Hey Joss, I love you man, but you’re wrong…

So I’ve been re-watching Buffy: The Vampire Slayer for about the 2^nd Billionth time recently, and it doesn’t seem to get old. In fact, now it has bonus 90’s nostalgia, so that gets better.

And Joss Whedon writes cool, likeable characters (debates over Tara notwithstanding), which is why the show has so much rewatchability. In fact, I’d say Joss’ best skill is his ability to make you care about his characters. His second important skill is to then kill those characters right when everything is going well for them, but that’s another story.

But recently Joss came out with a speech about his dislike for the word Feminist. It’s an entertaining speech, so rather than put words in Joss’ mouth, I recommend you watch this for yourself:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDmzlKHuuoI

Now as much as I love the man’s work, I have to disagree on a few different levels.

I want to have a look, first of all, at the notion of a “natural” state. The “natural” state is a highly problematic notion that seems to carry with some pre Garden of Eden utopic ideal, from which we are removed. And the battle ground over what is or is not considered natural is one of the more fiercely contested fields of ideology; it is the field in which homophobes, racists and sexists have all attempted to plant their collective banners.

This idea, that there is a blank, neutral, pure self upon which negative structures are overlayed, is inherently fraught and problematic. I’d argue that the mind, whatever it is, is the emergence of structure, and that emerging as feminist is no different, operationally, than emerging as a sexist, or racist, or whatever degree of those various positions you inhabit. The mind has no pre-formation state – if you understand that there are men, women, and states in between, then you have some notion of what those things mean. The nature of the signifiers you attach to those words can be anything, but if you have those words, you understand there to be some difference between those things. 

The next issue goes to that issue of degree. Joss makes the argument that the term “racist” allows you to put the context of it in the past. To that extent, I agree. The problem is, that in putting something in the past, in renders you unable to address it in the present.

I can’t address the roman practice of crucifixion, because it’s in the past. No one is literally crucified for crimes against the state anymore. And, to an extent, I don’t need to; because it’s long gone, and buried, and the Roman Empire is a distant shade of memory.

But race is not the same. Issues of race continue to afflict and damage people. Structural racism, subtle and not so subtle forms of influence that create barriers to some people, and open doors to others, pervade our society.

And here is where the issue with the binary nature of the word “Racism” exists. If I term something racist, I immediately categorise it in the same box as the Holocaust, the KKK, transatlantic slavery, and every other historical horror story. And people will react accordingly. And whilst many people may not consider structural issues that bedevil our society as being a problem they have to concern themselves with, they also don’t see themselves as being comparable to these monsters of history. Thus, calling such things “racism” seems hyperbolic, an overreaction. It is the very extremity of the word “Racist” that leads people to preface statements with the qualifier “I’m not racist, but…” before launching into a predictably racist diatribe.

Confining racism to those things that are “behind us” is a tool for preventing discussion of the world we live in now. It is a tool for silence, for the perpetuation and extension of privilege, for the maintenance of an unacceptable status quo.

So this is where I’ll start to look at what purpose the word “Feminist” serves, and why, unlike Joss, I think we need it and should defend it.

Here’s a part, where I will admit culpability to some terrible traits; traits I should not possess and that are a blight on my character. I am, to some extent, a racist, and a sexist. I judge people unfairly on attributes they have no control over and are in no way reflective of their true character. I have unkind, nasty thoughts that have no basis in fact and are instead the result of absorbed prejudices and ideas. I am a beneficiary of many kinds of racial and sexual privilege and would not have the faintest idea of where to begin divesting myself of that.

I say these things, not as form of self-flagellating castigation but instead in recognition that I, like probably everyone else, am not a complete human project. I catch myself thinking terrible things, and acknowledge those thoughts as what they are, and try to do better. I try not to give these thoughts any currency as being legitimate or meaningful, and instead think my way to the bottom of them where their untruthy tendrils begin.

In respect to one of these questions, I have a word for that ongoing project. I am a feminist, and whatever sexism lurks within me is contested by notion that I have not done enough.

