Chrissie Hynde
: Don't Get Me Wrong: I Won't Stand For Cruelty to Geese
Ed Miliband
: A Distant and Distracted Cameron Cannot Tackle Tax Avoidance
Charles Moore
: Margaret Thatcher's First Visit to Washington of the Reagan Presidency
Natalie Bennett
: Jobs You Can Build a Life On: The British Economy Isn't Delivering
Seth Freedman
: We Don't Need No Regulation
Last night, I stormed out of a dinner party in a rage with tears streaming down my face. I was in a conversation with a male friend who I love who was trying to explain away Galloway's comments on Assange.
At one point I ended up yelling and itemising the number of his female friends who have been sexually attacked. Let me clarify here, I have not been raped. But I have been assaulted with sex as a goal of the attacker and I have been sexually harassed more times than I can count.
Almost every woman I know has been at the receiving end of some sort of sexually motivated abuse. A few weeks ago I was in a meeting when I got a text that one of my best friends had just been attacked on the tube, it was 4pm. Two years ago, I was followed approached and grabbed on the tube, I resisted and asked other passengers for help, only to be ignored when the attacker said I was his drunk girlfriend. I only got away by diving in to another tube car as the door closed. Both of us would have been victims of 'legitimate' stranger danger rape rather than that of our boyfriends or acquaintances.
In ways, that would have made it easier - as people are able to believe that the baddie in the bushes raped you rather than the neighbour you've known since you were ten or the guy you've been on a few dates with that you would have probably slept with anyway. But both of us when recounting the stories repeatedly say what we were wearing... we explain that we were in no way encouraging it. We justify our right to have been, god forbid, travelling unaccompanied on public transport. This has been ingrained into our psyche. We must have been asking for it in some way.
This isn't meant to be a litany of woe is me and my friends. Rape, sexual assault, assault with sexual undertones and violence underlying it is a constant threat. Rape has been used as a weapon against women since the beginning of time. It is used to tame, silence and demonstrate power over women regularly. And currently in England and the US, two supposedly educated nations, it is headline news. From Julian Assange to Todd Akin; what is rape rape? What is legitimate rape? Why don't these women just roll over and open their legs, whether they are asleep or awake and let us get on with our manly business.
These aren't tears of sadness, they are tears of fury. People wonder why rape is only reported a quarter of the time? Because the cops and the people on the benches of so called justice are asking what they were wearing, they are silently asking if it is forcible, legitimate, real, actual, rape. Or just a misunderstanding. Or just a little bad sexual etiquette.
Something has to give, the fury and rage that is being expressed on Twitter is just the tip of the iceberg. Women need to come out in force and vote. And the men that we love, the men that we share our stories of abuse with, the men that stand by us, need to vote too. Galloway needs to be shamed out of politics.
In my opinion, Assange needs to be prosecuted for the alleged rapes that he committed and Akin needs to resign. And we need to stop electing Neanderthals that hold the belief that rape is anything other than a heinous act.
Follow Jamie Klingler on Twitter: www.twitter.com/photogirluk
Mike Lux: The Problem Is the Base
These are legitimate questions that need to be answered and I think they should be part of an official investigation into whether he committed the offences he is accused of, but it cannot be denied that (in this case) there is some doubt as to what actually happened. I don't agree with Galloway about the whole "bad sexual etiquette" defence, if the woman told him to stop and he didn't, that is rape and he should be punished for it but the other issue here is America's desire to "detain" him for embarrassing them with his Wikileaks revelations. Would you trust America now? A country that tortures people, detains them without trial for ten years and keeps looking for excuses to start new wars is not a country I would want to be extradited to!
The best solution would be if Ecuador were to commit to trying him for the crimes he has been accused of, then we could all believe justice might hopefully be served.
In 1963 I came to Victoria Station by bus to catch the train, returning to my hometwon West Berlin. I needed to eat in the about 2 hours break until the train departed. My suitcase was heavy, but at the left luggage there was a queue so long that I could have deposited and started queueing up for retrieval straight away. Not far I saw a large area of deposited suitcases - I hadn't been the only one. They were unattended suitcases, maybe 50 sqm. Nobody had any problems with that. I had my meal, and returned to retrieve my suitcase.
