You’d be surprised how many boys show up at university, and the one thing they are most looking forward to is the prospect of going to parties where girls get so drunk that they can barely speak, so that they can get laid. They don’t think of it as sexual assault, of course, and would be horrified if you described it as such. Hell, some of the GIRLS wouldn’t even describe it as such, sadly. This is why rape culture is so terrifying.
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And these are the young, impressionable adults in our population. What do they become next, and what do their descendants behave like?
When I were a lad, university seemed like a good way to get to a decent salary.
It seems so narrow to be so focused on shagging. It’s not the be all and end all, and even when I was 18-24, it didn’t seem that awfully important.
They become douchebags in bars with deep vee t-shirts. And probably go to law school (zing!).
Well, then you are clearly in the minority, if all of those college sex romp movies have taught me anything about society. 
Or, about American college life, at any rate.
So, wait a second… The guy doesn’t think it’s rape, and the girl doesn’t think it’s rape… So you’ve got two adults who engage in activity that they don’t think of as rape, and intentionally set out to have occur, regardless on legal “ability to consent” while drunk, you still have two adults who are engaging in activity that they intentionally set out to have occur… What precisely is the issue here? That people shouldn’t be so inhibited they need a day’s output of a brewery to have guilt free physical contact? Ok, with you there… but before you can put this in a rape category, doesn’t, somebody, like, ANY party to the actual action (not an uninvolved 3’rd party), have to object to the conduct in some fashion? Like, even if they were informed later and objected? Something? If everyone knows what happened and 100% doesn’t think it’s rape, (kind of implied by the “GIRLS wouldn’t describe it as such”) how is that going into rape? Bad life choices, certainly. Rape?
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I’m not talking about girls who go out and get drunk, but stay conscious, and engage in consensual (if not legally consensual) sex. I’m talking about girls who go out, get drunk, pass out (or are conscious but can barely speak), and then guys have sex with them while they’re passed out, and THOSE girls don’t think it’s rape, because they think it’s their fault that they got so drunk.
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So, I’m still untangling my thoughts on this, so, apologies if this isn’t 100% fully baked, but;
Don’t we, as individuals, get to decide when we’re going to consider ourselves the victim of a crime? Like, technically anytime someone bumps into me when it’s unwanted by me, it could be Battery, but, as an individual I get to decide if I regard it as some accident, or an assault, regardless on the outcomes of whatever belief others have should I pursue the matter, and regardless on the propriety of it happening at all, or the intent of the person doing it.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think people should be having intercourse with people who are passed out, or any activities otherwise fitting your description. It’s just that it seems like a fundamental concept of being an independent, free thinking adult that I get to decide for myself (and said women likewise get to decide for themselves) when I consider I’ve been wronged. Granted those opinions are influenced by society, and shaped by my upbringing, etc. But, part of it is all me, and how I decide to think.
This obviously doesn’t apply to giving someone factual information about an incident they were actually unaware of, or, didn’t see, etc. I’m just talking when a person, in full possession of the facts of what physically happened, decides they weren’t a victim, it seems… I don’t know, very off to me, to try to convince them they were. It seems like it impinges rather significantly on a pretty basic item of self determination. I look at it a bit like I look at folk who, when something bad happens, dismiss it as God’s will. The very idea infuriates me, that someone would accept something terrible happening to them due to some worshipped deity’s callous disregard or, whatever, but, as people, they get to decide that, and it just seems really shitty to disrespect that. And ultimately, I can’t say they’d be better off if I did convince them of the “truth”.
Hmmmm… Well, where this gets tricky is when someone else’s self determination is overly shaped by being dominated by a person/culture/religion/etc. If one determines that this shaping reaches the point of deformation, so that they don’t actually understand their best interests, one would be justified in stepping in and attempting to re-educate them as to what their actual best interests should be.
Admittedly, this is often associated with a can of worms.
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I understand where you’re coming from… But at what point do we try to step in (if we reasonably can) to prevent the perpetrator from committing their crime against somebody else who, perhaps, doesn’t feel as non-victimized as the first victim? If we had stepped in when the first person was victimized, we could have prevented that future heartbreak. The same sort of situation applies in domestic abuse situations - partners refuse to press charges because they feel they brought it on themselves, provoked the attack, they deserved it, whatever. That doesn’t mean that no crime occurred, and IMO it’s generally a net benefit to society to prevent that criminal from doing it again.
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Well, you’re sort of assuming the conclusion there. Which is kind of the point I was making. Can you have a perpetrator or a crime if the “victim” doesn’t think they’re anything of the sort?
