I really liked this anti-rape PSA from New Zealand. It shows the lead-up to a rape, but then rewinds time and shows several different outcomes in which bystanders of one kind or another (a friend, a bartender, etc) step up in plausible ways and the rape never happens.
Several thoughts:
1) Although the scene shown has a female victim, I do appreciate that the narrator referred to male and female victims.
2) I came across this via Slacktivist, which also included this very well-done video focusing on bullying, but without the aspect of the time rewind and showing plausible ways bystanders could have changed the outcome. I missed that; the bullying video left me feeling rather sad and hopeless, while the “time rewind” video left me feeling as if there are actually ways to help that would matter.
3) For me, the scene depicted in the time-rewind video shows why the frequently-asked “if two people have sex while both are drunk, are they both rapists” question misses the point. In this video both the man and the woman have been drinking heavily, but there’s different kinds of drunk; he is engaged and goal-driven, while she is too drunk to do much but be led and respond to direct questions. If one person is so drunk that he or she is unable to meaningfully consent or understand what’s going on, as the woman in this video is, then what happens is rape – even if the other person is drunk.
If BOTH of them are so drunk that neither one of them is able to take the lead or make an active decision to have sex – in other words, if both of them were in the state of the woman in the video – then no sex is going to happen. They’ll pretty much just find someplace to sit down and that will be it until someone sobers up.
If one of them is, despite being legally drunk, sober enough to do what the man in this video does – take the lead, guide the encounter, and make sure that sex happens – then yes, that person has committed rape. (It doesn’t matter what sex the person is.)
On the other hand, if both people understand what’s happening, and enthusiastically consent to the sex, then it’s not rape at all. Even if both of them are drunk.
Also, this video realistically depicts an incapacitated person being cut out of the group, isolated, and sexually assaulted, though the actual depiction of the assault does not go further than un-zipping the victim’s zipper.
So, TRIGGER WARNING for sex assault.
Grace
I don’t accept this statement. I think the drive to have sex can function at levels of inebriation far above those that permit you to retain the ability to detect whether your intended partner can/is giving informed assent (as opposed to active opposition, mind you).
I would say that in this particular video the male who is depicted appears to have the ability to understand that. But I would not say that the ability to form and act on the thought “hey, I want to have sex with this girl” automatically means that he’s also able to interpret whether or not she’s giving informed consent.
I am in favor of the overall point of this PSA, which seems to me to be “Hey, you see a friend/roommate/etc. looking like they’re headed into a bad situation, say something.” I’m cool with that. And if the stranger tells you to F off or acts hostile while your friend is unresponsive, take some action.
Yeah, the post dodges the point. We all agree sex without consent is rape. The issue is various people argue alcohol vitiates consent or should be presumed to, and that they don’t really bother to understand how alcohol affects people’s minds.
That’s why there’s all the hedging meaningfully consent, active decision, enthusiastically consent. It’s an attempt to play to the gallery by using the language of consent without actually beliving it in.
Your statement has nothing at all to do with my statement. I didn’t say a word about “the ability to detect whether your intended partner can/is giving informed assent.” I don’t think “I was too drunk to notice that he was saying no” or “I was too drunk to notice she was just lying there and not participating” are excuses.
What I’m saying is that if someone is sober enough to be able to take the lead and actively, physically make sex happen – i.e., get the other person’s clothes out of the way, physically move both people’s bodies into the position for sex, etc – then that person is not too drunk to commit rape. I think that’s pretty much what this video shows – both are drunk, but one of them still has it together enough to make things happen (in this case rape), and the other is drunk beyond the ability to do anything but be pulled along.
And if neither person is sober enough to physically make sex happen, then no sex will happen, so no rape.
Alex – A discussion without nuance – or as you call it, “hedging” – doesn’t interest me. If that’s what interests you, maybe you should go elsewhere?
Comments by a troll, who was previously banned from “Alas” under another name, deleted.
What a fucking coward. I am going to take pot shots at you from Feminist Critics and other websites.
If you can walk, you can form an impulse or desire to have sex. Was the victim character in the PSA falling-down, had-to-be-carried-or-supported drunk?
Because if not, then they were both in that impaired but competent range where they are able to form volition.
Robert, the video is eight minutes long. If you can find time to leave comments on this blog, you can find time to watch it, rather than asking us to describe it to you. :-)
You are not adding nuance. You are trying to subtly undermine the ordinary meaning of consent without having the guts to go all out and try and justify yourself. When you say:
I suspect the reason meaningfully is there is because you can’t face typing “If one person is so drunk that he or she is unable to consent … then what happens is rape“, as this doesn’t criminalise as rape some forms of consensual sex you disapprove of.
Similarly:
Now why active and enthusiastically? Consent in normal language and law can be passive and unenthusiastic. I suspect it’s because you don’t agree with and can’t bring yourself to type the unvarnished words, so hedge them, again because you want to criminalise consensual sex.
Most people bring up the “what if they’re both drunk” line because they believe in consent, and believe two drunk people can consent, and believe that causes problems for some interpretations of rape. When you say this complaint “misses the point”, does it? What you’re doing is subtly proposing a very different view of rape than the law or popular opinion. I don’t think that causes problems for the “both drunk” crowd, that’s the opinion they object to and that motivates the remark.
Video is dead; text or nothing.
I don’t need to burn eight minutes of lifespan watching hippies (not) mate. It’s a conceptual question, not one unique and specific to these people who were playing make-believe.
I posit that there is not-responsible-for-anything drunk, pretty drunk but functioning, a little bit drunk, sober. (And knurd but let us not speak of such horror.) I posit that the first of those categories absolves a person of voitional responsibility for actions taken, and the others do not. I also posit that the first category is typified by a near-total inability to walk – i.e., falling down drunk. On one side of the line, the plotting initiator of unconsented-to sex is a rapist. On the other side, s/he is not.
What behavioral test do you propose to distinguish the rapist from the non-rapist on this continuum? It needs to be a behavioral test so that bartenders and roommates etc. can reach the proper conclusion about needed action; it can’t be something inside the person’s psyche.
I think that turning this into a discussion of whether or not the woman in the video was too drunk to consent and understand precisely what she was consenting to, and why, and what the consequences might have been–there was, for example, no indication that the man was planning to use a condom–I think making that the discussion is a red herring. Because the video isn’t really about that. It’s about the people who did not, in the first half, check in with her along the way, even though her behavior and the way the man was isolating her should have given them ample reason to do so. It’s about the boundary that they chose not to cross when they chose to look away.
Each one of them could have checked in and each one of them might have received the answer, “I’m having a great time and I really like this guy,” and, in the end, the man still might have raped her. That’s not something that, given those circumstances, any one of them could have stopped, but they would at least have taken responsibility for what they’d seen, for what they knew it looked like, and for the fact that they were in a position to do something about it if that’s what it really was.
Also, the whole video, but the scene outside the dance club in particular, reminded me of this post that I wrote last year about confronting a man whom I thought might have been about to get violent with a woman.
I agree that it is not obvious that the woman in the video was in a state in which she *couldn’t* give consent. But nothing in this video indicates that she *did* give consent for sex. We can argue that she gave consent to being led to his flat – it would be difficult to make a case for kidnapping – but unless you believe that a woman that allows herself to be taken to a physical location by a man automatically gives consent to having sex with that man, that is immaterial.
Alex – I agree that Amp’s use of the word “enthusiastic” is a bit of an overstatement, it’s certainly possible to give consent without being enthusiastic about it (“Oh, ok, sure, why not? I have an hour to kill before anything good is on TV”), and I assume that’s also possible when one is drunk. But you’re making quite a lot of accusations about Amp’s agenda that are not at all supportable by what he actually said. Especially within the context of this video, where, again, the fact that the woman may have had the ability to consent is immaterial, since she did not actually consent. And it would be ridiculous to say that her drunkenness did not play a role in her allowing herself to get into a situation where she no longer had the choice of whether to consent or not.
Richard – I disagree that the discussion is a red herring, because I think that that assumptions about drunkenness and consent are at the heart of why people sometimes choose not to intervene. If you do not accept that being obviously drunk is a reason for additional vigilance (which, Robert and Alex, is not the same as saying that it is a categorical barrier to consent), then you will be more likely to adhere to the more general social rules that say that you do not interfere with other people’s actions.
That is along the right lines, Eytan, though its a differential that prompts an override of the social mores of noninterference. If I see someone macking on someone else and the mackee is clearly, totally, utterly smashed while the macker is just a little sloshed, I am a thousand times more likely to put in a word than if they’re both soused, or both just tipsy.
I think it’s seeing that one person is in a clear position of advantage that prompts a need to check in and make sure that the position of advantage is not being taken advantage of.
This video is bloody useless, and frankly, does more bad than good.
While it’s absolutely clear to me that what the video depicts is, in fact, rape, I cannot honestly say I blame most of the actors for their decisions. Apart from the friend, and the roommate, I would not have done anything different, period, because I used to see, in night clubs and bars around LA, literally hundreds of women indistinguishable from the one in the video. Make that thousands.
The greatest problem I have with the video is that in clubs and bars, you do not get such a clear indication of how drunk someone is, unless the alcohol affects their motions A LOT more than I saw in the video. Sure, the video gives us steady, well lit shots of her dead eyes, and keeps us watching her. Well, this is not how it goes in real life. My vision is quite good, but I cannot get such a good idea of how drunk someone is from his eyes in a bar or club. The lightning is about the worst for the purpose. Furthermore, this much starring needs a reason, and unless you do not mind all your crowd and all her crowd noticing your interest, you would not notice how few conscious movements she makes. And on top of that, one, the actress did not display any of the most common sings of drunkenness, and, two, this way of dancing – being barely there – is quite common.
The above does not hold for her friend and roommate. Those two have the opportunity and the obligation to watch (over) her. But all the strangers, including the bartender not only do not necessarily have the information, but also may get into quite a bit of trouble if they try to intervene and are wrong. The guy in the line outside? If he does this in Chino, he has a one in ten chance to get roughed up or cut for his trouble. If he were Hispanic. Asian as he is? A better than even one. The bartender? Depending on the laws of your city, he either has an obligation, or he will never open his mouth. The laws, where they exist, are there because he has every interest to keep mum.
