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I’m quite baffled by the problems some people seems to have wrapping their heads around the affirmative consent standard. This is just how responsible adults have sex.
Geez, it’s almost like interpersonal relations are complex, and hard-and-fast rules don’t work!
There is a hard-and-fast rule: it’s never rape if a feminist says it is. All other rules are flexible, including “she must give a verbal ‘no’.”
I think my earlier comment got eaten, so: Yes, there is a hard and fast rule, and it is that if a feminist says it’s rape, it isn’t. (Probably there is one exception, which is a stranger jumping out of the bushes.) All other rules are flexible or may be altered or discarded as necessary.
I mean look at the conversation; Weintraub says a clear verbal “no” is needed and “then it’s rape”; but when Amp points out that the woman did give a clear verbal “no”, Young jumps in to say that it’s still not rape. Those moving goalposts can’t stop, won’t stop.
Amp, a question:
Does defining something as “rape” for a competent victim require that
“at the time of the encounter the victim believed she was being forced or compelled to have sex against her will?”
That seems to be the real issue here.
The question is really two parts.
FORCE: If non-rape is the exception (i.e. “all unwanted sex is rape absent explicit consent”) then she was obviously raped. If rape is the exception (i.e. “sex is not rape unless there is force, threat of force, incapacitation, or other things which meet the definition.”) then based on the limited testimony we have she does not appear to have been raped even if you accept what she says as the gospel truth.**
Which do you think is more correct?
My view: rape is the exception.
TIMELINESS: Should people be able to reconsider and reconstrue their past actions? IOW, should someone who believed that they were raped be permitted to decide that the rape was actually consensual and that it was OK? Should a non-incapacitated person who did not feel like they were being raped at the time be permitted to reconsider and decide that the encounter was actually rape?
My view: This is not related to reporting. There are a lot of reasons for delayed reporting, the most obvious of which is “emotional trauma.” But if someone did not actually believe that they were being raped at the time of the encounter, I do not think that it is generally appropriate to classify it as rape, even if they change their mind later.
The situation she described–one party says no to an advance, the other party stops, but they try the advance again half an hour later–is one which is relatively common. Especially for two folks who are voluntarily sleeping in the same bed. (If that is defined as rape per se, I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of adults are rape victims, rapists, or both.)
**Of course, not everyone is able to protest. But generally a lack of protestation gets explained: If she said “I was scared to say anything” or “I was too impaired to know what was going on” or “it happened so fast that I didn’t have time to think” or anything similar, that would be a very different analysis. But you don’t usually expect someone to decide and lie there to be raped because they are “just tired and wanted to go to bed,” especially when a previous “no” appears to have worked pretty well.
Blogger The Happy Feminist, a former prosecutor, described a case she prosecuted:
So no, I don’t think that the victim’s belief should be decisive.
I disagree very strongly with your view, because it asks a person to try to stop someone else doing something unwanted to their body or else to be assumed to have been okay with it. The baseline assumption should be you get to decide what happens, and you can allow someone to do something to your body if you want. (Also, I think the “rape is the exception” view carries with it a presumption of the normality of certain very specific kinds of sex, and assuming that is very dangerous. For example–if the victim here had been a previous victim of a sexual assault, and had a PTSD response and froze the second time the guy tried to have sex with her, it would look the same to his perspective–but very different to ours, having the extra information. And I think you can come up with a lot of exceptions like that, which is why explicit consent should be the standard.)
We might be talking at cross-purposes, though, because I think there are some vague things about your hypothetical. (And assume the rest of this comment is about sexual ethics, not necessarily criminal behavior.) When you say “absent explicit consent”, for example, I would include body language, nonverbal communication, and verbal communication that isn’t an explicit “yes” under the umbrella of explicit consent. I do also think that ongoing, established sexual relationships change this calculus to some extent: you know the other person better so it’s easier to interpret what they mean, and also they know you and (as long as you’re not an abusive asshole) they know they can say a clear “no” without consequences, so a less effusive “yes” is more ethically acceptable there.
Also: if you’re wrong in a situation like that, which is a worse outcome? A, that you give up on having sex with someone you want to, and end up missing out on some fun sex you could have had? Or B, that you press forward with sex you’re not sure the other person wants, and end up raping them when you didn’t mean to?
I don’t mean to say I think the guy in the situation here should be convicted of rape. But if I knew a person who did that to a friend of mine, I’d certainly be more cautious around that person myself, and possibly warning other friends (depending on how well I knew the two people in question to judge the veracity of the story I heard).
Amp:
That was poorly phrased on my part. I don’t care about the person’s interpretation of the law.
What I meant to convey was that absent special circumstances, a lack of experiencing an encounter as forced/coerced/etc seems inconsistent with subsequently classifying the encounter as rape. Rape is a serious, felonious, crime. If someone has a sexual encounter that is not experienced as such, it doesn’t seem reasonable to call that a rape later on.*
Now that I have clarified, how ’bout answering the rest? (*and of course, there are exceptions for incapacity, etc. Just roll with it for the sake of the conversation.)
Harlequin:
Yes. I was hoping to avoid responses like Amp’s, in which someone elects to respond to one single line while ignoring most of the larger point. Of course he is welcome to do so, but the generality was intentional. I’m more interested in discussing THIS point than discussing the minutiae, at least right now.
But that is the issue, right? At some point you have to decide whether he is guilty or innocent, of whatever standard you decide to use. Does he get kicked out of school? Put in jail? Lose his job?
Whatever the standard, he has to fall on one side of it. And someone has to enforce it.
It might help you to think about it if you actually try to make a choice.
Dude, with all respect: Comments like the sentence I quoted sound very, very condescending. Please try to avoid that.
Sorry for the lack of a long response, but I’m very busy right now. Unfortunately, I’m likely to remain very busy for a long time, because I’m deep into work on Hereville 3.
Only if I agree that “rape” is a thing which has a legal definition and no other common-use definition. My analogy would be, somebody who claims justifiable homicide under castle doctrine laws is somebody I’d probably still (privately) consider a murderer, even if I agreed that that person shouldn’t have been convicted under the law. And I probably wouldn’t choose to associate with that person further, were I acquainted with them.
If you have better terminology for “somebody I consider ethically but not legally guilty of crime X under this standard, worthy of social but not governmental/administrative sanctions” than rapist or murderer, then I’m happy to use that term instead, because that’s what I mean. Or, in other words, when I said:
that was meant to be, on balance, what I thought should happen in that situation, not some attempt to sound reasonable when I actually thought we should be out for blood. I realize now that probably wasn’t clear from the phrasing I used.
(As far as “actually trying to make a choice”, in addition to the bit where I already told you my choice in a very unclear sort of way, I’ve also served twice on juries in domestic violence cases. I have, indeed, had to make this kind of choice when it actually did impact someone else’s life, if not at the scale that a rape conviction would.)
And in a more general sense, I think it’s valuable to talk about the ways this was ethically not cool, because the standard “this is what explicit consent looks like” is a lot easier to teach people as a guide–and has much better outcomes–than “this is how you toe the line of not actually raping people.” Which seems to be where a lot of rhetoric gets focused when these decisions come up.
So I agree with you that the guy in this situation was not legally culpable. Do you agree with me that he was, at the least, near the black end of the ethically grey area as far as sexual conduct goes?
G&W:
Would you apply the same standard to children who are sexually abused but do not experience as abuse, or realize that it is abuse, until later in their lives? And for the sake of argument here, let’s assume a circumstance in which there is no overt violence of threat of violence, the abuser is quite gentle, the child feels physical pleasure—in other words, a situation that might very well not feel like abuse to the person being abused.
And just to be clear: I am well aware that the abuser in such a situation is both legally and morally guilty independently of what the child feels or thinks; he or she has crossed a legal and moral line that we regard as pretty much absolute. I am asking whether you think it is reasonable for the person who was abused to redefine their interior experience and understand it as abuse, even if they did not originally do so—and may not have done so for years after the abuse took place?
Also, there are of course obvious differences between children and adult women, but adults have experiences all the time that they understand one way until someone gives that experience a more accurate name and changes our understanding of it.
Amp, I can’t speak for gin-and-whiskey, but I interpreted the quoted sentence differently than you did. He wasn’t saying “It might help if you think about it,” but rather, “You might find this easier to think about if you do X,” where X is choosing how you think the perpetrator should be punished.
It certainly wouldn’t be appropriate to apply that standard to children, but I think there some key differences that make the analogy difficult. The wishes, intents, and desires of the child are completely irrelevant when it comes to determining whether sexual activity with a child is licit. The wishes, intents, and desires of the adult persons involved in sexual activities are the _only_ things that are relevant when it comes to determining whether that sexual activity was licit. (Or if not the only things, they are pretty damn important.) As such, it doesn’t matter when a child’s mindset changes, because it never mattered in the first place. If an adult woman or man changes their attitude about an experience, it might still matter how they felt about it while it was happening–because it mattered at the time.
The problem with the story as it’s described (and it’s possible that it’s an imperfect description) is that it really comes across as though the woman in question decided it was preferable to be raped than to say “no” a second time, or to say it more convincingly, or to take one of the possible actions that people take when a horny bedmate is annoying them. And I feel like that does have the potential to reduce the power and impact of the word “rape,” by suggesting that sometimes, rape is preferable to being redundant.
I don’t know that discourse about this is improved by suggesting that all non-rape sex occurs only between people who both really really want it and are really into it. Sometimes when I have sex I’m really into it and I want it so bad ohmygosh. Sometimes I have sex when I’m not particularly interested in it but it seems like I might as well. Sometimes I have sex when I really don’t want to have sex but the other person does and I figure one of us might as well be happy.
