a male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself, and then the guy ripped apart clothing and forcefully inserted himself, fending off or forcefully countering (perhaps by preemptive hitting to weaken her) her attempts at defense (if any by that point) while just painfully (for her) enjoying his forced sex, control, cruelty, dominance and the humiliation / despair of his victim?
One major problem with communication on this issue is that the quoted text is not how sexual assault tends to appear in the real world. If that’s the definition of rape or sexual assault, then what happened in Steubenville wasn’t rape or sexual assault. (Just to be clear, I think what happened in Steubenville deserves to be criminalized as sexual assault).
Here is one analysis of the sociological research on rape. In brief, in a survey of ~ 1800 college students, 6% said yes to questions like:
Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?
63% of the folks who said yes to those questions admitted to having done it more than once. The mean for that group was 5.8 incidents (median of 3, so some big outliers are skewing the mean).
In a study of ~ 1100 naval enlistees, 13% said yes to a similar question, with 71% of the yes-population admitting multiple incidents. In that research, 61% of all the incidents were based on intoxication alone, with no threat of force.
That looks nothing like “male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself.” So if that’s what you are looking to prevent, you aren’t trying to prevent the thing that seems to be happening.
In short, “He was drunk, she was drunk” sex is a hard problem for policies based on consent and capacity to consent. But it looks very little like “He waited until she was drunk, then took her somewhere private, and had sex with her, knowing that she wouldn’t have said yes if she were sober. And he attended the event planning or hoping to do that to some woman.”
One major problem with communication on this issue is that the quoted text is not how sexual assault tends to appear in the real world. If that’s the definition of rape or sexual assault, then what happened in Steubenville wasn’t rape or sexual assault. (Just to be clear, I think what happened in Steubenville deserves to be criminalized as sexual assault).
This is, in fact, one of my points. People sometimes gloss over the differences between various points in the spectrum, and speak with connotations as if all forms of rape were exactly as horrible and utility-destroying as the one I described. My nitpick is that this should be avoided. My desire is that people pay more attention to avoiding this error.
In brief, in a survey of ~ 1800 college students, 6% said yes to questions like:
I’m surprised, and not in that direction. 6% seems unusually low if taken at face value. Adjusting for the fact that this is a self-reporting survey, sure, that matches my priors (even though that still feels a bit low, but might be a memory / bias thing). The military stats also somewhat fit within the bounds of my priors, though I’ll update a bit on this because I had very little specific information.
I may have to go read the link and related research later, since it’s considered a “blog” and blocked by the network I’m currently using.
That looks nothing like “male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself.” So if that’s what you are looking to prevent, you aren’t trying to prevent the thing that seems to be happening.
I’m not specifically suggesting anything to prevent, nor proposing any “rape” redefinitions, nor pointing towards any kind of particular policy (especially not legal or society-wide). I’m not sure how to interpret this part.
I don’t know what I did wrong. I’m making a comment about the way people (or LWers specifically) talk about sexual abuse, specifically about the way they conflate various meanings, specific actions, and vastly different ranges of personal experiences and internal monologues for both the victims and the abusers, and often lump everything into one big scary word.
I want to unpack that big scary word because I think we can have more meaningful discussion and less noise if we speak about experiences and actions, rather than an abstract “event” that can include a wide range of different (usually undesirable) activities.
Perhaps also importantly, I believe that the fact that said scary word is “rape” should not make the whole thing suddenly more misogynistic, evil, bad, improper, and worth condemning than if I wanted the same thing about the word “politics” or “theft”.
I didn’t downvote. Sexual assault certainly is a spectrum. But your two examples are roughly like saying:
There are two likely possibilities. First, DARE is right about everything. Second, drug abuse is not a serious problem in this country.
Suppose I have a strong prior that one doesn’t think the second prong is true. Then I should adjust my estimate that one is very confused about drug abuse significantly upward (because DARE is nonsense).
The interventions likely to reduce stranger rape are unlikely to effect skeevy rape. Since skeevy rape is overwhelmingly more common (the linked research says that no one described using force on a stranger), that’s where we should focus the discussion.