Feminist is an active word. It sees a world that needs to be changed. It challenges the status quo. It tries to improve. When Katy Perry says “I am not a feminist” this is what she means. She does not want to be seen to be challenging the world as it is. My active feminism is pretty small, and meek. I challenge myself. If someone says something grossly misogynistic in my earshot, I will endeavour to correct them. But it’s there, whatever it is, an active movement within me.

There’s no equivalent word when it comes to issues of race. There’s no descriptor for trying to lessen the inequality brought about by centuries of colonial rule, or for actively trying to recognise the prejudices that you contain within your multitudes. And I am less well armed without this word.

So I don’t think we need “Genderism”. We don’t need the idea that equality is something that can be achieved passively, that we can comfort ourselves that we aren't “genderist” and move on with our lives, ignoring the many examples of imbalances in power that surround us. We instead need more feminists, and we need to ask others to consider why they aren't feminists too.

So sorry, Joss, but you’re wrong.

(Also, fuck you for killing Wash.)

Here we go again...

So this, apparently, was a thing:

http://www.mamamia.com.au/social/sexual-assault-and-alcohol/

Every few months this issue seems to rear its head again. Some well-meaning individual decides that young women must be woefully uniformed about sexual violence in our society. The same individual believes that alcohol is the primary vehicle for making young women vulnerable and they would do best to avoid it or minimise its use.

As anyone who reads this who knows me probably should know, I have been embarrassingly, ridiculously drunk in my time. I have blacked out with a faint impression of standing on a table in a Sydney karaoke bar singing “Total Eclipse of the Heart” as if my life depended on, only to wake up in a King’s Cross backpackers with no wallet but a monster hangover indicating the likely location of my now missing funds. I drank enough at an art gallery opening that I became completely suggestible and at the urging of my mischievous co-drinkers interfered with artworks before getting lost in the city and getting cabs home with strangers, and got motherly advice from a Taxi Driver to “drink a glass of water”. I’ve developed infernal concoctions of Malibu and Tequila that lead me to giving prized possessions away to strangers. I’ve used my martini making skills to run a bar only to wake up the following morning with a black eye bad enough that I spent Christmas eve in a hospital. I’ve met random travellers, sang to piano players, gotten lost, kissed strangers, swam in fountains, and raised a general level of agreeable mayhem.

Should I have done these things?

My liver probably says no. A number of these incidents could have been worse, and I guess I’ve been lucky, to an extent.

But these adventures have formed the backdrop of my youth (and not so youth). My drunken foolishness made me friends in Japan, has given me great stories and has led me up many wonderful garden paths. My life without these stories would not even be recognisable to me. It might be better, I might be wealthier, but can I imagine my life without them? Not even remotely.

I’m sure that many would recognise their own misdeeds and stories in the list above. And although you might want to edit some of these out, would anyone really want to excise from their life of every night of excess as a method of forestalling the possibility that someone else might choose to do something horrible to you?

Because that’s what we seem to be saying to young women. And we don’t seem to recognise what we’re asking them to give up.

We’re certainly not asking men to give up drinking. Given as they are the segment of the population overwhelmingly responsible for these crimes, that seems a lot fairer.

But instead, we demand that for the sake of their safety, young women forgo what is, for good or ill, a major part of Australian identity; our drinking culture.

This is done, because rape is an inevitable and unavoidable part of society, or so the story goes. Because warning women about rapists is the same as warning people about sharks; they are just part of the backdrop of our lives.

Firstly, does anyone really believe women don’t know this? Women, in my experience, are aware of the limits to their safety in a way I have never had to consider. Women know the risks, and they make calculated choices on the basis of that risk. If I had to choose between a life of stories and avoiding that risk, I doubt I’d choose the safer choice. Of course, I’ve never had to, and that's the point.

And of course, the other thing a woman has to consider is that they face the risk of sexual assault if they go to work, if they go to school, or in a disturbing number of cases, stay at home. So given as the risks exist, why not enjoy what they can?

