Girls just wanna have guns

What do rightwingnutjob *REAL* women and young *REAL* women have to say about sexual assault? Phyllis Schlafly is on tour, blaming and shaming women for all the bad things that happen to them, claiming with a Botoxed straight face and a grim demeanour that feminists make women want to have divorces and abortions.

Meanwhile, the entrepreneurial & spiritual spawn of $arah Palin©™ believes girls and young women should carry guns to defend themselves from potential rapists. Since the majority of sexual assaults perpetrated on women under 25 are committed by men known to their victims - family members, neighbours, work colleagues, teachers or religious officials, classmates, acquaintances, friends as well as intimate partners, that's not bound to end well.

Nonetheless, here she is. Oh, and her sister participated in the ACORN entrapment scheme.



For a different, rational and not as shrieeeky analysis of sexual assault and rape culture, here's an opinion piece by Sady Doyle. She's known for her highly visible campaigns, mobilizing opposition to John Boehner's attempts to restrict access to legal abortions in the US and to defund Planned Parenthood.

Doyle compares and contrasts the media coverage of reports regarding journalist Lara Logan in Egypt, and about sexual assaults committed allegedly committed by Wikileaks founder Assange.

But the contrast is clear. In Logan’s case, all is fact. We believe her, as we have every reason to do. In the Assange case, nothing can be definitively known. In Logan’s case, the violence is clear and visible; in the Assange case, the alleged violence has widely been trivialized and dismissed. (In response to the allegation that Assange forcibly pinned a struggling woman and forced her legs open, Assange’s defender Geoffrey Robinson said that it was “what is usually termed the missionary position.”) In Logan’s case, the assailants were strangers, and they had multiple witnesses; in the Assange case, the alleged assaults took place privately, between acquaintances, which is also the case with most actual rapes.

We don’t need to play ranking games here. What happened to Logan was horrific; if the allegations against Assange are true, those assaults were also horrific. But one might assume — I did — that Logan would not be subject to the same sort of defamation or victim-blaming that Miss A or Miss W have been. We know it happened; there’s no way to dismiss it. We know that she was outnumbered and overpowered; there’s no way to blame her for what happened. Right?

Wrong. Just as Miss A and Miss W were subject to nasty insinuations about their sexuality and lifestyle — the Daily Mail found the time to tell the world that Miss A was “an attractive blonde” and “a well-known ‘radical feminist,’” and to assert that the case had negative implications for both women’s “values” — the coverage of Logan’s assault often focused on her sexuality or attractiveness. Simone Wilson of LA Weekly described her as a “blonde reporter” who was “known for her shocking good looks,” and whose “sex life famously came under fire” two years before the (completely unrelated) attack. Just as people insinuated that Miss A and Miss W somehow invited an attack, they said the same about Logan.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.