For the record, before reading your comment I interpreted the two examples as “here are two extremes, please be more specific about where on this spectrum what you’re describing falls”, rather than “which of this two was it?”
(This is not to contradict your critique. On re-reading the original text I can see it’s not explicitly saying either, I just interpreted differently. I only mean to make known to both the poster and you that (what I assume was) his intent was not opaque to all readers.)
Fair enough. I think the best form of my critique is something like:
On a scale of 1 to 100, where 1 is DaFranker’s first example, and 100 is DaFranker’s second example, most rapes are about a 10 - and incidents below 5 are not generally illegal. Rapes rated 80 or greater are so uncommon as to be not worth discussing when the topic is rape, considering both absolute numbers and relative frequency compared to rapes generally. Much like serial killers with > 10 kills are not worth discussing when the topic is homicide.
At that point, the endpoints selected seem more likely to derail the discussion into unproductive areas rather than talking about sexual assault as it actually occurs.
Aha. This makes some things clearer for me. Perhaps I can also make some things clearer about my thought process:
The intent behind those two specific examples was to give something that seems only a little bit less bad than Judge McJudgington’s average rape case, and then give something utterly horrible that can fight for headlines with Jack The Ripper.
My motive for this was that when Judge McJudgington’s (really) average rape case (not the one I gave as example) makes the headlines, people thinkof the second example and go all indignant and want the rapist to be punished more than a murderer. Many people on the internets have this model of what “rape” is that matches the extreme example. However, I’ve also noticed that many (feminists and anti-male-apologists seem to come up more often here) others have for model of “rape” the first example, and anything that goes above that they will decry “rape and torture!” in the same way the previous category of people get enraged at the extreme case.
In all those situations, the headline article for Judge McJudgington’s case will cater to both of these groups and try to appeal to their emotions. Thus the entire spectrum, from both endpoints, gets blurred into a single word—“rape”.
That is why I chose those examples. They’re the two endpoints where, from my observations, the entire spectrum of the word “rape” get blurred into one when a large representative group talks about it (or a headline news article gets written).
My motive for this was that when Judge McJudgington’s (really) average rape case (not the one I gave as example) makes the headlines, people thinkof the second example and go all indignant and want the rapist to be punished more than a murderer.
I agree that this dynamic occurs and is extremely irrational. I just think the better solution is to avoid talking about extreme-rape as if it is something that actually occurs.
Many feminists find this dynamic very troubling. When they want to talk about rare prevention, people start talking about how to prevent extreme-rape instead of how to prevent average-rape. Thus, those feminists that I find worth reading (like the pieceI linked) tend to sharply challenge the assertion that extreme-rape occurs with enough frequency to deserve being the focus of attention (or receive any attention at all).
Unfortunately, most discussion about rape turns quickly into advice that is likely (1) already known to any person not currently living under a rock, (2) not a highly effective intervention, and (3) very judgmental. E.g. “Don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party.” (1) Not exactly new advice to the listener (2) Doesn’t address the social context about other people at the party accepting or endorsing the consequences of skeezy sex (3) Implicitly, is quite judgmental about women even being at parties.
Unfortunately, most discussion about rape turns quickly into advice that is likely … (3) very judgmental. E.g. “Don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party.”
(3) Implicitly, is quite judgmental about women even being at parties.
There is a point where this kind of re-framing and attribution of intent goes beyond ridiculous and becomes outright dangerous. The advice “Don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party” is necessary wisdom for people living in the world that is. The same applies to the related personal security knowledge “Don’t walk alone at night in a dark alley” (Well, get a cab, you moron! And on the way, if a stranger offers you candy, don’t get in the van!.
It would be nice if the world was one in which it was not possible for people to have bad things happen to them. But we don’t live in that world. Yet there is a pervasive notion that acknowledging risks and taking precautions is in some way endorsing the need for them. Anyone who tells you to act as if the world is as it should be instead of how it is (on pain of being stigmatised as ‘judgemental’) is acting as an enemy, not an ally—they are sabotaging you.
(1) Not exactly new advice to the listener
That’s great. The cultural transfer of life skills is working as intended. Most instances where things like “look both ways before crossing the road” and “don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party” are shared should be redundant.
