So you were with your boyfriend and he wanted sex. You didn’t want sex. He fondled and cajoled and you still didn’t want sex. He fondled and whined and begged and whinged and whined so you had sex?
If you didn’t give in he MIGHT have pushed further, he might have decided to whine and cajole instead…eeeeeeeeeeeeekkkkkkkkkk if I don’t give in he might rape me thus having sex with me, in order to stop this I must have sex with him.
To describe that as rape is an insult. It can justifably be described as coerced sex. To call it rape is an insult to anyone who has been raped.
I have never been raped, in my eyes. I have been raped in the eyes of many. I left a night club VERY drunk and all alone. I was approached by a bloke who asked if I needed help getting home (yes I probably did!)
I got in a car with this bloke and his mate (STUPIDLY). They drove way past my place with me drunkedly protesting. They got to a park and demanded sex. I said no. They said they wouldn’t take me home otherwise (I was 17, staying in a youth hostel, drunk and verrrrrrry scared) so I had sex with them both . They drove me back to where they found me with me crying all the way.
We got to the door of the hostel and I said “what if I’m pregnant”…they threw $40 at me. I cried for sevearl weeks. I felt like slime. I had lost my virginity just 3 weeks before.
I wasn’t raped. No one held me down. No one forced me. I was stupid. I don’t believe (19 years later) that they wanted to rape me. They wanted an easy fuck. I agreed to be that…just as you did.
Was I happy with what happened? NO!!! Would I let it happen again? NO!!! Was it rape??? NO!!!
I believe that rape is a horrible thing that should not be denegrated by those who capitulated to sex.
Date rape is a very real thing…but you capitulated you wern’t raped.
NO! I was reallllllllllllly drunk and put myself in a stupid position. I still to this day believe I was seen as “an easy fuck”. They were not nice people in any way, not any one I would ever want to see again! (well they were Aussies! hehe…You know I’m joking Aussies!) They took advantage of the fact I had had wayyyy too much to drink, they took advantage of the fact I was very young and very stupid, they took advantage of the fact that they had me in an isolated place, they took advantage of the fact I was far from home.
They took advantage of the fact that I was STUPID.
As I said many believe I was raped. I KNOW I gave in cause it was easier. It isn’t the same thing.
Teenage guys do not have a god-given, constitutionally protected right to get laid before they graduate high school. He wasn’t made responsible by her saying she wasn’t ready? He was responsible for all of his actions, at all times. All guys are.
I am sick to fucking death of this mindset that teenage guys cannot, and should not be expected to, control their sexual urges. It should not be all on the girl to physically stop the boy from doing something she doesn’t want him to do. He should be able to stop himself, when she says ‘no’. The first time she says ‘no’. It is possible.
She agreed to sex cause it was easier then not having sex while he whined about not having sex and she thought about not having sex while he wanted to have sex and talked her into having sex so she agreed to have sex just in case he decided to have sex when she didn’t want to have sex?
I’m sick of it being acceptable for girls to be seen as victims. YES! there is rape. YES! there is date rape. Being talked into having sex is not rape.
Well, he was her boyfriend. Many people have the opportunity to run away from romantic partners who abuse them in various ways…but they often don’t. They might be afraid that worse harm will come to them if they try to leave, but many are also confused – why would you run away from someone you’re in love with, and who loves you? “My boyfriend” and “person I must flee” might seem to be mutually exclusive categories, especially to the young and inexperienced. When presented with this sort of situation it’s not unusual for a person to have difficulty deciding on the best course of action.
Your mind’s eye picture isn’t really the issue though, is it? You may certainly choose to picture young Zabali as a “petulant teen girl” who “whines” but gives “reluctant, grudging consent”, but this doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with how she really behaved. From looking at the same posts that you’ve read, my mind’s eye picture is of a frightened girl who knew she wanted to get out of the situation but was too confused and upset to act decisively.
