I came across your post quite by accident and I just wanted to thank-you for writing it. I've been feeling very alienated ever since the accusations against Assange were first reported. I've been hesitant to read many progressive political blogs because the subject is difficult for me. It has been especially difficult to deal with the sense of betrayal on the part of progressive political activists. I saw Naomi Wolf's post but didn't click on the link because I knew that if I read it I'd probably end up crying and hyperventilating.
I'm close to Wolf's age and was once a very strident and loud-mouthed feminist. I can assure you, people fought very hard to establish the fact that attacks by strangers weren't the only "real" assaults.
That paragraph in which you describe how someone might lay quietly so it's over more quickly is very close to something that happened to me a little over a year ago. Afterward, I confided in a friend who used to work as a prosecutor in the sex crimes division of a large city. He responded, "You were raped!" He also said that it would be really difficult to prosecute. He said in all likelihood, if I had gone to the police they would have taken my report very seriously, but in the long run they probably wouldn't done anything because it would be impossible to get a conviction. If Naomi Wolf thinks that these sorts of incidents are not "rape", she is not in line with mainstream legal thought.
Too many people seem to me to be responding, not to ideas and principals, but to personalities. I'm glad to know that I'm not the only person bothered by this.
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