Would it be reasonable to say that, if you’re going to have sex with someone, you should make sure that they have the agency and the ability to choose not to have sex? Would that be a reasonable standard? Realistically, not everyone is going to ask for explicit permission, but–also relevant–not everyone is going to want to give explicit permission. People are weird about sex.
Not intended to be condescending, though I agree it sounded that way. Sorry.
It was serious: I think it’s much easier to think about the issue if you take a stand on it, because only that allows you to really try to uphold a certain position and really understand its strengths and weaknesses, IMO. Also it makes it clear that the debate is between “my position” and “your position,” and which one of them is better–rather than “my position” and “the set of all other positions but mine,” which is really only appropriate in extraordinary cases.
It’s why many professors (logic, philosophy, law, and anyone else who likes to use the Socratic method) make students take a stand and then defend their position. I change my position all the time, often as a result of posts here.
Yup.
Personally, I think it’s better to reserve the term “rape” for “behavior which is bad enough to be punished under some sort of formal system,” because that is the only definition which seems to match all of the other common statements about rape such as “rape is a crime of violence” and “rape is a horrible crime” and “the conviction rate for rape is horribly low” and “police don’t do a good enough job enforcing rape” and “it is crazy that the rapist wasn’t expelled from school” and “we don’t do a good enough job punishing rapists” and so on.
The reason is that the decisions are pretty important. If someone is potentially going to experience _______ because of a standard, then the standard becomes amazingly relevant. That is true whether ______ is “have a sexual encounter which is bad enough to ruin your life but isn’t punishable, leaving you with no recourse against your assailant” or “be put in prison, expelled from school, fired, sued, etc.”
I’d like to know: is there any part of you which would read my many posts and actually conclude that I would answer “yes” to that question? It seems sort of ridiculous in light of things in this thread alone, such as
“There are a lot of reasons for delayed reporting, the most obvious of which is “emotional trauma.”
and
“Of course, not everyone is able to protest. But generally a lack of protestation gets explained: If she said “I was scared to say anything” or “I was too impaired to know what was going on” or “it happened so fast that I didn’t have time to think” or anything similar, that would be a very different analysis.”
and
“and of course, there are exceptions for incapacity, etc. Just roll with it for the sake of the conversation.”
Not to mention all of my other posts on rape over my time on Alas, including my various other posts when the topic of sexh abuse in the church, or Sandusky, has come up?
This is important to me, because if you seriously think that the answer could be “yes” then something is either very wrong with my posts or your reading skills and I would like to figure out what that is. And if you don’t think that the answer is “yes” then that seems to be an incredibly offensive question which deserves a response that’s a hell of a lot less polite than this one.
We have had several threads on the differences between college or university discipline and legal prosecution. It seems like we focus a lot on the differences regarding:
-Burden of proof
-Due process rights of the accused
This also seems to be the focus of the Department of Education in its guidance to colleges. However, what isn’t discussed as often is another tool that IMO is far more important – a college or university can punish behavior that is not criminal under state law.
For example, here is a link to the sexual assault policy on the University of Virginia’s website
And here is a key quote within that policy:
My intuition tells me that colleges are starting to swing a little too far in terms of lowering the burden of proof and removing due process. I think the key component to addressing rape culture on campus is to explicitly state (as UVA does) that some conduct that is legal is still unacceptable on campus.
Having read through the linked page and the Virginia statues (which are linked to by the UVA page), I think that if this case had happened in Virginia (it didn’t) it would probably be punishable by the college even though it was not a sexual assault under the laws of Virginia.
And that’s okay. Organizations are allowed to hold members to higher standards than the law does so long as those policies aren’t arbitrarily enforced.
Phil:
Then it’s a good thing no one is asserting that. :) (Actually, Pervocracy had a good critique of “enthusiastic consent” a couple of years ago that’s worth reading, if you haven’t–very in line with what you’re saying here.)
Looking at this situation: the guy had already been told a clear no, in the exact same situation, a short time before. Which, IMO, means he should be held to a higher (ethical!) standard for any consent that ensued in this encounter. Also, if we take the woman’s account at face value, it wasn’t just that she was uninterested to begin with, she never got interested. At some point, if your partner seemed completely bored and wasn’t getting more interested (and you didn’t have some kind of preexisting understanding about what those body language cues mean), wouldn’t you do some kind of check-in to make sure everything was okay? If we compare his behavior not to what a (legally-defined) rapist would have done, but what a good partner would have done, I think it’s clear there were a number of failures.
I just really have a problem with the idea that an extremely explicit “no” is required to stop sex from happening, but an extremely implicit “yes” is fine to start sex happening. If you can read body language and situational cues, you can read body language and situational cues. The only reason those two cases would be different is if you can only read body language that agrees with what you want, in which case I suggest refraining from making decisions based on body language. (Again: this isn’t a hard bright line; sure, have a go at starting something, but if the other person doesn’t respond in the way you expect, either find out why or stop.)
No worries. (I’m an academic, I’ve had much worse–with intent–in my time!)
Fair enough, although I think some of those statements (not all!) apply, if to a lesser extent, to the ethical sort of violations as well as the legal ones. Still, I think this was more a terminology disagreement than a substantial one about the underlying principles.
Once a crime (or not-quite-a-crime) has happened, I agree with you. But most people spend most of their lives pretty far away from those lines, and discussing the standards of good behavior can help draw the line of where the bad behavior is. To go back to your first comment, where you’re asking if rape is the exception: that’s an edge case where there’s already been a failure of some sort. But discussing how far it’s a good idea–not merely acceptable–to go in proposing sex when the other person seems uninterested is a) more relevant to most people’s lives and b) important in determining where we’d want to draw the line between “honest attempt” and “coercion.”
Some of this is an effect of these discussions mostly happening after a crime/ethical failure has occurred, of course.
So your proposed standard is, the subjective feelings of the alleged victim are not relevant to whether an act was rape, unless the act was rape, in which case they are not only relevant, but dispositive. Huh?
I also don’t understand why you’re being pissy at Richard in @15. He pointed out that among its other flaws, your “even if it’s rape, it’s not rape unless it felt rapey” standard would exclude sexual abuse of children who do not believe they were raped.
Now, you can certainly pull the rhetorical tactic where you pretend that Richard was attacking you personally and calling you pro-child-abuse.
A more honest response would be to admit that he was pointing out your argument is flawed and leads to a result everyone, including you, finds abhorrent, and address that.
Phil @12, here’s another interpretation of that story: by reacting to “no” with a delay before taking off her underwear, the roommate made it manifestly clear that he was not going to accept a “no”, and that he was not so much interested in a mutual session of lovemaking as he was on sticking his penis in her. So another “no” would have resulted in, what? A few more minutes of dozing off before he climbed on top of her? Physical force if she tried to back up “no” by getting out of bed or pushing him away?
I find it interesting that the actual description of what happened keeps getting wrapped up in euphemism. Young describes the roommate’s taking off her underwear as ‘making a move’. You describe his ignoring her no as merely making another refusal ‘redundant’.
Unsurprisingly, it turns out there’s more to the story than George Will or Philadelphia Magazine (Will’s source) printed:
Is there a typo in your reply? It seems like you left out a “not” somewhere.
My point is that from a process perspective, the subjective feelings of the victim
can limit but not increase liability. If I do something which I don’t want to do–but in a situation where I don’t actually feel forced to do it at the time–then it should not classify as a forced experience. Giving something grudgingly is not theft; working without wanting to is not slavery; having sex without wanting to is not rape; etc.
I am annoyed because I specifically said that there were exceptions and that this was a general discussion. It’s difficult to imagine that things like child sex wouldn’t fall into the exceptions, right?
OK, please change:
“and of course, there are exceptions for incapacity, etc. Just roll with it for the sake of the conversation.”
to
“and of course, there are exceptions for incapacity, etc. Just roll with it for the sake of the conversation. If you think that I am advocating a position which everyone would obviously find abhorrent–including but not limited to rape of children–then you should assume that it is one of the aforementioned exceptions.”
I didn’t really think that addition was needed but there you go.
She never says “I said no.” She says “I basically said, I don’t want to have sex with you.” What is that weasel word “basically doing in there? What did she really say? We don’t know.
What we do know is:
A man she had been sleeping with was in her room with her consent.
He took his clothes off and got into her bed with her consent.
She took her clothes off, put on her pajamas, and got in bed with him.
She said something about not having sex, we don’t know exactly what.
He took her pajamas off and had intercourse with her.
Did he use force? No.
Did she get out of bed? No.
Did she say, Stop! No.
Did she push him away? No.
Did she say, get out of my bed and go back to your own fucking room? No.
Was she afraid of him or intimidated by him? No.
Why didn’t she tell him to stop? Because, it was too much of a hassle – she preferred having sex with him and falling asleep next to him in her own bed to telling him to go back to his own room.
And this is HER side of the story. Imagine his side. What words would he say were exchanged? How did she respond when he took her panties off? Did they cuddle? Did they kiss? Was she wet? You really want to have to ask these questions?
I have a really hard time seeing this as nonconsensual sex in the first place. If you’ve been sleeping with someone and you let them in your bed and you get in with them in your night clothes, it looks a hell of a lot like implied consent right there, and “I’m tired, I don’t want to have sex tonight” is not the same as “No! Stop that! Get out of my bed!”
Oh, and this is pretty ambiguous, too:
“They’d now decided — mutually, she thought — just to be friends.”
Which sounds an awful lot like, “I had this idea in my head that maybe I didn’t communicate to my partner very clearly.”
