This completely awful New York Observer article has been making the rounds on the twittersphere today, with most of my feminist and ally friends observing that the article boils down to, as Spencer Ackerman says, “adult women should not ever have sex with any men ever, and especially not with us.” And frankly, how can one look at an article headlined “Rrrowl! Beware Cougar’s Young Niece, the Cheetah,” and think anything else? Clearly, the article is all about slut-shaming women into retreating to demure ladyhood.
And clearly, that’s what the article is about, which is why I’m breaking my reaction to this post up into two parts. Because while the article is about slut-shaming, the anecdote given to shame sluts is an anecdote about something else entirely.
The piece opens with an anecdote about “Seth,” one of the writer’s friends, who’s been at a party and had a few too many.
“I can barely stand,” Seth said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. (Seth’s a gentleman and asked that I change the names and obscure certain details in unfurling the horrors that so thoroughly furled him that night, in order to protect the honor of a woman.) He was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.
Joel said, “O.K., I think he needs to go home.”
Dana, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”
“I wanna go home,” Seth warbled.
“O.K., I’ll take him home,” Dana said.
Joel gave Seth a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take him home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dana said, hailing a cab and then bundling Seth inside.
“I woke up with a condom still on my dick,” he told me.
[…]
Dana’s hunting methods and psychology bear no resemblance to the cougar. As Seth aptly points out, “A cougar would fuck and then leave and not feel bad.”
Instead, Seth awoke to Dana’s limpid eyes, followed by an awkward kiss in broad daylight as the two parted ways on the street. The cheetah stays the night.
Now, you may see the problem here, but you may be thinking to yourself, “Jeff, that’s just a story about a girl having a one-night stand. What’s wrong with that?” Well, to illustrate, let’s turn to Amber at Prettier than Napoleon:
“I can barely stand,” Sabrina said, swaying innocently on the soggy sidewalk. … She was 24 at the time, a magazine writer.
Jennifer said, “O.K., I think she needs to go home.”
Dave, who was 29, said, “Let’s go get another drink!”
“I wanna go home,” Sabrina warbled.
“O.K., I’ll take her home,” Dave said.
Jennifer gave Sabrina a “WTF?” look and said, “I’ll take her home.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dave said, hailing a cab and then bundling Sabrina inside.
“I woke up with a condom still in my vagina,” she told me.
Precisely. Flip the genders around, and we have what is clearly a case of date rape. Not a borderline case, not a questionable case — a clear-cut, no-question, over the line case of date rape.
Now, we don’t know all the details here, and frankly, we don’t have to. We know 1) Seth was extremely drunk to the point of being barely able to stand, and 2) Dana knowingly took advantage of Seth in that condition. Anything beyond that is going to take us straight to Blame Town, where we can talk about what the victim did to cause his victimization.
So why is it that otherwise sensible people like Megan Carpentier respond by saying, not that this was rape, but that, “Everyone should be disgusted by a one night stand with any of the dudes quoted in the piece, imho.”?
The other day, in comments to a post of mine excoriating Bernard-Henri Lévy for his fawning support of Roman Polanski, a commenter named Politicalguineapig came up with a novel solution to the problem of rape:
Maybe setting up restrictions on men’s movements and disallowing men from gathering in groups would stop the problem. But a bill like that wouldn’t have a hope of passing.
This, of course, thoroughly derailed the thread,1 causing people to debate whether men having their movements legally restricted would be worse than the present situation, where women are pressured to restrict their own movements out of fear of men. The answer, of course, is that the argument was an apples-and-unicorns debate — the idea that men should be prohibited from gathering in groups, for example, is the exact opposite of what we tell women, which is that they should be in groups at all times.
But that’s neither here nor there. The reason I cite this argument is that it stems from the same place that has people completely miss the rape in the NYO article. It is, quite simply, a gender essentialist argument: men are predators, women are victims.
Now, that is the case more often than the reverse. And one shouldn’t pretend that the number of men being raped by women is in the same statistical universe as the number of women being raped by men — it isn’t. But if you believe, as I do, that one woman being raped is one too many, one man being raped is one too many, too.