(3) Implicitly, is quite judgmental about women even being at parties.
Wait, so when my mother was telling me this when I was 15, it was implicitly judgmental about women being at parties? (ftr: I’m male and always have been.)
I think the inference here is way too liberal and there’s way too much Find-The-Mysogyny being applied here. The advice is good, and if it happens to be even more important for women because they have the additional possible negative consequence of getting raped (or rather, much higher probability, since men can and do get raped at parties in rare occasions), then all the better for it to be said and applied.
Certain contexts may or may not make certain phrases like that one judgmental, and your experience may or may not show that such contexts usually do so for this particular phrase… but they don’t in my experience.
None of this was aimed as a rebuke to your main point that they can be extremely judgmental.
Your mother told you not to accept drinks from strangers at parties? Do you recall her rationale?
If there were no such chemical as a roofie, would the no-stranger-drinks rule at parties be a good idea?
Edit: Yes, it would be a better if men and women received the instruction equally, instead of the suggestion being directed predominantly towards women.
[the suggestion] was implicitly judgmental about women being at parties?
No, it was implicitly judgmental about the listener being at parties (i.e. your mother was expressing some amount of preference that you not go).
No, it was implicitly judgmental about the listener being at parties (i.e. your mother was expressing some amount of preference that you not go).
This is explicitly contrary to her explicit encouragement that I go to parties more when I was young. I didn’t really go out very often at all.
Your mother told you not to accept drinks from strangers at parties? Do you recall her rationale?
Yes. No. As far as I can recall/tell, it was a simple precaution against getting drugged or poisoned or just getting sick from drinking from a glass that a prankster or otherwise ill-intentioned stranger might have put something in, or even from just getting sick from drinking from a glass that a stranger has also drank from or spit in or whatever.
If there were no such chemical as a roofie, would the no-stranger-drinks rule at parties be a good idea?
I don’t understand the relevance / what you mean. If you mean if there were no harmful drugs or other bad stuff that could be invisibly inserted in drinks, then not particularly (the above reasons would still be valid, but not really worth having such a strong admonition for).
But this feels like asking “If physics never allowed car accidents, would the always-wear-a-seatbelt rule in cars be a good idea?”
It would be a defense if the crowd showed up to a getting shot party (this is an exaggeration). There’s a reasonable argument to be made that people show up to parties expecting to drink and do things they wouldn’t usually do except when drunk. That makes it a lot less sinister for someone to plan on going to a party and getting drunk and having sex with a drunk girl, if the social assumption is that’s what most people are going to the party for in the first place.
I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident it exists. I’m sure someone CAN drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating sex, and in fact most people probably don’t get laid. But I also think it’s not as immoral to go to a frat party expecting and planning on hooking up with a drunk person, as it is to rape someone.
Even if that person intended to have drunk sex, it doesn’t mean that they intended to have it with you specifically. And anyway, I doubt that many people who intend to have drunk sex also intend to have it while drunk enough to be in a state of consciousness so much diminished that they are unable to consent.
My impression is that both sides in the argument are using the level of drunkness which supports their point.
The people who don’t want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are moderately drunk, who are more likely to say choose sex than they would be sober, and who chose to get that drunk because they want to have sex but otherwise wouldn’t.
The people who do want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are very drunk—unconscious or barely able to mumble and make vague gestures.
Neither side is entirely wrong-headed, though my sympathies are with the second group, since it’s pretty common for people to drink to the point of incapacitation.
On the other hand, rules becoming much stricter than necessary happens too.
My impression is that both sides in the argument are using the level of drunkness which supports their point.
Yes; I also suspect many of them don’t even realize it—simply, the typical example of a drunk person is someone who deliberately drinks in order to lower their inhibitions in the minds of the first group, but in the minds of the second group it’s a passed-out person, due to the different experiences of the two groups and generalizing from one example.
(This is an example of a more general pattern, about which I’ve been thinking of writing a top-level post but kept putting that off.)
it’s pretty common for people to drink to the point of incapacitation
I was going to say “is it?”, then I remembered that, according to this article (discussed on OB before BTW), I am from an “integrated” culture and you’re from an “ambivalent” one.