Late to the party. As someone “out of circulation” from a 1998-2014 marriage, I gotta say it sounds like relationships have gotten out of hand in 16 years.
Maybe being at friend zone level 9000 isn’t so bad after all.
But seriously Barr, you JUST had an example of why I don’t debate obvious nitwits. I mock them for being idiots and move on. Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig.
http://beammeupscottyblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/08/tumblr_md1gnuf8ye1rgw7tko1_500.png if anyone wants to know my secret identity…
#20 – when you say, “the roommate made it manifestly clear that he was not going to accept a no,” you are making shit up.
We have no idea what he would have done if she had uttered the word “no.” She might have uttered it in a whisper. She might have shouted, “Hey! No! Stop it, shithead! get out of my fucking bed and go back to your own room!”
She might have pulled up her pajamas and pushed him away. She might have jumped out of bed.
But she didn’t do any of those things.
So we don’t know whether he would have accepted a “no.” And we shouldn’t pretend that we know.
Any guesses on Anon’s gender?
G&W:
Of course not, if we are talking about whether or not the person who perpetrated the rape ought to be arrested, prosecuted, etc. for that crime. Nor do I imagine that you would have a problem agreeing that a nine or sixteen-year-old child who belatedly understands that a sexual experience he or she has had at the hands of an adult was indeed rape should in fact start calling that experience rape, despite the fact that the child’s initial understanding of the experience was precisely the opposite.
The problem for me is that, once you extend that level of flexibility to the sixteen-year-old boy who was seduced by his teacher—or to the sixteen-year-old girl in the same position—I don’t understand why you won’t extend it to adults, not in terms of whether or not the perpetrator should be arrested and prosecuted, but in terms of how those adults understand their own interior experience.
I know I have said this before in previous conversations about this: Your stance towards the use of the word rape is an inherently conservative one in that you want to limit its meaning to an objective, legal definition so that it cannot be made messy with people’s entirely subjective understanding of their own experiences. I recognize, in other words, that we are, to some degree, arguing semantics here, not a difference in how we view the perpetrator’s behavior morally or ethically.
The problem is that semantics is messy. We already have situations in which the objective definition of rape, in cases of statutory rape in particular, requires us legally to call rape sexual encounters that are clearly consensual between people who are separated by only one or two years. In other words, the legal definition and the interior experience do not match up. It makes sense, then, that there are also going to be situations in which the interior experience that a person defines as rape is not going to match up with the requirements of the legal definition.
If we tell this person that he or she cannot or should not use the word rape to describe what was done to them, we are in essence silencing them, telling them that they do not have the right to name their own experience. Despite your good intentions—and I mean that with no irony; I know that what you are interested in making the prosecution of rapists more efficient, successful, and so on—nonetheless, despite your good intentions, the result is a big step backwards to a time when a whole host of forms of sexual violation were simply not understood as such because we had no word to name them. Or, to be more accurate, because the word we had was very carefully proscribed from applying to them.
#27 – Anon is a man. If you disagree with what I wrote, then say why. My gender doesn’t make what I said any more or less right.
gin-and-whiskey:
Wow.
My wife and I have been married for over twenty years, in a consistently pretty happy marriage. It has not been without disputes, certainly, but we communicate about them and learn and work through them. Throughout that marriage, we have had an active and enjoyable sex life. It has had some moderate downs, but we have, y’know, communicated our way through them and found workable solutions to problems which cropped up. We have found that we are very compatible, and built consciously on that.
If there is any situation, anywhere, where one person could make a strong argument that it’s okay to have sex where the other person has not explicitly said, “No”, that would be it.
And yet, when I imagine a situation where I make an overture, verbal or non-verbal, and get no encouraging response from her, and then continue, it seems utterly bizarre to me. While technically I can imagine doing it — I can put together a mental image of that sequence of events — in another sense I cannot imagine it. It doesn’t accord with reality. Nothing good could come of it, and it would destroy something unutterably precious. It would be like smashing a precious chandelier, a unique work of art, for the pleasure of hearing the glass shards crash down.
Once upon a time, I was a very horny seventeen-year-old. I had a girlfriend, age sixteen, whom I was visiting. We had the house to ourselves, and we decided that the best way to spend our time just then was to go to her bedroom and make out on her bed. We had no intention of having sex; we were just kissing and stroking and exploring, undies on, no touching of genitals even with our hands. We were making out.
And then, she went still. She stopped kissing, stopped petting, stopped stroking. So I stopped, and asked if everything was okay. She didn’t answer. I took her hand and called her by name. She didn’t respond. Her eyes were open, she breathed, she had a pulse, her pupils were equal and dilated, she was apparently awake and healthy in every way except that she did not respond. I asked her if I should stay. No response. I asked her if I should go. No response. Finally, I said, “Okay, I don’t know what to do. I don’t want to intrude if that’s the wrong thing, but I don’t want to leave you alone. So I’m going to step out of the room, but I’ll be where I can hear you. I’ll be on the couch in the living room, and I’ll come right back if I hear you call. Okay?”
No response.
So I did that. I went out to the couch. I sat and wondered how long I should wait, and thought about the best way to explain the situation to her parents when we got home.
After about twenty minutes, she came out and sat next to me and hugged me. I asked her if she was okay. She said she was. I asked her if she wanted to talk about it. She shook her head. I asked her what she wanted to do. She wanted to cuddle. So we cuddled. (Later, I found out why she went still like that, but that’s not relevant to the topic at hand.)
What I did not do, when she went catatonic: say, “Jackpot!” and perform a sex act upon her uncooperative body. Sitting by myself on the couch in the living room, I did not take care of my own sexual urges, because in that moment, I had none; the mood had been killed when my girlfriend stopped responding. I was worried about her.
(Also, I’m not trying to represent myself as a saint. Item: a year or so later, I made a move with a different person which was unwelcome and inappropriate. I shouldn’t have done it. It bothers me to this day. I wish I hadn’t done it. The best I can say for myself in that situation is that when she moved away from me and left the room, I understood it as a firm refusal, gave the matter some thought, concluded that I had acted like an ass, and never approached her again. But the fact that I did not double down on my act does not redeem the act.)
My experience is limited, obviously, but I’ve had more than several sexual partners in my life. In my personal experience, people who want sex generally say so (or communicate it nonverbally by helping the process along), and they keep doing it as you go along. They kiss you back. They say encouraging things, and/or make encouraging noises. They laugh. They play. They negotiate boundaries by telling you what they do and don’t like, what does and doesn’t feel good. And when they don’t thus indicate this ongoing desire, you stop. You don’t continue. Why would anyone do that?
Unless, of course, they fall into a certain category of people, that category of people for whom their own momentary sexual satisfaction or need for power is worth damaging another person. I’ve investigated reports of such behavior, and I get that people like that exist, and I know how their minds work. We even have a term for a person like that: “rapist”.
So, in the instant case, we have a woman who said, “basically”, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.”, and then a few minutes later, when he tried again, “just kind of laid there and didn’t do anything”. There is no consent in this situation, and there is one explicit rejection.
But there was not a sustained, repeated rejection.
And in your view, therefore, when this man put his penis inside this woman’s vagina without her consent, indeed, without her help, but also without her repeated rejection, it was not rape, but rather, “sex”?
Wow.
Grace
Grace Annam – you’re not talking to me, but I want to say that I reject what gin-and-whiskey said as well.
In the story you tell, the woman apparently had some sort of medical issue. It was obvious to you that she could not give consent. She was, in your words, catatonic.
The Swarthmore student was not catatonic. She did a series of things that, among couples who are lovers, are signs of consent. She let him undress and get into her bed. She herself undressed and put on pajamas and got into bed. She let him undress her without objection and enter her without objection. She didn’t put her hands on his to push them away. She didn’t say anything.
Not that she could not legally object or was too incapacitated for health reasons to object or was too intimidated to object or was too drunk or high to object. She was just too damned bored to object. So do we have a rule that if, after giving signs of implied consent, a woman is too bored to say no, she’s been raped?
May I say that I find the whole thing profoundly, profoundly weird?
Harlequin:
Yes. Yes.
You know, the stakes are very high. A mistake can be catastrophic, which is of course why there’s so much hand-wringing about ambiguous situations. Why on earth would you not be sure that your prospective partner actually wants you? Why is the standard for initiation or continuation of a sex act not “clear and convincing evidence”, or at a minimum, “probable cause”? It seems to me that gin-and-whiskey is arguing for something less than “articulable suspicion”, which as far as I know doesn’t even exist in legal circles. What would that be? “Complete absence of clear evidence to the contrary”?
And that’s an okay standard on which to go ahead and stick something in someone’s most private orifices, or stick some part of their private bodies in an orifice of yours?
Anon:
Right. She said something negative about what he was starting to do. Which, in the case of something as high-stakes as sex can be, reinforced what already should have been the standard: don’t perform a sex act on another person unless they communicate unambiguously that it’s okay. Even a “maybe” should elicit a response of, “Okay, I’ll hold off until that’s a yes.”
Arousal is not consent.
So, someone says, “I don’t want to have sex tonight,” and it’s okay for the response to be initiating a sex act?
You say you’re male. Assuming that you are solidly straight, if a man showed you his erection and you said, “I don’t want you to touch me with that,” it would be okay for his response to be to touch you with it and find out if you were in earnest?
Grace
Anon:
No. That’s not what she’s quoted as saying. Cutting and pasting the text from the original post, she reports saying, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.”
Did you even see the “No” which you edited out in your paraphrase, which you put between quotation marks?
Would you hear it if someone said it to you?