Women are capable of being victimizers, just as men are. They’re capable of being abusive. They’re capable of sexual assault. They’re capable of rape. Not all women, mind you. Not even most women. Not even a sizable minority of women are capable of assaulting someone else. But some women are, just as some men are.
The proper response when a story such as this is not to minimize or ignore it, not to bury it by saying, “Well, it’s an outlier, and women are the victims of rape far more, and that’s the real problem.” It may be an outlier, but that doesn’t make it okay. Rape is evil, no matter who perpetrates it.
Is the fallout different? Of course it is. I doubt Seth thinks he was raped, and most people — even most feminists — seem to think that it’s all okay, because he got laid, and that’s what men want most in the whole world. But quite frankly, men don’t want to get laid by anyone, and not all the time. And the fact that Seth was taken advantage of, and that so many people who I consider allies don’t see it — or worse, use the incident as reason to attack the victim — saddens me greatly.
Men commit more crimes against women than women do against men. That has its roots in a number of causes, most societal, some having to do with sexual dimorphism — men are on average bigger and stronger than women, and it’s easier for a man to use force against a woman than vice versa. But that doesn’t mean that men have a unique seed of evil planted inside of them, nor that women are pure. Women and men are both human, and all of us are capable of doing great good, and great evil. We are far more alike than different, and that goes for the bad as well as the good.
Later tonight: Part the Second: In which I discuss slut-shaming.
- Which, of course, led Mandolin to write her fine rejoinder. [↩]
I doubt Seth thinks he was raped, and most people — even most feminists — seem to think that it’s all okay, because he got laid, and that’s what men want most in the whole world.
Excuse me, but what the? Unless there’s a huge amount of distortion or deleted information in this anecdote, he was clearly raped. Many women don’t describe it as “rape” when something similar happens to them but that doesn’t make it not rape: he was too drunk to give consent, she knew it and initiated sex with him anyway. That’s rape, regardless of the genders involved. And Seth seems to me to display a lot of the classic behaviors of date rape victims, including the attempts to pretend it wasn’t rape, ie the kiss goodbye.
Very nicely done!
Dianne, to be fair, maybe it’s the subset of feminists I’ve seen commenting on this article, but for the most part, they’re ignoring this, or, in Megan’s case, essentially saying the victim should be “grateful.” I agree, Seth exhibits classic symptoms of date rape — but I doubt he would describe it in those terms. And certainly, most people wouldn’t — because rape doesn’t happen to men. (To be fair again, I doubt most people would describe Amber’s scenario as date rape, either.)
i must admit i didn’t see it as a rape until the genders were reversed, after which it seemed clear. in fact, i read the first “wtf” as “hey, she wants sex. cool.”
but if Seth didn’t see it as a rape then i find it hard to quibble. allow me to play around with a thought for a moment: is it possible Jeff’s addressing rape the way the right addresses racism, ie the goose/gander approach; “imagine if a white person said…”
when thats done the response is often, “context matters, for example, black nationalism is not the same as the white kind.” so, in the social context in which we live, can this really be assumed to be rape as easily as it would if the genders were reversed?
I think you underestimate (or perhaps overestimate) what most people are capable of in the right (or wrong) situation. You might say that most people aren’t capable of torturing someone else, but the notorious Milgram experiment and Stanford Prison Experiment both demonstrated that it’s not that hard to get ordinary people to do awful things.
in the social context in which we live, can this really be assumed to be rape as easily as it would if the genders were reversed?
Yes.
I’m sorry, but yes. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. Unless you believe that men really do always want sex and think it’s always good if we get it no matter what — beliefs which I’ll be happy to tell you are 100% false — then this is predatory behavior, and rape, full stop.
Just because Seth wouldn’t call it that doesn’t make it not that. There are plenty of women who’ve been on “bad dates,” who cling to the idea that they weren’t actually raped because they have a dim recollection of not fighting their assailant off. And given that we generally view rape as something only men are capable of committing, that gets expanded here. Why would Seth think he’d been raped? Plenty of feminists that I know would certainly not miss the rape in this anecdote if the genders were reversed not only missed it, but blasted Seth in the process for being whiny.
But just as date rape was still date rape in the 1960s, before there were even words to describe it; just as marital rape was still marital rape even when men had the legal right to compel their spouses to sleep with them; so this is rape, even if we haven’t caught up to seeing it that way.
