Considering all the liberal, conservative, anti-feminist and, err, occasional backsliding feminist angst about the Assange case in Sweeden doesn't it seem like the Minnesota case against Daniel Rick from back in March of this year seem curiously obscure?   It’s not at all 100% parallel to the Assange allegations but it’s similar enough that one wonders why the MRAs and their fellow travelers who’ve been up in arms about Sweden’s “Saudi Arabia” haven’t been all over the Rick case.

For instance, Rick’s victim chose to accompany him to his home after meeting him in a bar.  The victim chose to pass out drunk in Rick’s home and (after all) that’s practically the same thing as consenting to sex.  And when he did have sex with the victim he evidently didn’t use a condom, which triggered extra charges for knowingly putting the victim’s health at risk.  And in that case, too, when one complaint was filed other “me too” victims came forward, revealing a pattern of behavior on Rick’s part!

It's enough to make you think anti-Wikileak forces aren't the only ones exploiting the Assange case for their own political ends!

Once again, not 100% the same as the accusations against Assange (for instance unlike Assange Rick had related prior arrests on his record) but many of the particulars are close enough that it’s weird that the Assange charges seem to have caught MRAs off guard.

Of course the source of this particular "Saudi Arabianism" is Minneapolis, Minnesota and not Sweden, but... well... here's how their local Fox network station put it:

MINNEAPOLIS - Two additional charges of assault have been filed against an HIV-positive Minneapolis man already charged with raping a man.

Daniel James Rick, 28, was arrested Monday after more alleged sexual assault victims came forward. The victims said they had unprotected sex with Rick, who didn't reveal his HIV-positive status.

Rick was charged Wednesday with two counts of third-degree assault by knowingly transferring a communicable disease. Those charges are on top of charges in February of third-degree criminal sexual conduct and third-degree assault for the alleged rape of a man he left a bar with.

According to the original set of charges, Rick and his victim went to The Saloon in downtown Minneapolis and after to Rick's home. The victim passed out drunk and later awoke to Rick sexually assaulting him.

Source: MyFox9.com

Oh... wait!  Whawazat?  Did... did you see that?  Oh wait a minute, Daniel Rick is gay! His victims were all men! Doh!  Cancel the Operation Payback attacks on the Minneapolis Star-Trubune!

No feminist angle on the case for miles and miles. False alarm. Never mind!

For all MRA protestations that “but men can be raped too,” and for all the MRA protestations that accusations of rape are invariably false, it doesn’t count when the victims, or the accused, are gay.

Must be why nobody’s Tweeting about how Sweden’s a “feminist Minnesota.”

Image from Italian website Bioetica.
Original source unknown.

Geoffrey K. Pullum of Language Log dispenses with one evident miscommunication… but raises another. First, the big news policy-wise.

The Pope has changed his mind about condoms: they can be used after all!

That’s what the world’s media has decided to splash over the front pages this weekend. (“Pope Benedict’s condom U-turn” said the headline over Andrew Brown’s blog piece at The Guardian.) They are being scandalously irresponsible as usual: the Pope has said nothing of the kind. Rather, he grudgingly acknowledged, in one answer during a book-length interview, that perhaps in some cases perhaps the use of a condom by a prostitute (una prostituta) might be “a first step toward a moralization… Absolutely no sign of a Catholic Church volte face on contraception there.

Source: Language Log

Pullum points out that the issue appears to be a mistranslation of gender in the term “una prostituta” in Vatican’s official Italian-language edition. The Pope, however, is a native speaker of German, as was his interviewer, and there’s considerable evidence that he was talking about condom use for male prostitutes. The Italian version strongly suggests he meant prostitutes who are women. Thus the misunderstanding that the Church might somehow be moderating its opposition to contraception. No such luck there.

But if the ambiguous gendering of una prostituta has been reduced to a problem of mistranslation. Or possibly a problem of euphemism if, say, some of the target languages are culturally less tolerant and/or more prim about the possibility of male prostitution, Pullum introduces another language speed bump when he says (emphasis mine)

[S]ome of the odd things about the foggy passage just quoted might be relevant to my linguistic puzzle. One is the fact that using a condom generally means putting one on one’s own penis, and if that is to count as an assumption of responsibility, Pope Benedict must be envisaging an infected male prostitute whose service consists of active penetration and ejaculation of a passively participating client. I know very little about the world of prostitution, but it is my understanding that it is much more typical for it to be the other way round, in which case the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it, and the motivation would be the selfish one of protecting the prostitute’s own health, hence not an assumption of responsibility at all.

In which case, as Language Log commenters such as John, Aaron Toivo,and other have hinted, we can still delve into the function of the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

I am so not a linguist, nor do I claim competency with language tools. And I don’t think Google page counts qualify as reliable for statistical purposes. That said, a quick check suggests “he used a condom,” “we used a condom,” and “she used a condom” are all used with some frequency.