Anon:
But by your standard, she had ALREADY given consent, so I was good to go, right? We had been going at it quite enthusiastically. It wasn’t the first time we’d made out. We’d known each other for months, been going steady. We’d rolled around on her bed before. Under the standard you advocate, I had enough of a track record to have implied consent. I could have kept going, kept kissing, sticking my tongue in her mouth, feeling her breasts. And that’s assuming that, in my enthusiasm, I even noticed she was catatonic.
Which is why it is the obligation of each partner to pay attention to what the other partner says, and when there are signs that consent is not complete, stop and communicate and verify before continuing.
This is not rocket science. Any teenager or adult of ordinary mental capacity ought to be able to manage this. What depresses me is that I, and other people who don’t want to risk hurting their partners, seem to spend a lot of time explaining it.
Grace
Anon:
No, we have a rule that there’s no such thing as “implied consent” when we’re talking about a situation where the person in question can effing COMMUNICATE with you. “Implied consent” is a legal standard which comes into play when someone is INCAPACITATED, as in a medical emergency, where it’s okay to start a saline drip on someone so dehydrated that they’re not alert and oriented. “Implied consent” is why you can bandage someone who has lost enough blood to lose consciousness. Why would we be applying this standard to a situation where you can effing ASK, and LISTEN TO THE ANSWER?
WHY IS THIS HARD?
Oh, absolutely. It’s freakin’ bizarre. Possibly not for the reasons you think.
Grace
Actually, we do, because he understood her to be saying “no”. From the original post:
“‘I basically said, “No, I don’t want to have sex with you.” And then he said, “OK, that’s fine” and stopped. . . .”
I’m not sure why you think it is “making shit up” to interpret her statements (twice) that she said no when the guy in her bed also took it as a no. Cathy Young believed she said “no” the first time, too – do you believe Young is making shit up?
As to all the things she coulda/shoulda/woulda, you know, the guy fell asleep in her bed. Curious that nobody is asking what he should have done. You fall asleep in girl’s bed, wake up horny, try to take girl’s clothes off, she says she doesn’t want to have sex, so clearly the correct move is…wait a few minutes and then take her panties off? If we’re going to play armchair quarterback, why not ask about all the things he could have done “correctly”, like, oh, ask if she’d changed her mind?
(Especially not following the excuse-making that maybe he thought they were still dating, and if she didn’t clearly it was all her fault.)
g&w:
If you do not feel forced to do it, then you are consenting, yes? That is different from your argument that rape – which, by definition, lacks consent – doesn’t count if the victim nonetheless doesn’t ‘experience’ it as rape.
And what is the basis of those exceptions?
You’ve presented a rule: rape ‘doesn’t count’ if the victim nonetheless does not ‘experience’ it as rape. If you want to say that certain things fall outside of that definition, you have to explain why they do. Otherwise, all you’re saying is that the rule applies except when you don’t want it to, and you’re smart enough to know that’s not a rule, that’s just bullshit.
Oh gods, yes. I can’t even muster the non-despair to begin to explain. Explain the obliviousness of not understanding the power dynamic and the intimidation/fear that goes with situations like those described in the magazine article. Explain that reasonable, decent people make sure there is explicit (if not enthusiastic) consent before sexual contact. While I sometimes feel good about the decency and caring of people in general, I often wonder how we’ve managed to be as marginally decent as we are overall. This conversation evokes that wonder.
I find myself reduced to making noises that are similar to, “Gah!!!!”. So thanks to everybody who has the patience to explain explicit consent and why it’s both reasonable and desirable.
In the situation that there is an ongoing relationship between two adults, should the woman also assist in resolving ambiguities?
I get the feeling, maybe not in this case specifically, that there is an ever more detailed search for some way of saying that the woman didn’t really consent and so the man is the rapist. Even though women themselves don’t actually feel that way in real life.
Cathy Young also made a point that she is a rapist (or a sexual-assaulter) under Ampersand’s view of things.
There is also the idea that if you take all this theoretical spinning and enforce it, a woman who touches her husband’s penis in his sleep would be guilty of sexual assault and should be locked up. I’m not sure what the point is of trying to make something rapey that is not really your business (like always getting “enthusiastic consent” – some women want to have sex without having to get enthusiastic – why is that the business of anyone here?).
1. Obviously, the idea that “you shouldn’t have sex with someone unless you’re sure they want to be having sex with you” applies to women and men both, as well as to folks who don’t identify as either.
2. “I get the feeling” is your way of saying “it’s so much easier to attack a made-up strawfeminist than to respond intelligently to things the people here have actually said.” Why not accuse us of being the secret masterminds behind murdering JFK, while you’re making up conspiracy theories?
3. Except then Cathy immediately agreed that she wasn’t a rapist under my view. (Ampersand: “Of course just making a move a few minutes later isn’t in and of itself rape. Are you honestly saying you had sex with someone who said “no” and then gave NO indication at all, verbal or physical, of wanting sex?” Cathy: “No, of course not. But that gets us into the fine print of what counts as physical indication of wanting sex.”)
4) Obviously, no one is saying that an accidental touch while people are sleeping is rape. But surely, unless you’re so anti-male that you consider men unrapable, it is possible for a wife to rape a sleeping husband. If, for example, they had previously discussed “I want to wake you up with sex” and the husband had said “no, absolutely not,” and she does anyway, and he makes no statement or act to let her know he’s changed her mind, then by my standards that’s a form of rape.
5. “(like always getting “enthusiastic consent” – some women want to have sex without having to get enthusiastic – why is that the business of anyone here?).”
Why do you say “some women“? Men’s consent matters too.
The rule I’m arguing for is, in a not-carefully-phrased nutshell, “only have sex with people who you’re certain want the sex.” Enthusiastic consent is ONE way to be certain, but I never said it’s the ONLY possible way.
One way to be pretty sure they don’t want sex: they tell you straight out that they don’t want sex, and then try to go to sleep.
I think everyone is arguing about very fine distinctions between agreement, approval, permission, concurrance, acquiesence, accedence, and so on, but because you’re all doing this using only the word “consent” with different implications, it’s all very difficult to follow.
There’s the old joke about the fellow with a leaky roof who was so lazy he wouldn’t roll over to keep the rain from falling on his face.
But this tops that one. This is a woman who is so lazy she wouldn’t roll over to avoid being raped.
Anon, did you read Amp’s comment @21, or the link he posted with it? In case you didn’t, I’ll repeat:
You accused Mythago of making shit up for interpolating between the facts but in agreement with them. What are you doing when you continue to assert something that is blatantly untrue?
Also, you said above,
And then here you said,
Again, we have a double standard with respect to body language and situational cues. According to you, somebody in their own bed in their pajamas, which they got into after you fell asleep on their bed late at night = such an obvious yes you can ignore an explicit no. But somebody apparently acquiescing to your desire not to have sex, then a short time later suddenly and forcibly removing your clothing plus some other unspecified sort of violence = not in any way a threat or a sign of lack of interest in your consent, so just tell them no–or just roll over!–and they’ll totally stop.
Franz: for me, at least, all of those things fall under the umbrella of “consent” except “acquiescence” and “accedence”–those are a bit more situational (that is, “okay, why not” to a partner has a different meaning than an “okay” you think would prevent an attacker from using further physical force before raping you anyway). The Pervocracy post on consent I linked above lists a number of different kinds of consent and how they might come into play, if you’re interested in this topic.
The default state is no consent. Someone can give you permission to have sex with them even though they’re not really in the mood themselves, because they like you and don’t mind; they can agree with your great plan to have sex (or even your terrible plan–no judgment from me!); they can concur (perhaps loudly and at length) with your desire to have sex. All of those are ways of turning that default “no” into a “yes”; any of them are sufficient to turn a “no” into a “yes.” So’s a flat-out stated “yes.” But absent those things, there’s no consent, and you need to get some before you keep going. Body language is fine, if you can tell from that–if not, ask. Etc. The reason we’re discussing lots of ways to consent to sex is that there are lots of ways to consent to sex.
OK, he raped her. I’m convinced.
The punishment for rape in some jurisdictions is 20 – life.
Let’s get on with it. Get this guy what he deserves. The question is resolved, now the problem is getting society to recognize it and punish it accordingly.
In fact, we’ve got to root out the rest of it. Ampersand, I’m not talking about a woman who accidently touches her husband’s penis in his sleep, I’m talking about a woman who willingly does it out of sexual curiousity / arousal. Whether she goes back to sleep or not, she has committed sexual assault and should be punished accordingly. One thing is absolutely clear: He cannot consent to sexual contact in his sleep.
Rape isn’t just for the Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, it is all around. Punish this guy and punish the wife in my example. Maybe we can make a dent in the rape culture.
No one explicitly, as yet. But if you want I’ll go for it. Plenty of crimes include recklessness as an element, including other offenses against people. If I hit a golfball in a park not really caring whether other people may be hit and strike someone, it is still criminal even if I’m not aiming and don’t intend for anyone to be hit.
With regard to the wife sexually assaulting her husband in his sleep, I would like to add that some may say the husband himself may say that he was not sexually assaulted and does not want his wife to go to prison for several years.
That is the very same argument that people made against the sexual assault studies of Mary Koss and others. Many of the interviewees said that they had experienced things in the questions, but didn’t consider it to be sexual assault.
The husband has to be educated that he has been sexually assaulted and his wife should be punished. Because he was clearly unable to give consent, and his wife clearly engaged in sexual actions while he was unable to give consent.
In the state of Pennsylvania sexual assault (which is what this case is) is a class 2 felony and, as far as I can figure out, carries a sentence of not more than 10 years in prison.
