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Full transparency? Isn’t that Assange’s argument? Wolf goes further and likens Assange to Oscar Wilde. According to her, both men were held in solitary confinement. “Assange, like Wilde, faced a legal proceeding for alleged sex crimes in which there was state pressure on the outcome.” Finally, “anonymous” accusers “sealed Wilde’s fate.”
Yes, of course, the allegations may both be unfounded and untrue; that’s what trials are meant to determine. Yes, also, this could be part of an international political witch-hunt: Get Assange any way possible. Yes, I agree that young girls and young women, especially the more privileged amongst us, ought to have official drink-testers on hand to be certain that no one has dropped GHB or rohypnol (the date rape drugs) into their alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages.
But, ultimately, alas, alack, I find myself in agreement with The Nation’s Katha Pollitt (who has made a small career of attacking me, both privately and publicly). She writes:
What’s disturbing is the way some WikiLeaks admirers have misrepresented the allegations, attacked the (Swedish) women and made light of date rape. It’s been known for some time that Assange was accused of using his body weight to force sex on one woman, ignoring her demand that he use a condom, and penetrating the other woman while she slept, also without a condom, despite her wishes; yet writer after writer has treated the whole thing as a big joke. It was ‘sex by surprise’ – some arcane Swedish thing – wrote Dave Lindorff on Truthout. Also, Assange didn’t tell the second woman about the first and didn’t return her phone call. Hell hath no fury like a groupie scorned.
What can I say—other than that I hope the Swedish police and Interpol continue to do their job—and that no human “collateral damage” begins to turn up in reality or in cyberspace.
Here’s what else I can and will say.
It is easy to be quoted if you are female and “attractive,” but especially if you threaten no one in power. In 1994, in her book Fire With Fire, Wolf previously described herself as a practitioner of “radical heterosexual feminism.” She writes:
Male sexual attention is the sun in which I bloom. The male body is ground and shelter to me, my lifelong destination. When it is maligned categorically, I feel as if my homeland is maligned.
This does not sound too threatening to me. But clearly, she is also saying that she is not exactly “of woman born” and, like Athena, Zeus’s daughter, she is here mainly to help male heroes. Like Assange.
Yes, she and Roiphe are eloquent and “smart,” but this is not why they have so frequently been quoted. These media-anointed neo-feminist “leaders” are saying what the boys-just-wanna-have-fun crowd wanna hear, namely, that there is no epidemic of rape and incest–only an epidemic of malicious, feminist-induced hysteria, false memory syndrome, and fake statistics about rape, gang-rape, and date-rape–even as women are being gender cleansed/gang-raped in Darfur, Congo, Tanzania, South Africa; routinely raped within marriage in most Islamic countries; tricked into sexual slavery in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics or sold into sexual slavery as children in Asia and Africa and trafficked all over the Middle East, and into the West; and routinely and repeatedly raped in prisons and in war-zones everywhere.
But this is not what preoccupies Assange’s many supporters. Their idée fixe is to bring down America—even their other hero Obama’s America. All else is commentary.
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