Lots of people have made the point, better than I, about how telling women to be the source of control normalises rape culture. What I wanted to raise, was what we ask women to do when we state that their only chance of being safe comes from renouncing all excess. It’s not just swimming between the flags; it’s giving up on the ocean. A choice they shouldn’t have to make.

PS. I've been out of the writing thing for a while, my brain is full of study nonsense. I hope to shake the rust off with this one. It's rushed, so please, if you have criticisms, expansions, counter arguments please post - my rhetorical skills have dwindled arguing only with teenagers!

Birthers and the Total Collapse of Hope

So, first off, let's start with this:

http://www.theage.com.au/world/obama-relents-to-trump-releases-full-birth-certificate-20110428-1dx8j.html

I have a fascination with American politics, in the same way that a car crash is horrifyingly mesmerising. Also, as the resident 800 pound gorilla of world politics, I find things make a little more sense if you pay attention (not much more mind).

So as some background for those who don't share my morbid curiosity, there has been a slowly percolating conspiracy surrounding Barak Obama's country of origin. This began as a fringe right-wing conspiracy but has slowly bloomed into something resembling an ideological front piece for the entire Republican movement. I'm not going to say that most, or even all Republicans support the idea - the less radicalised will certainly disavow belief in the matter if pressed in front of a camera. But the Republican party is certainly happy to embrace those who do subscribe to this kind of idiocy. And in recent days, the hairpiece of destruction, the living symbol of greed and callous arrogance that is Donald Trump, in courting the batshit fringe, has also decided to leap on this bandwagon.

Donald Trump has previously expressed admiration for Barak Obama - so I have little to no doubt that his belief in this kind of bollocks is nothing but the most heinous opportunism. But as one person now referred to as a presidential hopeful (and it gives me the jibblies just to say that) it shows how deeply infiltrated this idea has become.

Never mind that Juan McCain...sorry, John McCain...was actually born in Panama. Never mind that the law itself is a piece of archaic nonsense that even the dystopian future of Demolition Man had the good sense to do away with (although that was to make Arnold Schwarzenegger president, but I digress). Never mind the fact that no other president has ever been asked to parade the pieces of paper that prove his identity before a camera before. None of that matters to the bigots that perpetrate this nonsense.

And it is bigotry. The country of birth is ultimately immaterial - this is about delegitimising Barak Obama on the basis of his identity. The birth certificate is code for "race", as used by people who know well enough that they can't say the word "race" in reference to their objections, but nurture this ugly little worm within themselves anyway. It's a code, a nod and wink to all those other people who have this part of them that lurks in a sub-linguistic kind of way, that says a black man can't be the boss of me.

As soon as Obama was elected, I said "He is going to have to make the rivers of America run with gold if he's going to survive". The close of the Bush era, a remarkable slide into poverty for the most prosperous nation on earth, allowed him to get elected. But it had the feel of the little kid in the Shining reaching out, summoning the groundskeeper. And I see, with ever increasing anger and frustration that Barak Obama has become some kind of racialised stalking horse, a goat layed out for the howling masses to descend upon. Jack Nicholson, just out of frame in the hallway with an axe.

So finally, Obama drags the birth certificate forth. Donald Trump claims it as victory. Reince Prebus (yes, you read that correctly, a parent did inflict that name on a child), the RNC chair, has the gall to imply that somehow this whole saga is Obama's fault. From the article linked above:

''As I've repeatedly stated, this issue is a distraction,'' said Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

''The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy, working with Republicans and focusing on the long term sustainability of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security.

''Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority - our economy.''

YAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGH!

I actually screamed when I read that. Even now, it makes me inarticulate with rage - there's a basic simian part of me that wishes the truth was a rock so I could bash the enemies of reason and sense with it. 2001 style.

