Assange & etiquette

“So you think you were born
In the wrong age?
Turn the page,
Turn the page.”
From Bachchoonama

Julian Assange has been holed up in a two-bedroom flat in the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge in London since he jumped bail on June 19 this year and sought asylum there. He defied bail conditions placed upon him by the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom when he lost his third appeal against extradition to Sweden for questioning on charges of rape and sexual molestation. Mr Assange hasn’t been charged with these offences but is required in Sweden for questioning about them. The Stockholm court issued an international warrant for his extradition in November 2010.
He turned himself in to London’s Metropolitan Police at the time and was then released on bail of £240,000. Mr Assange was by then a celebrity with thousands of people supporting WikiLeaks, his website exposing the secret correspondence of governments and armies. A flock of supporters, Jemima Goldsmith amongst them, came to his aid with the money. His rich supporters, celebrities all, haven’t said what they thought of his doing a runner. But then they have principles and it’s only money after all — what’s £240,000 to the likes of Ms Jemima? Especially if her ex-husband wins the Pakistani elections and then, as Presidents of Pakistan tend to do, receives a quantum leap in his income and gives her some of it.
Ecuador has decided to give Mr Assange political asylum and Britain has said it won’t touch him as long as he is in the embassy building near Harrods in Knightsbridge, but will grab him when he steps into the street. I presume that if he gets in a helicopter from the terrace of the building they will shoot it down.
The world knows that Julian Assange is a combatant in the fight for free information. He is the big pappy of WikiLeaks which published thousands of classified emails and documents, some of them from the secret files of the US military in Iraq. The reason he is resisting being sent back to Sweden for questioning and possible prosecution for rape and sexual molestation is that he and his supporters fear that Sweden will then extradite him to the United States where he could face prosecution, imprisonment without trial or even be tried on some charge relating to the exposure of military secrets and be sentenced to life or even to execution.
Neither Ecuador nor the US has a great record on civil liberties. The US is always urging China and other countries to improve their human rights records but is quite happy to keep the young soldier Bradley Manning, who worked for the US intelligence corps and is accused of passing thousands of emails and classified documents to Mr Assange, in detention without trial in Fort Leavenworth prison in Kansas.
So far neither the UK nor Sweden have received any request or order from the US for such extradition but there is the firm belief amongst Mr Assange’s supporters that the sexual charges in Sweden are trumped up subterfuge and that Sweden has some secret deal with the US. Mr Assange’s supporters say he will go to Sweden if there is a cast iron guarantee that he will not be extradited from there to the US. The Swedes or Barack Obama can publish such a guarantee but haven’t.
Mr Assange’s threatened extradition has initiated a heated debate in Britain — not on the laws of extradition or whether Sweden is more servile to the US than Britain is — but on the definition of rape.
Mr Assange’s story is that both women who accuse him of rape and of sexual molestation were willing participants in their romps. One of them met him at a club, propositioned him, took him to her flat and had consensual sex with him. Then they slept together. Literally. Now I’ve never understood the etymology behind the phrase “slept with”. It’s when you don’t sleep that the action takes place.
Not, it seems, in the case of Mr Assange and the said lady. After they had done their thing and gone to sleep, the lady alleges that Mr Assange had sex with her while she slept and this amounts to rape.
British feminist organisations such as Women Against Rape agree with this definition though it stretches my imagination to understand how the lady could have stayed asleep while Mr Assange was having sex with her. She must have (Your Honour) woken up and cried “refrain!” or the equivalent in Swedish. If Mr Assange then persisted, the waters of definition get muddied.
Not so, says the maverick politician George Galloway, a British MP who is something of a clown and a hero of the Muslim communities of Britain. He has come out in support of Mr Assange. Mr Galloway maintains, in a memorable if not universally accepted opinion, that “a man doesn’t have to ask permission for every insertion.”
His opinion, opposed, ridiculed and laughed out of the courts of reason by the feminists, begs the question of how such consent is manifest.
For thousands of years lovers and partners have either instinctively known when consent is given or when the mutual bargain of consent has been struck, or there has been on the part of one of the parties coercion or resignation to doing one’s duty. This last was the basis of the advice to “lie back and think of England!” I can also imagine some poor cave woman being dragged off for the purpose without knowing what it was or having the chance to consent.
It is perfectly right in our day, age and civilisation that consent be absolute and mutual because sex is the most intimate and most selfish-and-at-once-selfless thing one person can do with another.
What the Assange case poses is whether the law can ever interpret the interaction in the Swedish bedroom and define consent. And does the withdrawal of consent at the tail end of a night of consensual sex constitute “rape”? Or is it merely bad sexual etiquette — a charge to which Mr Assange pleads guilty?