Posts by Emma Hart
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I think we would be foolish even to infer intentionality about the Irish ( pace stephen clover).
Dude, have you seen Aidan Turner? And he doesn't sparkle.
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I should also note I find myself far more at ease with the idea of someone fantasising online about group sex with a posse of Irishmen than someone fantasising online about running down cyclists on a hill road, although, as Emma might argue, this is perhaps a private matter of taste.
Well, one fantasy involves hurting, possibly killing, another person, and the other involves consensual sexual pleasure, so I think the difference is more than taste.
With the appropriate caveats from Craig's comment that fantasy does not necessarily indicate intention.
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Okay, absolutely yes, we don't have all the facts by a very long shot. We do have some, though, and I have no reason to disbelieve those. In particular, it seems reasonable to take the prosecutor's statements at face value:
He said: "It is right to say that there is material in the chatlogs from the complainant who is prepared to entertain ideas of group sex with strangers, where to use her words 'her morals go out of the window'.
"This material does paint a wholly different light as far as this case is concerned. We take the view that it would not be appropriate to offer any evidence."
He said he was particularly concerned about one chatlog entry which referred to her prepared to have intercourse with six men from Ireland who wanted to travel to the woman's home.
Now, if that's what he's "particularly concerned" by, surely that's what led him to make the decision he did, and not something else he simply forgot to mention. So yes, let's get it clear Angus: is it not mentioning that she'd made these remarks about a group of men entirely unconnected to the case which has brought you to brand her a "liar"?
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There are people who for various reasons lie about being raped. Are we to send innocent people down to ensure we get all the guilty ones?
Ren does actually mention people who lie about being raped when they haven't, and not being raped when they have. But I don't think anybody said anything even remotely close to that. What she in particular is asking for is the right to be the person with the most authority on whether she has been raped or not in a civil context. I don't agree with everything she says, but I wanted to show how angry it makes her, having her agency taken away in that fashion.
For myself, seeing as you were talking to both of us, no, I don't take that view, I find that idea absolutely abhorrent. But I think you knew that.
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Ah, found it. Renegade Evolution on consent and rape in prostitution and pornography - both jobs she has actually done.
If a person does not have the ultimate authority to decide when they have not been raped, then by default that authority is also in question when they decide they have been raped. And that is an authority that should not ever be put in question in either scenario, because it then denies that persons authority in all arenas and renders any choice or decision they make absolutely worthless and subject to disbelief. And that shit? That shit there is a soul-killer.
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It’s the blanket assertion that the women (all of them) in porn (all of it), are, in the course of filming porn, being raped. This bothers me for so many reasons. Chief among them, I really do think overuse of the word rape cheapens it. I really do. I think it’s an insult to women who really have been raped to liken what happened to them to what goes on with a consenting woman who makes pornography. It also is incredibly insulting and agency denying to the consenting woman who does make pornography.
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But that's the difficulty: you are asserting that prostitutes consent, while the counter-argument is that the consent is given under duress and not particularly meaningful. You can't settle it by referring back to the consent unless you want to chuck out duress* altogether.
Actually, no Keir, what I was trying to do (obviously poorly) was to get you to see the difference between the two things in the emotional experience of the prostitute. I'll also refer you back to Russell's comment on previous thread about the Prostitution Reform Act's emphasis on consent.
Then perhaps you could go tell Amanda or the sex workers who write here how they're too coerced to consent. But give me advance notice, cause I want to watch.
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A prosecutor does not act for the victim (or alleged victim/complainant), the prosecutor acts for the state.
In most cases, of course, it's not necessary to have someone whose job is to act for the accusor, because they're not on trial. In a rape trial, however, it's sometimes hard to remember that it isn't the victim who's on trial.
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I do not know the full facts of the case to which Emma is referring, but I anticipate there may be more to it. This does not seem the type of case a prosecutor would readily drop.
This is actually the main reason I waited a week before writing on this trial, because I thought there must be more to it. If there is, it hasn't come out. The prosecutor has spoken to the media and said which bit he was most concerned about - which was a statement about something that never actually happened, with a completely different group of men. And the judge said she had no credibility, but there's no sign that the logs revealed she had lied about anything.
It may be that they didn't have a show of getting a conviction because of her past history - which should IMO, like the defendants', be inadmissable, and for the same reasons. But that would surely be because a jury would think, well she fantasises about group sex with strangers, she must be totally up for it all the time, not because of a point of evidence but because of a shitty incorrect assumption.
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But we we think that sex, given the importance of the act, ought be protected from the category of `work or starve'.
"We" who, dude? I think raising children is way more "important" than sex, and ditto caring for the elderly. Should they be "protected" too? And honestly, in practical terms I've got no idea what you mean by that.
So while the prostitute may have `consented' to a particular act, that consent is only granted based on coercion.
I think the actual "prostitute" who's naive enough to think she "consented" knows the difference between having sex s/he wouldn't have had without the financial reward, and being raped. And I think that falls under one of my largely unwritten rules for discussing sex/social/feminist issues on the internet: don't tell me what something is like if I've done it and you haven't. (Not, in this case, actual 'me'.)
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I suspect the issue for the court may have been that it was essentially her credibility that she said no at all versus the 5 men who presumably would have denied that she said no.
All the reporting states that the chat logs were the reason the trial was, basically, abandoned. The chat logs are all previous to the event in question, so don't mention anything about what happened on that evening. And the prosecutor has said that his "particular concern" was her remarks about the Irish men.
Most rape trials come down to 'he said, she said', because there tend not to be impartial witnesses. Why would this be different from, say, the Shipton-Schollum trials?