What happens when two people have sex who are both drunk or otherwise incapacitated/incapable of giving consent? Have they both raped each other?
wow, i actually never thought about this b/f but i guess i was raped by a woman by jeffs definition. there was a woman who pursued me for 3yers in college and i just avoided her. then one night she caught me pretty much out of it and took me to her room. she was completely sober. i remember everything and i remember consenting but i’m sure i wouldn’t have if i was sober.
anyway, i never thought of it as rape, never even really regretted it more than any other drunken escapade, and certainly was never emotionally traumatized. as years went by it became an amusing anecdote often retold by by college buds. so, as far as i’m concerned, i wasn’t raped.
but for a woman surely the context–probably her friends wouldn’t be joking, maybe she gets slut shamed, perhaps its less likely she give a drunk consent– is likely to be different no?
What happens when two people have sex who are both drunk or otherwise incapacitated/incapable of giving consent? Have they both raped each other?
My short answer: I don’t know. I tend to think of situations like that as similar to when, say, two fourteen-year-olds have sex. It’s a bad idea, it could lead to problems, but the fact is that both partners are unable to make rational decisions — the minors due to age, the inebriated due to inebriation.
I think I fall a little between Manju and Jeff here.
I think that it’s important to honor the subjective experiences of men and women, so in the same way that I’m not going to nitpick someone who says that she was raped, if someone says that she (or in Manju’s case, he) wasn’t raped, I also want to respect that, rather than dictate my understanding of their experiences.
That being said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say, “look, this was nonconsensual sex. This was sex you did not consent to or would not have consented do without drugs or alcohol. Generally we call that rape.”
Like, there’s a difference between saying “this is what happened to you,” and saying “here’s the definition … and if you meet that, you might want to think about it.”
—Myca
Pingback: Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » NYO Fail, Part the Second: In Which I Discuss Slut-Shaming
Great post, Jeff.
Regarding Manju’s example, I see a big difference between “I clearly remember consenting while drunk, though I probably wouldn’t have done so sober” and “I was too drunk too stand and I woke up with a condom on my penis.” Though drunk consent is often not competent consent, sometimes it is* — and in any case that’s a different matter from being totally unconscious during a sex act. The classic alcohol-related date-rape scenario, like Seth’s case, is the one in which the perpetrator takes advantage of someone so drunk s/he can’t say no.
Don’t get me wrong, a sober person propositioning a drunk person is, in most cases, unethical — but, if s/he consents, is it rape? It doesn’t seem like it to me. When I was a teenager I slept with someone while I was very drunk, and though she’d been drinking too, I think I’d had a lot a more, and she was much more experienced than me (it was my first time, in fact). Looking back, I think it would be reasonable to term her behavior unethical. I was traumatized by the experience. But it wasn’t rape; there isn’t any angle from which I can see it as rape, or her as a rapist.
All that said, I second Myca about letting people name their own experiences. Situations that look the same on paper can feel very, very different.
* I think there are definitely cases of sex in which one or more people are drunk that are not in any way rape. Pretty much everyone I know has had consensual sex while under the influence. To give the most obvious example, a happy couple who go to bed together after a night on the town are not committing mutual rape.
I’m with Myca @10.
maybe it’s the subset of feminists I’ve seen commenting on this article, but for the most part, they’re ignoring this, or, in Megan’s case, essentially saying the victim should be “grateful.”
For what it’s worth, the feminist blogs I’ve read (n=2) have agreed with your interpretation. Feminists are people and are susceptible to society’s prejudices as much as sexists. So, yeah, I can see some feminists going for the “men should always be greatful for sex no matter what” aspect.
I agree, Seth exhibits classic symptoms of date rape — but I doubt he would describe it in those terms.
As I said earlier, many rape victims don’t. I’ve heard of cases in which rape victims will go as far as initiating a relationship with their rapist as part of an attempt to convince themselves that it’s all ok, they weren’t “really” raped, etc. Seth, who has the additional burden of the social expectation that he should always be greatful for sex, seems to me to be displaying that sort of behavior.
I’m wondering whether there’s something to look at about alcohol as well as analyzing this as being about sex and rape.