And lastly, have you ever tried to intervene in a situation like this? I have four times. Twice I was with friends whom I would trust in a fight, and the cases were very very clear. In both of them the woman could not speak (once drunk, once with bleeding lips) Those went fine… that day. The time we carried a passed out girl wrapped in a blanked from a fraternity, I did not hear the end of it ’till I left MIT. Most of it was bad. The time we stopped a guy beating his wife in broad daylight in Chino Hills, we all had to show up in court.
The other two times? I got insulted by everyone around, and I pretty much resolved not to intervene ever again unless I am looking for a fight. Which I no longer do. And I knew one of the girls, the one I left in the room of someone whom neither I nor her roommate knew. The next day, she did not get back until dark, and her roommate got so much shit for it that they no longer talk to each other. We still have to explain, sometimes, that we did everything short of kidnapping her, which, her roomate being a hundred pound in wet clothes, we could not have done.
And the fourth time, I really should have known better. A falling drunk punk being dragged in a piece of shit domestic? What business did I have to care? I got called a dumb n-, and I guess I deserved it.
So, please babble on, if it makes you feel better. But, no, no one but your friends will intervene when you are drinking yourself into a stupor, and about to ruin your life. And unless your friends are tougher than you, that will probably not help either.
And yes, I am blaming the victim, and no, it’s not restricted to females. I have seen my best friend knock someone out for trying to grab his keys before he drove home on two six packs of Guinness. He was fine, but probably because he sobered up when he realized that he had hurt a friend. He still drove home drunk.
Drunk people do stupid shit, and they deserve what they get. The assholes who take advantage of it needs their asses kicked, but unless I care of one of the actors, I stay out of it.
This is a mind-bogglingly stupid thing to say in a thread about a depiction of a drunk girl getting raped.
Do not post in this thread again, Sebastian.
Eytan:
I did not mean that discussing how drunk the woman was/appeared to be was a red herring, because, of course, you’re right: how people understood that would absolutely influence whether or not they decided to intervene. Rather, I meant that Alex’s attempt to turn the discussion into one of whether or not, in the final scene of the first part of the video, she was able to consent meaningfully, along with the way he attempted to pick apart Amp’s consent-related vocabulary, deflected attention from what, for me, was the point of the video–which had to do more with the other people than with her.
I do think the video downplays the risk taken by the people in the second half, once they acted to intervene. In each case, the man gives up almost sheepishly, as if the video wants to underscore the ostensible cowardice underlying the way he is trying to have sex with the woman, but he could–especially if he was drunk enough–just as easily gotten aggressive and even violent. I say this not as a criticism of the video; it’s a PSA and a PSA can’t take on all the nuances of what it’s intended to address; but in discussing the realities of trying to intervene in a situation like that, the issue of risk is an important one to address.
The standards for what you should do (in a moral sense) are far more stringent than what you must do (in a legal sense.)
I don’t think it is reasonable to attempt to apply legal standards to a PSA which is designed to encourage people to act morally. Why would it have to be the same?
Of course, I also don’t think that it is reasonable to take people’s acceptance of a stringent moral standard and try to shoehorn that into changes in a legal or quasi-legal standard (in other contexts.) This PSA isn’t doing that, though.
Something’s been bugging me about this post and it finally came to mind.
It’s the headline. Imagine if it said “Anti-Rape PSA Shows Ways Victims Can Prevent Rape”. Good intentions…bad framing.
Bystanders can’t prevent rape either. We can maybe help an individual person avoid an individual rape – right time, right place and all that. And OK, like heightened personal vigilance, that might be a little drip-drip-drip against rape culture. But it’s rapists who can prevent rape, by deciding not to rape.
You know all this, which surprises me that I caught it before you did. All that crazy cartooning money must be turning you into a heartless member of the privileged class. ;)
Alex wonders why we want active and enthusiastic consent to sex.
“Now why active and enthusiastically?” Alex asks.
I have to wonder why Alex would want to have sex with anyone who is not actively and enthusiastically consenting to sex.
And yes, I have to say, someone who is not actively and enthusiastically wanting to have sex with you is someone who does not want to have sex with you.
Having sex with someone who doesn’t want to have sex with you = rape.
You can pretend otherwise all you like if it helps you sleep at night, but that’s just fact. (Not law, I agree, but fact.)
Welcome, Delurking! Thanks for commenting.
I entirely agree with your comment, other than the above-quoted line – I don’t think anything Alex says can fairly be read as saying that he personally wants to have sex with someone who “is not actively and enthusiastically consenting.” And it seems like a personal attack on him to say otherwise, and we try to keep a fairly high standard of not making personal attacks on this blog. I hope you’ll keep posting comments in here, but keep that in mind.
I can think of cases where one could have sex with someone who is not enthusiastically consenting, but it wouldn’t be rape – for instance, in a long-established relationship, one partner might do something for the other partner out of a heartfelt desire to be nice to the other partner, even when they don’t particularly feel enthused about sex at that moment. (And the partner might do the reverse on another occasion.)
But in a case like that shown in the video – two strangers meeting at a bar – I think you’re absolutely right. If the person isn’t enthusiastically consenting, don’t have sex. It’s not that difficult.
Drunk people do stupid shit, and I certainly saw (and did) my share of it at the Institute. But I believe in God’s grace and I figure it’s His judgement, not mine, to decide what people deserve.
I assume you’re talking morally here?
Relationships are an obvious example where that’s not true. People in relationships will frequently do all sorts of things that they don’t necessarily want to do at that moment–which makes sense if they are advancing their larger and more valuable desires. No, A may not feel like hosting B’s inlaws for the weekend, but A will do it to make B happy; B may not want to have sex but will do it to make A happy, and so on.
That’s also reasonably common outside of serious relationships. In fact, it’s reasonably common even in the context of first encounters between strangers: Again, a common example would be that A is trying to capture the interest of A’s flirty barmate, and that A believes (correctly or not; exercising good or bad judgment) that it won’t work out unless they have sex. A doesn’t really “want” to have sex in that context, but is making a perfectly rational choice to do so.
Is that ideal? No. It would be ideal (for A, at least) if all of A’s choices had ideal outcomes. It would be ideal if A was in a serious relationship with someone who has happy to host the inlaws without having sex first. It would be nice if A’s flirty barmate was interested in dating A for a week, without having sex first. But that’s life: unless you want to start treating A as a non-thinking person, then it’s not reasonable to categorize those scenarios as rape.
Huh. Deleted my last part somehow:
When it comes to defining moral interactions, people’s wants are relevant. In an ideal society, people wouldn’t have to do ANYTHING (including sex) unless they truly and enthusiastically desired it. There’s no harm in working towards that.
But when it comes to defining “rape” (which has a larger meaning outside morality) then usually we define it differently. It’s usually defined more like
Having sex with someone against their will = rape
Which takes into account the fact that people constantly do things (including sex) willfully but without “wanting to.” (I’ve omitted the “intentionally” part which is found in the criminal codes, as not to side track into that issue.)
Of course, there’s a big movement among feminists to “define rape down:” this would expand “rape” to include behavior that results in people being hurt or which is morally non-ideal, but which doesn’t meet standards for criminal convictions. “Any sex without prior, enthusiastic, non-impaired, verbal and physical consent from both parties is rape” is a good example. Of course, it also has the effect of diluting the term’s negative effect. And it leads to a lot of confusion when people start complaining about things like conviction rates, and they don’t distinguish between the various definitions.
The strategy hasn’t proved to work out all that well with the redefinition of “racism.” Perhaps people should reconsider whether the redefinition of “rape” is a good long term strategy.
Sorry, Ampersand. I see your point entirely.
OTOH, I can’t see Gin & Whisky’s point, exactly.
I assume the scenario being imagined is something like this: Partner A wants sex. Partner B doesn’t want sex. Partner B says no, but Partner A wants sex a lot, and so badgers and emotionally manipulates Partner B until Partner B gives in. Yes?
I agree that Partner B has (in a way) consented.
But Partner A is still forcing Partner B to have sex against Partner B’s will. Partner B has said yes (that is) but not said it willingly.
Partner B has been coerced into saying yes: not with a gun it their head, but under some kind of duress.
This isn’t legally rape, I agree. But it’s hard for me to see how it’s anything but rape in fact.
I am not saying both partners always have to be in exactly the SAME mood for sex, of course.
But forcing someone into having sex with you who doesn’t want to, by whatever means, emotional or otherwise, is surely rape?
It may be useful – as I argued in 2006 – to think of rape, for conceptual if not legal purposes, as being a spectrum:
delurking:
Actually, no. I don’t think that’s the scenario G&W had in mind at all, and I base that on his previous comments on this blog over the years. I think what he has in mind is a scenario where one partner says, however he or she says it, “I would like to have sex,” and the other partner, who is not particularly in the mood, says, “Ok,” because he or she wants to do something nice for the other person. The dual question, I think, is whether or not such a scenario, which is not rape, rises to the standard implied by the language “enthusiastic consent” and why it should have to. Seems to me the problem is in the word “enthusiastic,” how we understand it, and what we think it applies to.
If, for example, I want to do something nice for my partner by having sex with her even though I am not really in the mood, my enthusiasm, however felt and expressed, might not be for the sex per se, but it might be for making my partner feel good. Is that enough?
There’s more to say, but I am off to teach.
For further discussion of ‘enthusiastic’ consent versus not-necessarily-enthusiastic-but-no-less-sincere consent, some of you may be interested in this post (and its moderated comments) on The Pervocracy: Real consent.
Happy Thanksgiving! (or Columbus Day, or Monday, as culturally and geographically appropriate)
RJN is correct. The “enthusiastic consent or rape” standard seems to classify as “rape” a lot of relatively-normal human interaction.
To make an analogy, I do not enthusiastically consent to work (I’d usually prefer to be doing something else) but I would not in any respect be classified as enslaved. I’m not sure I’d choose Amp’s “mostly consensual but with reservations” language myself, but it’s close enough for blogging work.
Do you see how your word choice affects the outcome here, because of the judgmental nature of the words you chose?
