(Bold added.) Okay, this part I don’t know. I didn’t see that particularly mentioned in the Amherst material I read, that any Vast Feminist Conspiracy had chimed in on the case on her behalf.
I didn’t consider that that was very specifically the core topic of this thread, so maybe the whole Amherst discussion here is off-topic. Is that what your saying here?
The suggestion that his defense fails because he couldn’t remember any of it is weak, and the weaker the better, because it’s also damn dangerous, wouldn’t you think? Can anyone get away with rape now simply by getting the other party drunk enough not to remember what actually happened? Of course not (I hope). It would be a disaster if that could be a defense.
Incredibly bad reporting that conflates the timeline of the alleged events (what people knew when is pretty important when you’re accusing feminists of championing and/or ignoring a story), is sloppy about terminology, and leaps to a lot of conclusions about what happened.
Okay, so we just have a difference of opinion here. I can’t imagine that one can be drunk enough to engage in actions and not remember them later, and yet still be considered capable of giving consent.
Yes. The Amherst case is off-topic, here–or to say it a different way: it fails to support the “feminism is not about equality” position.
It just doesn’t work for the “feminism is not about equality” argument because it’s not a clear-cut case of a female sexually assaulting a male. That’s what the FINAE side needs, as a first stage in supporting their argument.
We don’t even come to the next stage of the FINAE argument–which would be looking for evidence of feminists hypocritically failing to condemn a female for doing the same thing they do condemn males for. That stage would come into play ONLY after coming up with a clear-cut case of a female sexually assaulting a male (which the Amherst case fails to be).
Agreed–that’s a fair fourth point (that I should have included!)
Okay, if this thread is that specifically about FINAE and not about anti-feminist rebuttals that feminism has run amuck more generally, then I’ll buy that. I think I’m responding to a real and serious argument (that the pendulum in adjudication of alleged sexual assault cases has swung way to far), but maybe that’s outside this thread.
I still feel that we have a reasonably good case of female-assaults-drunken-male here (and maybe she was drunken too), so I acknowledged that this case isn’t the right FINAE case for the other reason – that I saw no mention of any feminist consensus chiming in on the case on her side. But I didn’t see any feminist outcry on the other side of this case either.
The suggestion that anybody who is too drunk to remember what happened loses the case thereby is seriously dangerous, and this supports my claim that anybody too drunk to remember is also too drunk to give consent.
I’m an ERA bracelet wearing life long feminist, and former rape crisis advocate, and I have a problem with this case, because the accuser lied to the college and withheld evidence.
In the quote from the transcript, she says she “didn’t tell anyone about it for a long time” and that is a lie: She texted her friend right afterwards and told her about it. She withheld this from the investigators and the college.
She also stated in her testimony that she knew the accused was “very drunk”, but says that she herself was only somewhat tipsy. So she was aware that the accused was in an impaired state when the encounter began.
The college itself defines a “blacked out state” as being one where consent cannot be given, and the college accepted that the accused was in a blacked out state. Regardless of who wants to semantically argue the meaning here, the college’s definition should be the deciding criteria in this case.
I would be outraged if anyone considered convicting someone of rape when the sole evidence is the testimony of a witness who lied and withheld evidence. Whatever sympathy I might have for her regret later on about the situation, she fucked up her case when she did that, and I would tell anyone I counseled as an advocate the same thing.
I don’t know who gets to decide what “the point of this thread” is, but you do a disservice to rape victims and rape advocacy when you ignore these facts in your arguments.
IMO, this case does have bearing on the point of this thread, because if the situation was reversed, and it was the woman who was in an accepted blacked out state, the man would be liable for initiating the act if he admitted to being aware she was incapacitated.
Where did I say “feminists are fighting for women to be able to punch men all the time”?
Seriously, though, when you mischaracterize what I say, instead of addressing what I do say, it just shows you’re not arguing in good faith.
Also, if you look back at what I did say, you’ll see that I said it was patriarchy. Look right above, in the very first sentence of the post **you **quoted.
I bolded it for you, to help you find it.
Remember my OP: feminists misconstrue patriarchy as a conspiracy to oppress women. It’s actually no more than a recent form of a evolutionary/biological imperative to protect them.
That’s why he went to jail, and she didn’t: patriarchy.
Well, as I said I’m a card carrying feminist and my post is an outcry, so there you go.
Listen, these situations are tough: In many cases, there is simply not enough evidence, even when the witness is perfectly credible, and that is a big problem in obtaining justice. But when a woman lies, she not only hurts her own case, but she hurts the man who was falsely accused and the credibility of every other woman who comes forward, and that injustice needs to be fought as well.
BTW, this is in no way an endorsement of the OP’s conclusions about feminism.
Well shucks, you just blew my recent participation in this thread right out of the water!