As was said upthread, “drunken escapade”– I think there’s an idea floating around (less so in recent decades) that whatever uninhibited thing you did while drunk must have been fun.
Nancy: I don’t know about that. I got out of college pretty recently and the idea of alchohol=fun was still going pretty strong.
Apologize for the derail in the last thread. Most of it was frustration over how men’s movements and men’s opinions interfere with my personal safety (or perception of it.) Men don’t usually need to think of their safety during/after a night out.
It’s kind of interesting to think about the impact that the encounter would have on the two examples: Sabrina would probably stay out of bars for a while, but Seth would probably be in the bars the next week.
aeaea:
There’s something vaguely trollish about the question. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
At least one person has to consent, or else nothing can happen. I mean, someone has to act, no? Maybe I don’t drink enough at one time to understnd what you’re asking.
Myca (emphasis added):
Again, maybe this just reflects my drinking habits, but I think that if I don’t want to have sex with a particular person at a particular time in a particular way, alcohol isn’t going to change that, even if it affects my ability to express or act on it.
Nancy Lebovitz:
I don’t know about “less so”; look at Dude, Where’s my Car? and The Hangover, both recent.
Men don’t usually need to think of their safety during/after a night out.
Yes we do. I go out drinking in Denver periodically, and (especially in the wake of some gang attacks on people just like me) I think of my safety before, during, and after said nights out.
What I don’t have to do is worry about being raped or kidnapped.
Yeah, but how many men do you know who keep their safety in mind every single time they head out? How many men regard cell phones and mace as usual equipment for any outing?
Well, I guess the point is we don’t worry about being assulted by women.
And you’re basing your snap judgment of a fictional scenario and an actual rape victim on…?
aeaea:
My college went over this with all the incoming freshmen during their terrible, gender-segregated information sessions on sexual assault on campus. What I recall the school officials saying, somewhat paraphrased, was:
My personal opinion is that active does not always equal penetrating – someone could theoretically perform oral sex on a non-consenting male partner and this would be sexual assault. If both inebriated parties are sober enough to consent, no sexual assault happened. If someone was incapable of consent due to drug or alcohol use and another person performed sexual acts on them or with them, that active person is responsible. If somebody is capable of initiating or performing a dangerous act involving another person’s body and chooses to do so, they’re responsible for that action – even if they are mentally incapacitated at the time. We hold drunk drivers and other intoxicated criminals legally accountable for their actions because the fact that one was under the influence does not negate the harm one did to society and/or other people. I am not a lawyer or law student, but I believe judges and such take into account the mental state of criminals when determining guilt and sentencing – though the mental state of the accused doesn’t mean the case is dismissed.
Hershele Ostropoler:
At least one person has to consent, or else nothing can happen. I mean, someone has to act, no? Maybe I don’t drink enough at one time to understnd what you’re asking.
I don’t think its that far of a stretch for two to both be so far out of it that they would both engage in an activity they would normally not do when sober. The whole point behind the drunken escapade is that the person has given in to drunken abandon and cannot control themselves. It is possible for both people to get drunk and for one to initiate sex (yet they would not normally initiate sex with that person sober) and other to consent to it (yet they would normally not consent sex with that person do sober). And in that situation to only hold the person that intiated the sex responsible when both were horribly drunk would be unfair. How can you tell one person they are not responsible because they were extremely drunk and could not control their actions but then tell the other that despite being extremely drunk they should have still been able to control their actions?
Toy Soldier is banned from this blog, and is the reason why I won’t link to feminist critics.
If someone who is permitted to post here wants to bring up & discuss the study he just cited, that’s fine. But he’s not allowed in this space.
This is a news article about using alcohol to get boys to have sex. It’s not a fictional scenario. Nor is it funny.
@Danny:
Yeah, people are stupid when drunk. But I fundamentally see sexual assault as an *action* one chooses to engage in, and being assaulted as something one does not voluntarily *do*. Sure, people take actions while inebriated that they wouldn’t take sober. In this sense, sexual assaults caused by drunk people are similar to driving accidents caused by drunk people. People are responsible for their choices, including those who voluntarily choose to use alcohol or another recreational substance, and subsequently choose to get behind the wheel of a vehicle and drive into somebody else’s car, to sexually touch someone who is not consenting, or to pick up a gun and shoot somebody’s brains out.