So, let’s assume you’re right, that it should be considered a crime regardless of the views of the person you consider the victim. We recently had a pretty good example, that NFL player who’s wife, who married him AFTER the incident that caused the uproar actually occurred, who came out and decried the response of the public and NFL. Now, she didn’t comment, or, I didn’t see any comments from her, directly to if she considered it criminal, however, it was clear that she wasn’t appreciative of the attempts to “help” that resulted in an unquestionable financial penalty for her and her family, and it’s rather dubious if matters were improved for her in other aspects of her life.
So, what you’re saying by your comment is, screw the views or actual costs or benefits, either objective or in her subjective view, of the purported victim, we know better, both for her, as well as for society at large?
I think this might be some of those worms @ChuckV alluded to.
It just seems a huge gulf between making information available on, say, what is felt to be acceptable sexual or domestic conduct, and letting those who might be victims make their own judgements, compared to forcibly educating or even engaging in some kind of persecutive action against the perpetrator over the objection of the victim.
What it comes down to is, even if you convince someone that they were a victim when they previously did not believe so, have you actually, objectively improved their lot, or, have you just made yourself feel better? I can easily see that connecting to the old Trollycar dilemma. But in this case, you’re actively asserting your worldview over the worldview of someone else in order to “save” them.
When does a murder victim get to consider themselves the victim of a crime?
Can you have a perpetrator or a crime if the “victim” doesn’t think they’re anything of the sort?
How about you’re on vacation, your house is burgled, and you don’t know for a month.
Basically, you may not consider yourself a victim, but society has criminal laws to define criminality and prosecute it.
Every so often in the news you read about therapists ‘hypnotising’ people then touching them inappropriately.
The issue is this: if you allow a crack in the door, it swings all the way open. If you prevent someone who feels they’ve been violated from prosecuting, or the police from prosecuting, on the basis they were drunk, then just watch how the culture evolves to forcing people to be drunk, and the arguments centre around that, but at one remove from rape, thus diminishing the apparent consequences, obscuring them in a fog of legalistic rubbish.
What if your drink was spiked, and you believed you were consenting, but it can be medically demonstrated you were incapable of expressing dissent?
The whole idea here is to contain predatory behaviour and take a few steps back to some kind of civil culture, rather than sliding forward into god knows what oblivious future.
Change is constant. Which way it goes, is up to us.
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Oh come now. Society guessing/assuming that, generally speaking, folks probably would prefer not to be killed is a far cry from overruling the ACTUAL, stated and acted upon preferences of a still living person.
Here in the UK we have a rarely used, but valid, rebuttal to the presumed consent of a signature on a contract: ‘non es factum’ - not my consent. It covers the cases where the blind aunty is told she’s signing the post office receipt, but actually yielding her hoard of treasures.
The point is - if consent is in any way tainted, it does not exist.
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My point is - just because THAT victim doesn’t consider themselves a victim (due to whatever fucked up reasoning they have in their head), doesn’t mean that they are actually NOT a victim. When somebody is a rapist, and their rape victims don’t come out due to feeling like they are at fault, that they somehow “asked for it”, that’s no excuse to let their rapist go on to continue raping other people. Period.
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Please go back up and read where this particular fork derived from. And yes, I’m well aware that the train has somewhat departed on-topic station, would be more than willing to take this to a different thread.
What you’ll want to specifically note was I was responding to the fact that someone upthread noted it was scary that the women didn’t think it was rape. So, this was explicitly NOT about folk who feel they were violated who were prevented, either due to lack of information, or some other obstruction, from prosecuting. So, that puts your above quoted examples in another category entirely.
The later note about a spiked drink is a little closer, but, still I think in the category of not having all the info.
Well, what do you propose ought be done about it? Investigate and prosecute despite the wishes of this victim? Drag them through the process of being a criminal defendant kicking and screaming? Force them to be reeducated until they see things your way?
That may make you or I feel better, it might make society feel better. But, is that really a defensible solution?
So the alternative is to let a rapist keep raping people until we find somebody who doesn’t think they deserved it for some stupid reason? The solution is to teach women that no, they did NOT deserve to be raped, despite the fact that they were wearing provocative clothing/had too much to drink/walked down a dark alley they shouldn’t have walked down/said yes initially but changed their mind/whatever other stupid societal reason we use to blame rape victims. Rape is a nasty crime, and very often leads to a he said/she said situation, but that doesn’t mean we should just fucking give up.
As for forcing women to testify against their attackers? That’s already happening. It’s a highly contentious issue. On the one hand, going through a rape trial is horrific for a rape victim. On the other hand, you can’t just let rapists continue to rape people over and over because the trial happens to be traumatic for the victim. I frankly don’t know where I stand on the issue, and I don’t have a better alternative.