Watch:
Partner B doesn’t want sex. Partner B says no, but Partner A wants sex a lot, and so asks really nicely, Partner B says “sure!”
Badgering? Or “asking?”
Giving in? Or “agreeing?”
or
Partner A wants sex a lot, and so they offer to do Partner B some favor that B really wants, in exchange for sex, and Partner B agrees.
Prostitution? or “normal human tradeoffs?”
or
Partner B doesn’t want sex. Surprised, Partner A accurately states em’s position, which is that B is welcome to decline sex at any time, but that A is not interested in dating someone who doesn’t want to have sex. Partner B decides to have sex and keep A around.
Emotional blackmail? Or “agreement?”
This one gets trotted out a lot as blackmail or coercion or emotional pressure or what have you. And sure, it can be coercive: “I don’t care if it’s Xmas eve and -40 outside; this is my flat and you and your kids will be out on your arse with your kit on the sidewalk 5 minutes fro now unless you put out” is way over the line. But “If you won’t have sex then I’m going home” is no more coercive than “if you don’t stop bugging me to have sex then I’m going home” and I suspect you’d think that was just fine.
Again: None of those interactions are ideal. All are problematic in their own sets of ways. But they aren’t worthy of being termed rape, at least in most cases.
Delurker – I agree with much of where you are coming from. Maybe a lot of the words you use – like want and coerce and force – are very strong.
Consent is a fairly undemanding standard, you consent if you have the ability to make a choice and make one. Want is a stronger word in some senses, more along the lines of desiring something for its own sake, but more flexible in others – the mentally disadvantaged and young children can want something. There’s a different logic behind it, our law prioritises choice rather than desire. “Enthusiastic consent” is a bit of an attempt to mix the two.
It is always interesting to think about why we choose one concept rather than another and and how we could have ended up in a different place. Even old rejected ideas about seduction as a crime – where someone can want and consent to something, but still need protection from being exploited – have something to them that the current law doesn’t see.
Interesting model, Amp, and very helpful. I’m working on a presentation about detecting and preventing rape & abuse in BDSM, and I’ve been fooling around with a kind of continuum model myself – it’s Not Yet Ready for Prime Time, I think, but my notes so far look like this:
– enthusiastic consent
– willing consent (“if you want to”)
– coerced consent (quid pro quo?)*
– assumed consent (“they consented last time,” “they’re a sub,” “they’re my slave”)
– pseudo consent (consent out of fear, false choice)
*This is the one I’m least satisfied with right now – I’m thinking of something more consenting than “I’m afraid you’ll leave me and the kids if I don’t give you sex” which would be pseudo-consent, but less consenting than “OK, I don’t have a lot of desire right now, but I’m cool if you do.” In the realm of “I’m saying yes so you’ll stop badgering me” and the like.
I think the word you’re looking for is “pressured” rather than “coerced,” preceded by the appropriate adverb (mildly, somewhat, heavily, etc.) Pressure can be well within social bounds (your aunt Em pressuring you to try the sweet potato casserole) or, in some cases, outside the bounds. But everyone uses some sort of pressure on some people sometimes, so it’s not a dirty word in and of itself. As I said to lurker: “if you won’t ____ then I’m going home” is a type of pressure, but is functionally the same as “if you don’t stop bugging me to _____ then I’m going home” and I suspect you’d think that was just fine.
With respect to what you’re calling pseudo-consent, I think the word you’re looking for is “coerced consent.”
Elusis, a lot of that description for coerced consent sounds like a post Jill had on Feministe about a lack of oral sex, and particularly reciprocal oral sex, was a deal breaker for her in a relationship. In anything involving two people being together by choice I thnk we need to be careful with the word coerced. Yes the threat to throw someone out immediately if they won’t negotiate or meet your relationship needs is very coercive but at some distance this has to come down to a negotiation or it becomes coercive the other way.
I would include a whole bunch of other consents as well – from willing to ambivalent to hostile. Consent is a really tricky word because a lot of the things we do normally in life are far from being enthusiastic consent. Personally I don’t think I’ve enthusiastically consented to anything in the last 5 years.
The problem with Jill’s posts was not as much that not getting oral sex was a dealbreaker for Jill, but rather the assertion that there were very few, if any, reasons for a man to not perform oral sex which were not misogynistic. Vilifying someone by calling them misogynists for not consenting to a sex act is in my view crossing the border of coercive.
From that post 2ndnin refers to:
Her first sentence about men having a 100% right to not consent to oral sex is pretty much negated by her assertion that it is perfectly ok to tell them that that is some misogynist bullshit unless she find their reason for not consenting to be acceptable and believable. I mean, there is no way that could be coercive, right?
Reading Jill’s post, it’s clear that she’s specifically talking about guys who won’t go down on their girlfriends for specifically misogynist reasons, such as “it’s gross.”
Should what men say be beyond criticism? Are you denying that some men do say misogynistic things, or just that it’s ever okay to criticize misogynistic things that are said?
No. Some men say misogynists things and in general it’s not wrong to criticize them for that.
Can I conclude that you see no problem with Jill’s post and that it in no way veers into coercive territory when it advocated demanding a “relatively good reason” for not consenting to a sex act and that a failure to provide such an approved reason results in “That is some misogynist bullshit right there, and if you are not only unwilling to give me what I need to be sexually satisfied but you also pathologize my body then you are officially kicked to the curb”?
Goodness, mister prosecutor, you sure are building a case there! I bet you’re going to successfully convict me.
Of course, you can conclude whatever you want (and I suspect you will). But would it be an accurate conclusion? Nope.
I read Jill’s post – giving her rather more benefit of the doubt than you do – as talking about the example of a guy who refuses to go down *AND* who gives a misogynistic reason for his refusal. (“you also pathologize my body.”) I don’t think that breaking up with a guy like that is “coercive.” (Ditto if the sexes were reversed and the reasoning was misandrist.)
The point being though Amp that many feminists do support the idea that within a personal relationship you can and should be able to draw lines regarding what behaviour you want, and will support. This means that certain things that will look coercive (‘I don’t want to be with you if you won’t do x’ etc.) have to be looked at both as coercive but also as completely acceptable at the same time as a being forced to maintain an otherwise voluntary relationship that doesn’t meet your needs is also a form of coercion.
It makes it harder to draw a line saying ‘x is y’ in a clear fashion. Can something be easily classified as non-consensual if you have to do it to maintain something you do want? How negative do the consequences of the act have to be to make it acceptable to force the other person to compromise their own position?
It was a mistake of me to append my interpretation of Jill’s post to the question I posed and to open it with “Can I conclude…”. Let me try without that:
Do you see no problem with Jill’s post and does it in no way veers into coercive territory in your view?
If you see no problem with it we’ll just have to disagree.
Although I could’ve formulated my question badly I intended no disrespect nor snark. I was disappointed in the patronizing tone of your reply.
The irony of writing “Although I could’ve formulated my question badly” is not lost upon me.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with having certain “dealbreakers,” as long as you’re upfront about them. Like, if you get into a relationship, and then, once it’s established, you start presenting all sorts of “If you don’t do this, I’m going to break up with you” stuff, then that can be skeevy. If everyone goes into it knowing what’s expected, though, then I don’t think I see anything wrong with it.
The way I read Jill’s post, she’s not saying “I’ll break up with you if you don’t go down on me.” Rather, she’s saying “I’m breaking up with you because you won’t go down on me, and because your reasons for not going down on me reveal that you have some misogynistic attitudes, and I don’t want to be with someone who thinks like that.” There’s a difference.
In general, I’m not buying the notion that someone can start by innocently setting a personal boundary and end up unwittingly coercing their partner into some unwanted sex act. Real-life communications are more subtle than these “I’ll do x, you do y” negotiations. If A says “I don’t want to be with you if you won’t do x” and B says “OK, I’ll do x,” context and body language hold all sorts of clues about whether B really means “I’m offering a compromise so that we’ll both be happy in this relationship” or “I really, really don’t want to do x, but I’m terrified of what will happen if A leaves me.” And in the latter case, A is allowed to say, “You know, I can tell you really, really don’t want to do x, so maybe that means we aren’t right for each other.” Unless, of course, A cares more about doing x (or about controlling B) than about having a healthy relationship.
Regarding the term “enthusiastic consent,” which is not perfect or applicable to all situations: I think it was intended, really, for a situation like the one shown in the video.
Because people really DO ask: In a situation like the one in the video, where she’s allowing herself to be led and (in what we are shown in the video) not explicitly saying the word “no,” how can the guy possibly be expected to know that what’s he’s doing is rape? “Is he supposed to be a mind-reader or something?” And the answer is, in a situation like that, people should not have sex with anyone without that person’s enthusiastic consent and participation.
I don’t think the term has to be perfect for all situations, but it is useful when discussing some situations.
Charles mentioned what he thought was a better term last night, but now I can’t remember what it was. Maybe he’ll suggest it.
Re: “I’ll break up with you if you don’t do X” — the behavior isn’t problematic by default, IMO. It’s problematic under certain circumstances. I think some feminist writing has suggested it’s all problematic by failing to specify what the situations are when it is problematic, which I assume is because they are assuming a shared context in which all the readers understand what they mean even if they don’t spell it out. That may have been a terrible sentence.
Anyway, I think the kinds of circumstances that make it problematic are (and I expect the list is incomplete):
1) When there is pressure on a young person that is not age appropriate.
2) When there is a massive power differential between the two people.
3) When the pressure is to do something unsafe.
4) When the pressure is to do something that fundamentally changes the rules of a long-term, established relationship that involves agreed-upon dependencies. For instance, if one partner has agreed to give up their career in order to raise children, with the understanding that the other partner will provide emotional and financial support. It would be unsettling for a woman to come to her stay-at-home husband after 10 years, while he has no job and their finances are entangled and their children are 8, 5, and 3, and say that although she got into the relationship with the knowledge that he did not like performing oral sex on her, she had now decided he had to do that, and if he didn’t, then she would leave him.
