Here's a feminist article critiquing Sweden's law reforms, it was the article I was looking for originally:
http://sunnysinghonline.blogspot.com.au/2010/12/swedens-rape-law-infantilise-women.htmlIn this one she cites the same info, someone questions it in the comments, but the OP mentions that the same information was available from Swedish new sources avaliable in English, and she puts a name to the person pushing those laws: Mariane Ny. I haven't been able to find those specific news articles yet, but I guess this woman could by lying too ...
EDIT: tracking down other references:
https://web.archive.org/web/20101204033654/http://www.aolnews.com/world/article/sex-by-surprise-at-heart-of-julian-assange-criminal-probe/19741444Dana Kennedy, mainstream US journalist, making the same claims about Sweden's law reforms at the time:
In fact, the current prosecutor, Marianne Ny, who re-opened the case against Assange, has been active in the proposed reforms of Swedish rape laws that would, if passed, involve an investigation of whether an imbalance in power between two people could void one person's insistence that the sex was consensual.
EDIT: More relevant detail is available here (sydney morning herald, about as mainstream a paper as you can get in Australia, equivalent of the nytmes basically):
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/the-truth-lies-trapped-in-a-web-of-intrigue-20101223-196mv.htmlthis one is pro-assange, but it gives an interesting take into the politics in Sweden, and the people who've made a name from this and related cases:
https://justice4assange.com/Gender-politics.htmlIt's best to read this after digesting all the other stuff. Marianne Ny is at the center of all this, along with a male politician Claes Borgström who hitched his wagon onto the radfem thing in Sweden. Ny and Borgström are basically closely allied, both involved in the radical legislation I mentioned, and both knees deep in the whole Assange thing. Originally Ardin, the main complainant against Assange talked to one of the Swedish papers (see smh article) contradicting what Ny and Borgström were saying but later she fell in line and started parroting what they were saying. These are very powerful rising political figures in Sweden, so my guess is that there was pressure on her to toe the line on this.
~~~
EDIT2: to understand why such a law would be contemplated, you need to understand Engel's concept of "false consciousness". Marxist-style rad-fems often cite the "false consciousness" of women who make choices the rad-fems don't like, and it's normally about having sex with men. So a law created by radfems in which women are said to not be in command of deciding whether they are a victim or not is in line with paternalistic radfem doctrine, in which the women's own protestations are denounced because of their "false consciousness". They have the same attitude to swedish sex workers who oppose their crackdowns as destroying their livelihoods and making the working women less safe: sex worker's voices don't count because they have "false consciousness". Marianne Ny was just trying to expand this worldview into the realm of sexual assault laws: women's opinion about whether they consented or not don't matter, because they have "false consciousness" - they can never
truly consent because of the patriarchy, in the same way that Swedish radfems say that prostitutes don't truly consent. One is about money, the other is about social power. Hardcore radfems can very easily see those are completely equivalent, therefore active consent of a heterosexual woman to sex with a socially dominant male is no different to a prostitute consenting to sex for money: both are "false consciousness" of the "consenting" women, hence they should both be treated as assault and forms of gender-based violence. If you buy into the set of premises it makes complete sense and is consistent.
(False consciousness is of course, completely real. What doesn't logically flow is that whatever doctrine is promoted in opposition to the existing false consciousness is in fact the
real consciousness. It could be better or worse).