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No, actually. It’s the district or state’s attorney’s office that decides whether or not to move forward on charges, not the victim. They can even subpoena the victim to testify if need be. Obviously, in many/most cases if the victim doesn’t want the exposure of trial it would be much harder to get a conviction without their (willing) testimony, but it really isn’t up to the victim.
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But this is really, really simple.
If you cannot acknowledge that lack of consent is rape, or that consent can be tainted in, at the very least, the moral sense, then you’re in the spectrum that really doesn’t mind a little bit of non-consensual activity.
Do you not see the issue must be defined as black and white, otherwise you get tax code complications about it all?
Here’s a simple test. Do you have kids? A sister? Where on the spectrum of activity, from brutal beatings and force, through to charming caddish persuasion, is the line you draw where your own kith and kin can be copulated with, over which you have doubts about the merit of the activity?
The point is a kind of balancing act. Preventing harm to others is a duty we all have in society. The law is set up partially to prevent situations arising where individuals take matters into their own soon-to-be-bloody hands - it’s what humans do when adequately frustrated.
No means no; a drunken inability to say no means no; a concerned silence in fear of any form of consequence isn’t a yes; and a lack of yes is lack of consent.
By switching the legal and societal view to requiring a positive, active, alert and permission-providing yes, you avoid a heap of trouble, and keep everyone safer.
So, where do you sit on the spectrum? I’m sensing you’re alive to the issue, so I want to get a feel, with precision, for what you find permissible.
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The state is the agrieved party. It feels violated because its monopoly on violence was infringed upon.
Very little with human interpersonal relationships is “Really really simple”
Well, it depends on WHICH of the multiple issues that have gone back and forth here. Is clear denial of consent a black and white issue (aka, “No means No”), Yup, very much so. Societal balancing in terms of how to prosecute crimes in such a way as to not perpetrate more harm than is prevented? That’s about as gray and murky as can be, and has been a shifting landscape for hundreds of years, even to the point where it’s at times it was questioned what the goal of Law should even be.
The former, and given that info, perhaps unsurprisingly a wife. I have a daughter, and I also have a son, and, this issue affects him just as much as my wife and daughter. These questions are things to figure out for everyone, and impact all, not just women. As to your follow on statement, what I want personally for those I’m emotionally connected to is entirely different, and SHOULD be entirely different, to how society goes about the administration of justice, setting of rules, etc.
It’s almost entirely certain that both my son and my daughter will have interactions with other human beings that will cause them sorrow and pain. And as a father, That will cause ME pain. And I won’t be very happy with those that are the source of that. At all. That does not mean that the activities should either A)Be illegal, or B) if illegal, have some reduced burden of proof. Nor should society or especially the justice system react like a loved one to a supposed victim does.
No, No, double No. We have a duty to be civil to others, to avoid harming others ourselves, but, a duty to prevent all harm? Not at all. Not as ordinary members, and definitely not as a function of government, especially the law. The second law gets into trying to PREVENT crimes, we get into all sorts of murky and treacherous waters. The closest law should be involved in preventing crime would be perhaps stopping a crime in progress, or, that was imminent. But part of freedom is, ultimately the freedom for people to fuck up, sometimes criminally, and, if things are working well, face consequences for that. As members of a free society, one of the costs we bear is that sometimes bad things will happen to us, and the best that can be done is some action later to punish the source.
I think I’ve responded to the “keep everyone safer” bit above, but, on the permission-providing yes bit, Come now. Human courtship is not a computer communications protocol. There are no threeway handshakes and explicit ACK and NAK responses or discreet response codes for each individual action in a relationship, or in a single encounter, or as has even been suggested, each individual discrete action in an encounter, sexual or otherwise. The question of if it would keep everyone safer is more or less irrelevant; virtually no human being actually engages in courtship in that fashion, and to even attempt to do so, let alone suggest that it’s the expectation or the norm would be viewed as extremely bizarre by almost any in our larger culture. If you want that, you’ve got a long way to go before it’s anything besides a rarity and a quirk, let alone common or especially a norm and expectation. As to the legal requirement, well, if it’s not the societal expectation, then it DEFINITELY has no business being the legal expectation.
So, ultimately, as to your “Spectrum”, I think the issue here is, I’m talking about another continuum entirely. There are simply things that are too gray for society to punish, or, cannot be proven to satisfaction even if the conduct itself is clearly unacceptable if true. So, the point I’m making isn’t that you or I are on the right or wrong point of the spectrum, or what points those might be, rather, that the law must set a bar high on purpose, so that all are clearly on notice, and that violations are clearly proven to be true. It’s very tempting to do an end run, or water down, those limits, when it’s a very emotionally charged issue or incident. But those are the times when the limits and restriction do the most good, and are the most important, in safeguarding us from our worst instincts.
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