Okay, I know not everyone is into the feminist blogosphere. That’s fine. But if you’re a big name feminist like Naomi Wolf – if you’re publishing books, doing speaking events, and writing articles about the movement and its issues – then you sure as shit need to pay attention to what’s up online. Because if you don’t, you might end up writing something really embarrassing and offensive, like this.
Dear Interpol:
As a longtime feminist activist, I have been overjoyed to discover your new commitment to engaging in global manhunts to arrest and prosecute men who behave like narcissistic jerks to women they are dating. I see that Julian Assange is accused of having consensual sex with two women, in one case using a condom that broke.
…Thank you again, Interpol. I know you will now prioritize the global manhunt for 1.3 million guys I have heard similar complaints about personally in the US alone — there is an entire fraternity at the University of Texas you need to arrest immediately. I also have firsthand information that John Smith in Providence, Rhode Island, went to a stag party — with strippers! — that his girlfriend wanted him to skip, and that Mark Levinson in Corvallis, Oregon, did not notice that his girlfriend got a really cute new haircut — even though it was THREE INCHES SHORTER.
I’m sure Wolf thought she was being clever and pithy by writing that Assange was arrested by the “dating police.” But for those of us who have been paying attention to the case – be it by tweeting, blogging, or taking the two seconds it requires to Google what the actual charges are – it just comes off as victim-blaming and callous.
Because Assange was not accused of having “consensual sex”- he’s accused of assault. From the BBC:
One of the charges is that he had unprotected sex with a woman, identified only as Miss A, when she insisted he use a condom.
Another is that he had unprotected sex with another woman, Miss W, while she was asleep.
I’m fairly certain that Wolf would agree that “having sex” with someone while they’re asleep isn’t sex at all, but rape. And even if you’re iffy on the consent/condom question, Jill at Feministe breaks it down for you. Basically, if someone agrees to have sex with you with the condition that you use a condom, and then you remove said condom and continue the sex or if you continue the sex despite your partner’s protestations – that is straight up assault. And I’m betting Wolf would agree with that as well.
When I met Wolf in Copenhagen last year for a conference on International Women’s Day, she told me that she rarely spent time online and didn’t really know anything about feminist blogging. Which is too bad; if she was even keeping up slightly with what was going on online she probably never would have written this piece for HuffPo. Because she would have known that getting information from a Daily Mail article (and one that calls women “radical” and “militant” feminists, no less) was a terrible idea. She also would have seen Jill’s great piece and known that feminist bloggers have been writing about consent issues like this one for years and perhaps used that to inform her post, rather than snark. (I also imagine that when moderating the MORE young feminist panel recently, she would have known was ‘cisgender’ meant.) At the very least, she would have made damn sure that she knew all the available facts of a sexual assault allegation before penning a sarcastic piece about it.
Because as a prominent feminist, Wolf’s words matter. I guarantee you that her glibness about this case will be quoted by rape apologists the world over – something I’m sure Wolf will be horrified by. So prominent feminists, I beg you – get online! You don’t have to start a blog or have a Twitter account; you just have to pay attention.
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14 Comments
Broken condoms aside, perhaps Naomi Wolf doesn’t know that in Sweden it is a crime to buy sex?
Yes, of course it is assault. But don’t you resent an important issue like this being used as cover for illegal National Security actions? Who’s doing worse here, Wolf, or Interpol and the British government?
Trumping up Assange’s charges makes a mockery of the victims more than Naomi Wolf ever could. If anything, the illegal insanity is what prompted her mockery, and much worse from non-feminists.
Sad, sad. Naomi Wolfe just doesn’t get it any more I fear. Thanks for pointing out that BBC article, I’d caught on about the condom charge but didn’t know about the second charge (which is even more damning).
PS typo in the article – “callus”.
To be honest, I’m surprised by the gravity of the accusations presented today. Of course, they are reason to prosecute, yet they seem much closer to the charges originally made and then quickly dropped again. Later, the Swedish prosecutors seemed to look for anything they could charge him with and came up with the condom thing that is now still in the charges but really not important compared to the charge of raping one woman while she was asleep. I think it is important for feminists to accept that saying this whole thing looks somehow staged is not inherently rape-apologetic or victim blaming. To be honest, if it should turn out to be a manufactured accusation, that would probably be really bad news for anti-rape activits, as it would demonstrate how well-intended legislation that relies on trustworthy accounts of victims can be used as a means of attacking men. Saying that Assange should be sentenced if he did rape the women is one thing and necessary – but it should be accompanied by a statement about how strange all this looks. Because it does.