I’ve encountered people who want drunkenness to be non-consent who explicitly reject the reasoning in your second example; they want any reduced capacity to make decisions to render consent invalid. (And I’ve seen some very convoluted logic about passive versus aggressive sexual behavior justifying why it’s still rape when the man has also been drinking from a couple of them.)
(The inability to strawman feminism is really bizarre. It’s possible to strawman individual feminists, but for the ideology as a whole, no matter how bizarre a position you can think up, there’s somebody that actually holds that belief, and more insists it is proper feminist thought, and who probably also insists that anybody who doesn’t agree isn’t a proper feminist. And the craziest also tend to be the loudest; Jezebel, for instance.)
That sounds like a way too broad category to be useful. Most of the time there will be something or another that negatively affects my mental faculties.
The ability to consent varies continuously with intoxication level, hence it could be technically argued that a gray area exists. But the effect seems quite non-linear, with a sharp transition. As a rule of thumb I would say that if somebody is able to walk on their own then they can consent, otherwise they can’t.
I suppose there are cases when somebody first consents, or reasonably appears to consent, then they fall unconscious during the act, then they wake up and OMG I WAS RAPED!!!11ONE1!! This type of “accidental rape” is possible, but I doubt it’s common: evidence suggests that the majority of rapes, including those enabled by victim intoxication, are committed by a small proportion of men who are serial rapists and often have other patterns of antisocial behaviors. These people typically understand that their behaviors violate laws and social norms, yet they do it anyway because they don’t care and believe (often correctly) that they can get away with it.
Yes, my point was that walking on your own has at least one well-known exception, and so of course no one would say that walking is any more than a fallible piece of evidence, a heuristic, a relatively reliable guide, a rule of thumb. You rephrasing it implied skepticism that it was ever fallible, so I brought up the exception (and particularly appropriate, note the mention of sex in the lede of the link).
As I said, there is some gray area. Some people can do things they later regret during alcoholic blackouts, but it doesn’t mean that they are completely incapable to exercise judgement in these circumstances. In fact, in most cases they would be still considered legally responsable for their actions.
Yep. Kill somebody, you’re still held wholly responsible. Consent to sex, on the other hand, is far too serious a matter.
My general rule of thumb is thus: If you inebriate yourself, you’re responsible for everything you do under the influence of alcohol, including consent. Your responsibility for your actions precludes actions intended to deny your own responsibility.
Which is not to say that sex with an unconscious person isn’t rape; I limit myself strictly to those cases where the person does in fact give consent.
I don’t necessarily agree. It’s dangerous if there’s a grey zone and all parties sort of sidle into it and bad stuff happens, but I think it’s not bad to have a subset of parties for this purpose. A more socially acceptable and accessible version of play parties :)
If the norms were better articulated people could more clearly consent or opt out, but as it is I’d say it’s easier to treat drinking as its own thing and create such parties from scratch if you must have them.
Just to be clear I also find what happened in Steubenville unacceptable, then again I find a lot of sex related things unacceptable that you probably don’t.
Care to explain why [the Steubenville perpetrators should be convicted criminals]?
Their actions weren’t consensual among all the participants. The places in law or morality where non-consensual acts between private citizens are allowed are few and far between.
I’m aware of your hypothetical about high caste people wanting a huge physical space from lower caste people. That’s not about consent—that’s about what acts society requires consent to perform. Physical contact is a pretty clear line.
Whether it was “rape” depends on vagaries in the definitions in Ohio’s criminal code. That’s why I’m talking about the category of sexual assault.
That’s not about consent—that’s about what acts society requires consent to perform. Physical contact is a pretty clear line.
Except that’s not where society actually draws the line. For example, there are people who for religious reason don’t what what to be touched by any member of the opposite sex who isn’t a relative or spouse. Yet we don’t demand consent before touching in social situations even though some people might object to being touched.
Edit: also why that particular Schelling point? The history of attitudes towards sex over the past century is a series of Schelling points regulating what is or is not acceptable sex getting overturned. Why, shouldn’t this one also be overturned?
