Lacy Macauley has declared herself as a radical liberal, as if there were any other kind. She was an organizer for #DisruptJ20, a group dedicated to disrupting Trump’s inauguration and various events of that weekend.
She’s basically been involved in every leftist protest action for years, from G20 and Occupy actions to protests against pipelines. She’s the mouth in this video agitating for some group against tar sands.
Then she decides to go to Turkey and become the girlfriend of a Muslim to show her diversity. But guess what? It didn’t turn out the way she hoped. She wrote about her experience:
He offered a ready smile, engaging kindness, and intelligent conversation. He said all the right things to convince me that he cared about women’s rights and activism. In February, I decided to return to Turkey with the promise of love driving me forward. I couldn’t have known things would turn sour.
Then came our first fight. I had wanted to interview a local woman for an article on Syrian refugees. He did not approve. He knew the woman and did not like her, so he strictly forbade me from speaking with her. After I questioned his rationale, he yelled and stormed out of the room to go smoke a cigarette. I just stood in the middle of the room not knowing what to do. Of course, as a Western woman, no one had ever forbidden me from speaking with anyone else.
In the following weeks, I was violently pushed, blocked from leaving freely, and repeatedly told not to speak. If I spoke anyway, anger erupted. I endured threats that I would be burnt with cigarettes, flinching as he “faked” with his lit cigarette. I had to duck to avoid having sharp objects thrown at my face. I had water angrily poured over my head.
Unwanted sex? Rape? All the time. He did not stop to determine whether I consented to sex.
Two days later, however, I was jailed by Turkish police for several hours when I tried to simply enter a large public speech in Antalya by the president of Turkey. (They make a habit of jailing reporters and activists, and I didn’t look like I fit their norms. I wrote about this experience with the Turkish police here.) I had an “out of the frying pan and into the fire” sensation.
So, did she learn her lesson? Nope, she returned to her radical ways. She initially withheld what happened in Turkey because she didn’t want to feed the narrative that Muslim men are aggressive. You just can’t fix stupid.