s spurious data portrays the men of India, one of the world’s hottest countries, as having among the world’s smallest penises. Consistency has never been the “scientific” racist’s strong suit.)
Now, I know the Good Men Project doesn’t claim to be progressive, or feminist, or anti-racist. But as I noted above, they’ve signed up some biggish names in the feminist blogosphere to write for them recently, and they’re clearly making a play to be seen as a serious voice in contemporary discussions of gender politics.
This ain’t the way to go about it.
Update | Hugo Schwyzer, a male feminist columnist for the Good Men Project, responds on Twitter: “Sigh. It wasn’t the greatest choice to run the penis map. Hard to believe anyone takes it seriously tho.”
A couple of things in response. First, some folks clearly are taking it seriously, as a look at the comments thread at GMP shows. When researching this post, I found plenty of examples all over the net of people earnestly debating the stats’ validity.
Second, and more to the point, as a joke … it’s a racist joke. Again, just look at the comments at GMP: “I cannot help but notice that the guys with the smallest dicks own most of the world and it’s weapons/resources (at least for the moment). The guys with the biggest peckers are still waiting to find out about toilet paper and indoor plumbing.”
Second Update | The Good Men Project has linked to this post, noting my criticism of the data while maintaining that they haven’t seen proof of the map’s fictitiousness, so here are a few examples: [examples snipped].
Third Update | Now the GMP is admitting the map is fake, and linking to the sites I pointed out in my original piece as evidence, but they’ve pulled the link to this post.
They’re happy to give traffic to a penis-enlargement scammer, in other words, but they won’t give credit to an anti-racist feminist critic who pointed out their error. Cute.
FIRE — the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education — is on the right side of the issues a fair chunk of the time. Their (right-wing) politics aren’t mine, by any stretch, but when they’re beating the drums for freedom of expression and due process on campus, they’re doing important work.
I just wish they could do that important work better.
Here’s the latest example. Back in early August, Professor Thomas Thibeault of East Georgia College was called to the office of EGC president John Bryant Black. By Thibeault’s account, Black demanded that he resign from the college that morning, and threatened to make public Thibeault’s “long history of sexual harassment” if he did not.
Thibeault refused to resign and was escorted from the campus, under threat of arrest if he ever returned. In the two months since, Thibeault says, he has not been given a hearing, been permitted to defend himself against the sexual harassment charges, or even been told what exactly he’s being charged with, despite the fact that Black convened a faculty committee to investigate him.
This is seriously screwed up. If Thibeault’s version of events is true (and neither Black nor EGC have publicly disputed it), the EGC administration has behaved shamefully — attempting to bully him into resigning with vague and ominous threats, then refusing to allow him a timely opportunity to be informed of, and respond to, the charges that have led to his removal from the classroom. Bravo to FIRE for shining a light on this situation.
…And that’s where I stop praising them. Here’s why.
Two days before Thibeault was brought into Black’s office, he attended a faculty training session on sexual harassment, where he made some remarks from the floor. In FIRE’s gloss, “he presented a scenario regarding a different professor and asked, ‘what provision is there in the Sexual Harassment policy to protect the accused against complaints which are malicious or, in this case, ridiculous?’ ”
FIRE sees this as “Kafkaesque irony,” saying that “Thibeault made the mistake of pointing out — at a sexual harassment training seminar — that the school’s sexual harassment policy contained no protection for the falsely accused.” But Thibeault’s own account of his remarks makes it clear that FIRE’s summary of his comments is woefully inadequate.
Here’s how Thibeault himself describes the “scenario” he presented at the sexual harassment training:
Last week two students were talking to me in the hallway after class. One student said that she didn’t want to go to a professor’s office because he looked down her cleavage. The woman was wearing clothing that was specifically designed to draw attention to her cleavage. She even sported a tattoo on her chest, but I didn’t get close enough to read it. The cleavage was also decorated in some sort of sparkly material, glitter or dried barbecue sauce. I couldn’t tell. I told the student that she shouldn’t complain, if she drew such attention to herself. The other female student then said, and I hope you’re not offended by her actual words, ‘if you don’t want anyone looking at your titties, I’ll lend you a T-shirt. I have one in the truck.’ The first student then said, ‘No. I’m proud of the way I look.’ I left the conversation at that point.
Let’s break this down, shall we?
- A female student told Thibeault that another professor’s habit of staring at her breasts made her uncomfortable.
- Thibeault told her, in front of another student, that she had no right to complain because she was dressed provocatively.
- A week later, Thibeault recounted this story to a large group of faculty members at a public meeting, complete with identifying details of, and gratuitously offensive comments about, the student’s appearance.
- To top it all off, he presented the student’s complaint about the other professor as an example of a “ridiculous” sexual harassment charge.
According to the EGC faculty handbook, by the way, “conduct of a sexual nature” that “has the purpose or effect of … creating an intimidating, hostile, or offensive academic environment” is sexual harassment.
FIRE has all this background. But they chose not to mention it.
And this is why I find FIRE so frustrating. It’s not “Kafkaesque irony” that Thibeault was hauled in to the president’s office on a sexual harassment complaint two days after the training. It’s not ironic at all. It’s not even surprising. By Thibeault’s own account, he made wildly inappropriate sexualized comments to a female student, told that student that it was her own fault if a professor leered at her while she was wearing a low-cut top, and then shared this anecdote at a faculty meeting in a bizarrely insulting way. (Barbecue sauce? Come on.)
I don’t know whether any of this is actionable as sexual harassment. I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know what Thibeault’s history is, or whether the university’s claims that he has a “long history” of misbehavior have any merit at all. As I said at the top of this post, I’m inclined to believe that Thibeault has been treated unfairly, and that EGC has violated his right to academic due process.
But this whole incident serves as yet another reminder to me that when I see a piece on FIRE’s site, I can’t just take their analysis and run with it. I can’t even assume that they’re presenting the basic outline of the story in a fair and complete way. I have to research and fact-check the whole thing from the beginning. And because they break so much news — because they are out there digging these cases up — I have to ignore their stuff if I can’t find independent corroboration of their claims.
Because they just can’t be trusted to tell a story straight.
And that sucks.
Note: As I indicated above by linking to Thibeault’s statement at FIRE’s website, and again by saying that “FIRE has all this background,” FIRE did post that statement as a PDF document, and link to it from other documents. I never intended to suggest otherwise, and I’m happy to make that clear.
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