Naomi Wolf has certainly made an error by implying that the accusations, if true, would not be rape. She should apologize for that.
However, I think the core point she is making is correct. Thousands of ambiguous rape cases that cross borders occur in Europe every year, but somehow this one case gets immediate action from Interpol. She’s pointing out that even if Assange actually is a rapist, this is still a case of the power elite turning the screws on a journalist. If law enforcement had previously been known for its spectacular record in such cases, this would be different — but we all know that’s not the case.
Here’s a pretty detailed Reuters report on the Swedish legal moves against Assange: http://reut.rs/eI2jHk
Jessica, do you really feel that a feminist, scratch that…do you really feel that a smart person would need to read what other feminists on the internet are saying to be able to see the straight-up misogny in that daily mail article she linked to?
I had no idea the daily mail was known for sexism. I read Wolf’s piece yesterday and I felt like my hair might fall out. When i went to the daily mail article she linked, I was horrified.
No one had to tell me. I can recognize sexism and misogny. Guess what? I’m not making a living claiming to be a feminist. I really admire your piece, and I understand why you have to soften things up, but I’ll state straight out – she’s stupid.
That is a stupid woman and she has zero right to be calling herself a feminist activist and using that as credibility for a really stupid, and very harmful, piece.
So now forever more we will hear “even the Naomi Wolf said…”
Yeah, Naomi Wolf is a moron and this isn’t the first thing she’s pulled that made me think so (though it is the most egregious). But good luck convincing anyone else that a best-selling author and famouse feminist is a moron. No, she’s screwed everyone with that. And she needs to do no less than issue a full apology.
She won’t though.
I am so horrified by this. After what Naomi Wolf must have gone through when she accused Harold Bloom of groping her inner thigh you think she would know better than to write such an insensitively dismissive and mocking post about these accusations.
It is possible to believe there is something suspect about the charges while also respecting the women who brought them forward and knowing that this is a complicated situation. I would have thought Naomi Wolf mature enough for this.
With all respect to the importance of what you’re saying here, this is not a black and white issue. The latest is that the accuser used to work for a group led by a CIA op, AND she published a seven step “guide to legal revenge” against cheating boyfriends.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2010/12/assange-rape-accuser-cia-ties/
Talk about missing the point, Paul. The point is that a well-known feminist is buying into misogynist narratives that allege that women routinely cry rape whenever they are unhappy with a lover’s behavior. She seems to not understand or accept that consent can be withdrawn. And she accepted uncritically a blatantly misogynist account published in the Daily Mail (a paper known to British women as “the Daily Male” for its unrelenting flogging of anti-woman narratives on a daily basis). This post really wasn’t about Assange’s guilt or innocence, about which we really don’t have all the facts. I agree with Stella that Naomi Wolf is a straight-up moron.
But you know what? I am going to go down the rabbit hole with Paul just a little bit on this CIA bit. (As the daughter of a retired CIA operations officer, this is a subject I know a little bit about.) First, this woman’s alleged “connection” to the CIA is so attenuated as to be laughable. She once worked for a feminist organization run by someone believed to be a CIA agent. OK. So what? Do you think that the CIA has secret control powers that anyone even slightly within their orbit can be magically be made to do virtually anything the CIA wants?
Do you have any idea how difficult / virtually impossible it would be to convince a young woman — a FEMINIST woman, no less — to manufacture a bogus rape charge? To put herself on the world stage and straight-up lie about a rape that never happened?
Do you have any idea what a risk that would be for the CIA and the US? What if it came out? What if this woman turned on the US? I mean, how exactly would the CIA protect itself from her spilling the beans and making them look like idiots?
And, even if the CIA were to manufacture a rape charge, surely they would do a better job of it, no? Surely, if the CIA were to go to all that trouble, they would come up with a more unambiguous story (like “he held me down and forced me despite my loud protests”) that people at large would more easily recognize as rape?
