J. Merrick, horribly ugly and a complete asshole, but very rich, offers $10,000 to a woman for sex. She’s deep in debt, about to be evicted, and needs to pay for operations for her suffering child and saintly mother. She’d never sleep with him under any other circumstances, and is repelled at the thought. But she agrees anyway, because of her desperate need for money.
S. Chase, horribly ugly and a complete asshole, is the senior partner at accounting firm Sweet Farwick, and his recommendation is necessary to become a partner. He tells the earnest young woman hoping for a partnership that the only way she’ll get it is to sleep with him. He assures her that she has no way to prove a sexual harrassment case against him. She would never sleep with him under other circumstances, but believes it’s the only way to secure the partnership that her work already merits.
H. Berger, a noted lawyer with a great track record against the local Social Services agency, is approached by a young woman whose two children have been taken from her due to false allegations of neglect. After realizing that she cannot afford to pay his fee, he offers to represent her for one tenth of his usual fee if she sleeps with him, and notes that he is the best chance he has for getting custody of her children back. She agrees to the deal.
At least the first one and probably the second one, in my opinion. Sex without free consent is rape; coercive sex is rape. If she would truly “never sleep with him under any other circumstances,” if she is truly “repelled at the thought,” and if he knows all this and coerces her into sex anyway, he’s raping her.
If he changes his answer from “yes” to “no” the next morning, that would make him a bitch in addition to a slut.
I’m not convinced there isn’t some truth to it even if its prevalence has been exaggerated. You can refuse to have sex with anyone for any reason or no reason, but you can’t revoke your consent afterward.
In that case, Nogginhead, the only way to be sure is to request a notarized affidavit from the woman testifying that she’s above the age of consent, mentally fit, not chemically dependent or in any way cognitively impaired, and sufficiently fluent in English to understand the difference between the words “Yes” and “No.”
Apart from that you’ll just have to rely on your own best judgment, remember the golden rule, and trust in a jury of your peers to arrive at the truth if it comes down to your word against hers.
At what point is a person sufficiently incapacitated in the first instance that their answer isn’t “yes” to begin with?
I actually don’t disagree with any of this except for the notarized affidavit bit. This is the sort of calculation a guy should make before anything happens. But you seem to be ceding the converse point: that, if a woman is chemically dependent or cognitively impaired, a man who presses on will be at best irresponsible and guilty of poor judgment, and at worst a rapist.
Which brings me back to Felonius Mink’s earlier statement:
I think you have nailed the reason that I’m glad I am not a man in modern times. The problem with all the definitions of rape I’ve seen so far is that there’s so much room for someone to turn around the next day when the guy didn’t call and accuse him.
Then his name is in the newspaper and on TV and his life is ruined. Scary.
Here, again, is a basic problem. Some people want to conflate “rape” with “unethical.” nogginhead is positing that anything that is not rape is, by definition, morally sound. Once again, you can do that if you want but I prefer my definitions to be meaningful. There’s no reason that unethical sex practices and crimes can’t have different labels and still all be bad things to do. There are a great number of gradiations that ought to be distinguishable, both in terms of the physical act and in the level and quality of consent.
For example, I strongly object to calling every possible form of sexual assault “rape.” There are different levels and types of harm that occur. Forced sexual intercourse is a qualitatively different thing than forced sodomy for a whole bunch of reasons, not the least of which is the attendant risk of pregnancy. We need to have the language to distiguish between them.
Ditto for the consent issue. None of Bricker’s examples ought to be thought of as “rape.” They all may be various shades of unethical or illegal but it is ridiculous to try and lump them all together with being physically forced to have sex by a stranger with a knife at your throat. Apart for making for lousy statistics, doing so dillutes the very impact that those trying to expand the definition of rape are seeking to appropriate.
Look at his first example. Essentially, this is prostitution. It might be ugly, immoral and even unethical, but prostitution simply isn’t “rape” under any meaningful definition of the word.
Exactly. The phrase “she’d never sleep with him under any other circumstances” is irrelevant here, because the circumstances have changed to a situation in which she’s is willing to sleep with him. He hasn’t threatened her in any way, only bundled $10,000 in with the sex act to make it more appealing.
Look at shows like Survivor and Fear Factor for a similar example. Most people would never eat a bug just because someone asked them to, but for $1 million they’re happy to eat a handful of bugs. There’s a world of difference between being “coerced” to eat a bug with the promise of cash, and being coerced to eat one at gunpoint.
That’s a meaningless question. If the malt liquor tonight says “yes” but the hangover tomorrow says “no,” the one that comes out of your mouth prior to intercourse is the one that determines your consent.