There are a lot of shades of how bad that scenario can be, depending on the dependency, the established agreement, the power dynamics between the people, what the request is, and what the history of the request is between the two people. That’s a lot of factors to twiddle back and forth and you can come up with scenarios in which it’s pretty okay and ones in which it is massively not okay.
People still have the right to leave, though. And things that are bad from one perspective can still be the right thing to do from another. Someone who realizes they’re just not going to be happy unless they’re poly in the middle of a monogamous relationship in which their partner is dependent on them… well, the goal becomes threading the needle of doing what’s necessary for oneself in as ethical a fashion as possible.
Well, I didn’t like the prosecutorial tone of your comment. I’m glad you didn’t intend disrespect; I wasn’t intending disrespect either, just self-defense. So let’s call it a wash and forget about it.
I do see problems with Jill’s post; mainly that she doesn’t acknowledge the kind of complexities that “Another Delurker” and Mandolin describe very well in comments 42 and 44. However, I think your interpretation of her post as “Vilifying someone by calling them misogynists for not consenting to a sex act ” is not giving Jill reasonable benefit of the doubt; yeah, I can see how you’d interpret it that way, but there’s another obvious and much more benevolent interpretation of what she wrote.
Forgotten.
My interpretation is influenced by how little room she leaves for reasonable causes for not wanting to perform cunnilingus. She cites spine-issue as one reasonable cause only to go on and state that she thinks that don’t think that’s for the most part why men don’t want to perform cunnilingus. She goes on to state that she why have never met a man telling her that he doesn’t like giving oral sex – but suggest that might be because dudes are hesitant to say woman-hating things around feminist bloggers.
And finally the last paragraph:
Which I found pretty thoughtless and callous considering the men who in the comments revealed that they didn’t like and didn’t perform cunnilingus due to having been made to do that act when they were sexually abused as children. Just what they needed to hear: They are definitively 100% not anywhere approaching decent in the sack.
This is a further explanation of my interpretation of that article.
Agreed.
I have a lot less faith than you do in the unspoken. I think that many feminist writers have significantly different idea of where the line is. As an example, if someone is using the line “anything but enthusiastic consent is rape” then you and I should have no reason to believe that they will, all of a sudden, intend a more nuanced view w/r/t “coercion.”
These are three very good examples. In your hands they would work. It would be important, though, not to take the first and second one and turn them into a default “because women are discriminated against there is always a massive power differential” situation.
Eh.
Unsettling, sure.
Immoral, no.
Coercion, perhaps (or perhaps not.)
Rape (if he agrees,) no.
Again: you are taking a rational, nuanced, view. But there are plenty of people who are writing without nuance and there’s no reason to believe that they would look at this reasonably.
Jill’s a smart writer. When she wants to use nuance, she does. If she doesn’t, I assume it’s intentional.
So I wonder: Given that “it’s gross” is probably one of the #1 reasons not to like to give oral sex, how would Jill react to the reverse? You know: if Joe Dude suggests that a girl who thought BJs were “gross” was a misandrist, and might as well be a member of the puppy hating club, and “ought to” be kicked to the curb? I can’t help but think that she’s call that sexist and horrific, and/or that any BJ given in response to the accusations would be coercive, rape-ish, etc.
Jill’s often right. She’s often on target. Not this time, though.
Agreed!
The way I read Jill’s post, she’s not saying “I’ll break up with you if you don’t go down on me.” Rather, she’s saying “I’m breaking up with you because you won’t go down on me, and because your reasons for not going down on me reveal that you have some misogynistic attitudes, and I don’t want to be with someone who thinks like that.” There’s a difference.
I think this is important. The motive in saying it is not to try to get the guy to change his mind and perform oral sex; deciding to perform oral sex would not solve the underlying problem.
***
[I hope this isn’t too much of a derail; let me know if it is.]
I don’t think that not wanting to perform cunnilingus necessarily makes someone particularly misogynistic*, even if it is because the person thinks it’s gross. I’ve been trained by my culture all my life to think that eating bugs is gross. Many people (including Timon and Pumba) have pointed out that bugs are a nutritious, environmentally-friendly protein source. I know that it’s completely irrational to think that eating bugs is gross. I eat lobster and shrimp, and those are basically giant bugs. But I cannot get past it. Similarly, I think that a man who does not make a big deal out of how gross vaginas are but says he’s not comfortable performing oral sex on a woman, should not be assumed to be particularly misogynistic.
And, as g&w alludes to, people can think that performing oral sex on men is gross, too. When I first heard of it as a ~9 year old kid, I thought oral sex of any kind was really, really gross. I think there will always be some people who think of oral sex as kind of gross. It seems to be less common for people to say that about performing oral sex on men, though, and I suspect that at least part of the reason for the difference is misogyny and/or male privilege. (I would put actively encouraging “vaginas are gross” in the misogyny category, and male entitlement to oral sex and/or discouragement of saying fellatio is gross in the male privilege category.)
*I’m using “particularly misogynistic” because we’ve probably all got some misogyny lurking in the corners of our minds, and because the idea that “oral sex performed on women is gross” probably comes from misogyny–so a person’s aversion to it can come from a misogynistic source because it’s coming from a misogynistic culture (rather than the person him/herself).
G&W — I can think of at least two sex columnists, Dan Savage and Amanda, who have basically explicitly said that BJs come standard, and the negotiation point should be around *lack* of them.
(Which I’m fine with, personally.)
Closetpuritan — That sounds right to me.
Which brings us to this article in Slate, entitled “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk”.
Remembering that authors are rarely responsible for the headline on their articles, the gist of the article seems to be that
1) When a young woman gets $h!tfaced to the point of incapacity it greatly increased the odds that someone will sexually assault her,
2) Young women would be therefore be well advised to not get $h!tfaced to the point of incapacity, but
3) When this kind of advise is offered publically the advisor is pilloried by activist groups for “blaming the victim”.
A collorary to point 3 is that discussion of alcohol consumption in school-published guides to life on campus rarely highlight the link between alcohol consumption and sexual assault. I personally speculate that this is because the school administration doesn’t want to deal with accusations from various activist groups that they are blaming the victim instead of taking actions that such groups believe will prevent the assaults in the first place – or make it easier to enforce penalties against people who are accused of such assaults.
So I would be interested in what you think on the topic. Is such advice “blaming the victim”?
The video above seems to ask people other than the victim to take responsibility for taking action when they see a situation that indicates that someone else is in danger of being sexually assaulted. That seems sound to me. I think we can all also agree that the potential assailant has responsibility for not committing an assault. But if onlookers have a responsibility to act, and the potential assailant has responsibility to act (or not act, if you will), what responsibility does the potential victim themselves have?
I think Thomas at “Yes Means Yes” said pretty much everything that needed saying about Emily Yoffe’s column.
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/emily-yoffes-rape-apologism-some-very-quick-thoughts/
http://yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/16/emily-yoffe-a-further-catalog-of-ways-she-is-wrong/
Here’s the first sentence from the first link you cite and the first two sentences from the second link you cite:
I read Yoffe’s post. This is not at all what she said. So I’m afraid I don’t see Thomas’s posts are particularly relevant.
However, you are fairly responding to my question of whether or not you consider the advice that Yoffe offers as “blaming the victim” by saying “Yes, I do.” Am I mischaracterizing your position?
Personally, I figure advising people that there are predators out there and that they should take steps to avoid being a predator’s victim is a wise thing to do and does not relieve responsibility for predation from the predator. It’s certainly the advice I gave both my son and my daughter when they went away for college.
Re: So I would be interested in what you think on the topic. Is such advice “blaming the victim”?
Yes.
That was easy, wasn’t it?
It’s easy to simply say “No.”. It would be more interesting if you did not take the easy route and supplied an explanation, however.
While we’re at it, here’s another question. Is the video saying that other people – such as, say, the roommate – have a responsibility to act when they see a situation such as what the video depicts? Or is it saying that it is highly desirable for them to act, but that that they have no moral responsibility to do so? How would you describe the position that the video is taking?
Mandolin:
I’m kind of surprised to hear anyone on here say that there are any kinds of sexual activity that should be considered “standard” and that NOT performing them would be required to be negotiated. I would consider that such a position would discredit the supposed authority of anyone holding them.
Negotiated in the sense of “lack of X is out of the ordinary & should probably be discussed in a non-sexual conversation before a long-term relationship is embarked upon”, not negotiated in the sense of “X is going to happen right now unless you explicitly say no.” The first is an argument about expectations and disclosure for two (or more) people in a relationship; the second is a lack of consent during specific acts, and the advice columnists in question are not advising it.
Ron – I think the US has a very warped relationship with alcohol. College students drinking is a crime, but at the same time most students go to college to drink and colleges knowingly turn a blind eye as because a dry campus would have a negative effect on recruitment. That probably has much more to do with administrations alcohol policy than any thoughts about the wrongs of victim blaming.
I’d extend that to the feminist criticism. The overwhelming majority of drunks don’t get raped, and it isn’t victim blaming if there isn’t a victim. The outrage seems to me to be mostly people who can’t handle their booze without getting $h!tfaced hiding behind the skirts of rape victims to avoid criticism. If the headline “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk” had been followed by nothing about rape, there’d still be outrage.
What the heck does this even mean? What are you talking about?
At a guess, he’s alluding to a (real) phenomenon among some immature young people who are sexually active. It’s a lot less common today than it was ‘back in our day’, I THINK but I’m not on campus much these days. (Damn kids with their rock and roll skates and electronic cane dejanglers!)
Girl A wants to drink and have a good time. Girl A wants to have sex with her boyfriend. Girl A believes that a girl who gets drunk and has sex is a bad person with bad values – sometimes with great fervency she believes this, other times as lip service. Either way, horny. So Girl A gets drunk – really drunk. “Oh my God I got so drunk last night I bet Tony just totally took advantage of me [like I yearned for him to], wotta creep.” There is no intention or desire to persecute or prosecute Tony, or to dump him; she LIKES Tony and wants to fuck him. She just feels, whether from the pressure of a religious upbringing or a desire to avoid social stigmas or any of a number of different, though related, reasons, that she cannot or should not volitionally will this outcome, but instead arrange it through “accidental” overindulgence.
