Content note: this post discusses sexual violence, rape apologism and racism
News has emerged that the New Year mass sexual assaults by Arab men may have been made up or colossally overstated. If this is true, it’s a rare occurrence of sexual assault allegations proving to be false, and it’s utterly disgusting and unhelpful to everyone.
Except white men. Remember the frothing glee with which white men seized upon similar attacks, a year before. Remember how Nigel Farage, practically hard, threatened that this was why Migration Is Bad. Remember how the police rounded up brown men, ostensibly for the safety of women. Remember the wild-eyed excitement from the right, literally saying “told you so“.
And compare and contrast this with the reaction when an allegation is made against a white man’s idol. Donald Trump, Roman Polanski, Julian Assange… the endless list of beloved white men, protected by other white men who claim to be exercising healthy scepticism. I’ve pointed out to white men in the past that what happened in Cologne on that night sounded quite comparable to what happens every time I’ve had the misfortune of being in a rugby time on a match day, with pissed-up posh white men grabbing away. This has been met with scoffs of disbelief. There is disbelief in attacks by white men, and unconditional belief in attacks by brown and black men.
Allegations of this type have always revealed an ugly truth about white men and the conditional belief in sexual violence. At a most charitable analysis, it’s rooted in the biggest rape myth of all: that sexual violence is perpetrated by strangers, the other–not, as is most common, by someone the survivor knows. However, it’s likely that more plays into this: Nabila Ramdani wrote on how they fit a neo-Nazi agenda. The response to the allegations is dripping with racism.
What will happen next, with the treatment of the allegations, is two things, simultaneously. First of all, white men will seize upon this to add to their pitifully thin file of actual cases of false allegations, to throw about whenever one of their white faves is accused, screeching that false allegations happen all the time. And yet, at the same time, the allegations will be forgotten, because if false, they do not neatly justify the hysteria against Muslims and refugees. The racist genie is out of the bottle, and all that will be remembered is that brown men did some mass sexual assaults. The specifics, and the fact this may not be true, will be forgotten. White men are capable of holding these two conflicting beliefs simultaneously: they have proved they are capable of believing at the same time that all women are liars, and all Muslims are rapists.
It is an unpleasant prediction, yet I fear it will play out in the immediate future, and over years to come. The damage has well and truly been done, and the veracity of the allegations, in a way, does not matter particularly. Instead, we need to examine the motives of a xenophobic and misogynistic media, as well as those who influence and are influenced by it.
What these allegations have laid bare, is yet another ugly truth about white supremacy.
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Another angry woman 
As I understand it, the assaults now known to have been fabricated were in Frankfurt. The Cologne incident was real; what is contested is the immediate rush to blame Syrian refugees, merely on the grounds that some of the attackers had foreign accents (assumed to be Arab, although I doubt most white people can tell an Arab accent from most others, let alone a Syrian one from, say, an Algerian one, since they’ve neither been to the countries concerned nor had much contact with people from there). Nobody satisfactorily explained why a group of refugees would go to enormous effort to travel to a faraway country by land to claim asylum, then immediately begin assaulting local women.
It’s not good is it. I can only comment on the things I’ve heard before so that limits my reply. I have big doubts about the accusations made against Julian Assange, and my reasoning is quite simple and virging on the paranoid. He was only accused or wanted (as far as I’m aware) of these things after he went into hiding, to make him look like the bad guy perhaps?
Reblogged this on Feminist Aspie and commented:
(I’m not going to manage the usual Friday evening blog this week, so instead here’s a great analysis by Stavvers of how white men are trying to have their cake and eat it over the New Year mass sexual assaults. See you next week!)
Thank you for showing this post to me. Although I think that the larger ideological point is a little more complicated than what’s written here (which I won’t go into for fear of seemingly contradicting myself), I think that as a white man, this is a wakeup call for the kind of hypocrisy we are prone to agreeing with, and the media seems to be grooming us by confirmation.