I realize that your assertion that rape carries sentences of 20-life is the least appalling part of your bullshit, but it stuck in my craw for some reason.
yrs–
–Ben
Oh for fuck’s sake.
You really cannot distinguish between a single touch (that might very well have been consented to generally) and sex that received a specific verbal “no”?
KellyK:
Is all sex that receives a specific verbal “no” at some point in time sexual assault? I really doubt it – as Cathy Young put it (and as many people here – men and women – can imagine) – that makes her a rapist, because sometimes people playfully continue and sex results. With consent, as confirmed by the initial nay-sayer.
On the other hand, sexually assaulting someone – and I’m talking about a woman specifically grabbing her husband’s penis at the very least, maybe quite a bit more, is very clearly done without consent.
Regarding “consented to generally”: Do you really want to go there? A man has regular sex with a woman, he cannot rape her? A prostitute is open for business to all comers, so to speak, and she cannot be raped? How close in time to the situation does this “general consent” have to be? What part of “consent can’t be given when you are unconscious” don’t you understand? And why are you adding on conditions that seem to mitigate the act (“general consent” and “a single touch”) that are not in the hypothetical at all?
I can distinguish between a “no” that turns into consent via subsequent conduct or acquiescence … and … sexual actions that are performed on an unconscious person who is unable to give consent.
I think this is hilarious – now I’m “awaiting moderation” in a content-related answer to Richard Jeffrey Newman on a different thread. I guess I’m not saying the right stuff.
[Wordpress moderates some comments automatically. When that happens, the comments won’t appear until a moderator sees them and approves them. Since we don’t sit by our monitors 24/7, sometimes that doesn’t happen for a while.
Also, sometimes Akismet mistakes a legit comment for spam, in which case the comment might never appear unless someone tells a moderator that a comment got lost, so we know to go looking for it in the spam trap.
If you find this unacceptable, then you should consider going to another blog. –Amp]
She did a series of things that, among couples who are lovers, are signs of consent. She let him undress and get into her bed. She herself undressed and put on pajamas and got into bed.
So apparently, “letting someone fall asleep on your bed and not waking them up and kicking them out” and “putting on pajamas so you can go to sleep on your bed also” equals consent to sex. Good to know.
That’s not what I said. Obviously, if someone says no you can ask again. But there was no asking. There was no “On second thought, sure, go ahead.”
Again, none of these are things that I said. But on the off chance that I was unclear, let me explain what I mean by “might have been consented to generally.”
A couple can have a conversation where she says, “I’d like to wake you up with sex.” He’s allowed to respond any way he likes, from “Wow, no, don’t ever touch my penis while I’m sleeping,” to “That sounds like fun—but not on a work night” to “Yes, you should totally do that.”
That’s what I mean by general consent—that they’ve talked about the specific thing, and he’s expressed that it sounds good to him. Note that this is miles and miles away from “if she’s had sex with him or others, she never gets to say no again.”
KellyK,
All you are doing is imagining scenarios that sound plausible. You are just making stuff up. If a man falls asleep and a woman grabs his penis, there can be all kinds of scenarios. I’m wondering why you are trying so hard to spin the situation so that the unconscious person kind of consented.
What do you think of a general situation, where there was no discussion of anything, a man falls asleep and a woman grabs his penis? Not just a single touch, she grabs it out of her lust.
Bejeezus. I feel like I am in a car that is constantly veering hard to the left no matter what steering corrections are made. What part of “unconscious people can’t consent” don’t you understand?
And, by the way, there is the notion that people can’t consent in advance to serious crimes. Dr. Kevorkian in Michigan was convicted based on that notion. And sexual assault is very clearly a crime, and maybe men with very little self-esteem need to be educated on this issue. And prosecute.
Acquiescence isn’t consent, though.
There are two parts to consent that I think get conflated. There’s a mental state of wanting (or at least being willing to have) sex. There’s also the communication of that mental state. If you attempt to have sex with someone who hasn’t communicated consent to you, you’re *risking* sexually assaulting them. If it turns out that they’re willing, then it isn’t sexual assault. If they aren’t, then it is. (With the caveat that touching that has been okay in the relationship should be renegotiated if it stops being okay.)
The reason you don’t sexually touch an unconscious person is not that it’s *always and automatically* sexual assault. It’s that you don’t know (unless you’ve already had this conversation with them) how they feel about being touched while unconscious or woken up with sexual touching, and because they’re not aware of what you’re doing, they don’t have the immediate opportunity to say “Hey, stop that!” if you do something they don’t want you to do.
Is a woman who touches her husband’s penis while he’s sleeping, assuming they haven’t discussed this, taking a risk that she might be sexually assaulting him? Yes. Is it automatically sexual assault before we even consider how he feels about the topic? No. He can’t communicate consent while sleeping, but he’s allowed to be okay with sexual contact while he’s sleeping.
It sounds like this is just a game to you, KellyK.
Well, she may be sexually assaulting him, she doesn’t know in advance (giggle), but he will probably be okay with it (snicker).
If she is sexually assaulting him, and that means anything, then she should be prosecuted and given a hefty punishment. Just because police would likely care less about such a report doesn’t give you the right to be so flippant (*giggle*) about it.
Things change.
Police used to be that way about domestic violence caused by women. They aren’t anymore to an increasing degree. Some jurisdictions now have nearly equal arrests of women for domestic violence. Let’s educate men now about their options regarding having to put up with sexual assault. Maybe your giggles about your female entitlement on this issue will start to wane.
Edited to add / now I’ll spin things with a real-world scenario: Maybe he wants to divorce her, but he doesn’t have the money to pay for the house AND an apartment for him. So he just stays, hoping she will just leave him alone. If she tries to wake him up with sex, and he only has hatred for her, that really is an unwanted sexual assault. No matter how you spin it. I realize that no one would even listen to him, so he would never report it, but as I said above with respect to domestic violence – that can change.
And, by the way, mark this one down as a female entitlement right now.
Wahr, please read (or reread) the comments policy, in particular the part that says “Debates are conducted in a manner that shows respect even for folks we disagree with.”
KellyK didn’t say anything you just attributed to her – the giggles, etc. You just made that up. That’s lying, and a personal attack on another comment writer here. Please take responsibility for your own words, and do better from now on.
Here’s a real-world scenario: He has told her “don’t try to wake me with sex. I hate that.” Then she tries to wake him up with sex.
I’d say that’s sexual assault. I doubt anyone here would disagree. You seem convinced that no one here would believe a woman can sexually assault a man, but that’s really not true.
OK, I welcome the criticism and think that you’re right. I shouldn’t adopt an insulting or mocking tone and should stick with the facts.
I don’t mean that as sarcasm, although it may come across that way. I want to improve my debate style, and being insulting and mocking is not the way to go no matter what.
“You seem convinced that no one here would believe a woman can sexually assault a man, but that’s really not true.”
—–
Well, up to now I have the feeling that there is hard-core spinning going on. I provide a straightforward scenario, and for quite a while there were only interpretations trying to steer away from a woman sexually assaulting a man.
You started with inadvertent touching in sleep. No that is not what was meant. Ben called my posts “bullshit”. KellyK was providing scenarios where maybe it wasn’t so bad after all. Not much on the other side until now.
Thanks! I really appreciate you taking moderation well. :-)
Making stuff up is what you’re doing too, unless there’s an actual scenario that happened that you’re referring to. Your sarcastic “throw all the rapists in jail” is based on an extreme example, so that you can convince us that if *that’s* not sexual assault, then neither is having sex with someone who’s already told you “no” and hasn’t given any indication of having changed her mind.
I’m not “trying to spin the situation so that the unconscious person kind of consented.” I’m pointing out that there are some situations where he could have, and some where he would not have.
I think that it’s up to him whether he’s okay with that or not. He’s allowed to decide that it’s fine, and tell her explicitly that she’s free to touch his penis any time she wants. He’s allowed to decide that in this situation it’s fine, but that he’d prefer that she not do so in the future (and if he tells her that, and she does anyway, then of course that’s sexual assault). He’s also allowed to not be okay with it, and to consider it sexual assault. If he considers it sexual assault, he’s absolutely entitled to report her to the police for it, even if they’ve had sex previously.
I’d also note that I’m assuming “husband and wife” since you stated that initially. A man falls asleep and a random woman grabs his penis? He’s still allowed to decide he’s okay with it, but that’s *extremely* likely to be sexual assault.
Does your willingness to be accept Amp’s criticism mean you’re willing to engage with what I actually said seriously, without trying to distort it so that I’m the evil entitled female?
I’m willing to continue the conversation if that’s the case, but I’m getting *thoroughly* tired of being mocked and deliberately distorted.
Yes. That’s blatantly and obviously sexual assault.
Actually, your original scenario was not at all straightforward. What you wrote was”There is also the idea that if you take all this theoretical spinning and enforce it, a woman who touches her husband’s penis in his sleep would be guilty of sexual assault and should be locked up.” That doesn’t tell us nearly enough about the context to judge one way or the other – we don’t know from what you wrote if the touch was accidental or on purpose, we don’t know if the husband has consented to wake-up sex or not, we don’t know how he responds to the touch, etc.
Basically, from what you first wrote, we don’t know if what you described is consensual or not. And that’s important, because whether or not a sexual touch is an assault depends on consent. To try and illustrate that, me and others “spun scenarios” in which the situation you described might or might not be sexual assault.
That’s not true. From my very first response to your scenario, which was also the first response anyone gave:
From the start, I and others have been in effect saying “that can definitely be sexual assault or rape, or not, depending on if there’s consent.” And you’ve been responding by implying, falsely, that we’re saying men can’t be raped or sexually assaulted. But no one here is saying that, and no one here has implied that.