Also, considering that just as it wouldn’t be unusual for a restaurateur to say “I used plastic wrap to cover the customer’s leftovers” it wouldn’t seem unusual for a prostitute to say he or she uses a condom to cover a customer’s penis. Thus while getting a condom on to a customer may be a problematic element for at least some sex workers, it’s not necessary to say “receptive sex workers don’t use condoms, their customers do.”

There are other instances where receptive partners are presumed to be condom users but the most glaring would probably be the controversial ordinance in New York Washington, D.C., that allows police to detain a woman on suspicion of prostitution if she has more than a certain number of condoms in her purse.

Final note: if I was a linguist I’d probably write a post about how the assumption that being the penetrating partner makes one the active agent conditions the way we employ the word “use” in “the prostitute would not be using the condom, but asking the client to use it.”

-=

p.s. you learn something new every day at Language Log, and in this case the commenters really came through. Even though I’ve been a fairly active sex blogger for years I hadn’t known that more same-sex customers seek penetration than seek to penetrate. Several commenters, including at least one former male sex-worker, set the record straight. Knowing that makes sense of a number of differences in rates of condom acceptance between those who are straight and those who are not.

Mark Seddon of Big Think calls attention to Stephen Fry’s over-the-top perfect submission to the bogus Two Rules of Desire. Seddon says Fry manages to fall for both rules in one sentence!

Stephen Fry raised the curtain when he said that men secretly felt ‘they disgust women’ as they ‘find it difficult to believe that females are as interested in sex as they are’.

Yup. In heterosexuality Rule #1 is about the inconceivable impossibility of women having desire, Rule #2 about the similar impossibility of men being desirable.

Fry being gay, is strongly aware of the other side of Rule #2 — intolerability of men being desirable. As a gay-rights activist Fry is obviously aware of this part of Rule #2. And it’s patent absurdity. Which makes it a shame that he falls for the rest.

Seddon continues

He continued: ‘If women liked sex as much as men there would be straight cruising areas in the way there are gay cruising areas.’

Fry said that the only women who accepted being promiscuous were prostitutes and that was because they receive payment.

‘Women would go and hang around in churchyards thinking: ‘‘God, I’ve got to get my f*****g rocks off’‘, or they’d go to Hampstead Heath and meet strangers to s**g behind a bush,’ he told the November issue of gay magazine Attitude.

‘It doesn’t happen. Why? Because the only women you can have sex with like that wish to be paid for it.’

Source: Big Think

Right! And the only reason men ever “turn” gay is because they had strong mothers and weak fathers. Oh, oh, or maybe because other gay men “convert” them from straight to gay. Yeah, that’s gotta be it, right? One imagines Fry would call that part somewhere between offensive and insane. Well… yeah. So why participate in that breed of stereotyping in the first place?

No remember, the Rules of Desire insult both men and women — men for being sexually unlovable, undesirable, and unattractive; women for being calculating golddiggers. Fry seals the… um… misperception thusly

I feel sorry for straight men. The only reason women will have sex with them is that the sex is the price they are willing to pay for a relationship with a man, which is what they want.

Fry has evidently retired from Twitter, at least (where much of the uproar occurred) and possibly other online venues. If so it’s a shame since he’s a thoughtful, insightful, progressive, and not particularly more indoctrinated to the dominant paradigm as anyone else. Because, seriously, almost everybody believes those things. And not being directly hetero himself Fry is particularly unlikely to have directly experienced anything to the contrary?

The nice thing about Fry, I think, is he’s thoughtful enough to get that the rest of the stereotypes about straight men and women are as perniciously bogus as the stereotypes about gay men and women. Assuming he gets it he’ll almost certainly become a marvelous ally instead of a bewildered obstacle.

(Hat tip to reader Eve.)

SlightlyMetaphysical of Asexual curiosities has had enough of a certain near-universal gender stereotype. Even better, he beautifully illustrates how men are socially constructed as the obligate, reflexively sexual “sex class.” Check it out.

“Isn’t it annoying how men are really sex-obsessed?”
“Not all men are sex-obsessed. If you thought about it for a moment, you’d realise that a lot of the men you know aren’t.”
“Give me an example.”
“I’m not.”
“Well, you don’t count. You’re asexual.”

“I think everyone would secretly do anything for sex, they’re just hiding it.”
“Again, not true. I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, but you don’t count. You’re asexual.”

So what’s with this idea that, because I’m asexual, I’m outside of the normal spectrum of sexuality? I’m statistically written off? I think partly, it’s an example of how people construct a ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy in their stereotypes, especially of gender. They think that, for example, men like sex, and so think of men who like sex as being most typically men, and then, when they think of the people who they know who are typically male, surprise surprise, they all like sex.

He said it here.

Got that? The notion of men as the sex class is so entrenched that men who don’t fit the profile aren’t even permitted in the data set! It’s like… well, we wanted to do a sexual-interest profile of men. But since including them always screw up our results we discard asexuals before we do our analysis.

I’ll go him one better! In the face of such stereotypes about men, men with low or no libido are going to be extremely unlikely to disclose their actual preferences… and actually rather likely to pretend otherwise. Either way they have very little incentive to buck the stereotype.