There are reductions in sentencing for insanity or temporary insanity defenses for a reason, and there are charges like “manslaughter” and degrees of crimes like murder and sexual assault for a reason. While I think reductions in jail time make some sense for this type of case, doing something wrong that causes others to suffer remains wrong after one’s third or eighth or seventeenth drink.
Quill:
Yeah, people are stupid when drunk. But I fundamentally see sexual assault as an *action* one chooses to engage in, and being assaulted as something one does not voluntarily *do*.
So the one that started the sex while drunk should be held responsible but the one that went along with it while drunk should not be?
Drunk person B has a diminished capacity and was not able to say no. Drunk person A has a diminished capacity and was not able to not initiate sex. One difference between this and the drunk driver you mention is that the person was (more than likely) not drunk so its not like both parties in that drunk driving accident were drunk.
The part that has me hung up is in a situation where both (or all) parties involved are of a diminished capacity how can you just declare that the diminished capacity of one person counts while the diminished capacity of another person doesn’t?
The reason I picked up on the rape aspect of Seth’s experience is the fact that the woman in question was known to make a practise of this. That seems to mean that she likes the fact that her targets are out of it, more than the actual sex.
Somebody, the law probably, needs to catch up with her and tell her that it is wrong.
Without this I’d have the same dilemma I usually have, I have been drunk and out of it myself and would not like to have been taken advantage of, however, it should not be assumed that just because a woman (or man) is drunk, that in itself makes it rape.
IOW, the questions about that are not unique to the fact that the target here was male.
If you drink or get drunk that is your choice, but at the same time, every single one of us needs protecting from ourselves at times.
The trouble with the current rape ideology that has come to the fore is that the trope of ‘innocent’ victim-woman, preditor-man, really only works for white middle class women, few other women can be perceived in that way without great difficulty.
In a funny way men are seen in a similar light to those women, incapable of the ‘purity’ required to be a convincing enough victim.
As for manju’s experience, it has been mooted many times that there should be some categorisation of rape, as with other crimes.
Some rapes are less serious than others, such as when the capacity to consent is diminished although not extinguished and although that doesn’t necessarily speak to the effect it may have on the victim-just like other crimes- it’s worth re-considering.
@ Danny
Say you’re really drunk and I’m really drunk. I, a relative stranger, decide suddenly that I’d like to buy your car. I grab the keys out of your pocket and replace them with twenty bucks. Meanwhile, you’re too out of it to be sure what’s going on, but you’ll likely be upset when you’re slightly more sober and drastically more carless in several hours.
Did I really buy your car? No. It wasn’t a legal, voluntary exchange if you were incapable of giving consent. You’d have every right to call the police and report the theft. The fact that you have my twenty dollars in “payment” doesn’t make us equally culpable or victimized. And it’d be the same if I had drunkenly decided I wanted to “have sex” rather than “buy” something from you, even if I argued that alcohol rendered me somehow incapable of not interfering with your bodily autonomy or property rights.
Being sloshed doesn’t absolve me of my responsibility towards others, so if I’m unable to control my illegal impulses while under the influence, I can either potentially go to jail or choose not to drink myself into that state. The people I act on don’t share my blame.
(This isn’t to demean rape by comparing it to theft btw, they’re only comparable in the sense of consent being the determining factor for the legality of a situation.)
I agree with Mayday. I really hate the “if the rapist was drunk then it wasn’t rape” line of thought. Is there any other area of law where people argue that committing crimes isn’t really a crime, as long as the person committing the crime was drunk?
Drunken consent is still consent. Drunken rape is still rape. And drunken rape of a drunk person who has not consented… is still rape.
Regarding the anecdote in Jeff’s post, it looks nasty, but it also frankly isn’t enough information to say for certain if what happened was rape or not. (And the same is true for Sabrina’s story).
Here, for instance, is a non-rape version of the story:
What if A took B home in the cab, just as in the anecdote. Then, at B’s apartment, B invited A up. They had coffee and chatted for a couple of hours, and B, although still drunk, sobered up to the point of being able to make decisions. A made a pass at B, which B went along with, and they had sex. Then, hours later, B woke up still wearing a condom.