But this brings me to the collapse of hope. For contained in this statement is the thesis for the destruction of this planet - a fractal replica on the inanity and horror of the age we're living in. It's a purely political statement - no actual assessment of the situation could lead to the conclusion that in any way did Obama manufacture this situation, the doubt over his birth certificate. A reasonable person would perhaps take this moment that a fringe element within his party had propagated this, and to demand that they now shut the fuck up and go back to fucking their cousins or demanding the right to arm bears or whatever it is that abject lunatics do when there isn't a black man in charge to fixate on. But instead, it's simply an opportunity to bend Truth over the table and give it another solid rogering. It's "Politics as Usual".

Once it becomes apparent that no issue, no matter how transparently obvious, becomes simply another battleground for political grandstanding; that lies have no consequence whatsoever, that one can simply spew nonsense without one's credibility being impaired at all, that we have descended into some post-modernist nightmare.

I find it interesting that whilst the right-wing takes great joy in heaping scorn on postmodernism, they are ready and willing to adopt its fluid notions of objectivity. For a break in this disheartening diatribe, and general amusement, please watch the following:

http://gawker.com/#!5791100/watch-stephen-colberts-defense-of-planned-parenthood

Which brings me to the horror. Right now, we, the human race, have a giant freight train of objectivity bearing down on us. We are standing on the verge of a dose of almost Lovecraftian objective reality. Science isn't Santa Claus or the Boogeyman. Not believing in it won't stop it tearing you limb from limb (yes, Santa Claus does that, it's why our parents destroy our belief in him before we hit puberty and get too naughty. It's for our safety). But it's a big complicated issue, one you have to think carefully about, think about the real ramifications and what the real possibilities are. Something that requires a level of curiosity, but also a healthy respect for certain immutibilities. But the people who are in charge, the people who have tied us to the tracks cackling and twirling their moustaches, they have not even the most basic respect for factuality. They can't make a statement that agrees with itself from beginning to end.

So what hope is there for us?

I just hope that the beetloid race that succeeds us has a little more sense.

Just for Nerds - Catching the Painting Bug

This post will be devoid of the usual rantology - apologies to any who tuned in for that. This particular post will simply be dedicated to the unabashed joy of painting - in particular, painting miniatures.

What I do isn't art. There are miniature painters who hit this standard, but I don't, anymore than a child who proficiently draws within the lines. But if I wanted to be an artist, I'd need a heroin habit, longer hair, motifs of sorrow, loss, and other such stuff. And I have no time to do all of those things because I have a pile of pewter that fills an entire cupboard that needs painting.


Miniature painting is like exercise (or at least, what I've been able to observe of exercise at a safe remove). At first it is painful and labourious. The rewards seem distant and the aches and pains ever present. But if you do some, everyday, even just a little, it gets easier and easier, and more and more consuming.


Having a fair whack of spare time on my hands at the moment has given me the opportunity to catch the bug. And it's been wonderful.


First of all, my giant pile of shame has been steadily diminishing. In a world full of unquantifiable gains and losses, this is something I can see happening. Bits of scattered pewter steadily become a squad, an army! I'm not good at setting goals but this is something tangible and concrete. It's a sense of achievement that grants me pretty minimal bragging rights within a very limited set of people, but the internal sense of satisfaction in definitely disproportionately large.


The way it starts to occupy your mind is also great for stress relief. Instead of worrying about the unavoidable minutia of adult life, you think about washes, what highlight you're going to use where and trying out that new feathering technique. I actually dreamt about washes and shading the other night.


There is a meditative aspect to painting that I haven't been able to access through actual meditation (actually, for various reasons meditation is now associated with social anxiety for me but that's a story for another time). In high school, and was pretty solidly stressed out, what with managing the only known atheist chapter of the Junior Anti-Sex League all by myself, listening to waaaaay to much Ministry and Big Black in the mornings and trying to complete work requirements. The only thing I think that kept me sane during that time was rhythmically painting skink after skink. This was back in the day when each was identical, so I don't even know how I managed to paint 80 odd of the little bastards.