Why has London changed to what's described above?
As far as the "Rape" article is concerned I'm of the opinion you're either too naive to be allowed out unaccompanied and are therefore a vulnerable adult or you're simply another government puppet subjecting the gullible to the party line on this man, media propaganda to convince the dumbed down population that everything government does or has a hand in is within the boundaries of the law, when clearly, to many watching this saga unfold thats simply not the case, either here or with many other issues.
If you don't want a rational discussion about a topic, don't discuss it! I'm sure, most women AND most men have been sexually assaulted. I have. Though I know no rape-victims, I know two victims of attempted rape: one a woman victimized by a man, the other a man victimized by a woman. In my experience, women have less regard for the principle of consent than men do, because they know men rarely report women for sexual offences.
The jury must be sure beyond all reasonable doubt that rape occurred. Rape isn't like murder, where there's usually evidence! By saying what proportion of rapes is reported, you're taking the alleged victim's side, when the law demands that you take the accused's side, unless the accuser's allegation is proven.
To imply rape is a crime committed by men collectively, against women collectively, evinces a sexist mindset that denies the principle that every adult is responsible for his or her crimes. Women are lucky. The law doesn't even recognize that women are capable of rape: if a woman rapes a man, that's just 'sexual assault'.
You said that Galloway's comments reduced you to tears, and I have no doubt about your sincerity, all I ask is for you to explain what part of Galloway's comments caused you so much hurt. Very little of what he said was factually innocent and his tone, to me at least, seemed genuine. Galloway never said that rape was okay or that it wasn't a heinous act. What he did say was that what happened to these women, if true, do not constitute as rape.
Rape is a very serious and powerful word. If was start calling sex without a condom for example "Rape" then that diminishes the real and horrible meaning of that word.
Except that it does. A woman agreed to sex ONLY with a condom. Therefore she had not given consent for what happened to her. Non-consensual sex = rape. End of story. Sex with someone who is asleep = non-consensual sex. End of story.
Galloway - and anyone else who questions, queries, fudges or otherwise muddies the issue around consent, what it means, and how it relates to whether something is rape or not, really needs to think long and hard before they open their mouth.
Same here. Having sex without a condom when woman wants it with a condom is not good of course, but to call it a rape - this is complete overkill. With the same logic we can get to the point that any change of sexual position during intercourse should be agreed beforehand (preferably in writing) because what if woman says that she agreed only to missionary position? Or without the light? God forbid to do anything different later on!
P.S. I am a woman and as I described in a different comment to this post, I have been raped (for real).
By this logic if the women had told her boyfriend to take out the trash as a precondition to sex and he in fact did not, then she could claim she was raped. The whole notion of conditional consent needs to be thrown out. You consent or you don't. Yes to sex or no to sex. END OF STORY!
Are you unaware of the fact that male rape victims do exist? Your comment is pretty damn misandric and it's exactly why I think these appeals to emotion are damaging. If a man said something like that about women we would know there was something wrong with him and I think even when a women says it about a man there is something wrong with her.
There are differences in rape, in reality and under the law. We don't have to play dumb to create slogans like "rape is rape" when we all know sex without consent can occur under a wide variety of conditions with varying degrees of harm being done to the victim like any other crime of violence. We even define murder in varying degrees because context matters.
We should honestly deal with the reality of false rape claims that are in part driven by hysteria. When we keep lowering the bar for what we call rape we increase the likelihood of illegitimate claims. What is legitimate rape? Sexual penetration without consent is rape. When we start accusing people of rape who received consent things get very complicated. The Assange case was about him not using a condom (as she requested) with a consensual partner making it a questionable charge. Conditional consent should not be considered non consent if the conditions are not met for something like sex.
I dislike that the author conflates groping with rape. Someone touching your butt is not on par with rape and if that were the case a great many women could be accused of sexual assault by men. I for one have been sexually touched by women without permission on many occasions.