For example, there are people who for religious reason don’t what what to be touched by any member of the opposite sex who isn’t a relative or spouse. Yet we don’t demand consent before touching in social situations even though some people might object to being touched.
The law surely does require consent. Implied-consent-from-social-context is different from overriding non-consent.
Not obvious given that the Steubenville victim didn’t even know about it and thus couldn’t have suffered trauma until she found out about it several days later.
Given how the perpetrators acted, it was virtually certain the victim would find out. Parading her around and bragging about what they’d done might not have been done with the purpose of causing her to find out or humiliate her. But it certainly was an easily predictable consequence.
One major problem with communication on this issue is that the quoted text is not how sexual assault tends to appear in the real world. If that’s the definition of rape or sexual assault, then what happened in Steubenville wasn’t rape or sexual assault. (Just to be clear, I think what happened in Steubenville deserves to be criminalized as sexual assault).
Here is one analysis of the sociological research on rape. In brief, in a survey of ~ 1800 college students, 6% said yes to questions like:
63% of the folks who said yes to those questions admitted to having done it more than once. The mean for that group was 5.8 incidents (median of 3, so some big outliers are skewing the mean).
In a study of ~ 1100 naval enlistees, 13% said yes to a similar question, with 71% of the yes-population admitting multiple incidents. In that research, 61% of all the incidents were based on intoxication alone, with no threat of force.
That looks nothing like “male punched a female down to the floor or otherwise used physical violence until the female had no more ability to defend herself.” So if that’s what you are looking to prevent, you aren’t trying to prevent the thing that seems to be happening.
In short, “He was drunk, she was drunk” sex is a hard problem for policies based on consent and capacity to consent. But it looks very little like “He waited until she was drunk, then took her somewhere private, and had sex with her, knowing that she wouldn’t have said yes if she were sober. And he attended the event planning or hoping to do that to some woman.”
I feel like I’m being read rather uncharitably.
This is, in fact, one of my points. People sometimes gloss over the differences between various points in the spectrum, and speak with connotations as if all forms of rape were exactly as horrible and utility-destroying as the one I described. My nitpick is that this should be avoided. My desire is that people pay more attention to avoiding this error.
I’m surprised, and not in that direction. 6% seems unusually low if taken at face value. Adjusting for the fact that this is a self-reporting survey, sure, that matches my priors (even though that still feels a bit low, but might be a memory / bias thing). The military stats also somewhat fit within the bounds of my priors, though I’ll update a bit on this because I had very little specific information.
I may have to go read the link and related research later, since it’s considered a “blog” and blocked by the network I’m currently using.
I’m not specifically suggesting anything to prevent, nor proposing any “rape” redefinitions, nor pointing towards any kind of particular policy (especially not legal or society-wide). I’m not sure how to interpret this part.
I don’t know what I did wrong. I’m making a comment about the way people (or LWers specifically) talk about sexual abuse, specifically about the way they conflate various meanings, specific actions, and vastly different ranges of personal experiences and internal monologues for both the victims and the abusers, and often lump everything into one big scary word.
I want to unpack that big scary word because I think we can have more meaningful discussion and less noise if we speak about experiences and actions, rather than an abstract “event” that can include a wide range of different (usually undesirable) activities.
Perhaps also importantly, I believe that the fact that said scary word is “rape” should not make the whole thing suddenly more misogynistic, evil, bad, improper, and worth condemning than if I wanted the same thing about the word “politics” or “theft”.
I didn’t downvote. Sexual assault certainly is a spectrum. But your two examples are roughly like saying:
Suppose I have a strong prior that one doesn’t think the second prong is true. Then I should adjust my estimate that one is very confused about drug abuse significantly upward (because DARE is nonsense).
The interventions likely to reduce stranger rape are unlikely to effect skeevy rape. Since skeevy rape is overwhelmingly more common (the linked research says that no one described using force on a stranger), that’s where we should focus the discussion.
For the record, before reading your comment I interpreted the two examples as “here are two extremes, please be more specific about where on this spectrum what you’re describing falls”, rather than “which of this two was it?”