Painting gets me out of a grown-up self-critical linguistic state. When I finish painting some giant monster and make "Raaaargh" noises as I put him on my shelf I am lost in the mindset of a child. There's no artifice to it - I'm not going to make more money, be cooler, or pull more ladies as a consequence of completing it. Yet there it is, a slice of pre-pubescent joy, to see something angry and cool-looking on the shelf. 8 year old Reuben would think it was completely awesome.


So there it is, a little love letter to my current hobby. For those of you out there who share it, then you know what I mean. For those of you out there who don't, well hopefully this is some insight into why I'm at home on a saturday night.

RSVP: Its part in my downfall (Apologies to Spike Milligan)

So...
After a productive year of successful singledom, this summer produced Bernard Black-eque feelings of the necessity of a summer girlfriend. Something about the humidity, I think. This culminated in an admission, at breakfast, to two of my nearest and dearest, that I did not foresee being able to last another year of singledom. This was an extraordinary admission from me, as I have previously claimed I could do a year of celibacy standing on my head (not literally). However, this statement bore with it an obvious question - if can't do singledom, what choice do I have?

Smeames, my erstewhile companion, has oft regailed me with success stories from the world of internet dating - I am told her sister located a strapping transylvanian gentleman thereon, with whom she has produced a child. With the promise of summer vampire love, and having watched too many episodes of True Blood, I resolved to at least look. No harm in looking right?

Initially, it seemed very unlikely to bear fruit. Lots of profile photos with pictures that looked like they'd been taken at flemington racecourse, with words like "bubbly" and "live, laugh, love" and other shudder inducing phrases. I was very close to giving up on the idea, when I stumbled across a young woman - black hair, likes sci fi and video games, has tattoos? Had I found my Ramona Flowers?

I took a deep breath and set about creating a profile. It's a difficult thing - trying to write something that appears snowflake-like, doesn't include any foibles that people aren't likely to find charming, not appear to be self-aggrandising whilst being exactly that. Neil Strauss wrote about "peacocking" in his excellent book "The Game", and this is very much what was brought to mind. If you haven't read this book, then you should - despite what I thought was highly suspect subject matter (the International Society of Pick Up Artists) it is in fact an extremely interesting examination of neuro-linguistic programming, human interaction, and ultimately a charming love story. And it has Courtney Love in it! But I digress.

So I wrote something that highlights what I believe to be the selling points of me, and obscures my Woody Allen-esque nerotics (I believe some people like my neurotic habits, but it's not romance material). And sent a form of limited exchange to the the dame who caught my eye.

It is here that the slightly odious element of monetisation enters the fray. I get it - I'm not some wide eyed neophyte. No one runs a dating site so they can go home with a warm fuzzy feeling. They do it to make money, and they're entitled to do so. But the only way to make such a system work is to restrict access between people. But you can send a little, canned piece of script that you can select out of several options, just to ensure you haven't wasted money on someone who perhaps sees you as "well, maybe if you were the last man on earth...but you'll still have to wear a bag over you head."

So I sent this, and to my near fatal shock, got a positive response - "You seem interesting, I would love to learn more about you."

Gads? More? About me? How could I refuse? Someone, somewhere out there was currently suffering from a dearth of information about me! How could I, as just, reasonable, compassionate man deny her this? Out came credit card.

I got ready to send an email. Finally, a chance to use my WORDS. I'm an articulate guy right? I even use the world "dilettante" in an appropriate context in my profile! So...

What little shame I have left does not permit you to give the exact text used, but it was something along the lines of "So...do you like...stuff?"

I am not surprised that this failed to elicit any response whatsoever.

Saturday night saw dear Smeames leave me at home with her laptop, scrolling endlessly through faces frozen in a rictus of "cheerful, bubbliness". There's something hollowing about this experience - the cold, brutal assessments you make on a person based on their slightest written inflections, the grim knowledge that the same callous judgements are at this very second being meted against you as well. But there's a sense of voyeuristic power as well - although you are  not entirely unobserved, with a click I can approach someone I'd never approach in real life. With another click, I can dismiss someone who's found me. I found myself quite addicted, I have to say. When Smeames returned home, she found me scrolling like a madman. It felt icky, slightly sickening, like eating too many pringles. But once you pop, you can't stop...
Monday was an oddity - I received a contact from a girl, far too attractive for the likes of me. Evidently the press I'd used had succeeded, but perhaps too well. Email banter ensued - areas of common interest found - and slowly, a consensus to meeting up in the real world.