Tony, for his part, may be a tacit co-conspirator in this drama, or he may be the kind of asshole who fucks drunk girls because he can.
Sometimes, though, if nobody puts 2 and 2 together (“why does she keep going to Tony’s apartment and getting shitfaced if she is angry at him for fucking her every time she does that?”) the facade can become part of a genuine get-Tony-and-his-kind sentiment. That’s what the other commenter means about people getting shitfaced and hiding behind the skirts of rape victims, I suspect; they can’t just stand up and say “oh geez, fine, Tony is not raping me, I want him to fuck me, I just like to get plowed before I get plowed” without great social opprobrium. So they murmur “yes, rape is bad” and try to blend in.
Robert, I did see some similar situations when I was in college in the early 2000s, but usually, she wouldn’t mention rape. It would just be, “I’m trying to stay a virgin until I get married, but I got drunk, and oops, I had sex with him.” And then the same thing the next weekend, and every weekend for months. Never with a condom — if they bought condoms, that would mean they were PLANNING to have sex, which would be wrong. If they both got drunk and “it just happened,” then, well, who could blame them? I can’t remember anyone ever mentioning rape in that scenario, though — the girls I knew who said a guy raped them would be pretty careful to never be alone with that guy again.
What I meant is that there is a massive harmful (& illegal) drinking culture on US campuses. Criticism of this (“College Women: Stop Getting Drunk”) isn’t victim blaming. Most obviously because the overwhelming majority of drunks don’t get raped and aren’t victims. And also because, among actual victims, date rape is if anything quite mild compared to the horrific range of poisonings and vehicle accidents and drownings etc that happen to other drunks.
Particularly online, there are plenty of young US feminists who are essentially pro-alchol abuse and use the “victim blaming” card to shut down legitimate criticism of idiotic behaviour. You only have to looks at places like feministing and feministe, the root of the outrage is criticism of drinking culture.
Alex, try to realize that people can disagree with you and be sincere and not game-playing.
It’s pretty fucking obvious that the folks on Feministing (for instance, and like most feminists) also get pretty pissed off about “victim-blaming” in contexts other than drinking – for instance, objecting to “she should have fought harder” or “look how she was dressed.” Your attribution of bad faith to them doesn’t have any foundation at all.
Ampersand, I’m just curious why you keep bringing up “enthusiastic consent” – that men supposedly have to adhere to.
I’m a woman, and I simply don’t want to put on my cheerleading dress and pom-poms and scream with glee if I want to have sex. I also like to be awakened with my boyfriend already initiating and engaging in sex.
I’ll wait for your answer – and I hope you provide one – but my guess as to motives already goes towards unwarranted chivalry, playing the hero role and other guesses along that line. I apologize if I’m wrong.
Frankly, the only other male feminist I heard of who asserted that was “Hugo Schwyzer”, who verified my prior thoughts about him.
If you’re not going to respond, can you at least see how paternalistic (and maybe phony, depending on your motives) it is to demand certain actions from men that *women themselves* don’t want? And why are you putting women so high up on that pedestal?
There are groups (other than manufacturers) who are pro alcohol abuse? Can you provide some links to explicit support of alcohol abuse?
I’ve never heard of such a thing.
1) Wow, Karina – for someone who apologizes for assuming malicious motives, you sure do it A LOT! The entire tone of your post comes off as sneering and hostile, and I won’t be at all surprised if you turn out to be a troll.
2) I never said “men” should adhere to the idea of enthusiastic consent. My comments apply to both men and women – and I said so explicitly in the post. What about “It doesn’t matter what sex the person is” did you find ambiguous?
3) In the post I’m talking about the situation of two total strangers who have been drinking (i.e., the situation depicted in the video). In that context, I think the enthusiastic consent standard makes sense. I certainly agree that there are other situations where it doesn’t apply. (See also comments 21 and 43.)
OK, I’ll take your word for it that both genders have to get *enthusiastic consent*.
Now what remains unanswered, at least in my mind, is “why”. We can’t be grown-up enough to decide what we want if there is consent?
————————————
“… and I won’t be at all surprised if you turn out to be a troll.”
I’m expressing my real opinion. I’m even suppressing what I really think of you demanding “enthusiastic consent”. I can’t even fathom where you are coming from on that if it’s not some chivalrous posturing.
“… and I won’t be at all surprised if you turn out to be a troll.”
Yes, I get the implied warning. I’ll try to sugarcoat things, or just leave.
Katrina:
I’m a woman, and I simply don’t want to put on my cheerleading dress and pom-poms and scream with glee if I want to have sex. I also like to be awakened with my boyfriend already initiating and engaging in sex.
I’m a woman, and I don’t want to wake up with a surprise penis inside me, even if it’s attached to my fiancee. I assume that’s what you mean by “engaging in sex”? I would find that deeply disturbing. To me, it’s very weird that someone would like that. Now, it’s entirely possible that I’m the one who’s weird, and your preferences are more common. (I don’t think so, but then, I would think that, wouldn’t I?) If we use a standard of enthusiastic consent, than I’m in no danger of someone deciding that everyone likes surprise penises and just assuming that I’m fine with it. We can also avoid this by using the “real consent” standard, mentioned in dragonsnap’s link @28, though. (You can also substitute in whatever sexual practice you think is weird, that you wouldn’t want your boyfriend just deciding to try without asking you.)
I also second what Amp touched on, and is also touched on in the comments of dragonsnap’s earlier Pervocracy link @28–enthusiastic consent is the best standard when strangers and/or drunkenness are involved. Clear consent is a good standard with relationships. Clear consent when it’s drunk strangers is almost always going to be the same thing as enthusiastic consent, I suspect.
closetpuritan:
First off, you got my name wrong. But I forgive you.
With regard to enthusiastic consent: If you don’t want your boyfriend to wake you up with sex, that’s your deal. Tell him not to do it if you don’t like it, and break up with him if it is important to you and he continues. I guess. I’m not the one trying to be the boss here.
The promoters of “enthusiastic sex”, however, are the bosses here. Why it is their sphere of bossiness and determination has not yet been explained to me. Why they want to give the world a standard that many or most people do not want – if there is consent – is truly beyond me.
If you are in favor of “enthusiastic consent”, but not in favor of mere consent, why? Ampersand won’t explain his reasons, at least so that I can understand it.
If I want to be awakened with sex, what business is that of yours? Honestly.
Re: I certainly agree that there are other situations where it doesn’t apply. (See also comments 21 and 43.)
I think Gin-And-Whiskey’s comment at 23 pointed out that it didn’t necessarily apply to people who just met at the bar/club, either. I would think that ‘clear consent’ should be enough. Not to be an ‘ideal’ situation, necessarily, but certainly to make something ‘not rape’.
Re: Anyway, I think the kinds of circumstances that make it problematic are (and I expect the list is incomplete):
1) When there is pressure on a young person that is not age appropriate.
2) When there is a massive power differential between the two people.
3) When the pressure is to do something unsafe.
I think you need to flesh those out a little more before I’d know if I agree. What do you have in mind in terms of ‘age appropriate’ and ‘power differential’?
With regard to enthusiastic consent: If you don’t want your boyfriend to wake you up with sex, that’s your deal. Tell him not to do it if you don’t like it, and break up with him if it is important to you and he continues. I guess. I’m not the one trying to be the boss here.
If I want to be awakened with sex, what business is that of yours? Honestly.
What? He doesn’t. No one has ever done that to me. The thing is, if he was doing it, without checking first that it was OK with me, he would be in the wrong. I shouldn’t have to preemptively tell him that it’s not OK, he should make sure it’s OK first. Having sex with an unconscious person who does not want to is rape. Your first comment was a little vague, but I got the impression then, and even more now, that you thought waking-up-with-a-penis-inside-you was what should be ASSUMED to be standard, and it’s other people’s responsibility to specifically state that they don’t want that to happen, or, guess what! Surprise penis! And if you would find that distressing, TOO BAD, you should have thought of that. My point when I was saying that I think that’s weird, is that it would never occur to me that someone would ASSUME that that was OK. So if people act the way that you think is normal (judging by the “many or most people do not want” enthusiastic consent), people get to just do whatever they want without asking first, unless that person has thought ahead to expect that person to do it and forbid it. I mean, people make jokes about pro-consent feminists making everyone sign contracts, but this would be even more cumbersome. “I have looked up every weird sexual practice on the internet, and here is a list of things that I don’t want you to do…” Did you specifically tell your boyfriend that you didn’t want him to pee on you while you were sleeping, for example? Did you tell him that you don’t want to go from anal directly to vaginal sex because you don’t want to get an infection? Would you be freaked out if, out of nowhere, your boyfriend punched you during foreplay because he heard that some women liked that and he thought it would be fun to try?
You say you don’t want to be the boss, but you seem to think that people should follow your ideas about consent, i.e. if someone does not specify that they don’t consent to something, go ahead and start in, it’s up to them to let you know if they don’t want to do it.
I don’t CARE what you and your boyfriend do, but I DO care that you seem to be advocating for a world where I (and everyone else) have to anticipate every kind of sexual practice that I might not want to engage in–and my point in saying that wanting to wake up with a penis inside you is weird to me is that there’s no way I would have predicted that in order to preemptively say I don’t want to do that–I only knew that that was a thing that some women liked after reading it on the internet within the last year or two–so you’re basically asking for a world where, if I was unlucky enough to sleep with a man who likes doing that, that I would end up being raped.
If you are in favor of “enthusiastic consent”, but not in favor of mere consent, why? Ampersand won’t explain his reasons, at least so that I can understand it.
As I said before, I think that for drunk strangers, “enthusiastic consent” is about the only way to get clear consent, and I want clear consent. So in the situations where I am in favor of enthusiastic consent, it is because it minimizes the risk that someone will mistake/interpret freezing up or confusion or unresponsiveness as consent. I don’t think that enthusiastic consent is necessarily needed when people know each other well enough to be confident [“reasonable person” confident, not unfounded overoptimistic drunk person confident] that their partner is truly consenting. Even with these caveats, I think “enthusiastic consent” is probably an oversimplification, but I think that it is a good, simple way to communicate about the concept of consent to people who are somewhat new to sex and relationships, and counteract the toxic idea that unless someone is actively fighting back, they’re consenting.