(This is not to contradict your critique. On re-reading the original text I can see it’s not explicitly saying either, I just interpreted differently. I only mean to make known to both the poster and you that (what I assume was) his intent was not opaque to all readers.)
Fair enough. I think the best form of my critique is something like:
Aha. This makes some things clearer for me. Perhaps I can also make some things clearer about my thought process:
The intent behind those two specific examples was to give something that seems only a little bit less bad than Judge McJudgington’s average rape case, and then give something utterly horrible that can fight for headlines with Jack The Ripper.
My motive for this was that when Judge McJudgington’s (really) average rape case (not the one I gave as example) makes the headlines, people thinkof the second example and go all indignant and want the rapist to be punished more than a murderer. Many people on the internets have this model of what “rape” is that matches the extreme example. However, I’ve also noticed that many (feminists and anti-male-apologists seem to come up more often here) others have for model of “rape” the first example, and anything that goes above that they will decry “rape and torture!” in the same way the previous category of people get enraged at the extreme case.
In all those situations, the headline article for Judge McJudgington’s case will cater to both of these groups and try to appeal to their emotions. Thus the entire spectrum, from both endpoints, gets blurred into a single word—“rape”.
That is why I chose those examples. They’re the two endpoints where, from my observations, the entire spectrum of the word “rape” get blurred into one when a large representative group talks about it (or a headline news article gets written).
I agree that this dynamic occurs and is extremely irrational. I just think the better solution is to avoid talking about extreme-rape as if it is something that actually occurs.
Many feminists find this dynamic very troubling. When they want to talk about rare prevention, people start talking about how to prevent extreme-rape instead of how to prevent average-rape. Thus, those feminists that I find worth reading (like the piece I linked) tend to sharply challenge the assertion that extreme-rape occurs with enough frequency to deserve being the focus of attention (or receive any attention at all).
Unfortunately, most discussion about rape turns quickly into advice that is likely (1) already known to any person not currently living under a rock, (2) not a highly effective intervention, and (3) very judgmental. E.g. “Don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party.”
(1) Not exactly new advice to the listener
(2) Doesn’t address the social context about other people at the party accepting or endorsing the consequences of skeezy sex
(3) Implicitly, is quite judgmental about women even being at parties.
There is a point where this kind of re-framing and attribution of intent goes beyond ridiculous and becomes outright dangerous. The advice “Don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party” is necessary wisdom for people living in the world that is. The same applies to the related personal security knowledge “Don’t walk alone at night in a dark alley” (Well, get a cab, you moron! And on the way, if a stranger offers you candy, don’t get in the van!.
It would be nice if the world was one in which it was not possible for people to have bad things happen to them. But we don’t live in that world. Yet there is a pervasive notion that acknowledging risks and taking precautions is in some way endorsing the need for them. Anyone who tells you to act as if the world is as it should be instead of how it is (on pain of being stigmatised as ‘judgemental’) is acting as an enemy, not an ally—they are sabotaging you.
That’s great. The cultural transfer of life skills is working as intended. Most instances where things like “look both ways before crossing the road” and “don’t accept drinks from a stranger at a party” are shared should be redundant.
Wait, so when my mother was telling me this when I was 15, it was implicitly judgmental about women being at parties? (ftr: I’m male and always have been.)
I think the inference here is way too liberal and there’s way too much Find-The-Mysogyny being applied here. The advice is good, and if it happens to be even more important for women because they have the additional possible negative consequence of getting raped (or rather, much higher probability, since men can and do get raped at parties in rare occasions), then all the better for it to be said and applied.
Certain contexts may or may not make certain phrases like that one judgmental, and your experience may or may not show that such contexts usually do so for this particular phrase… but they don’t in my experience.
None of this was aimed as a rebuke to your main point that they can be extremely judgmental.
Your mother told you not to accept drinks from strangers at parties? Do you recall her rationale?
If there were no such chemical as a roofie, would the no-stranger-drinks rule at parties be a good idea?
Edit: Yes, it would be a better if men and women received the instruction equally, instead of the suggestion being directed predominantly towards women.
