Comments | verasteine: One of those rare times I dump a link here.

verasteine

One of those rare times I dump a link here.

Aug 23, 2012 14:23

[Massive trigger warning for the link, and therefore probably also the comments to this post.]

Laurie Penny, being a very brave woman indeed.Laurie Penny is one of the few mainstream reporters whose work I regularly read, and this piece, while published on her personal blog rather than in a mainstream paper, is a powerful argument against ( Read more... )

frustration is for the frustrated, politics, announcing at large, my brain hurts from thinking, feminism: women are ppl too, plotting world domination, rl

Comments 10

thrace_adams August 23 2012, 18:41:06 UTC

OH wow. what happened to her was repugnant...what happened to her by her friends? Even more so :(((((

verasteine August 23 2012, 20:00:57 UTC

The gaslighting after? Yeah, that's horrific.

superbadgirl August 23 2012, 19:19:35 UTC

I keep trying to figure out what distresses me most about rape culture (and, yes, it's been a very rough week), and the fact that stories such as Laurie Penny's are incredibly common is right up there. We need to get to a place where the response of a woman who explains to her friends situations such as Ms. Penny's is, "You were raped, is there anything I can do to help?" rather than, "You shouldn't have put yourself in that situation."

We need to start getting angrier about our tax dollars (USian here) being spent to fund wars that kill innocent men, women and children everywhere instead of angry about the very small number of tax dollars spent on abortions for women who were victims of violent assault. (This is often twisted by uber conservatives to: the federal government is forcing you to pay to kill babies!)

And we need to not shut up about it just because people don't want to talk about it.

verasteine August 23 2012, 20:04:30 UTC

Oh god, yes. (Rough week, indeed.) It shouldn't be a 50/50 chance that your family or friends are going to support you or not.

We need to be angry that this is the norm, and yes, angry about our local political issues, too. And we need to keep talking and yelling, because this isn't going to go away.

fide_et_spe August 23 2012, 19:36:29 UTC

Very interesting and it's such a common story. You know I think it's about how we don't want to acknowledge how much violence is actually done by family members. So people feel safer believing that children are abused and murdered by sick strangers when the reality is that it's almost all by their parents (4 children a week in Britain killed by parents or carers). They don't want to believe that husbands rape and murder their wives, when the stats on that are also awful ( ... )

verasteine August 23 2012, 20:14:32 UTC

Do you think the situation is hidden because women aren't coming forward? The situation is hidden because the police doesn't take allegations like these seriously. The situation is hidden because of the truly horrific ordeal women go through when they come forward. If Penny makes anything clear, it's what happens when women talk about it. The problem isn't women needing to report it. The problem is that the world prefers to doubt the word of women rather than believe them, and the personal cost of coming forward is far, far too great ( ... )

fide_et_spe August 23 2012, 20:59:56 UTC

Oh I'm not saying he shouldn't go. I'm just saying that I don't think he's trying to avoid it because of the allegations per se. Now I don't know his logic re the US, but it does seem that his lawyers are arguing he could be extradited to the US if he does ( ... )

verasteine August 23 2012, 21:21:02 UTC

No, I'm sure he's not worried about the rape allegations. Who would be, with an atrocious conviction rate in most Western countries? I'm sure he's just genuinely concerned for the far graver crime of having done something the US doesn't like. (Which, we shall just add, is also a criminal offence. And one that endangers people. But I digress.) Of course he can be extradited to the US from Sweden. He can be extradited to the US from Britain, too. And the same procedures he used to try to stop the extradition to Sweden are open to him then, too. It's called the rule of law.

I don't think the allegations are a perfect way to get rid of him because they would end up with him in prison

Isn't that what he's worried about in the US, too? Them locking him up? So how is this any different?

I do think he's being condemned as a rapist, and yes I do think he's an alleged rapist.

He is an alleged rapist. Let's stick to the facts, and not argue semantics or whatever, because this debate has been about semantics too frequently already. Whether ( ... )

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