Alex: In addition to what Amp said, Thomas Millar of Yes Means Yes does not drink.
RonF:
I read Yoffe’s post. This is not at all what she said. So I’m afraid I don’t see Thomas’s posts are particularly relevant.
Well, she doesn’t say not to drink with boys, but not to get drunk with boys. She does briefly mention mention educating students about rape, including bystander programs–but follows it with “But nothing is going to be as effective at preventing alcohol-facilitated assaults as a reduction in alcohol consumption.” And she does have other ideas for getting girls (and boys) not to drink besides just telling them not to, or at least she quotes people who do. So I’d say that Thomas’s characterization is hyperbolic, but not so hyperbolic that he can’t make some good points.
The parts of her article that addressed the general culture of binge drinking at many colleges, I thought, were pretty strong. I think Amanda Hess is right that “a ‘feminist’ impulse for women to protect themselves by staying sober will not ‘trickle down’ to boys, because they’re situated at the top of the social ladder,” though. And I think Millar at Yes Means Yes is right that the culture of binge drinking is likely to be at least as intractable as rape culture. I would add that while it might be easier in some ways to get girls and women to change their behavior than rapists, because it’s in girls and women’s interest to not be raped and not in rapists’ interests to stop raping, there are a lot more girls and women who binge-drink than there are rapists. If you get some potential rapists to not rape–and as Hess points out, “rape has declined markedly in the United States since 1979, even as female binge drinking has risen”, so it’s possible–that will directly lower the number of rapes. If we reduce the rate of female binge drinking by half but don’t affect the rapists, there will still be a fair amount of of drunk girls, and of course rapists have other ways of manipulating people.
I think Jennifer Marsh of RAINN makes a good point: that it sets a different tone when rape is addressed as one of many crimes that someone is vulnerable to when drunk, rather than singled out: “[Rape prevention literature] shouldn’t just be about sexual assault and awareness; it should be about being safe in the face of general danger.”
And I think Yoffe is being just plain silly when she says that “Young women are getting a distorted message that their right to match men drink for drink is a feminist issue.”
(I notice that in one of Yoffe’s example stories, a woman is initially confused about an encounter that she had little memory of, and initially thinks it was consensual but later realizes that it was rape. Yoffe is willing to accept that this was rape, maybe because it helps make her point in this piece, maybe because she’s actually learned something. In an earlier advice column, she talked to the friend of a woman with a very similar story, and said, “Trying to ruin someone else’s life is a poor way to address one’s alcohol and self-control problems.”)
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, and I think that the language of “prevent rape” (in terms of binge drinking) is looking at it from the wrong perspective. Even if you do take it as a given (which I don’t, but for the sake of argument) that there is some young woman who is going to get drunk next weekend, and someone is going to rape her, and that, if you can convince her not to get drunk, then that person won’t rape her — what have you accomplished, exactly? That guy who was going to rape her — is he going to just go to that party and, since she’s not there, go home? Or will he rape someone else? If it’s the latter, then you haven’t prevented a rape, you’ve just shifted it. From the perspective of everybody except those two women, nothing at all has changed. The “don’t get drunk” stuff may be moderately useful on a personal level, but it’s completely useless on a societal level.
Almost all mainstream crime science is situational, takes the opposite view, and has rejected the idea that crimes happen because of evil people, and thinks instead that people commit crime because of opportunity.
Current ideas about rape are different, but honestly, I find it very difficult to take feminist ideas about rape seriously. I’m sure morally and political their hearts are in the right place. But you regularly get random complete reversals in opinion every 15-20 years.
Prior to Brownmiller rape was though to be rare, post Brownmiller/Koss everyone changed their mind and was thought to be common and the cause of universal fear among women. We used to think rape was committed by deviants, but then we had Dworkin and Brownmiller telling us it shades into normal sex and seduction, now everyone agrees with Lisak and we’re back to the deviants again. In the 90s everyone was sure it was because of miscommunication and we had the Antioch Code helping to get messages straight, now the that position is met with horror because rapists are evil plotters who know what they’re doing. I can go on.
You can literally argue the orthodox position from 15 years back and people will be outraged. But the rest of criminology is actually pretty stable. I just don’t have confidence in feminst theory, it isn’t normal for disciplines to change their mind so wildly and so often.
I agree, feminism is only very indirectly influential for normal people. No offense. Pop culture has more impact, I can’t imagine many sorrority girls log on to Feministing before hitting a keg party.
But there are arguments that culturally women are supposed to behave virtuously and this is oppression etc etc which should be rejected. They’ve got a point. But on the other hand it is biologically hard for women to match men drink for drink, just cos of size.
Here’s an example:
http://www.jaclynfriedman.com/in-defense-of-going-wild-or-how-i-stopped-worrying-and-learned-to-love-pleasure-and-how-you-can-too
Whether Yoffe realized the implications of what she was saying, “Girls, don’t get drunk around boys” means that girls shouldn’t drink around boys. If you are drinking alcohol, particularly if you are young and inexperienced with your own tolerance (and when it might be higher or lower), what drinks are stronger and hit you harder than others, and how to pace yourself so you don’t go from zero to sloshed before you expect it – there is a nontrivial chance of getting drinker than you planned. Especially in a situation where there is social pressure, where some of the boys may be encouraging drinking for their own reasons, where somebody might find making a very strong or spiked drink funny, and where there is also a nontrivial chance that someone brought a date rape drug.
In other words, this is stupid advice. If it’s safety advice, then tell girls to drink only in all-girl groups and never at bars or clubs, and if they must drink around boys, to get one low-alcohol drink from a close container they saw opened, like beer, and nurse it all evening – while of course fending off all social pressure to drink more and never ever let it out of their sight.
On the contrary, this is totally normal for young or cutting-edge fields. If you have access to British TV, the latest episode of QI discusses this: 60% of the facts they presented in the first series 10 years ago are now known to be wrong. 15 years ago everyone thought the universe was decelerating. 15 years ago the now-discredited study linking autism and vaccines had just been published. To take criminology, 15 years ago the broken windows theory was still having a bit of a moment, iirc (my media sources have changed though so that might just be observational bias).
In any case, changing a theory to fit new data isn’t a sign of weakness or lack of intellectual seriousness… it’s what a rational person is supposed to do.
1) You have helped that young woman avoid a rape. That is a good thing; as the cheesy but surprisingly applicable anecdote goes, “it mattered to that one.”
2) Unless there is another target of opportunity, you will have prevented a rape. Certainly this will happen in a non-zero percentage of circumstances (and the effectiveness increase as more people do it.) So it would be ludicrous to suggest that it won’t prevent rapes. If there are 30 shitfaced girls at a frat party, reducing it to 29 won’t do much for the remaining 29. But if there are 30 shitfaced girls at a frat party, reducing it to 5 will almost certainly have an overall effect on everyone, not just the sober ones.
Besides, think of the relationship between prevalence and seriousness:
10: Armed predators, who aim to rape someone, including a stranger, and will use violent force to get it: very rare; very hard to deter.
9: Non-armed predators, who aim to rape someone but prefer methods that are designed to avoid defensiveness, like roofies: Rare, hard to deter.
8: Non-armed predators, who are looking for an available target of opportunity but who will not take major steps to proactively create one: Moderately frequent, moderately hard to deter.
and so on, down the line to:
1: People who are not necessarily intending to commit rape or sexual assault; who don’t think of themselves as willing to commit rape or sexual assault; and who–in at least some part of their psyche–don’t want to commit rape or sexual assault, although they might try. This is the guy who, when Sally murmurs “no, stop, I’m not in the mood” when they’re naked in bed, keeps saying “c’mon, just the tip” instead of immediately rolling off her. Very common; very easy (relative to other rapists) to deter.
It’s true that “not getting drunk” won’t stop everyone. But it will stop the people who rely on alcohol-induced incapacity to choose targets of opportunity. And there are a lot of those.
It’s true that saying “STOP RIGHT NOW YOU ARE RAPING ME AND IF YOU ARE NOT OFF OF ME IN ONE SECOND I WILL CALL THE POLICE” won’t do anything against the high level ones. But it will stop the people who had erroneously themselves that nothing is wrong; and/or who rely on a belief that the victim won’t report it or didn’t think it’s rape. And there are even more of those.
Are there rapists who are willing to assault and rape a sober woman while she is struggling, fighting, screaming rape, etc? Yes. But those are a relatively tiny minority of rapists overall.
The concept that victims can’t influence outcomes is simply false. Victims influence outcomes in every other crime. Rape has many differences with respect to other crimes, but it still lives in the same world. There’s no good reason to suggest that
What IS true is that focusing on what victims can do will, in a zero-sum game of time, lead to less focus on stopping individual rapists. But it’s not clear that this is a zero-sum game; the actions of potential victims should be included in ADDITION to going after rapists, not INSTEAD OF going after rapists.
In that respect, modern feminist discourse seems way, way, WAY too willing to sacrifice potential victims on the altar of general anti-patriarchy work.
Paragraph 2 was supposed to read like this:
2) Unless there is another target of opportunity, you will have prevented a rape. Certainly this will happen in a non-zero percentage of circumstances (and the effectiveness increase as more people do it.) So it would be ludicrous to suggest that it won’t prevent rapes. If there are 30 shitfaced girls at a frat party, reducing it to 29 won’t do much for the remaining 29. But if there are 30 shitfaced girls at a frat party, reducing it to 5 will almost certainly have an overall effect on everyone, not just the sober ones. You cannot know anyone else’s status. The rapist may find another target, or not; there may be other people protecting folks who you would think are targets, or not. You cannot know whether “he’ll just rape someone else” or whether he will give up for the night and move on. So you can’t assume that it’s ineffective.
It’s not clear that this is a zero-sum game of time, I agree. But when there are still many people who don’t even agree that many cases of rape are actually rape (particularly acquaintance rape and rape involving drugs or alcohol), it can be a zero-sum game of whether people actually hold the rapist responsible.