It is important, at this critical juncture, to remind readers that I have this...tendency. I tend to construct these long, romantic narratives about any vague prospect I have. Long as in "growing old together" long. It requires little participation from the other person - in fact, the less they are involved, the better really. Real people rarely match up to the idealised narrative. I will henceforth refer to this as "The Ramona Flowers Effect". So of course, prior to even meeting this person I had spun this elaborate story of the past, present, and future of this involvement; its place in the grand scheme of my somewhat farcical romantic life.

Once again, gentle Smeames was the one to jar me out of my suppositions. Of course, I had no real idea who this person was. I had no idea whether we would work. I had no way of knowing at all. And acting like this was anything other than a possibility was abject foolishness.

Thus it was that I came to be much better prepared for the rejection that followed. We met, had a few drinks and went on our way. I have never felt so comfortable being let go by anyone. It was actually kind of a relief - no longer wondering whether enough I would attractive or witty enough, whether eating that for lunch was a wise idea, any of that stuff.

It seems to be winding up now - the interest I found, or garnered seems to be drying up. I have many rejections under my belt, endured with an increasingly degree of nonchalance, and a great number more of being ignored without response. I find myself doing this scientific dissection - the autopsy of a social experiment. I am chalking it up to a learning experience. I will now return to the quiet dignity of going to Pony, getting drunk and going home alone, or alternatively spending saturday evenings shooting monsters in Gears of War. I have a strong temptation to scrawl "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here" across my profile and abandoning it to the wolves, but I still bear some tiny, niggling hope that something will come of it. But nonetheless, chase not the elusive transylvanian promise of internet dating. It is a perilous game.

Sometimes, I really, really hate Facebook.

Today is such a day.


Last night, I stayed up too late after drinking a bucket of coke during Tron. Today I am not my peaky best. So I follow a relatively benign link and end up inadvertently viewing the profiles of not one but two people I'd really prefer not to think about most of the time, let alone today of all things.


Do we need it? Constant information saturation, the melange of interconnected bollocks? I know it's pretty much a cyberpunk wet dream, total connectivity, global village rah rah rah. But fuck, my brainspace could use a break from knowing shit, once in a while.


He wrote, on his blog on the internet.


Yes, yes, yes, Juicy, salty slabs of delicious irony.


I'm a junky for the this information hyperload - the ready access to trivia, gossip, argument, opinion, hype, anti-hype, fucking you-tube videos of cats riding turtles, the lot. I have been lured in thoroughly. But fuck! Where's the nanny state when you need it? I don't need protection from seeing the accumulated piles of Zombies in Left 4 Dead 2. I need to be protected from pictures of my ex having fun.


I return you to your day. Hypocrite Out!

Rape mythology rises from the dead.

So spending your life in North Fitzroy starts to generate some comforting illusions - in the relatively niche world of latte sipping left-wingish green electorate-dom you start taking certain things for granted. So the recent Julian Assange furore kind of caught me on the hop. On Saturday night, drunker than I should have been for these purposes, I engaged in an argument with a young avowed marxist/feminist, about the specifics of the charges Julian Assange is facing. I'm not going to bore you again with the specifics - suffice to say, my position is - he's been charged with rape (and it is rape, not condom mishandling or any other nonsense) not espionage, and if a giant pile of money is going to anyone's legal defence, it should be Bradley Manning who is actually in the grips of the US legal system and not Julian Assange.

My rhetorical skills were not exactly in fine form - trying to hold a complex argument in Yah Yah's whilst impaired is not exactly the best circumstances for a reasoned debate, and I may have said at one point "Socrates raped children" a charge for which I have no basis, and if untrue I send my sincerest apologies to Olympus. And my erstwhile antagonist in this debate was as impaired as I was, at least, so she may be forgiven her own rhetorical excesses.