No, it was implicitly judgmental about the listener being at parties (i.e. your mother was expressing some amount of preference that you not go).
This is explicitly contrary to her explicit encouragement that I go to parties more when I was young. I didn’t really go out very often at all.
Yes. No. As far as I can recall/tell, it was a simple precaution against getting drugged or poisoned or just getting sick from drinking from a glass that a prankster or otherwise ill-intentioned stranger might have put something in, or even from just getting sick from drinking from a glass that a stranger has also drank from or spit in or whatever.
I don’t understand the relevance / what you mean. If you mean if there were no harmful drugs or other bad stuff that could be invisibly inserted in drinks, then not particularly (the above reasons would still be valid, but not really worth having such a strong admonition for).
But this feels like asking “If physics never allowed car accidents, would the always-wear-a-seatbelt rule in cars be a good idea?”
Ozy Frantz tried to remedy that on zir blog.
Isn’t the inverse there: “She attended a party, planning to get drunk and sleep with some guy who she wouldn’t sleep with if she was sober”?
Where’s the consent issue? She made a decision when she was sober and had capacity to make decisions.
If you point a gun into a crowd and fire, it’s no defense to say to you didn’t intend to kill whoever was unlucky enough to get hit.
It would be a defense if the crowd showed up to a getting shot party (this is an exaggeration). There’s a reasonable argument to be made that people show up to parties expecting to drink and do things they wouldn’t usually do except when drunk. That makes it a lot less sinister for someone to plan on going to a party and getting drunk and having sex with a drunk girl, if the social assumption is that’s what most people are going to the party for in the first place.
Where did that social assumption come from? Can’t someone drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating having sex?
I don’t know, but I’m pretty confident it exists. I’m sure someone CAN drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating sex, and in fact most people probably don’t get laid. But I also think it’s not as immoral to go to a frat party expecting and planning on hooking up with a drunk person, as it is to rape someone.
Even if that person intended to have drunk sex, it doesn’t mean that they intended to have it with you specifically. And anyway, I doubt that many people who intend to have drunk sex also intend to have it while drunk enough to be in a state of consciousness so much diminished that they are unable to consent.
My impression is that both sides in the argument are using the level of drunkness which supports their point.
The people who don’t want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are moderately drunk, who are more likely to say choose sex than they would be sober, and who chose to get that drunk because they want to have sex but otherwise wouldn’t.
The people who do want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are very drunk—unconscious or barely able to mumble and make vague gestures.
Neither side is entirely wrong-headed, though my sympathies are with the second group, since it’s pretty common for people to drink to the point of incapacitation.
On the other hand, rules becoming much stricter than necessary happens too.
Yes; I also suspect many of them don’t even realize it—simply, the typical example of a drunk person is someone who deliberately drinks in order to lower their inhibitions in the minds of the first group, but in the minds of the second group it’s a passed-out person, due to the different experiences of the two groups and generalizing from one example.
(This is an example of a more general pattern, about which I’ve been thinking of writing a top-level post but kept putting that off.)
I was going to say “is it?”, then I remembered that, according to this article (discussed on OB before BTW), I am from an “integrated” culture and you’re from an “ambivalent” one.
I’ve encountered people who want drunkenness to be non-consent who explicitly reject the reasoning in your second example; they want any reduced capacity to make decisions to render consent invalid. (And I’ve seen some very convoluted logic about passive versus aggressive sexual behavior justifying why it’s still rape when the man has also been drinking from a couple of them.)
(The inability to strawman feminism is really bizarre. It’s possible to strawman individual feminists, but for the ideology as a whole, no matter how bizarre a position you can think up, there’s somebody that actually holds that belief, and more insists it is proper feminist thought, and who probably also insists that anybody who doesn’t agree isn’t a proper feminist. And the craziest also tend to be the loudest; Jezebel, for instance.)
That sounds like a way too broad category to be useful. Most of the time there will be something or another that negatively affects my mental faculties.
The ability to consent varies continuously with intoxication level, hence it could be technically argued that a gray area exists. But the effect seems quite non-linear, with a sharp transition. As a rule of thumb I would say that if somebody is able to walk on their own then they can consent, otherwise they can’t.