I think, also, that some of the people who really push for these kinds of interventions–telling women how to better avoid being rape victims–underestimate the amount of time that is already spent doing just that. By the time girls are starting high school, most have already been taught ways of keeping themselves safer, and those lessons continue in school and from parents throughout university at least. (Those lessons can be mutually exclusive: I’ve been told to avoid elevators at night because you’re trapped in a small place with strangers, and to avoid stairs because predators can hide. I guess I’m supposed to stay on ground level after dark?) That advice can be made better, and I agree with the middle 50% of Yoffe’s article that none drinking presents certain dangers that we would do better to teach young people of all genders about. But at a certain point, you’re curtailing women’s activities a lot for diminishing returns on the rape prevention front.
Part of my reaction is also based on my experience which says that the vast majority of rape prevention interventions focus on women’s behavior, not men’s. But I wonder if that’s an inverse impression of the one I was talking about above, where many men don’t realize how much safety instruction women get because they’re not around for much of it.
Binge drinking, not none drinking. ah, autocorrect.
I remember once in high school health class, the teacher split up the boys and the girls, and asked each group separately, “When you’re going to your car in the parking lot at the mall after dark, what do you do to stay safe?” The girls came up with a list of about 25 items that at least one of us would always do, and mostly it was stuff that our mothers had told us to do. Hold your car keys between your fingers so that you can use them as weapons, make sure to stay near the lights, use the clicker button (which was still relatively new) to open your car doors before you get to the car, if you don’t have a button then make sure to get your keys out of your bag before you leave so that you’re not fumbling with them when you get to the car, check to make sure there’s no one in the backseat, etc. The boys came up with something like “Look around.”
Headdesk.
Let’s go to my example:
Do you think it is MORE likely or LESS likely that someone will commit a “date rape” or “acquiaintance rape” when the victim was screaming, fighting, biting, etc.? I’m going with “much less likely.”
Do you think it is MORE or LESS likely that someone who heard the victim’s testimony (and perhaps, saw the physical evidence) would agree to hold the rapist responsible? I’m going with “much more likely,” since the standard is pretty low.
Do you see how crazy it seems, that people decry the low conviction rates and the high offense rates while actively opposing discussions of ways to theoretically improve them?
Not on the right stuff.
You might get better advice if it were possible for the experts to discuss what advice to give, without being tagged as victim blaming rape apologists. And of course, all the advice you mention is designed to prevent violent stranger rape, which is almost impossible to deter anyway.
“certain dangers?” You mean, “being the #1 characteristic of people who have a lot of horrific things happen to them; and being one of the #1 characteristics that make people target you as a victim?”
We’d be a lot better off if we stopped warning people about elevators or staircases, and started warning them about binge drinking. But we can do both.
I don’t presume to tell women what they MUST do. I presume that they would want people to accurately and responsibly talk about the link between behavior and targeting of predators. We can talk about facts and give advice, but they they can make their own choices.
Feminists disagree. They appear to think that giving information or making analyses is, itself, patriarchal. but facts aren’t political in and of themselves.
To the degree that you think that rapists are relatively rare, repeat, predators: that would be unsurprising. Those people are not very amenable to prevention; they are only amenable to deterrence. And of course, as a statistical matter men are rarely raped outside of prison, so they are rarely good targets for rape prevention from the victim side.
How do you get from A to B?
Let’s say that Sally goes to a frat house where she knows nobody, and intentionally drinks seven beers, and passes out, and therefore gets raped. It isn’t Sally’s fault. But since we’re talking about education, and since Sally isn’t a real person: The ideal situation is that the rapist doesn’t do anything, because he is in jail. The second most ideal situation is that Sally doesn’t get drunk and doesn’t get raped. But we’re in the worst situation. How did we get here? What do you think Sally knew?
1) Did Sally take a calculated risk, i.e. “well, I’ll probably be safe and I understand that I may not be safe; when I balance the risk against my desire, I really want to drink?” That doesn’t make her “responsible” any more than it makes her “responsible” if she gets hit by a drunk driver coming home from school on a Friday night (which is when lots of folks are drunk.) But it does mean that the education was sufficient.
2) Did Sally take an uncalculated risk, i.e. “this isn’t really safe, I know, but I’m not really sure how unsafe it is; I’ve had a bad day and I don’t care?” Again: that doesn’t make her “responsible.” But it does mean that she might be susceptible to more education and information; she might have made a different decision.
3) Did Sally THINK she was taking a calculated risk, but ACTUALLY take one based on inaccurate information? IOW, did the “anti victim blaming” forces manage to prevent Sally from fully understanding that she was hugely, significantly, more likely to be raped if she decided to get falling down drunk? Did they manage to convince Sally (at least before the party) that a decision not to do as she pleased would be a concession to the partiarchy, because she should not limit her behavior? If so: do you think Sally would appreciate that “helpful” input, in retrospect? I don’t.
I don’t want to sound too patriarchal, but: you’ve seen those frat parties. Do you think the freshman girls who the fratdude-rapist-wannabes refer to as “meat” really understand what they’re getting into when they walk in the door? I don’t.
Can a mod edit the post above? It should say:
The ideal situation is that the rapist doesn’t do anything, because he is in jail. The second most ideal situation is that Sally gets drunk and doesn’t get raped. The third most ideal situation is that Sally doesn’t get drunk and doesn’t get raped. The worst situation–which is where we are in this hypothetical–is that Sally gets drunk and gets raped.
G&W:
I’m sorry, but WHAT? I have yet to meet a feminist of any stripe who objects to talking to girls and women about how to keep themselves safe, about precautions they can take, about learning to defend themselves, about what to do to give themselves a greater chance of surviving if someone is actually trying/raping them and/or to make it more likely that the rapist will be caught and prosecuted, about the importance of reporting rape when it happens, and so on. Never. Not one.
Nor have I ever read a piece of feminist writing that says we should stop doing such a thing because it is blaming the victim.
What I have heard, what I have read, what I agree with, is that making that kind of talk the (almost sole) focus of rape prevention blames the victim because, among other things, it takes rape for granted as part of the “natural” order of things. That kind of talk is not about confronting rapists; it is not about getting other men to confront rapists. Indeed, that kind of talk—when it is more than just practical advice and is presented, either by default or actively, as a/the primary solution (meaning it is the only solution people talk about)—actually lets men off the hook because it places the onus of prevention on the shoulders of women.
I agree, with the rest of your argument in this line as well. I just don’t think telling women not to binge drink because they might get raped will be that effective*, so I think the impact of making some people blame women more when they get raped after drinking will be greater than the impact of reducing the number of rapes. But no way to tell that before we try it.
*but I do think a general effort to reduce binge drinking among all people on campus would be more successful than an effort to tell women not to do it because they might get victimized. A reduction of peer pressure is usually, in my experience, far more effective than fear for teenagers and young adults.
Wait–are you calling Emily Yoffe an expert on rape prevention? Anyway, I agree that the focus on stranger rape was a problem with the advice as generally given when I was in high school, but that has changed over the years, partially because the actual experts are involved in the curricula that are used in schools and the PSAs posted all over college campuses. There are ways to pass on this advice that don’t come across so victim-blamey; for example, by pairing it with increased concentration on the responsibility of the perpetrators, or using it as part of a general personal safety and common sense lesson. The experts are much better at doing this than Yoffe.
That’s a bizarre semantic argument; deterring a rapist prevents a rape. My argument was meant to encompass any (effective) way of reducing the number of rapes, including deterring rapists.
I’m not sure what the last third if your comment is referring to. What I meant by this:
was that if there is a lot of education/intervention focused on men to prevent rape, I’m probably not aware of it, not being in that demographic, the same way some men are unaware of the education and intervention focused on women’s safety. So my perception of which side gets more attention may be biased.
Richard Jeffrey Newman opines:
” I have yet to meet a feminist of any stripe who objects to talking to girls and women about how to keep themselves safe, about precautions they can take, … [and then it drones on and on]”
— — — — — —
There are slut walks and feminists on talk shows objecting to safety tips for women (put the focus on telling men not to rape) and campus posters that say: “You can dress any way you like and go anywhere you want” with regard to rape.
There most certainly are feminists who don’t like the “safety tip” approach. Don’t take my word for it – just look around.
On a side note: Can you sell me some of whatever it is you’re taking? I’m kind of tense and need to check out of reality for a while.
Wait… huh? Are you and I living in the same country? Reading at least some of the same stuff? In the same thread? Because this makes no sense to me either.
What you describe is almost precisely what “victim blaming” is considered to be these days: “talking to girls and women about how to keep themselves safe,” as opposed to “taking steps to prevent people from targeting girls and women.” The very act is considered to be at best “victim blaming” and at worst rape apologia (see Elusis’ links, feministe, etc.) or even pro-rape. (It didn’t used to be that way: victim blaming used to require that you were talking about a victim, i.e. “what Sally should have done differently.” That was/is properly called victim blaming. Now, talking about what other people can do to avoid potential harm is considered victim blaming, which is getting a bit ridiculous.)
I’m sure you can find an occasional exception, either in subject matter or content. But as soon as you start talking about what potential victims can do to reduce rape, it’s pretty much done.
Don’t believe me? Try starting a thread on a feminist board called “let’s talk to girls and women about what they can do to lessen the chances of being raped” (which is a pretty good summary;) post under a male moniker; and see how many posts it takes before you get called a rapist. Good luck with that.
This is sounding like a True Scostman argument. You’re claiming that no feminists oppose this type of discussion. But what you mean is that feminists don’t oppose it under a set of severely limited circumstances (and, in my experience, participants) which rarely, if ever, come to pass. It’s like a libertarian claiming that they support free medical treatment–perhaps they do sometimes, but not really as a general rule.
When’s the last time that you saw folks agree that the statements were valuable, as opposed to rape apologia? It’s simple to say “it shouldn’t be the focus of every conversation” (and indeed it should not,) but as a practical matter it just so happens that it never ends up being an appropriate topic. Which is odd, given its importance.
This is no different from an MRA who, in every conversation, “concedes that male behavior is important” but who insists on “this time, we need to focus on talking about what women are doing wrong.” You would recognize that as BS; you should apply the same standard here.
