Confidential To The Internet

The Surprising Adventures Of Lux Alptraum: Excerpts from emails about rape.

luxnightmare:

On Jan 13, 2013, at 3:34 AM, [redacted] wrote:

Dear Ms. Alptraum,

Could you please clarify your recent reaction on Tumblr to Ann Friedman’s NY Mag post? This is probably because while I consider myself a feminist, I am also a man, but I had trouble parsing out portions of both Ms. Friedman’s article (is she saying that we should no longer punish or condemn the perpetrators of rape in any way because it does not directly help the victims?) and yours (I do not believe that a rapist is a “good guy”- period).

[redacted]

On Jan 13, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Lux Alptraum wrote:

[redacted]

With regards to Ms. Friedman’s article, and my response post: no, Ms. Friedman’s point was not that we should no longer punish or condemn the perpetrators of rape; her point was that the mass condemnation of cases like Steubenville may make us all feel like we’re doing something to fight sexual assault, but, in fact, helps to obscure the fact that most sexual assault cases are not as cut and dry as Steubenville—and that, independent of our mass outcry against that case, there are numerous women (and men) who are sexually assaulted by people who aren’t so easily labeled monsters; and because those perpetrators aren’t as easy for us to uniformly condemn, it is challenging for victims to name their accusers. As a culture, we’ve (rightly) labeled rape and sexual assault as some of the most horrific things you can do to a person, but an extension of that is the parallel assumption that rape/sexual assault can only be committed by the most vile people on the planet. As a result, when someone who we believe—or want to believe—is good is accused of sexual assault, the cultural impulse is to defend said person, because we don’t believe that anyone short of a Snidely Whiplash style cartoon villain could possibly be out there committing an act as vile as rape.

By way of example: compare the reaction to Steubenville to the reaction, a few years ago, to the assertions that Julian Assange had sexually assaulted at least two women (in this case, by having unprotected sex with each of them after they had *only* consented to protected sex). Granted, dragging a passed out woman from house to house on some sort of revenge rape tour is of course more extreme than forcibly refusing to use a condom with someone who has already consented to protected sex with you, but I think that we can agree that both are forms of sexual assault that should be roundly condemned. But while the football players of Steubenville have received such condemnation, the reactions to Assange were decidedly mixed, with many—even feminist icon Naomi Wolf—downplaying the accusations, insisting that they must be false, or even going so far as to construct a vast conspiracy theory in which Assange’s accusers were, in fact, covert CIA operatives.

Why the support for Assange where Steubenville received condemnation? Well, for one thing, Julian Assange isn’t some anonymous high school football player, he’s an international hero and liberal icon. And we don’t want to believe that our heroes and icons can do bad things, let alone that they can do horrific things like rape another person. So when someone like Julian Assange is accused of rape, a sort of cognitive dissonance arises: since we believe it is impossible for a good man to have raped, then either Julian Assange is not a good man (which then puts defense of WikiLeaks on potentially shaky ground) or Julian Assange did not rape. You can see that most of Assange’s fans chose to believe the latter.

But I don’t believe that it is so simple as that. I don’t believe the choice is between Assange having done good, important work with WikiLeaks or Assange being a vile rapist; I’m completely aware that both states can exist within the same person. It is entirely possible that Julian Assange is a *person* (not a hero, not a great man, just a person) who has done amazing, important work with WikiLeaks while simultaneously showing complete disdain for the women in his life by taking advantage of them while they are sleeping and ultimately sexually assaulting them. In fact, I know that that is the case, because, of the numerous people who have engaged in sexual acts with me without my express consent over the years, approximately zero of them were Snidely Whiplash style cartoon villains. Most, if not all, of them would generally be considered good people—but that doesn’t change the fact that they did horrible, upsetting things to me.

One of the kindest, sweetest men I have ever met stuck his dick in me without a condom because he “wanted to see [my] reaction.” My friend [redacted]’s lifelong friend groped me while I was half passed out once. And someone I knew for years once had sex with me—despite the fact that I’d begun the evening by explicitly stating I did not want to have sex with him—because, without ever asking me, he decided that I had changed my mind.

Do I believe that the acts above are horrific things that should be roundly condemned? Absolutely. Do I believe that the people in question who committed them are horrible people who deserve to be in jail? Absolutely not (in fact, it is worth noting that—when confronted with my view on what happened—every single one of these men felt horrible and apologized). What I think is that we live in a culture where men are taught that their sexual pleasure is a paramount goal, and that women are objects whose primary purpose is to fulfill that goal; what I think is that when you’ve been served up that message for years, or even decades, in the heat of the moment it can be easy to forget that the woman in front of you is a fully realized human being with her own wants, needs, and desires who may not share your interest in the pursuit of your sexual pleasure. And I think that it is possible for all sorts of men—even really, really good men—to ignore their better side and do something really fucking terrible to another person because they’re unable to see beyond their own wants, needs, and desires—and because society has taught them that at no point should they ever have to.

The problem with the condemnation of Steubenville isn’t that we shouldn’t be condemning men who videotape themselves dragging women around town and sexually assaulting them. The problem with the condemnation of Steubenville is that it allows us to feel that we’ve done our part for the fight against sexual assault while completely ignoring the experiences of the vast majority of sexual assault survivors—the way feeding the homeless on Christmas allows us to feel like we’ve really helped fight hunger while completely ignoring the reality of food insecurity in America. Furthermore, it allows people like Julian Assange to continue to deny any wrongdoing, because when they look in the mirror, they don’t see anything even remotely like the monsters of Steubenville—and if they’re not like those boys in Steubenville, then of course they can’t be rapists.

As I said in my blog post, a friend of a friend of mine once tried to have unprotected sex with me without my consent. And when confronted with this fact, my friend—who I have known for thirteen years, and who was my roommate for four of those years—immediately did his best to defend his friend. Because just like the supporters of Julian Assange, my friend can’t mentally deal with the idea that someone he likes and hangs out with and plays video games could possibly be guilty of something as vile as sexually assaulting a woman. Does that attitude help me? Not really. Does it help other women who might, at some point in the future, find themselves on the receiving of some unwanted sexual act from my friend’s friend? Definitely not. But since it helps my friend sleep at night to gloss over the finer points of his friend’s sexual behaviors—rather than confronting them and acknowledging that his otherwise lovely friend did something really shitty to a girl he was having sex with—the experience that I had, and the experiences of numerous sexual assault survivors, ultimately gets swept under the rug while we all pat ourselves on the back for being anti-rape while we condemn the boys of Steubenville.