“Your sarcastic “throw all the rapists in jail” is based on an extreme example, so that you can convince us that if *that’s* not sexual assault, then neither is having sex with someone who’s already told you “no” and hasn’t given any indication of having changed her mind. ”
———————–
No, this really goes to the core of an issue here. Why SHOULDN’T we give rapists jail time? Isn’t that what is wanted?
What you are inherently saying I think – and please correct me if I am wrong, I really will listen – is that there are different stages of rape. Kind of a “rape lite” or “sexual assault lite”, and we don’t really necessarily have to throw those kinds of people in jail.
I saw a Republican congressperson who thought the very same way, he mentioned something about women who are REALLY raped, get absolutely excoriated by feminists. I think he meant pretty much the same thing – he was thinking there is a difference between Richard Ramirez climbing in a bedroom window with a knife … and a woman having regular sexual relations with a man and there is ambiguity about a sexual encounter, but not something that traumatizes her or that she could care less about. Or that she may even remember in two days. She knows that if she REALLY didn’t want to, he would have stopped, otherwise she wouldn’t continue a relationship with him.
If sexual assault is simply sexual assault, period, then it should be punished. Period. Otherwise an ever more detailed search about how a woman may not have consented, even if she could care less, just becomes stupid.
Also, what part of “It’s up to him” and “that’s his call” that I’ve stated *repeatedly* gives you the impression that I would be flippant if it actually were sexual assault?
The thing about real stories, as distinct from hypotheticals, is you can actually ask the person involved if they consented. That makes it really hard to answer a simple “yes” or “no” on a hypothetical where I can’t ask the person whose opinion actually matters—the guy whose penis has been touched. Because it’s up to him. (Really, it’s up to him, because it’s his body. Have I made that perfectly clear?)
Nope. Not at all what I’m saying. Not even remotely close.
What do you mean by “an ever more detailed search about how a woman may not have consented…becomes stupid”? Doing something sexually to someone else *without their consent* is the whole definition of sexual assault.
As I said in my twitter conversation (in the original post), my focus isn’t on what the judicial system does, but on what is and isn’t sexually ethical.
In practice, I don’t think it’s very likely that anyone – a man or a woman – could be convicted in court in the sort of cases we’re discussing. There are a few reasons for this. One major reason is that criminal courts are – rightly – obligated to consider a defendant innocent until proved guilty beyond all reasonable doubt. This means that there are rapes that are, on a practical basis, incredibly difficult to prove in court. But that doesn’t mean they’re not rapes. (If I steal Don Knott’s wallet, but no one can prove I did it, then what I did was still theft, even though I can’t be convicted of it in court.)
Im the abstract, I’d be happy to see more rapes, including the rape described in George Will’s article [*], convicted. But in the real world, I don’t see how that would happen without significantly decreasing protections for accused people, and since I already think too many people are falsely convicted (not just of rape, but of many crimes), and since our judicial system is extremely classist and racist, on the whole the negatives of concentrating on criminal trials seem to outweigh the positives.
Futhermore, you can’t actually get more rape convictions without first changing the way society (including prosecutors, judges, and juries) think about rape and consent. So even if we believe that trying to get more convictions is the way to go, that still requires first changing society.
In the end, I think reducing rape is more likely to be accomplished by changing the way our society thinks about sexuality, consent, and rape, than it is to be changed by concentrating on law-and-order approaches.
[*] Assuming that what the victim said in the Philadelphia article and in subsequent interviews is true.
Edited to add: I’m responding to KellyK, not the intervening posts.
“Because it’s up to him. (Really, it’s up to him, because it’s his body. Have I made that perfectly clear?)”
Well, that argument was given about women who were interviewed by Mary Koss with regard to sexual assault (Ampersand – you can step in if you want, LOL). As I understand it, many women thought that yes, the scenario in the questions happened to them, but no, they didn’t think it was sexual assault.
The feminist position (someone please correct me) and the way those answers flowed into the statistics was that the women themselves didn’t know it was sexual assault, but it was.
Maybe I got that wrong – I am open, but I am also a bit ready with some links to what people have said in the past.
And going back to my analogy with domestic violence: Some women say that they deserved to get beat because they were nags. So it wasn’t any kind of crime. Huh. That’s just the low self-esteem I mentioned above, many men suffer from that to with regard to women.
You’re welcome to form your own interpretations to work towards your own feelings of what should be criminal and your own understanding of consent. But in ordinary usage consent is has a very broad range of meaning and does include acquiescence. You can’t be surprised if people see the word consent and read acquiescence, that’s not lingustically wrong.
I think it is, you’re discounting confessions. “Oh, so you didn’t force her to have sex; you’d been hooking up, were sleeping in the same bed and just took her pants off when she’d stopped saying no”. There are people who’d agree, thinking that’s an exculpation when in fact it’s a confession. Once you’re on that hook, it’s very difficult to get off.
And assuming that’s not a coerced confession, and assuming there isn’t more to the story that would change things (i.e., somewhere in the story where she consented), I’m comfortable with the person in your example being convicted of rape. (Or, if I’m uncomfortable, it’s only because I have general doubts about our justice and prison system as a whole, not anything particular to this example.)
In ordinary usage “acquiesce” is a term that might or might not indicate consent, depending on the context. For instance, if I say “he told me to give me all my cash, and pointed a gun at me, so I acquiesced,” ordinary English speakers would not understand that as meaning I consented.
The important point, in my opinion, is not whether or not a rape victim terms what happened to him/her as “rape,” but whether or not what they describe is consensual.
For instance, in Koss’ survey, some of the victims described themselves having sex because they were forced to, physically or with threats; being physically held down as they struggled and/or tried to reason with their attacker; but nonetheless didn’t answer yes to “it was definitely rape.” Koss counted that situation as a rape, and I think she was correct to so so. Although the subjects may not have been sure the situation was “definitely rape,” what they described was nonconsensual.
It should also be noted that Koss herself, who is very involved in the “restorative justice” movement, is hardly a “throw ’em all in jail” type.
Uhm, you do realize that literally in this thread there has already been a fairly substantive discussion of the “it’s only rape if the victim thinks its rape” argument. Is it too much to ask to read the thread you are posting in before bringing up the same argument?
yrs–
–Ben
P.S. If you would prefer a different word than “bullshit” for when you blatantly lie in order to belittle rape victims, let me know. I am perfectly happy to say, for instance, “blatant lies in order to belittle rape victims.”
Okay, so I realize I wasn’t necessarily clear when I said “it’s up to him [the person to whom something sexual was done].” “Is he okay with [the sexual thing that was done to him while he was unconscious]?” is what’s up to him. (That might not be a conscious decision so much as an emotional reaction.) If his answer is “no,” then it would be sexual assault, even if he doesn’t necessarily feel that it’s sexual assault.
Just like, if someone knowingly takes money that I left on the table, but I’m willing to chalk it up to a misunderstanding, they’re still a thief, whether I decide to call them one or not.
Exactly!
Grace @30: This. I cannot wrap my head around the idea of getting all the way to sexual intercourse with someone who’s completely unresponsive, and not even checking in with the other person.
***
She did a series of things that, among couples who are lovers, are signs of consent. She let him undress and get into her bed. She herself undressed and put on pajamas and got into bed.
If I’m planning on having sex before going to sleep, I’m not going to put on pajamas. I could see putting on a sexy negligee or something… I would see the pajamas as a sign that sex will not be happening.
Was she afraid of him or intimidated by him? No.
I don’t see any evidence of this. As mythago noted, I think he made it reasonably clear that he planned on ignoring her lack of consent.
***
The situation she described–one party says no to an advance, the other party stops, but they try the advance again half an hour later–is one which is relatively common. Especially for two folks who are voluntarily sleeping in the same bed. (If that is defined as rape per se, I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of adults are rape victims, rapists, or both.)
Really? It’s never happened to me, either as the first party or the second. Not in a case where one party is trying to sleep, anyway. Trying again in the morning, sure. Maybe I’m just especially reverent of sleep. (And yes, I do have experience voluntarily sleeping in the same bed with someone.)
Also…
The narrative George Will quoted said “a few minutes later.” Either Ava or Cathy did the same thing in our twitter conversation (in one of the bits I didn’t quote) – magically “a few minutes” became “half an hour.”
I suspect this is a bit of a Freudian slip. I think you (and Cathy/Ava) realize that to assume consent just a few minutes after receiving a clear “no” is unreasonable, and in a subconscious attempt to make the guy’s actions seem more reasonable (and your argument seem stronger), a few minutes is converted to half an hour.
Or maybe it was just a completely random error that coincidentally trends towards helping your case. But in any case, it was “a few minutes,” not “half an hour.”
No.
But before I explain why, I’ll start by saying that I am discussing what is/should be formally punishable behavior. Which is a whole sight different from what is ideal, ethical, moral, etc. behavior.
But that said: “If it’s not forced, it’s consensual and vice versa” is a false dichotomy. It’s more of a continuity, which starts at “I’m incredibly psyched” and goes through “meh” into “not really a fan. Not sure if it’s OK” into “definitely not wanted, but I don’t really feel forced” into “force/threat.”
Not everything which is unforced is wanted, and not everything which is unwanted is forced.
That is different from your argument that rape – which, by definition, lacks consent – doesn’t count if the victim nonetheless doesn’t ‘experience’ it as rape.
That is not my argument. Amp talked about them thinking it was rape, and I explained that is not what I meant. There are plenty of people who don’t know what the definition of rape is and that isn’t really a relevant datapoint.