I have, luckily, never been raped or experienced a truly severe sexual assault. However, as an adolescent there were several occasions when I was grabbed and groped by boys my own age or a few years older. The first time this happened I was just a few months shy of 13. I was both terrified and confused, and part of why I was confused was because I was terrified. I clearly remember thinking, “I don’t like this. Why don’t I like this?” I knew about child molestors, and a little about rape, and of course I knew about sex and “fooling around” (mostly from movies and books, some from friends who were dating already), but at that age and that level of experience I genuinely had no concept of peer sexual assault or the importance of consent. I felt like throwing up, but at the same time I was trying to figure out why I felt that way. I didn’t understand why I was so upset and I had no idea what I should do. As a result, I did almost nothing. I certainly didn’t put up anywhere near the level of resistance Zabali described. In fact, I remember forcing a smile because I didn’t want to look scared.
I don’t think any observer could have guessed how distraught I was. If I were to present a simple “outside view” account you might come to the conclusion that I wasn’t really frightened, or even that I was enjoying the attention. But if you did, you would be completely wrong. I have rarely been so frightened in my life, not even in much more dangerous situations. In purely physical terms I suffered almost nothing, but more than a decade later I feel sick again remembering it because I was so frightened. It’s hard even for me now to understand how I could have been so clueless and helpless, but I was just a kid. I can only imagine how much more confused and upset I would have been if the boy in question had been my boyfriend and not merely some guy who I knew only by name. If Zabali says she was truly afraid then I believe her, even if she didn’t try to run away.
I’ve gone home with plenty of guys, fooled around, made out with them and gone home without incident. You don’t have to have sex with a guy every time you go home with him, and regardless of whether or not you’re an asshole, doesn’t mean you deserve to be raped. There are women who are perfect angels who have been raped and women who are gold digging, heroin addicted, puppy kicking bitches that get raped. Neither one deserves it.
I’m glad you were so clear headed and perfect when you were thirteen.
How’s that hindsight working out for you in traffic these days? Just because YOU have everything worked out perfectly of what YOU’D do in EVERY GIVEN SITUATION, doesn’t mean everyone else on the planet does.
I was already admonished for using my own experiences in this thread, but I’ll bring it up again. Date rape DID happen to me, as you well know, and I did very strange things to try and stop it, as did you…you know what…still got raped. And just because you believe in your head that your rape situation was worse than anyone elses, or that you suffered more…doesn’t negate the experiences of other people.
What about it? THat has nothing to do with what I said, at all. You’ve got a great talent for twisting everyone’s words around to fit your particular daily agenda. If a man believes and acts on the belief that because he took you to Bermuda he gets to fuck you, and YOU DON’T WANT TO…
I agree. The same thing happened to me when I was 15. My boyfriend, 17 at the time, pressured me into having sex. It wasn’t until years later that I realized I had been taken advantage of, but I certainly was not raped. 13 certainly is much too young to be having sex, and I can certainly see how the situation has left you with emotional scars, and I am sorry for that.
My last reply to you (#145) was, in the cold light of day, not something I am particularly pleased to have put my name on. While I certainly disagree with you on the definitions of rape, and in particular the reaction that should be expected from a victim, I went over the top in the way in which I attacked your views, and imputed things to you that I think are probably very unfair.
It’s a topic I feel intensely strongly on, and have just spent way too much time researching recently, so I have developed a bad habit of demonizing people who view it differently to me. Posting at that time of day I have a tendency to forget that rational opposition to a point of view may be more effective than diatribe. Sorry.
Don’t want to get involved in the debate (learned my lesson on that one), just want to say that I have a lot of respect for the SD women, and I think that being involved in this might not be helpful for some of you.
If you’re feeling more hurt after being involved in this thread, it might be a good idea to take a break from it and look after yourself.
This isn’t directed at anyone in particular, just a general
“Ladies, take care of number one and don’t get too invested in what people on a message board think”.
When I began to develop sexually, my father began to say highly inappropriate things.
He also began fondling me but it never lead to intercourse.
Was that rape?
No, but I still felt violated and traumatized and it effected how I related sexually for years.
When I was dated in my teens, I would often have sex before I was comfortable or ready or even really wanted.
Sometimes it was because the boy pleaded and cajoled and badgered me.