I’m not saying this is what happened; on the contrary, I think from what the article says it’s likely that Seth was raped. But there is no rule that says that if a person is drunk they can’t consent, and there’s definitely no rule saying that if someone is drunk then it’s cool and not a crime if they rape someone.
Danny:
This sentence doesn’t make any sense to me. How can someone be unable to not initiate sex?
I’m not trying to be argumentative, I am genuinely mystified by this. Unable to make the decision necessary to consent I understand; unable to express or act on nonconsent I understand; even unable to perceive the other person’s protestation I think I can understand. This? No.
Hershele that represents my confusion over what appears to me to be telling one person “you had control of your actions despite being intoxicated” but then telling the other “you didn’t have control of your actions because you were intoxicated”.
Not trying to argue that said drunk person should be let off. I know its something I’m missing and am trying to figure out.
I really hate the “if the rapist was drunk then it wasn’t rape” line of thought. Is there any other area of law where people argue that committing crimes isn’t really a crime, as long as the person committing the crime was drunk?
Not that I’ve ever heard of.
But there also aren’t areas of law (at least, that I know of) where the same intoxication has different legal effects on the presumed decisionmaking of two different parties.
The argument that you don’t like isn’t really “drunk people can’t rape”. It’s more “how is it possible that we decide drunken consent cannot possibly count, but drunken sexual aggression does.”
Personally, I’m consistent; intoxication doesn’t negate consent* nor does it obviate responsibility for crimes. The converse – intoxication can negate consent, and can obviate responsibility for crimes – seems wrong, but at least is consistent.
The split decision – “she was drunk so she couldn’t possibly consent, so it must be rape” simultaneous with “he was drunk but that is too damn bad, he’s responsible for his decisions” – smacks of special pleading.
* I don’t mean that someone who passes out drunk is fair game for sex; I mean that a drunken “yeah, let’s do it! woooo!” from an adult who wasn’t tricked into getting drunk or something is good enough for “this isn’t rape”. Adult people are adults; drunk adult people are also adults. Drinking often helps you make BAD decisions but they’re still your decisions.
Intoxication doesn’t negate consent. (I thought my comment was clear about that?) Very few, if any, people are actually arguing that “yeah, let’s do it! Woooo!” from a drunk adult is not consent.
However, the model that too much of our culture runs under is “if she didn’t say no, then she consented.” Rather than requiring enthusiastic consent — “yeah, let’s do it! Woooo!” — the standard all too often seems to be “did she/he actually resist or say no? If not, it wasn’t rape.”
And a lot of men (and some women) do appear think that they’re not committing rape if they just get the person so drunk so that they can’t effectively resist or say “no” — even if that person is, in fact, drunk enough so that they don’t really know what’s going on; even if they’re way too drunk to be able to say “yeah, let’s do it! Woooo!” In my view, that’s rape. And that’s what I’m referring to when I talk about people being too intoxicated to consent.
@Danny:
Somebody performing the action of sexual assault is responsible for their actions. Somebody lying there and being sexually assaulted is not actually taking an action – they’re neither consenting nor persuading the person assaulting them to stop nor successfully resisting their attacker. A victim of a sexual assault is not responsible for the lack-of-action involved in unsuccessfully preventing their own victimization. The idea that the person committing the crime and the person being harmed are equally “responsible for their actions” is absurd, regardless of the drugs or alcohol involved.
To use a non-sexual assault example: Let’s say that I am walking across a street, and I am moving slowly because I am drunk. Timmy the Drunk Driver doesn’t notice me standing in the road and runs me over. Hypothetically, we’re exactly equally drunk. Timmy still bears responsibility for my serious injury or death, and I do not, because I was not taking any action which endangered anyone’s life – Timmy is the person who has just driven over me with his car and committed manslaughter.
I see “initiating sex” and “driving a car” as actions, and “being sexually assaulted” or “being hit by a car” as things that happen to people and do not count as performing actions. Arguing that the victims of sexual assault are uniquely “responsible” for the crimes committed against them in ways victims of murder, theft, or driving accidents are not is something I find distasteful.
