Bella Doe

A few thoughts on the DM article which misrepresented what a FEMINIST (no quotation marks needed) campaigner said IN RESPONSE TO what happened to Gisele Pelicot: 1. What I and many others understood from the tweets in question, is that Dr Long spoke to all women, reacting to horrors of the mass rapes of a married woman, by her husband and many other married men. in order to start a conversation about female separatism. Nobody who actually read her words can pretend that she was saying this to the survivor of horrific rapes in a heterosexual marriage, where she thought she was safe - like so many women do. 2. The DM misrepresented the “outrage”. The “outrage” was driven by a particular faction of the GC movement - the one which continuously simps for male paraphiliacs and uses female language for men, while calling women who object “extremists, ultras, speech policers, tinpot dictators” - and worse. 3. The DM quoted ONLY the tweets by this faction. It omitted the many conversations and long thought-out reactions that engaged with Dr Long’s tweet mindfully, and understood it to be a reaction to the horror, NOT a “victim blaming” comment directed at the survivor of mass rape. 4. This is what is especially egregious about the DM article: not even women who got really offended by Julia’s tweet, were actually claiming she said this to Mrs Pelicot. This angle appeared in the DM and it really begs a question - WTF? Followed by - WHY? 5. The Pelicot trial has been deeply traumatic for many women. We have watched in horror (at the system, the rapists, our lives) and awe (at Mrs Pelicot), feeling it deeply and viscerally, in our own rape scars, mental and physical. Rape is so endemic that it has become almost decriminalised. Of course tempers will run high among women, traumas will clash, we are grieving, sobbing, changing, as the truth of the patriarchy is laid bare for all to see. Why use this to make a false accusation against one of the most staunch and female-centred feminist campaigners in the UK? You published her photo too, and seem to have stuck a knife in to the Party of Women while you were at it. Do you not think this paints a target on these women’s backs? At a time when misogyny is rife? You saw how lies about the “ultras” and specifically Kellie-Jay Keen, Standing for Women and everyone who won’t kiss the above mentioned privileged clique’s arses, ended up in women nearly being killed in New Zealand? Is this what you are all trying to do? Pant more targets? Is this not the very replication of patriarchal oppression, weaponising male violence against women you dislike? 6. I do not believe this was an accident. I think that either this was a deliberate stitch up, designed to misrepresent Dr Long and all the “ultras” or an EXTREMELY shoddy work by the journalists, who somehow managed to completely miss the whole another side to this story, including many healing and productive conversations in reaction to Dr Long’s tweet, from women who survived rape and male violence and agree with her? 7. I have seen and commented on the controlled opposition in the GC movement, and sabotage, power grabs, replication of institutional control and escalation of false allegations about feminists, for some time. I sincerely hope that this time, the woman who is being scapegoated - Dr Julia Long - is given the right of reply.