I suppose there are cases when somebody first consents, or reasonably appears to consent, then they fall unconscious during the act, then they wake up and OMG I WAS RAPED!!!11ONE1!!
This type of “accidental rape” is possible, but I doubt it’s common: evidence suggests that the majority of rapes, including those enabled by victim intoxication, are committed by a small proportion of men who are serial rapists and often have other patterns of antisocial behaviors. These people typically understand that their behaviors violate laws and social norms, yet they do it anyway because they don’t care and believe (often correctly) that they can get away with it.
How do blackouts figure into this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_%28alcohol-related_amnesia%29#Consequences
This implies that the ability to walk doesn’t imply a reliably good grade of consent.
Who could ever have doubted that?
V_V says:
Yes, my point was that walking on your own has at least one well-known exception, and so of course no one would say that walking is any more than a fallible piece of evidence, a heuristic, a relatively reliable guide, a rule of thumb. You rephrasing it implied skepticism that it was ever fallible, so I brought up the exception (and particularly appropriate, note the mention of sex in the lede of the link).
As I said, there is some gray area. Some people can do things they later regret during alcoholic blackouts, but it doesn’t mean that they are completely incapable to exercise judgement in these circumstances. In fact, in most cases they would be still considered legally responsable for their actions.
Yep. Kill somebody, you’re still held wholly responsible. Consent to sex, on the other hand, is far too serious a matter.
My general rule of thumb is thus: If you inebriate yourself, you’re responsible for everything you do under the influence of alcohol, including consent. Your responsibility for your actions precludes actions intended to deny your own responsibility.
Which is not to say that sex with an unconscious person isn’t rape; I limit myself strictly to those cases where the person does in fact give consent.
I think we should start by addressing this problem.
Also levels of drunkness, also directedness. IIRC evidence suggests some issues with intentionality.
That sounds like a very dangerous social norm, which should probably be changed at the earliest opportunity, but excellent point.
I don’t necessarily agree. It’s dangerous if there’s a grey zone and all parties sort of sidle into it and bad stuff happens, but I think it’s not bad to have a subset of parties for this purpose. A more socially acceptable and accessible version of play parties :)
If the norms were better articulated people could more clearly consent or opt out, but as it is I’d say it’s easier to treat drinking as its own thing and create such parties from scratch if you must have them.
Care to explain why?
Just to be clear I also find what happened in Steubenville unacceptable, then again I find a lot of sex related things unacceptable that you probably don’t.
Their actions weren’t consensual among all the participants. The places in law or morality where non-consensual acts between private citizens are allowed are few and far between.
I’m aware of your hypothetical about high caste people wanting a huge physical space from lower caste people. That’s not about consent—that’s about what acts society requires consent to perform. Physical contact is a pretty clear line.
Whether it was “rape” depends on vagaries in the definitions in Ohio’s criminal code. That’s why I’m talking about the category of sexual assault.
Except that’s not where society actually draws the line. For example, there are people who for religious reason don’t what what to be touched by any member of the opposite sex who isn’t a relative or spouse. Yet we don’t demand consent before touching in social situations even though some people might object to being touched.
Edit: also why that particular Schelling point? The history of attitudes towards sex over the past century is a series of Schelling points regulating what is or is not acceptable sex getting overturned. Why, shouldn’t this one also be overturned?
The law surely does require consent. Implied-consent-from-social-context is different from overriding non-consent.
Also, I doubt that they suffer anywhere near the level of trauma from this compared to the Steubenville victim.
Not obvious given that the Steubenville victim didn’t even know about it and thus couldn’t have suffered trauma until she found out about it several days later.
Given how the perpetrators acted, it was virtually certain the victim would find out. Parading her around and bragging about what they’d done might not have been done with the purpose of causing her to find out or humiliate her. But it certainly was an easily predictable consequence.
Would you have objected it they hadn’t bragged about it and posted pictures on their website?
That’s irrelevant as she did find out, probably would have found out eventually, and almost everybody strongly values knowing what happened to them.