Wednesday 22 August 2012

I am so tired.

I almost feel like I should blog about Julian Assange, but I see his name so much at the moment that it's stopped looking like words and started looking like what happens when your printer glitches out and prints everything smooshed onto one or two lines, surrounded by squares and Greek letters.

I've been reading around the Assange controversy and I feel a lot of things. I feel anger. I feel resentment. I feel no small amount of hatred - for the man, for the people who defend him, for the regressive legislation active both in this country and the countries that intend to grant him asylum. But mostly, I just feel tired.

Since I first became serious about feminism three years ago, rape has undoubtedly taken up the most debating space in print, on the Internet, in my social circles. My fellow feminists and I have gone around and around the circle of what constitutes rape, why it's bad, why that still counts as rape, yes, that too, no really, people hate it when you do that, why would you even think that's OK, and so on and so forth. Some people understand quickly. Some people understand eventually. Some people will never understand.

The fact that we still have to have this same conversation - the one that's been going on since Wollstonecraft, the one that's been at the forefront of discourse since feminism had a name - and still get the same rebuttals, the same legislative failures, the same pig-headed willful ignorance as we always have, just makes me want to roll over and go back to sleep until it goes away.

Which it won't, because it's failed to go away until now and will only settle down, in a few weeks, until the next public figure is accused of rape or until Assange inevitably farts some more horrific apologism onto a sheet of paper or the Internet.

I find it completely disgusting that, after so many years, people still don't know what rape is. But more than that, I find it exhausting.

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