I was talking specifically about them experiencing force or threat of force, which are classic elements of rape absent things like statutory rape, and rapes involving incapacitated people, etc.. Right?
If someone doesn’t “feel like there is force or threats involved” (or other similar criteria such as “duress” and whatnot) then absent one of those many exceptions it does not seem that the description should be classified as a rape–by which I mean “treated as such by a formal system of adjudication which has significant consequences.”
I am talking–as always–about the question of what we should do formally in this sort of situation, because–as always–I don’t think I have any right to question on how someone feels about their own personal experience, but I certainly have a right to opine on how society should react when people relate experiences similar to this.
And that is what we’re trying to decide, right? The questions aren’t “is this ideal? (no,) “would you do that?” (no,) and so on. The question is “what do we do the next time that this happens?”
No, actually, it’s not, outside Antioch. Doing something sexually to someone else against their will is a better definition of sexual assault (at least if you want a short one liner.)
This is why leaning over and kissing your date (even if you don’t ask permission first) is not sexual assault even if they didn’t want you to, but continuing to kiss them if they say “gross, get away from me” is sexual assault.
Huh. I don’t know where I got it. It may have been an error on my part entirely, though I read the actual conversation on Twitter on each of the three twitter feeds before I posted so I probably got it there. This is the first I’ve been aware of it.
That’s a continuum. It would be more accurate to say that my position is that circumstances and time and input combine to affect whether another attempt is acceptable or not. There isn’t a bright line “it’s rape before ___ minutes” any more than there’s a bright line “it’s not rape after ___ minutes.”
But the thing that I don’t get is why you’re skipping over WHAT it’s acceptable to do. The default argument here is about “assumed consent to sex,” as if you could flip a button and have sex. But that’s a straw man unless you happen to both be butt naked and lying in the right position.
I read this more as a question of “assumed consent to have someone make a pass at you that leads to sex.” Which is to say that while most dating relationships do not entitle folks to assume consent to sex, they often entitled folks to assume consent to trying to start the process of having sex, even when they might have been rejected before. And often the relationships have had established leeway in allowing folks to restart advances, often after short notice. It isn’t that you can’t rape your partner (of course you can!) but rather that you and your partner may allow each other considerable leeway in testing the waters. Whether for sex or anything else, don’t you have different language that you use to tell your partner “really, seriously, do not ask/try again” versus “not really interested now?” I do. I think most people do.
When I read the first post, it seemed to me that this was a process. I’m picturing some mutual lifting and adjusting and moving about. Since they seemed to have some sort of existing sexual relationship, when I read the original passage (which is all I was responding to, not the additional information) the “remove both people’s underwear and start having sex” part read to me like “tried to start the sex process by undressing her, under some sort of established course of conduct where it was expected she’d say ‘no’ if she was really uninterested” as opposed to “started raping someone.” Which is also consistent with the “let him finish so I could go to sleep,” “hooking up for three months,” lack of described force/threat/etc.
Now, the shorter the time between the “no” and restarting the process, the less acceptable that it is.
“Playfully continue”? What he was “continuing” was sexual activity she had TOLD HIM TO STOP.
I find it very revealing how some folks arguing that was consensual have to keep minimizing this, and rebranding it as ‘play’ or just another mild sexual approach.
Instead of “playful,” I think a better term would be “pushy.” Pushy is not necessarily mild. Pushy is, well, pushy. Which is obnoxious, but is pretty common.
Could you be just seeing it as minimizing because people are coming to a different analysis?
I mean, obviously she said no. But like a gajillion other people who have made similar commentary across the ethernets, I have personally had many times where I have said no and someone has repeated a ___ (sexual advance, grope, pass, request, etc.) over the course of my life. All of them were pushy at a minimum; some of them were offensive/improper/assaultish; almost all were not.
So for me the fact that “she said no” puts this into a category where it COULD be a problem, which means you need to analyze whether it was actually a problem. For many people here, the fact that she said no seems to put this into a category where it ALWAYS IS a problem, so further analysis is inherently improper.
Perhaps this is just a split between people who have, or have not, had plenty of experiences that went on both sides.
Trying to figure out why type of analysis makes the most sense is why people ask the obvious corrollary: If this is “always a problem”, do you similarly think that everyone else who has had similar experiences (and there are a lot of them!) has also been raped, whether or not they think so? And since consent is by no means limited to sexual issues, do you apply similar analysis to consent everywhere else, in other aspects of interpersonal relationships?
What seems strange to me and other folks isn’t that you conclude she was raped. That is easily a normal conclusion. It’s why you conclude she was raped, and the fact that your process of analysis doesn’t seem to make sense–in fact it directly contradicts the lived experience of me and of a ton of people who I know.
This isn’t an accurate description of my thoughts. Is there anyone here for whom that is an accurate description?
(It’s not what I think, because I can easily imagine a situation in which one person says “no,” and then a few minutes later says or indicates “yes” without being coerced. I wouldn’t conclude that situation was rape. However, in this case, if we take what has been reported about what she says at face value, she said “no” and then a few minutes later did NOT say or indicate “yes,” and he proceeded anyway.)
Not me. The problem isn’t asking again after getting a no a few minutes before. (At least not so major a problem that it becomes rape. I personally would find it pretty annoying for him to keep pestering when he already had an answer.)
What makes it rape, in my mind, is that she never said yes, never in any way indicated that she wanted to have sex, and he stuck his penis in her anyway.
g&w, I think your question gets back to what you pointed out above:
and then you summarized your thoughts as
I didn’t read that as “tried to start the sex process by undressing her” as even the original account seemed to find this behavior odd/unexpected (to my reading), in addition to the statement that they were no longer seeing each other. So, to me, it didn’t seem the woman in question perceived it as the early stages of “trying to start the sex process.”
So when you say:
it’s not that I think ALL sexual requests after her “no” would have been inappropriate, but that I think this particular level of action was clearly inappropriate. And so does the woman involved.
(So, basically what Amp and KellyK said, I guess. :) )
I also made the half an hour error, by the way, and only noticed it when I followed Amp’s link to the Media Matters article where it said “a few minutes.” I think perhaps because “half an hour” seems like a more specific time frame than “a few minutes”, so it’s the one that stuck in my brain?
OK, my bad.
OK, so we both agree that people can change their minds.
I think we both agree that people can (within reason) express where they are on the scale of consent with actions/inactions/words/silence.
We both agree that this described situation is not good, or ideal.
We both agree that if the woman involved wants to classify the situation as “rape” it is her right to do so.
I assume we mainly disagree on whether this particular described conduct would be appropriate for an objective and neutral observer to formally classify as “rape,” leading to formal punishment for the accused. I assume you think that it should be.
Here’s the part that I don’t get. How do you weigh the fact that the write-up doesn’t reflect her being upset at the time, or the next morning? That it doesn’t say a thing about any trauma, fear, anger, sadness, apprehension, or anything happening at the time other than “tired?” That she waited six weeks?
For me, those are really importantin combination. If you left the descriptions of “what happened” exactly the same but added supporting information about any of those issues, it would change the analysis entirely and I would reach the opposite result.
Are those irrelevant to you? Unimportant? Excusable? Or simply not relevant enough to change the balance?
Why is the question of “whether or not this is rape” dependent on the question of “was the victim traumatized or upset by it?” Plenty of upsetting, regretful, even traumatic sex is consensual. Plenty of rape survivors don’t end up feeling traumatized by the experience (plenty more are in emotional shock and don’t respond emotionally for months or years afterwards).
I have had things stolen from me. I am not generally someone who gets particularly attached to things, so it wasn’t upsetting to me emotionally. Generally my response has been “I hope whoever took it needed it more than me.” That does not change that I had things stolen from me. If you steal from me, and I’m not upset by it, it doesn’t retroactively become a gift or a sale.
I consider none of your sideways accusations in any way important. Rape victims don’t need to put on a broken-doll weepy trauma act for you, for the cops, for the courts, for the media, or for anyone. We get to respond however we want.
You assume wrongly.
What we have here is an account in Philadelphia magazine (which George Will quoted) from a report on how a university treats students who report rape. That account does not give a complete moment-by-moment account of what happened, nor should it be expected to. Additionally, we have another article interviewing the victim, who confirms that the Philadelphia account is incomplete, and says the actual events were more violent than what Philadelphia described. Again, not a moment-by-moment account, and that’s fair enough. Neither she nor any other victim is obliged to give the public a full accounting of what happened.
From what has been printed, I’m comfortable saying things like “if we take what has been reported about what she says at face value, she said “no” and then a few minutes later did NOT say or indicate “yes,” and he proceeded anyway, and that’s rape.”
However, obviously if the (alleged) rapist were facing formal punishment – if he were criminally charged by the police, for instance – then there would be a trial, which would attempt to construct a much more detailed account of what happened than what we know, and at which a defense attorney would get to question any witnesses, including the victim. The judge or jury would then decide guilty or not guilty based on that much more detailed accounting, not based on what Philadelphia magazine published.
So no, I wouldn’t want anyone convicted based just on what we currently know. I’d want someone convicted, or not, based on a trial.
However, unlike a judge or jury, I am not required to be that exacting. I am not required to assume innocence until guilt is proven beyond all reasonable doubt. So I’m comfortable both saying that I don’t think what we have is enough to justify a criminal conviction, and at the same time to say that if the account we’ve read is accurate, then what happened was rape.
Like Ben, I think this is all irrelevant. For one thing, just because the write-up fails to indicate that she was upset, doesn’t mean she wasn’t.