Also, I’m seconding Ampersand’s definition of “too intoxicated to consent.” I doubt someone can become so inebriated they perform sexual acts on another person’s body unwillingly, or without being aware that they are doing so.
Mandolin: Because the fictional woman would know that being assaulted could happen again, whereas the man would be quite safe in figuring the incident was a one-off and wouldn’t be repeated.
Amp:
That seems to affirm my answer to aeaea, that by definition if all parties are too drunk to consent, nothing happens, so they can’t “rape each other.”
And aeaea hasn’t been back, so I still say trolling. The question is somewhat trollish, after all, and nothing has happened to change that impression
Well, I might as well do the dirty work…
Much of the rest of his post (available at his own blog, which you can Google) consists of ranting that “Alas, a blog is notorious for its apologism and denialism in regards to male victims”, though.
— begin actual discussion —
It’s interesting that the claimed “1 in 6” figure is pretty much the same as the “1 in 6” figure that is commonly cited as the rate at which women are sexually assaulted during their lifetimes. The equivalent U.S. Department of Justice figure for men is 1 in 33; You-Know-Who claims that the discrepancy is because of under-reporting.
— begin digression here —
In general, there are good reasons not to ban people simply because they disagree with you. Put a bunch of pro-X (or anti-X) people in a room together and have them discuss X, and they’ll all wind up with a more extreme position on X than any one of them had when they walked into the room. When you kick out everyone that disagrees with you, as Ayn Rand’s followers did, you risk turning into a cult with little connection to reality, as Ayn Rand’s followers did. It is reasonable to have a forum for “believers only” – you won’t get much work done if you keep getting interrupted – as long as you have some venue in which you, or someone who acts on your behalf, engages in discussion with dissenters, even if all that comes of it is to just reassure yourselves (and third parties) that they really are crazy, misinformed, or whatever. “Alas, a blog” might not be suitable to be such a venue, but there really ought to be one somewhere. (Indeed, “Feminist Critics” is trying to be such a place, but with limited success.)
I thought you did think intoxication = no consent, Amp. My bad. I was wrong. Never mind.
Check your figures, Doug. I think the accepted figure for women is one in 4. Or 25% of women. And considering under-reporting, it might be nearly a third of women who experience violence. Doing the math, who’s got the bigger problem?
Frankly, the stats on both sides are appalling, but as we humans are a violent species, I think we have to settle for reduction, rather than stamping it out.
I really hate the sort of statistic-flinging that’s going on in this post. Years ago, when I had more time, I would have followed up on all the linked footnotes and tried to figure out what the cited studies were actually measuring. I can’t do that anymore, alas, because I’m way too busy working. But if you’re citing statistics, you should have some idea where they came from and how the study was conducted.
For example:
But the passage you quote argues that “any unwanted sexual contact constitutes rape.” In contrast, the US Department of Justice study you cite, which found that about 1 in 6 (14.8%) of women have been raped, defines rape in a narrow, conservative manner. (For instance, it’s not clear that the sort of rape Jeff’s post discusses — in which someone is raped while more or less unconscious due to intoxication — would be counted as rape by the DoJ study.) To suggest the two figures are meaningfully comparable is ignorant at best, deceptive at worse.
We don’t ban all people who disagree with us, as is obvious if you read the comments here. Toy Soldier is banned for other reasons.
Well, as I just said to Doug, you really can’t compare the statistics this way, because they’re measuring different things entirely.
Just to clarify, the 1 in 4 statistic, which comes from a fairly famous study by Mary Koss (which I’ve written about quite a lot on this blog), refers to both completed rape and attempted rape. If you counted only the completed rapes, Koss found that about 1 in 8 female college students had been raped at some point in their lifetimes.
The bottom line is, the numbers for rape (of either sex) are appalling, as you say.
Yeah, I expect that he’d make a big mess of this place. (I rather liked reading Daran’s comments, but he got banned too.)
Also, I stand corrected on the statistics.
Someone said TS is no longer posting at FC? If so, I withdraw my objection to their links.
Ampersand wrote:
Sure. I’ve heard people casually argue that intoxication is a mitigating circumstance for almost every behavior under the sun. But that’s informal argument by lay people, and where is it written that they have to be consistent or have well-reasoned opinions?