Sometimes it was because I desperately wanted affection and approval, and sometime it was because I was too stoned to care and it seemed easier just to give in.
Were those boys guilty of rape?
No.
When I was eighteen, a man in Oakland grabbed me forcibly and pulled me into an alley.
If my boyfriend had not fortuitously appeared, there is no doubt in my mind that I would have been raped.
When I was in college and shared a house, I got very drunk with two of my male roommates.
I passed out in my bed but didn’t lock my door. Stupid me.
I gained consciousness to find them undressing me, sat up and screamed bloody murder.
They left the room.
Had I not woken up, would they have been guilty of rape?
You bet.
I’m sharing these experiences because I’m still on the fence about the original OP.
My father’s fumblings were far more a violation than anything that my dates did to me.
The latter I allowed, the former was forced on me.
Yes, ** Zabali ** was technically a child and yes, what her boyfriend did does constitute statutory rape because of her age.
And yes, I’m sure that it was an awful awful experience.
With that said, like Thea, I’m not sure that he would have prevented her had she simply gotten up and left.
** Zabali ** would have been humiliated and embarrassed and ashamed if she’d left but I’m not sure that she would have been forced.
There in lies the difference for me.
In all fairness, there’s a lot of talk of the “reasonable person” standard being applied to Zabali in particular, and rape in general.
I just wanted to point out the unreasonable people can be raped too, and the age of consent laws address this by deciding that people under a certain age cannot be assumed to be able to handle something as powerful as sex with reason. Of course, not every underage teen is incapable of reason, but it’s a standard set to protect the majority of them, right or wrong.
To my mid, this is precisely why statutory rape is a lesser offence than rape. Because the underage teen may or may not actually be reasonable enough to make the decision to have sex, suffering no mental/physical anguish afterwards. (Barring pregnancy and STD’s, I’m not trying to discount these.)
I’m thinking back to a day about a decade and a half ago. I get into a conversation with a friendly student on the train coming back from college; we have coffee in a diner to continue conversation and flirt a lot, then decide to go back to my place. Go up to my room, kissing and fondling on the way up the stairs. We’re both pretty much unclothed on arrival and then she lays down on my bed and starts acting in a fashion that’s a turn-off for me, going on about what-all she’s gonna let me do and making it sound like sewage and describing me as a “bad boy”. So I lost interest. Anyone here think I didn’t have the right at that point to decide not to go through with it?
Oh, then is it only girlpeople who don’t get to change their minds?
OK, the rape thing. It isn’t rape if there’s consent, and the person giving consent has to be able to give consent. Most of the conversation on this thread revolves around whether or not 2 hours of pestering, with varying interpretations of the extent to which an unspoken threat was implicit in the situation, creates “unable to give consent”. (A great many folks are inclined to say that being 13 means “unable to give consent” and Zabili was 13 at the time; and it’s not really a simple matter to abstract out the rest of the situation and erase age from the scenario).
Allegory time. Another situation involving consent and free will to consent and coercion. In psychiatric institutions in NY, short of a “Rivers” competency hearing or an emergency, the staff aren’t supposed to administer psych meds to patients against their will. Our advocacy group is involved with trying to establish what constitutes coercion on a locked ward. One of our assertions is that it isn’t freely given consent if you’ve got a nurse following you around on a locked ward constantly asking and re-asking if you really wouldn’t like to take your meds, even if you do end up saying “OK”. In part this is because it’s a locked ward (you can’t go to a space where the annoying ward nurse can’t follow you), and in part it’s because of the wide range of physical coercion practiced in plain sight on the ward – the person you’re saying “no” to can have you strapped down in restraints, bundled off to a seclusion room, or for that matter shot up with the very substance you’re saying “no” to on an “emergency” basis.
