Consexual Sense

Homecomings bring Reckonings on Julian Assange

The Homecoming of Julian Assange is a well overdue, hardwon, just and joyful outcome, and arguably not the occasion to rake coals. The duration of his detention was not only disproportionate to any of the crimes he was accused of, but, of course, he should never have been charged for and history-changing interventionist exposure of US war crimes, that is, for journalism,

The BBC just published an interview with Anna Ardin, one of two women who accused Assange of sexual misconduct.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1jgv3knnwo

For Ardin their encounter remains unresolved. And Assange is now in a position where redressing her claims can’t be seized upon by regimes hellbent on extraditing him to face charges in the US that carry the death penalty. He could issue Adin and Wilen with an apology for smudging their consent and overstepping their boundaries.

Ardin herself has never been in a position to simply dismiss these allegations as a CIA plot, and impressively she now calls for nuanced understanding. ‘She slams many of Assange's supporters - and journalists - for seeking a “one-sided narrative” which turns him into a hero, and her into an evil CIA agent.’ Ardin adds, “I think that we have a problem that we have to have these heroes that are flawless… I don’t think heroes exist outside fairytales.” And ‘“I want him to be seen as a normal guy. That's what normal guys do sometimes. They cross other people's boundaries.”’

Now this, every woman whose been intimate with men, will relate to. The number of times we’ve consent to sex with men who then, without checking, introduce acts, say they’re doing one thing and taking it further, fail to respond to changed circumstances, suddenly adopt a more aggressive persona, or get underway without securing enthusiastic consent, I suspect none of us could count on two hands along with all our toes. The number of times we’re left bewildered and hurt, trying to understand why we went along with things we’d never agreed too - I doubt can be quantified.

Except that the wilful misinterpretation of any consent by men as unfettered has been since quantified. So much so since Assange’s charges, that this study refers to a so-called “Consent Moment”:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/13634607221096760

To add one personal example to the reams of testimony during #MeToo, I have been banned for Twitter for life after setting up a AI generated profile and using this ‘honeypot’ to very explicitly lambast men for the sly and sneaky stunts they’d been pulling on me during 3 years of online dating, and directing them in no uncertain terms to change their behaviour.

Like all Het women, I have some skin in this game, which is why it is worth raking the coals.

When as Wikileak’s frontman Julian Assange appealed his order from a London embassy for extradition to Sweden and prosecution for two accusations for sexual misconduct, I was then reminded of our Ormond College consent moment. Since then so much of consent advocacy has been focused on tertiary and secondary education institutions, with posters behind toilet doors (the last frontier of non-screen advocacy) etc.

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Some of can remember, Helen Garner’s book The First Stone lobbed a grenade into the Australian feminist movement, when she appropriated an actual incident of sexual harassment to argue women enfeebled themselves when they called on police to fend off unwanted sexual advances they should have the wherewithal to repel themselves.

Ironically Garner used this woman’s experience without her consent. Arguably she called upon a higher authority, she went to the cops, because of the University’s failure of process. Arguably Assange might too have averted this course of action if he had simply apologised to the women when they confronted him. For the woman at Ormond college - who mercifully still goes unnamed, for who would put themselves in Ardin’s shoes - in the end a drunken grab at her breast at a university college social event descended into national scandal because wheels were set in motion that ended up disproportionately damaging everyone involved.

Soonafter the Assange scandal added to this body count. The same incredulous question was left hanging over the two Swedish women who originally sought ‘advice’: They went to the police? This same sense of disproportion, added to the heady mix of ‘dodgy’ opportunistic charges directed at Assange, hinges off unresolved tension from the ‘sexual revolution’ in which the status of women’s sexual autonomy and our consent is still unclear when viewed over the sights of persistent, endemic sexual violence.

I mean, these girls ought to have been a little more careful, a little less drunk, a little less willing oughtn’t they? Or so the unspoken thinking still goes.

Ardin and Wilen initially inquired as to whether they could legally compel Assange to undergo an STI test. Their accounts were grounds for sex crime charges for the duty officer, who then leaked them to the Swedish press. The rape charge was rescinded by the chief prosecutor for the Stockholm region, but the ‘annoyance’ charge remained. A few days later, however, a lawyer, Borgstrom, and former ‘gender equality ombudsman’, became involved. She approached the head of a ‘crime development unit’, Ny, who is a specialist in the development of sex crime law, and who reconstituted formal charges against Assange, which then provided Interpol with the grounds to extradite him to Sweden.

Critical to what unfolded was the fact that no accusation was made that consent was withdrawn. The pursuit of this allegation was in the hands of the Swedish prosecution, not Ardin or Wilen.

To add insult to injury the women themselves came under intense scrutiny; proof of their various equivocations were widely circulated in the press, from withdrawn tweets to advice on getting revenge on ex-boyfriends posted on the web since withdrawn. For many feminists then observing, at issue was how decades of rape law reform, could be misappropriated by lawyers to expedite the unrelated legal process of Assange’s extradition by the US. A radical movement found itself opportunised by the machinations of international diplomacy.

Recalling the Garner scandal, there was a clear disjunct between the nature of the allegations and proportional legal redress, not to mention public perception of all those involved, claimants and accused. At the time I argued the intensely public reverberations through gender relations in both scenarios centred on the ambivalent reception of women’s relatively recently asserted sexual autonomy. It was part of a backlash against it. The lingering concern is that none of these women had any desire for their experiences to form the basis for a reexamination of contemporary definitions of sexual interaction, let alone the decades long persecution of an esteemed journalist and activist. Who would sign up for Ardin’s life? How was her homecoming after she left Sweden to escape death threats?

Under attack are still hard won gains against an ongoing epidemic of sexual violence against women and children. In defending women for sexual harm, feminism became the persecutor. Assange at the time dubbed Sweden the ‘Saudi Arabia of feminism’, and prosecutor Ny, was accused of being a ‘radical feminist’, and ‘preoccupied’ with women’s victimization and ‘biased’ against men. Ardin still wants her allegation heard in a court of law.

And here again is the Garner rub - no pun intended. In defending women’s sexual autonomy a machinery can be set in motion that brings into question whether such allegations should be the province of the law - not to mention its Interpol machinations - or left to recently declared autonomous women to handle as they best see fit. Grinding a spiked heel into the foot of an assailant became the badge of feminist home-remedy during the Ormond College affair. Like the Swedish claimants, these women were shown to have demonstrated all manner of autonomy in their young, feminist-informed lives.

In an intimate encounter entirely devoid of violence, threat or coercion where enthusiastic consensual activity has taken place, for whatever reason whatsoever, a woman has a right to withdraw her consent at any moment. But she also has a responsibility to state that unequivocally at the time. While consent can’t be assumed, neither can its withdrawal be second guessed.

In the Trinity College and Assange cases we have two historic scenarios where women’s attempts to use legal processes to assert their sexual autonomy set in motion a series of events for which they were then held responsible. Ironically the then examination of their histories, characters, and the actual events in question, created a mantle, a sexual history in disrepute, that none will ever escape from. But has Assange? A simple apology is due to Ardin and Wilen and nothing obstructs this now. Bring it home Julian.

This article updates a 2011 op ed on the ABC:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-03-08/consexual_sense/44764