Crusade for truth does not warrant misogyny
What has been most striking about Julian Assange being prosecuted on sexual assault charges is not the timing, although that is indeed ponderous. Rather it’s the public and media reaction, which has been marked by hasty judgement of the women making the allegations, and hurling all kinds of derogatory epithets at them that are almost invariably tied to their gender. As often seems to happen in rape cases, it is the women’s sexuality and personality that is being put on trial in the public arena. These charges, regardless of their merit or lack of it, have been taken as a trigger to unleash all sorts of outright misogynist statements and slander.
It’s practically impossible not to see these charges in conjuction with the broader political accusations levelled at Assange and his website. The swiftness with which the British justice system has pursued this warrant when it is slow to respond to similar complaints made by its own citizens doesn’t deserve to pass without comment and, as anyone with an awareness of history will know, there is an ignoble tradition dating back to the racist lynch mobs of the American Deep South of using sex crime allegations to furnish political agendas that have nothing to do with women’s safety.
But Assange’s status as 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 dishonesty that others are not – and, in this case, deserving of the same crowd-sourced scrutiny applied to leaked diplomatic cables.
In this way, rape allegations against a maverick internet provocateur are trivialised in the context of his crusade for truth instead of being capable of existing alongside it, unpalatable as that may be.
The fact that the defence of Assange has spawned such vitriolic misogyny should be of concern to all women and men who find it as distasteful and counter to the pursuit of truth as the attacks on WikiLeaks itself.
BY ANNETTE MAGUIRE