Thank you for speaking up as you did.
Let me add a comment (or rather, a question) about your post:
If one party is too drunk to consent (including being “blacked out”) and the other isn’t, is any sexual activity thus considered a sexual assault, regardless of who initiated it, or “who did what to whom”? And regardless of which party initiated it, or which party “did it”, if that is considered an assault, then is the not-so-drunk party necessarily always culpable? Or is it the active, or initiating, party (the one who did unto the other) who should be culpable, regardless of which is the drunk one?
In the extreme case, where one party is literally unconscious and the other party commits a sex act, then the committing party is absolutely guilty, right? If the male is too drunk to consent and he rapes the female, he is certainly absolutely guilty regardless of the state-of-mind of the female, right? But if the female is too drunk to consent and the male rapes her, then he is guilty in that case too, right? The sensible rule would seem to be, it’s the initiator or active party who is culpable, regardless of which of them is the drunk one. Is there an established body of cases that establish that logic? If so, the problem with the Amherst case (at least on the surface) is that it seems to violate that logic.
Which, regional colloquialism notwithstanding, is pretty much the standard definition as used by the AMA, CDC, Alcoholics Anonymous, etc, and it’s been used at least since the 1940s. Further, there is no direct correlation between alcohol-related amnesia–blacking out–and amount of alcohol consumed.
That’s disturbing. If being black-out-drunk is not correlated with BAC, then someone could be black-out-drunk without being very drunk at all (this is what jsgoddess has been saying), and they might not be recognizably drunk by other people around (specifically, a potential sex partner). And yet according to the Amherst definition (which I imagine is pretty much standard), black-out-drunkness IS sufficient to make one incapable of consent – yet with no way for a potential partner to detect this.
What next? Affirmative consent now requires a blood or urine sample to be tested for BAC? Well, no, even that doesn’t work, if BAC is not even closely correlated with black-out state.
So what then? Now, does affirmative consent require that the partners spend (and document) at least 8 hours in each others’ presence (or in the presence of other Credible Witnesses) and to document that no incapacitating chemicals were ingested by either party during that interval? Everyone knows, that isn’t going to happen. How will this work?
(ETA: I suppose this really belongs in the “NY Affirmative Consent” thread, but the above comment follows up on earlier posts in this thread, so I put it here.)
Well, inebriation on the whole is notoriously subjective. (Dunno if you’re a drinker, but I’ve certainly experienced the whole “woo, two beers and I’m buzzed, WTF?” phenomenon, as well as “Great Ghu, I’ve had enough to fell an ox but I’m pretty ok, WTF?”) Blackouts seem to be similarly subjective.
Which is just to say that neither amount of alcohol consumed nor the experience of blackout can be reliably tied to degree of intoxication.
(Apologies for all the unsupported assertions here; I’m in and out today and not taking much time to provide citations. Happy to oblige on request.)
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I’d like to know what you mean by “predators”. What does “predator” means to you?
And, when you say there’s not enough emphasis on on accurately describing “such encounters” as rape, are you talking about two drunk people having sex? And if so, do you think both should go to prison for rape, be labelled as sex offenders for the rest of their lives… or just the men?
Can you provide a cite, please, showing feminists pushing for more women to be arrested for rape?
And I haven’t ignored them: I’ve asked for evidence. None’s been provided. Hopefully, that evidence will be provided later on in the thread.
You seem to have ignored the citations of NOW decrying males being raped in prison (both by males and females). I was eager to see your response to those posts.
Well, yeah, that was a whole compendium of seeming silly questions I put there – but there was a point to that.
We see all those people claiming things like “These new laws make ALL sex illegal!” and stuff like that. Exaggerated a bit maybe, but there’s a point there.
The vast majority of sex acts occur in amicable circumstances, presumably, and don’t give rise to accusations after-the-fact. These cases were never the problem to begin with. Those were never the cases we needed laws to address.
The cases where an accusation arises after the fact are the problems. The new rules purport to address those cases by prescribing a set of protocols for having sex that should protect all parties from non-consensual sex AND protect all parties from accusations of non-consensual sex. But the new rules, as our dear MRA-type friends point out, are highly unworkable, often with no way to figure out if they are being followed. Case in point here is the rule that black-out inebriation invalidates any consent (sounds perfectly reasonable, right?) while at the same time, there’s no way to detect black-out inebriation.
And sure, the questions I asked: Should we require BAC tests now? Should we require 8-hour witnessed alcohol quarantines? – are silly questions. They are rhetorical questions, Frylock. You know what those are. They are meant to demonstrate the absurdity of some of the new rules, because they can’t accomplish what they mean to accomplish short of going to absurd lengths.
Sure, it isn’t a “real” problem most of the time. It’s the cases where it’s a problem that it’s a problem, and then the rules don’t work well.