I’ll bet you’re not keen on prenuptial agreements either.
Well, you know, we’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t, aren’t we?
The “consensus” you seem to be trying to reach is that sex = rape at a woman’s sole discretion whether she consents to the activity or not.
That just strikes me as appallingly insensitive, both to women who’ve survived a sexual assault and to men who’ve been wrongfully convicted of the same.
If you want to have that view of women, why not just assume that at any given moment a complete stranger may file a report against you for rape?
If I were a guy, I would assume that any intoxicated woman that had not had sex with me previously was off limits.
If a woman comes into your bedroom but still says no, it’s rape. That doesn’t mean that you can’t try to entice her into changing her mind. But no is still no. Even if she is penetrated and then changes her mind, you must withdraw or it will be rape.
I’m left absolutely speechless by this. Consent, once given, can be withdrawn on a whim? What if the woman says no right at the point of orgasm? Is that rape?
Not only no, in my opinion, but HELL no. What it is is ridiculous, the fact that you think you can change the parameters of a consentual act any ol’ time you feel like it.
I need some aspirin right now. My eyes are a little sore from how far they just rolled into the back of my head.
What if she has a flashback to something awful in her past and says, “NO, NO, honey, please stop!” while crying? I’d stop, wouldn’t you? That doesn’t mean she’s not a bitch if she withdraws consent frivolously, but I’d say you’d still have to stop, just as you wouldn’t have the right to kidnap her if she frivolously backed out on a dinner invitation at the last minute.
One caveat: Ladies, if you must say no in mid-act, please remember that 90% of our blood supply will be somewhere other than our brain. Say it loud and clear, and give us a few seconds to process it. It’s not rape if we don’t know you don’t want to. For this reason, I would be reluctant to convict a man of rape under those circumstances–I would need to be sure beyond a reasonable doubt that the man heard the “no.” Morally though, the man is honor-bound to stop.
Right. And perhaps more commonly, what if she says “Ow, stop, you’re hurting me!” while crying? Better stop right away, or you might do her some serious physical damage. Sometimes people may have important, valid reasons for withdrawing their consent after a sex act has begun. If I ended up with a torn and bloody vagina because my sexual partner ignored my cries of pain and pleas to stop then I would feel raped, and I think justifiably so.
Ummmm, damn straight I feel I should be able to enter a man’s bedroom and not have sex with him. I’ve done that quite successfully on a number of occasions. In fact, one ex and I used to sleep in the same bed for many, many months before there was any sexual intimacy at all, but he was a gentleman and knew exactly what he was getting into. Geez, if I’m in a guy’s bedroom and kiss him, somehow I’ve magically consented to sex? Does the geographical location somehow give divine blessing to force unwanted sexual contact on me? I think not.
In fact, I think that as long as I’m not misleading him about what level of physical intimacy I have consented/will consent to, I should be able to do (or not do) anything I want. If I want to get naked but not have sex, that should be OK. If I want to have oral sex but not intercourse, or vice versa, that should be OK. And you’d better believe that if I consented to intercourse, but the guy forced me to give him a BJ instead, I’d consider that rape.
The flip side of that, though, is that I wouldn’t go into a guy’s bedroom if I didn’t trust him, and I wouldn’t drink in a situation where I was likely to be alone with a guy if I didn’t trust him. (Of course, I doon’t drink often anyway, and have been drunk exactly once in my life, which helps.) Not that this would prevent any possibility of rape, but it sure cuts down on the odds (of an acquaintance rape-type rape, anyway).
Well, **Tristan, ** I guess you and I will never be an item…
I should make it clear that I am always upfront about my expectations, and have never known a guy (not since the schmuck I dated in high school, anyway) who had a problem with that.
If a guy is only interested in nakedness if sex will follow immediately, he also has plenty of opportunities with me to bail beforehand. Geez, doesn’t anyone believe in the joys of delayed gratification anymore?
Plus, if I am comfortable with a guy and confident that he will respect my limits, the delay between nakedness and sex (or kissing and sex, for that matter) is likely to be a lot shorter. If he gives me what I want, which is security (OK, that’s not all of what I want, but if it’s not there, it’s a dealbreaker) it’s a lot more likely that he will get what he wants shortly thereafter.
I guess there’s a need to address this ‘I expect intimacy’ issue before we can even define consent. Most people do plan on some kind of intimacy when they get naked in bed together. There may be a stopping point though. Is this unreasonable?
You mean the woman is emotionally willing, but so dry it hurts, and they have to stop altogether because the man can’t skillfully help resolve the problem? I’m sorry, Lamia, I had no idea such a thing was possible, much less common.