In New Hampshire criminal law, voluntary intoxication is specifically an IMpermissible defense. As far as I know, in the U.S. that is generally the case, though states may vary. In other countries, I don’t know how they treat the issue.
That leaves available involuntary intoxication as a defense. It’s seldom invoked, because it’s not all that common for the perpetrator to be involuntarily intoxicated.
The victim, on the other hand, can be involuntarily intoxicated or incapacitated in any number of ways. A search on YouTube will turn up video tutorials in how to get someone more drunk than they think. One example: girl asks you for wine cooler. You fetch one, pop the top, take a swig, replace the swig with vodka or Everclear. If that happens twice, she thinks she’s had two doses, and she’s actually had four to six.
Certainly, even though she’s still conscious and able to consent, I would argue that sex in such a case is rape, because one party is deliberately impairing the other’s judgement.
On the other hand, there are scenarios where two people can be very drunk indeed, or just one very drunk, and there’s no rape. For instance, a happily married couple arranges for the kids to stay at the grandparents’ house for a weekend, and they drain a bottle or two while watching a movie together and, both quite drunk, they have sex.
Legally, in New Hampshire, it’s possible for both parties to be guilty of sexual assault on the other: two fifteen year-olds, both under the legal age of consent, have sex. However, grand juries are reluctant to charge in such cases, and juries reluctant to convict. In general.
(They can be reluctant to indict even in clear-cut cases. I once got a 21-year-old to put on paper that he had sex with his 15-year-old girlfriend on specific dates w, x, y, and z. She was pregnant as a result. The grand jury refused to indict. It was an eye-opener for me, and it took me awhile for me to come to terms with it. (Which I had to do, or go nuts, because there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.))
There is a phrase often used in criminal law: the totality of the circumstances. Things which are rape in one circumstance are not rape in another, even when they usually would be. See example about happily married couple who get drunk planning to have sex, and then have sex.
But these can be murky waters, and there do exist circumstances where people of good conscience can argue opposite sides of the question. Example: a happily married couple, who have pretty much never declined sex since they were partnered 20 years ago, and one night one of them kinda doesn’t feel like it, but could be persuaded, and the other one doses a drink with some vodka, and they have sex. Rape?
You’d have a hard time getting a jury to convict, certainly. It would be hard to get even an indictment.
But to convict you need proof beyond a reasonable doubt, and just because you can’t prove it in court doesn’t mean there wasn’t a crime.
Fortunately, most cases are far more clear-cut.
Grace
TS’s last blog post on Feminist Critics was at the end of August, and I don’t remember if he’s posted any comments since then. I also don’t remember him making a formal “I’m not posting any more” announcement, but he’s been pretty quiet nevertheless.
I’ve read those right-wing pieces and they’re ludicrous; all the same, I find that response unsatisfactory. Hate is hate. Under some circumstances, hate may be understandable (I hate bullies and people who deliberately speed up to close gaps in two-lane traffic) but it seems willfully blind to go further and declare one flavor righteous, while the other is frightening and taboo. For one thing, consider the association of some manifestations of “black nationalism” with anti-Semitism. Do African-Americans have special insight into Jewry and its supposed evils? Or is it, like white anti-Semitism, the product of flawed thinking in the context of culturally sanctioned xenophobia? (Full disclosure: I am Jewish. More importantly, I detest nationalism in all its forms.)
Tangential, but I want to make sure the OP sees it: More double standards, just for you Jeff Fecke! A GAP commercial that sells with possible rape, with Baby It’s Cold Outside: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hEJQbEYjRg
It’s playing on the original context of the song, but it’s still kind of weird that they’re selling clothing with it.
Doug S: probably a bit late to point this out now, but the “1 in 33” figure from the Department of Justice only counts men as having been raped if they were sexually penetrated. So, for example, Seth is very unlikely to count as a rape victim. (Ampersand also appears to be correct in stating that it doesn’t count women and men who were too drunk to consent.)
While this definition is in line with the law, it’s pretty useless for comparing male and female victimization rates. For example, women count as rape victims if someone uses force to perform oral sex on them without their consent, but men don’t. Likewise, a woman using force to have penis-in-vagina sex with an unconsenting man doesn’t count, but a man doing the same to a woman does.