Look, I don’t claim to know what the real facts are, but it drives me nuts when otherwise intelligent people put forth far-fetched CIA conspiracy theories predicated on a notion that the CIA is a semi-magical organization that can do whatever it wants. It always seems that as soon as people mention the word “CIA,” people’s brains fly right out of their heads. I don’t doubt, as Jill suggests, that Interpol may have made this rape claim more of a priority than they might have otherwise due to political reasons — but that it was manufactured by the CIA? I would be most surprised and certainly a vague, attenuated connection to someone who might work for the CIA is evidence of precisely nothing. /end rabbit hole, journey into something not the point of the post.
THANK YOU Elizabeth. So much mansplainin’ going on in these comments…
I have to agree that Naomi Wolf is an idiot. Admittedly I’ve only read one of her books (“Fire with Fire”) all the way through. In that she makes huge generalizations on very little basis and comes to the conclusion that all 19th-century feminists thought one way (the good way) and all 2nd-wavers think another way (which is wrong).
Then there’s a lot of this kind of comment on the “Beauty Myth”: “Wolf seems to assume expert-level knowledge about various religions and their respective, complex traditions, market economies, and even gender studies, among others, molding her understanding of each to fit her preconceived notions and support her case. But as I said already, (and I’m not discrediting every idea she proposes), so much of each case she tries to build is based upon conjecture and unscientific theory that it is difficult to buy very much of what she’s selling.” (at Amazon)
Also, not only doesn’t Naomi Wolf read the internet, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read books either. When she published “Misconceptions” my reaction (and this was before I had a child) was “DUH!” How could she be a feminist and not know anything about the women’s health movement and its intersection with the natural childbirth movement? I wasn’t the only one, either:
Publisher’s weekly: “Wolf says little here that hasn’t been said before in books like Jessica Mitford’s The American Way of Birth and Ann Crittenden’s The Price of Motherhood. What stands out with embarrassing clarity is her emphasis on the sufferings of a privileged minority. In prose that often lapses into purple, Wolf describes the “savagery” of breastfeeding and the unsheltered wilderness of suburban playgrounds. This work is so unoriginal in its social critique and so limited in its portrayal of the hardships endured by mothers and children and families in this country that it comes across as a weirdly out-of-touch bid for personal attention rather than a genuine expos‚.”
Amazon reviewer (Bradley method teacher): “This book has some good aspects but feels like it needed more research or more time in introspection. Sure it is great to have a well known respected feminist writer say the things that Suzanne Arms, Ina May Gaskin, Sheila Kitzinger, etc. have all said before(and somewhat better in my opinion)”
It really makes me wonder how people get “anointed” as famous, talking-head feminists. I know you have to be young, white and pretty, but how does the selection and promotion process work?
Elizabeth and others, I definitely haven’t been clear. I resent that idea that I was “mansplaining” away a rape charge. I commented on this article in the first place because I think Naomi Wolf’s comments were over-the-line and not substantive, on what I think is an important problem. But the problem doesn’t begin with her.
The charges were extremely confusing. First it was rape, that was withdrawn; later we heard assault, molestation, and finally the media latched onto this condom issue. There was so much internet noise around the case it became difficult to find reliable reporting of the facts. Jessica’s more recent articles have been incredibly enlightening about the real charges.
To me, the question has always been: where and how did the breakdown in information begin? Is it the language barrier? Were the charges ever clear? If not, why not?
Certainly I am not implying “a far-fetched CIA conspiracy” when he was actually apprehended on red alert by Interpol. Do we do an international manhunt for every rape charge? Don’t most rape cases go un- or under-investigated? Doesn’t this red alert, on some level, make a joke out of the serious charges in this case, and victims of these crimes when committed by non-celebrities?
That’s the problem as I see it, that got amplified by pundits around the world. That’s what Naomi Wolf participated in. I realize that, as a feminist writer, Jessica felt the need to shine a light on Wolf, but she’s not the source of the problem. She was over the line, but it was clear that she got bad facts too. That’s what I was trying to say. I am glad to see Jessica’s great follow-up articles on the subject.
Elizabeth: only just read this, but personally one of the things that makes me uncomfortable about the whole mess is just what would be required to convince a young woman to make up a bogus rape charge… or even to bring a not-so-bogus one to the police when she otherwise wouldn’t be willing to. It’s definitely a very unpleasant situation for the women involved, no matter what actually happened.