By extrapolation, if one party is repeatedly asking another to consent to sex, and eventually sex occurs, that’s not necessarily rape but I’d be inclined to think it’s rape if the person being asked is not easily able to leave the environment and permanently get away from the person doing the asking; and if at least one of the following conditions also is present:
• there is an explicit or formidably implicit threat of force, which can include demonstration of force used on other people or verbal reference to the possibility of using force, or the introduction of unsolicited touching concurrent with the asking;
• there is an explicit or formidably implicit threat of retaliation that takes a form that a reasonable person would not be expected to tolerate lightly, i.e., that significantly reduces “choice”. (“or I won’t like you any more” would not qualify; “or I’ll abandon you here in the middle of nowhere and let you try to hitchhike home” certainly might; “or I’ll fire you” normally would; etc).
• the person doing the asking has such a monopoly on necessities that can be passed out as rewards that the possibility of withholding rewards constitutes such a threat of retaliation. (“or I won’t hire you” could qualify under some circumstances; “or I won’t feed you” certainly can if the asking person is responsible for feeding the one being asked; etc)
To me, although I wasn’t present to do a Rodney King videotape of it or anything, it seems apparent that Zabili was raped, and furthermore that the events described would have constituted rape even if she had been significantly older. The guy was asking her while concurrently touching her without her consent, “dancing” her over to a more secluded place and preventing her from leaving, and repeating the inquiry over and over again after having already been told “no”. That lands right inside the bounds of many of my coercion parameters without even having to include age.
The addition of age reinforces the coerciveness of the situation. All other things being equal, it is reasonable to assume a 13 year old would have less reason to be confident of the safety of continuing to say “no” in this situation. She’d have familiarity with the existence of crimes of sexual violence and therefore awareness of what could happen, but would have limited experience with contending with such situations so as to be able to assess the likelihood of him personally becoming violent.
If he just sat beside her and kept reiterating his request while adults were milling about within earshot and she could leave but didn’t, that could be a different story.
Although as jarbaby says, it would also still be rape if she had listened for 2 hours and toyed with the idea, agreed to wander off to the secluded area, let him run his hands over her, and then thought better of it and said “wait, I don’t want to” and he had prevented her from leaving or getting up.
Sorry, noctural_tick, on 2nd read that looks like I’m implying that you were saying women who change their minds are bitches, when you were stipulating “on purpose”.
There are a couple of things Zabali has written that keep blaring out at me from this thread and just seem a little off kilter. I agree that the latest version of the story would definitely be rape, but I just can’t shake this feeling that we are being manipulated.
Her comments about how hard this subject is to talk about and how it is causing her great mental anguish, yet she is the one to bring it to the board in at least two separate threads.
That she asked the question “Is this rape?” yet she flies off the handle screaming “THIS WAS RAPE!!!” whenever anyone expressed an opinion that it was not. Was she really looking for an answer or something else?
As much as I am trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, I am having a hard time with the inconsistencies in her story and how it keeps changing to better fit her argument.
Had she given the latest version of her story in the beginning, would she have felt the need to ask “Is this rape?” The latest story doesn’t jibe with the original question and the original story doesn’t jibe with the direction she has taken this thread.
One of the reasons that I don’t think that Zabali’s story qualifies as rape is that she has consistently worsened the story each time someone has disagreed that she was raped.
Yes. Or to go into the house, lock the doors and either call someone or stay there until it was safe.
I brought mine up because torie made the statement/rhetorical question that I had no personal first hand experience with date rape.
It does have to do with what Zabali said in the other thread, which was that she did not consider what happened when she was thirteen and her boyfriend sixteen rape, until an ‘advocate’ for a battered women’s shelter counseled her years later.
I don’t see where you said anything that was over the top or in any way too harsh. No need to apologize.
What Diane said sums up what my view of Zabali’s recounting has been.
Thank you Diane, for so aptly summerizing what is making me uncomfortable about this whole thread.
I certainly do not want to dismiss Zabali’s story out of hand and yet I am feeling extremely manipulated by her inconsistencies.
And while I’m not judging the way she chooses to deal with her trauma, I can tell you that, even over 30 years later, I have a very hard time talking or writing about what my dear Daddy did, so I am confused about why she’s so intent in making her rape a topic for public discussion if she’s still in so much pain.
Finally, some of her descriptions sound like a bad romance novel:
Once again, part of me hates to even appear to be questioning a victim of rape and part of me feels as if my chain is being yanked 6 ways to Sunday.