Nonetheless, at one point, the defence of Assange was: "He was at Melbourne Uni. He's a nerd." This, as a justification on how he couldn't possibly be guilty of any wrong doing. I was stunned. Really? People still think that's a valid defence? It's the same argument as "We're in the same footy club. He's a good bloke."

The whole public structure of this argument follows similar lines - if you ask any of Assange's defenders about what the basis of their firm belief in his innocence is, a discussion immediately begins on the American Industrial Military Complex. The power of his enemies immediately obviates any positional that four different women might actually have a claim. This is repeated all the way up the line.

So whilst the public discussion and "Free Assange" movement is debating the relative merits of the wikileaks as a whole, it seems that the proper point of these arrests is entirely overlooked - the complaints of four women who are alleging rape.

Other bits that have brought up questions in my mind. Any discussion of rape nearly inevitably brings up the "false rape" scenario - it's nearly never actually specified what incident of provably false rape claims actually happened. This idea has almost a free floating status, an almost archetypal quality. And it's a quality that associates itself with almost every rape accusation that ever comes up.

It's not something that comes up with other crimes - when someone's murdered, no one says: "Well, there was that guy in Germany who asked to be eaten" or when a house burns down, no one jumps to the conclusion "well sometimes people burn their own houses down for the insurance."

But when you think you've seen it all, there are choice pieces of human detritus like this guy.

http://theothermccain.com/2010/12/06/unintentional-hilarity-feminists-ask-if-julian-assange-committed-rape-rape/

Aside from the masturbatory predator drone fantasies (which will be the subject of a later rant, fear not dear readers), this guy actually intones the ancient “blaming of the victim”, that is so beloved in Tehran and Saudi Arabia. "Buy the ticket, take the ride" he says. I'll spare you all the verbal revenge porn I wish upon this man, but it got me to wondering, why don't people treat ALL crimes this way. So, without further ado, I bring you my short, one act play –

Blaming the Victim - for all walks of Life

Scene opens on a courtroom. A jeweller sits in the dock, having just tearfully recounted his robbery at gunpoint by an armed assailant.

Lawyer: Is it not true, Mr. Jeweller, that in fact you sell jewellery for a living?

Jeweller: Yes, yes - it's my trade.

Lawyer: One of the world's oldest, is it not?

Jeweller: I don't really see what that has to do with it.

Lawyer: Isn't it true, Mr. Jeweller, that you handed over Jewellery to over 20 people  that day already?

Jeweller: Yes, because they paid for it.

Lawyer: Aha! So you admit, you charge people money for jewellery.

Jeweller: Yes but what -

Lawyer: Is it not a fact that many people give Jewellery as gift?

Jeweller: Yes, all the time.

Lawyer: So is it not possible, that my client, having seen over 20 people walk in a walk away with jewellery that day, assumed that you were happy to give it away? You certainly showed enthusiasm when giving it away to other people.

Jeweller: Of course I was! They paid for it.

Lawyer: Yes, yes, we're all aware of what you're willing to do for money now, but how was my client expected to know? And is it not true that you had an abundance of jewellery on display that day?

Jeweller: Yes! It's how I let customers know what I have for sale.

Lawyer: A lot of people are much more careful with their jewellery. They put it in safety deposit boxes, or hide it. Such a flagrant display is bound to attract attention is it not?

Jeweller: That's the point of it!

Lawyer: Aha! So you admit deliberately flaunting your wares in order to attract clientele?

Jeweller: Yes but -

Lawyer: Surely if you wanted to keep your jewellery, you should have been more circumspect with it.

Jeweller: Yes, but that's not the point! I charge for jewellery! When I objected to your client taking it, he put a gun in my face!

Lawyer: But surely, if you wanted to avoid violence, you should have chosen a profession less prone to violent, dangerous situations.

Jeweller: (breaks down in tears)