Julian Assange and 'The Women's Issue'
By Leehee Rothschild
... In a disappointing but quite typical rape apology column, Stone and Moore come to Assange’s defense. They list all of his achievements, speak about the massive threat to the freedom of speech posed by his potential extradition, detail all his generous offers to be interrogated for his sexual crimes in various locations, and narrate conspiracy theories as fact. They also go as far as explaining that he was not “charged with anything,” but only wanted for interrogation for sexual assault.
What’s missing from the entire column, which was shared extensively by my friends and acquaintances, males from the left, are women and their experiences. Assange’s rape survivors were not mentioned once. Their experiences minimized into “nothing but” sexual assault, through a carefully phrased sentence. Furthermore, Moore and Stone do not even spend a moment considering the implications of overlooking Assange’s sexual violence, on the women of the world in general, and women in the left specifically. Women who see they can expect neither solidarity nor support from their comrades on the left when they call out a man from among their ranks, but instead have to deal with contempt, mistrust, and victim blaming. This is nothing but another layer in the well-worn social mechanisms that silence victims of sexual violence, this time employed by the so-called radical left.
Fortunately enough, though, women were not completely excluded from the article. They are present in a small ad on the side bar, inviting the readers to check out “The Women’s Issue,” of the newspaper.
Newspapers and magazines don’t have a “Men’s Issue” because the newspaper itself is considered a man’s issue – politics and finance, news and sports. In other words – everything that happens in the public sphere. The Women’s Issues is the place reserved for everything that belongs to the domestic sphere – cooking and clothing, kids and relationships, all those things too far beneath men to be bothered with. Women’s Issues are the magazine’s way of defining the roles of women and, as a result, of men in the world – women get the kitchen and the nearby mall, and men all the rest ....
http://972mag.com/julian-assange-and-the-womens-issue/54925/