Um, since when is that the goal? “Confronting rapists” /= “reducing rapes,” of course. “Getting other men to confront rapists” is also unrelated–and, frankly, I don’t bear any extra responsibility to protect anyone or not just because I’m a dude. These things have different procedures and processes and outcomes and pros/cons. They’re also very relevant! But they’re only part of the puzzle.
Yeah…. I don’t think that you’re intentionally waffling here, but the bold is important.
Rape prevention by victims is not THE primary solution, because we should also focus on catching and stopping rapists.
Rape prevention by victims is A primary solution, because we will never catch and/or stop them all; and because it so happens to be a relatively effective way of improvement.
Women do bear some onus of prevention, as a practical matter. we all know that. Should they? No, of course not: neither should anyone else who is a victim of a crime. But just as with all other crimes and all other negative behavior which we don’t like (criminal or not,) we need to deal with reality. It’s ridiculous to pretend that we are actually living in some sort of utopia. instructing women to shake off all of the onus of prevention will result in more rapes, not fewer rapes.
G&W – the problem is that framing things in terms of “let’s talk to girls and women about what they can do to lessen the chances of being raped” is not just another way to say “the world is a crappy place, how do girls and women best protect themselves”. It’s specifically an invitation to the KarinaLs of the world to come and tell women that maybe they shouldn’t go where they want to go, and dress how they want to dress.
Learning how to protect oneself is a skill every single person, male or female, should have. Learning how to make responsible decisions with regards to drinking and drugs is also something I wish more people, of all sexes and genders, would know. But the discussion often doesn’t go there, it goes to telling people that their physical appearance and behaviour makes them responsible for the actions of others. And when you hear that a lot, then it’s understandable you may become less interested in engaging in those discussions, and perhaps a bit too quick to judge discussions that seem similar.
Re “it lets men off the hook”
I am more than happy to talk about how to enforce rape laws. Or how to find rapists. Or how to talk to men and deter rapes. Go for it! I talk about that sort of stuff all the time; I wish more people would do it; I chime into discussions (although it’s difficult if you’re dealing with people who don’t distinguish between moral, civil, and criminal standards.) I am ALSO happy to talk about women. The reverse is not usually true, at least for feminists.
I entirely agree! I may be wrong.
I agree again. In the absence of that…
God no. She’s just a columnist. but to riff of my response to RJN: when’s the last time you saw a positive treatment of an anti-rape-for-victims advice, on a feminist site?
Well, it’s a balance. Do you focus on avoiding victim blaming? Or do you focus on convincing people that ___ behavior is a really really stupid idea to do voluntarily?
Those programs are largely influenced by feminists. Feminist discourse is, largely, balanced towards “avoid victim blaming and avoid anything which could be construed as other than a total male responsibility for all rapes” and, as such, I frankly don’t think that they’re done well.
Sorry, that was unclear: by “prevention” I was referring to things like “talking to men about why they shouldn’t rape.” that might work for people who wouldn’t ordinarily rape; it will have little effect on people who are determined to rape. The determined rapists who don’t rape, avoid rape because they are deterred (fear of consequences) or foiled (no available victim/situation combination)
I’m not sure what the last third if your comment is referring to. What I meant by this:
Rape OF MEN? No, because that’s quite rare.
Rape BY MEN? No, although I’m in favor of it in principle. But it is probably somewhat rare because it’s a bit sticky to do. If you’re treating all men as potential rapists you have one set of problems; if you don’t, then you have an effectiveness problem.
Moreover, it’s of dubious effectiveness, especially w/r/t “true predators.”
KarinaL:
Regarding this:
I’m asking you, nicely, please stop this, and not just because this particular instance of condescending and dismissive snark was directed at me. You want to be part of the conversation be part of the conversation. And, in case you are wondering, I am a moderator.
G&W:
Point me to an instance where a discussion started with and is focused on a truly comprehensive approach to rape prevention and someone suggests that there ought to be material for girls and women to learn how to protect themselves, etc., and show me, in that discussion, where feminists are calling the giving of such information victim blaming, and I will take a good strong look at my assumptions here.
(On a related tangent: I also think people’s responses to Yoffe’s article might have been different if she’d led and stuck with the idea of comprehensive education for men and women about binge drinking and had kept the relationship between binge drinking and rape in that context—meaning it would have focused more fully on the greater likelihood of men raping when they are binge drinking rather then relegating that point to a mere mention.)
My own experience is that when feminists object to the women-need-to-protect-themselves discourse—and I include myself in this–it is pretty much always in cases where that discourse is introduced into a discussion where men’s responsibility and accountability for rape is the focus, or where the discussion is about the patriarchal, systemic and systematic nature of men’s rape of women, or where the discussion is a reaction to a particular case of rape. In other words, in contexts where it is, in one way or another, derailing.
Gin-in-Whiskey:
If “therefore gets raped” was accurate, then you COULD assign responsibility to Sally, since being raped is apparently considered as the logical/natural/predictable outcome of her actions. “subsequently gets raped” would seem a much more accurate construction here.
You’ve seen the frat parties that people hold up (justifiably) as a bad example. How representative can you say they are of frat parties in general?
mythago:
No, it doesn’t. She didn’t say “Girls, don’t get drunk around boys”, she said “Girls, don’t binge drink” – and even proceeds to provide a definition of the same. She’s clearly talking about not getting completely $h!tfaced. What’s she’s not doing is saying what you would like her to have said so that it’s easier to discount it.
Why? Safety advice can tell someone how to do something safely without telling them not to do it at all. I take kids rock climbing. They can get killed doing it. We don’t tell them not to do it, we teach them how to tie the knots and put on the harness and how to belay, etc. I didn’t tell my kids not to drink. I told both my son and my daughter when they went off to college to never accept a drink in an open container from someone unless they had watched it being made, and to never let their drink out of their sight until they had finished it. That way they knew how much booze was in it and that nothing else but booze was in it.
I didn’t tell them how much to drink. I did tell them drinking to the point of passing out was dangerous for all kinds of reasons, including what someone else might decide to do with you when you were passed out. My daughter was well aware at that point that she couldn’t drink as much as, say, a football player. Both my kids are/were jocks and had seen a fair amount of drinking in high school by teammates (and likely themselves). But telling a young woman “You can’t drink as much as a young man your age and size, never mind one that’s a couple years older and 100 pounds heavier, so don’t do it” is not the same as telling her “You can only have one low alcohol drink.”
RJN:
So who’s proposing that this be the almost sole focus of rape prevention?
Rape is a crime, an outrage, a horrific thing to do to someone or to happen to you. And yet it happens. It should not. But it does. So it seems to me that when we are talking to women – who are far more likely to be a victim of rape than a perpetrator of it – the emphasis would be on taking those steps that minimize the likelihood of being a victim. When talking to young men it’s a different story. But there we’re not talking about mechanisms of prevention. We’re talking about morality, which is an entirely different kind of conversation.
Harlequin:
It’s also totally normal for people who are spouting complete bullshit and are getting called on it. Which I can’t say is the case regarding feminist theory, because I haven’t read enough about it to have an informed opinion. But just so we understand that there’s more alternatives than what you presented.
gin-and-whiskey:
When’s the last time that you saw folks agree that the statements were valuable, as opposed to rape apologia? It’s simple to say “it shouldn’t be the focus of every conversation” (and indeed it should not,) but as a practical matter it just so happens that it never ends up being an appropriate topic. Which is odd, given its importance.
Well, one example is at the end of the Jaclyn Friedman link that alex linked to, the one that starts out as a defense of partying. She says:
She then continues the list with ways to reduce your risks if you do decide to drink and party.
Another example is Thomas Millar. His posts in reaction to Yoffe (linked earlier by Elusis) were about as strongly-worded as anyone’s… and yet, he’s been a big force in popularizing Lisak’s work. I think every link I’ve seen WRT Lisak’s work that isn’t to Lisak’s study/Lisak’s writing itself has been to one of Millar’s posts on the subject. I’d say it’s the post he’s most known for, and he seems to agree. I don’t think I’d call it advice, but I think it’s at least as useful as any advice-format information I’ve read on the subject. This isn’t the only case that he has given out useful rape-avoidance info; there’s a memorable bit at the end of Mythcommunication:
Now, I think you’re right that feminists are more likely to see advice/rape avoidance info as victim-blaming and less likely to give it the benefit of the doubt if it comes from people (especially men) without street cred, people who they don’t already know to be feminists. As Eytan Zweig alluded to, there are reasons for that–it’s still not fair, but there are reasons. Given Emily Yoffe’s history, she was worse off in this regard than a total unknown would have been.
Or, actually, Millar also addresses the question of “What advice will you give your daughter going off to college?” in the comments of his most recent post.
KarinaL:
Karinal, thank you very much for your interest in contributing to “Alas.” I’m sorry to say, your further services here will not be required. Thanks for your brief but flashy walk-on role here, and best of luck in all your future blog commenting duties.
RonF:
While I don’t agree with your framing here—morality versus prevention—I think it points to an important distinction, one that often gets lost in these kinds of conversations. The problem with the self-protection rhetoric that is usually directed at women, aside from those that I pointed out in my comment above, is that it all-too-often veers off—intentionally or not—into a rhetoric of morality, one that judges women morally for the degree to which they do or do not take the preventive steps that whomever is speaking imagines they should have taken.
Ahem.
“point me to an instance where people are talking about the precise subjects I want to discuss, giving the appropriate weight( no less!!) to the subjects I think are important. (I get to be imbalanced towards my priorities. You don’t. Disagreement on that front will disqualify you.) Because, in that excruciatingly limited context–and among the very small number of speakers who are “approved” to participate in that context through bona fides, appropriate “tone,” and (as a practical matter) prior agreement with most of the folks in the group–it becomes possible to talk about the subject YOU want to discuss. So it’s not fair to say we won’t talk about it.”
Um, sure! I concede! The many, many, places where that doesn’t happen are probably just insufficiently comprehensive. Or, perhaps, I am confusing the giVER of the information with the giVING of the information, so that calling someone a victim blaming rape apologist is just a polite way to redraw the focus on a properly “comprehensive” discussion.