More importantly, questions like being upset at the time or how long she waited to report are variations of The Myth Of The Platonic Rape Victim – the idea we should imagine a perfect rape victim, and then ask if the complainant’s behavior and statements match what our imaginary perfect rape victim would have done and said. But real-life rape victims often differ from the Platonic Rape Victim.
My concern is solely if, in the few minutes after clearly saying “no,” she said or did anything to indicate that she had changed her mind. If a more complete account indicated that she had indicated consent, then of course that would change my view of whether or not what happened was rape. The other stuff, like “fear, anger, sadness,” doesn’t seem relevant to determining if it was a rape or not.
(That said, I feel like I should point out she herself says she felt and still feels traumatized.)
Um… duh? Surely you don’t think that I think that a paragraph written from the perspective of a single party is anything like a complete description of a complex incident. But since most people either engage in arguments imagining what might or might not have happened, or insist on waiting for trial, this seemed like a nice, solid discussion, about a nice, defined, statement and summary. .
There has always been a world outside the post. I have always been discussing what you actually posted, and not a set of entirely-separate testimony (or speculative testimony), which is why I have said things like “based on this limited testimony” when writing my post. (And of course, if you wanted to look at actual testimony you would presumably also want to talk to the accused.)
I’m not talking about “what has been printed.” I’m talking about “what Amp posted.”
And sheeeeeit, it seemed nice to be discussing something specific instead of having yet another unsolvable conversation in which the only thing you can agree on is “rape is bad.”
Because if they don’t describe any physical acts of force or coercion; and if they also don’t describe experiencing any of the feelings that might accompany being forced or coerced; and if they also don’t describe any of the gazillion things which might explain why the first two didn’t happen, that seems like a relevant datapoint if we are trying to decide whether they were forced or coerced into sex. Don’t you think? I mean, it can’t be “victim testimony matters but only if it supports the victim,” that’d be ridiculous.
Yup.
I’ll duck this one because my experience is limited–trauma is a precise word, and you may be right. However, I mentioned being upset and certainly all the victims I have worked with have been upset, unless….
Yup. Which was one of the things that I said would make the lack of time-current things moot.
Theft is a very, VERY, bad analogy for rape. Especially for rape accusations between people who have recently been sexual partners. You must know that. But if you insist…
If I see your friend carrying your stuff and you’re not upset by it (like I said, this is a bad analogy) and if you didn’t say anything for weeks, and if you didn’t explain why you didn’t say anything or why you weren’t upset, I would probably consider that reason to question you if you subsequently informed me that the thing your friend took was actually stolen.
This seems like you’re arguing that we should never judge the victim’s response, since any judgment would be a “variation on the Myth.” But that would be ridiculous, since the victim’s response can be relevant. Am I reading you right?
I say that because my imperfect list–which includes, for example, “don’t say a thing and act perfectly normal until you eventually report it years later, and explain you were in shock during the interim” is about as far as you can get from Platonic without going into “no questions” territory, and yet you seem to be strongly opposed to it.
Yes, of course, everyone can respond however they want. But if you’re going to do things like “grant an interview to a widely published magazine,” then it seems that the “don’t ask details, wonder why details are missing, or judge the context (or lack of content) in what I say” meme doesn’t apply.
That’s fair, but the very simple answer to that may well have more to do with what the magazine chose to include than actual holes in the story.
Also, a fairly obvious reason for waiting six weeks to report is right there in the article itself. When she finally did, the drug and alcohol counselor she spoke to
The assumption is always that it was the victim’s fault, or an honest misunderstanding, or she’s making it up. I really doubt she was totally unaware that this is how rape victims are treated. (Scroll back up through these comments for some examples.) To me, the real question is less “Why did she wait so long to report it?” and “Why bother reporting it at all, when it means you get to go through the wringer and the odds are strongly against it doing any good?”
True.
Yes, that’s ridiculous. I don’t really get who the “drug and alcohol counselor” is or what his role is supposed to be, but if he is doing that then he should be fired (if his job includes these conversations) or at least retrained or moved (if he is not supposed to be doing this.)
My initial assumptions take account of the context in which the victim is speaking.
If someone is talking about themselves; or if they are asking for help that involves them; then there is absolutely no question that one should believe them. Even if the situation isn’t exactly as described, who cares? They should have help anyway and “giving extra help” isn’t really causing any harm.
But if someone is asking that another person be punished; or if they are asking that policy/process be changed; or that we adopt a different world view; then the assumptions are different. As are the motivations. Because if we punish the wrong person, or if we change a policy due to misinformation, then that is a real harm. It isn’t that we should assume the accuser is lying, but rather that we shouldn’t assume that they are accurately portraying all of the truth, and we shouldn’t refrain from questioning them to try to figure out what is real.
That’s a hard one to answer. The blunt response would be that there are many harms which have no remedy (either because they’re not illegal or they’re not provable.) Things which are “just legal” and not rape are in this category, as are a lot of things which are legally rape but not provably rape even in a civil context.
The more complex response would be that the process can be made much better, but that is not what people are usually focusing on.
Ideally, colleges would have on-call victim advocates of both genders, who were specially trained and who would confidentially represent only the complainant’s interests. Colleges would fund immediate emergency transport to the cops (for police reports) and the courts (for restraining orders,) and would pay to process any rape kits so they didn’t sit there for years, and would provide separate, confidential, counseling for the victims. IOW, the issue isn’t “how can we ensure that a drug counselor has the proper response to a rape report” but rather “why don’t we have a special rape reporting service set up yet?”
I would similarly distinguish between one-party issues and adversarial issues. For example, a victim should be instantly eligible for emergency temporary housing, and recordings of their classes, and similar support, without needing to have a hearing or even to have their report questioned at all. Support services are free of charge and questions.
If they want to affect someone else (“I want him removed from my dorm/class/school,” etc.) then the schools would do their damndest to push it in front of a judge in some context (deciding that sort of thing is their job) and would otherwise do their best to recreate good process. This might require a national push to make civil restraining orders available for dormmates as well as housemates, but that would probably pass.
And so on.
Amp wrote:
Swarthmore’s Interim Sexual Assault Policy is available here.
The policy defines effective consent, and states the following:
I don’t know whether this is an Interim Policy that was put into effect before or after the assault we have been discussing took place. But it codifies Amp’s thought process (and mine).
Amp continues:
This is all true; however, it omits one other significant difference: the state’s definition of sexual assault and rape is very different than the University’s definition. If the victim’s statement as filtered through the Philadelphia article were all the testimony provided, I don’t think this meets the state’s definition of rape or sexual assault, which is available here.
The state would seem to have to prove that he engaged in sexual intercourse with her by threat of forcible compulsion that would prevent resistance by a person of reasonable resolution. The original article doesn’t support this.
Of course victims aren’t required to be an expert in the law, and journalists aren’t either. Given her subsequent statements it is certainly possible that he used force or a threat of force and the journalist either didn’t know what questions to ask in order to elicit relevant details, didn’t want to elicit relevant details, or just didn’t print them.
That the university has a broader definition of sexual assault is okay. And it’s a good thing. In other areas it is even uncontroversial. Few would argue that a school can’t make it a firing offense for a professor to have a relationship with an undergraduate (or even a graduate student), even if both are consenting adults. As long as the university sets a standard and applies it even handedly. Much of our focus is on lowering the burden of proof and reducing due process in university proceedings. But I think the more important effort is in defining rape, sexual assault, and other sexual misconduct in a way that is more inclusive while preserving the ability to provide notice to all students about what behavior will and will not be punished.
It doesn’t seem to me to fit the State’s definition of rape but it does seem to me to fit the state’s definition of sexual assault, which is colloquially included in the term “rape.”
The definition of sexual assault is “a person engaging in sexual intercourse or deviate sexual intercourse with another person without their consent.” See more at the above link.
yrs–
–Ben
gin-and-whiskey, I agree with everything you said in #95.
I wasn’t talking about your assumptions so much as the assumptions of the majority of people when a woman says she was raped. I think your distinction between automatically believing someone if they just want help and only doubting and questioning when the question of punishment comes up is perfect.
Although, I didn’t get from what the article that she was necessarily looking to have the guy punished, so all this discussion of how she acted afterwards and whether she was really traumatized may be beside the point.
I am going to take this rare opportunity to entirely agree with you, at least at this stage. The description failed to reflect a claim of force or threat of force; it did reflect a claim of lack of consent. And of course, a fuller investigation could certainly lead someone to conclude that there was actually force or threat of force, or that there was actually consent.
But I’m going to switch to disagreement for a moment.
It was the very first paragraph of my very first post when I talked about the “force or threat of force” thing, and I have stuck to it ever since. (See post #5.) Would it have been so freakin’ hard to have made the “oh, yeah, I agree that’s not rape, and when I was talking about non-consent as enough I was discussing something else” comment come about 40 posts ago, instead of now? Sheesh.
Indeed. If only the very first sentence of Ben Lehman’s very first comment on this thread began,
In fact, that was comment #48, well more than 40 posts before your comment above, and well after Amp specifically said he was talking about sexual ethics, not the legal system, in the original post, and after Fibi and I had told you we didn’t think this was legally-defined rape, and after Richard Jeffrey Newman said directly that we were mostly arguing semantics with you. This general idea, that we are discussing ethical behavior and colloquial definitions of rape that may be more expansive than the legal definition you want to use, has been repeated in some form by just about every person disagreeing with you on this thread.
I understand that the legal definition is a topic you want to discuss; I’m not that interested in it, personally, but I don’t begrudge you your chance to have the conversation. But it’s pretty explicitly not the conversation everyone else is having.