Ah, did you hear that? It’s the sound of a feminist tornado occuring on your laptop.
If you’ve been at all active on Twitter, Facebook, or any blog; if you have read the news- or watched it, or even watched not news, like Keith Olbermann’s show perhpaps; if you have taken a gender class, or a sociology class, or an anthropology class- you get my drift. Chances are, you heard it: the massive swirl of four entirely large personalities (or I guess five, since the whole thing is about one man). They are Michael Moore, documentary filmmaker; Keith Olbermann, political talk show host; Naomi Wolf, feminist author; and Jaclyn Friedman, editor of Yes Means Yes! (and, admittedly, one of my own feminist sheros). All of these people are speaking out on the topic of Julian Assange and the rape allegations brought against him internationally.
Let’s start with a quick summary: Julian Assange was finally put in jail for the allegations (he avoided them for a while), and then celebrities- including Moore and Wolf- posted bail for him. Moore went on Olbermann’s show to discuss it and the two men ended up opining (and tweeting) about the “rape” and using words like “hooey” and lots of “quotation marks.” What occurred then was a shitstorm: Olbermann shut down his account on Twitter after receiving an abundance of criticism, and Moore has simply ignnored the voices talking united under the hashtag #MooreandMe.
And so, round two: Wolf and Friedman appear on Democracy NOW! with Amy Goodman and talk about the case, from woman to woman and famed feminist to another. How disappointing, then, that it was actually a debate on the merits of the allegations and how seriously they should be taken. (more…)
