lots of stuff gets mucked up when alcohol comes into the picture.
My first sexual experience (to this day I’m uncertain all of what exactly happened):
Graduation party with bunches of friends. Folks kept filling my glass with stuff. Beer -yech, I’d dump it out. Harvey Wallbanger? what’s that? sip, doesn’t taste like beer, so I drank it up. I’d had some wine earlier, too. A pal (ie we’d never even flirted with each other let alone dated) was there. He says “wanna go for a drive?” I agreed and went with him.
What follows is all that I remember - I remember being parked somewhere. I remember a zipper being unzipped. I remember pushing him away and saying ‘no, I want the first time to be with some one I love’. The very next thing I remember was sitting on a curb. Some one else (don’t know to this day who) took me home. I was so drunk that I didn’t realize I didn’t have my glasses on (I am very, very, very nearsighted). I had to go the next day back to the SOB and retrieve my glasses from his car.
I heard from friends that he claims we had a ‘wild night’. He believed that it was consensual. I know that it wasn’t. any time that I was conscious, I was pushing him away. I may have been unconscious for a while, too.
For those of you with the drunken scenario, please remember, that there’s often two sides to the issue. I agree that regrets the next day don’t constitute rape. I also believe that not every person actually hears the word ‘no’ when it’s spoken.
I agree that the presence of alcohol does not automatically make a sexual encounter rape, but if either partner is so drunk that they are incapable of giving consent then it is rape. The guilty party is always the one who takes advantage of the other person’s drunkeness in order to force them into a non-consensual sex act.
This looks an awful lot like “If the woman gets drunk, she deserves whatever happens to her”. I hope that this is not what you mean. Sure it’s irresponsible to get drunk, but drunk people can only be held accountable for their own behavior, not what others choose to do to them. If someone takes advantage of another person’s drunkeness in order to do them harm then that is their fault, not the fault of the victim.
That’s been the traditional view of sex for a long, long time. I might even go so far as to say that it is responsible for many of the problems in heterosexual relations. It’s an idea that needs to die, but that’s going to take a while and it will require both men and women to start thinking about sex in new ways.
Two people have misunderstood so far, so I think it’s best to clarify. No, that’s not what I meant at all. What I’m saying is that if a woman has drunk so much that she cannot fully appreciate her actions, she has a responsibility to herself and others to make sure she doesn’t get that way in the first place.
Instead of getting so drunk she goes off and sleeps with the first person she sees, imagine if she ended up getting in a bar fight. “I’m sorry officer, I didn’t mean to punch that guy out. I was just too drunk to know better.” That doesn’t fly.
What if she drinks so much, she doesn’t understand that it’s not ok to drive home? Do you think that the fact that she’s too drunk to know that she’s driving drunk would ever fly in a courtroom?
Look, I’m not talking about when she is drunk and someone coercing her into sex she doesn’t want. If she says no, that’s rape. I’m saying that if she get drunk and does something where “she shoulda known better,” well, tough luck. No one forced her to inebriate herself and no one is there to babysit her and make her do the responsible thing.
The right to consume alcohol does not come with an automatic “get out of jail free” card.
I dont know if I have this right, but this is what I’ve always believe to be the difference between rape and date rape…
BOTH of the crimes are heinous and BOTH are rape. Although the word “date rape” seems to lessen the crime, it is still rape. From what I remember (sorry to not have a post here) rape in some states was not classified as such if a woman invited a man into her house. Then a woman in California I think (they made a made for TV movie about it - why im getting all my knowledge from a TV movie dont ask) and in this movie a woman was brutally raped but the police did nothing because of the fact that she invited him into her home. So, she sues and pushes for change, and what ensues is a law making that illegal. Instead of calling it rape (Cause there were legal loopholes about letting someone into your home) it was labeled as date rape.
Now, to the OP, I will agree that if a guy does that he is lower than dirt. If a woman is drunk and that somehow impairs her vision and influences her to say “yes” then its her own fault. She made the decision to drink and should be able to pay for the consequences. NOW, If shes so drunk she cant say either way, and you sleep with her, then its rape.
If a person is influenced by drugs but not completely impaired, then its a bad judgement call on her part. If shes completely impaired and is unable to say yes or no, then its rape. Finally, any guy who wants to “put a few beers into a girl” so she will say yes, is lower than dirt and to ME that is rape. The courts disagree.
And justice is a woman wearing a blindfold. How Ironic.
I always felt it was kinda worse. Like the difference between get burglarized, coming home to a trashed house with stuff stolen, and having a local trusted person turn con and steal you blind with your trust.
Both are thieving and wrong, but one is through brute force and is less personal than someone you have talked to, trusted, laughed with, screwing you over.
Rape when you can just chuck the fuckwad in jail would seem easier to handle to me than wandering around a college campus as ‘the slut who pressed charges on Mr. Frat brother’.
From my totally inexperianced POV, I might be content with dropping a ‘typical’ rapist in jail. But if someone I trusted to let into my home, or get into his car, etc. then decided no wasn’t a good enough answer? I think I’d want to eat his liver raw.
As for the drinking angle, I’m a wicked witch about consent. While I belive you can give consent through intermediate stages of drunkeness, I personally wouldn’t trust it. I don’t sleep with drunk people or sleep with people when I’m drunk. Unless I and they gave consent when we were sober. (Let’s get trashed and fuck! Okay!) But I count that as part of drinking responsibly. You make your choices sober and then stop thinking.
Sexual assault law in Canada is defined by the Criminal Code of Canada, a federal law. Since the Province of Ontario has no say over the content of Canada’s criminal law, I would suggest that the story here is a little incomplete. I doubt that Ontario is arresting and convincting people for indictable offenses that aren’t in the Criminal Code.
Exceptions to the grant of consent, for the purpose of defining sexual assault, can be found in the Criminal Code section 273.1(2). Drunkenness is NOT included.
I think you would be hard pressed to find a court in the land that would convict a man of rape after having consensual sex with a woman who decided the next morning that she’d made a bad decision. That is not only because conviction rates for rape are extremely low, but because this scenario does not fit the legal definition of rape. But if you’re really worried about it, my suggestion would be to do the responsible thing and not have sex with drunk women.
I’m not trying to be insensitive here, but if you can’t remember how do you know it wasn’t consensual? There is a big difference between blacking out and passing out, and sometimes you will lose memories even when you are fully conscious and functional.
At the DFW Dopers Mardis Gras gathering at Chef Troy’s, I had quite a bit to drink. I wasn’t wasted, but I had about 5 beers and a couple of bottles of wine (not too much when you weigh 290 lbs). I have no memories from about 20 minutes before me and my wife left until I woke up the next morning. I didn’t pass out, or get sick, or lose the ability to function normally. I found out that we went by the grocery store on the way home and I stayed up a while and watched TV when we got back. Blackouts are unpredictable, there have been times where I was so drunk I couldn’t feel a thing and couldn’t move and remembered everything, and there have been times when I blacked out yet was able to come home and talk to my parents without them figuring out I was drunk. I don’t think you can assume you were raped if you can’t remember it. Yes, the last thing you remember was saying no. You were drunk, maybe he talked you into it later, people will do things drunk that they won’t sober.
I was pretty sure that that was the law in Ontario, if not in all of Canada. However, I didn’t want to say Canada if it were only a provincial matter. So, I used Ontario as a subset of Canada, if that makes sense. I didn’t to imply that the law was thus only in Ontario, but that it was thus at least in Ontario.
I figured somebody would challenge me on this. Thanks, RickJay!
I did some research. According to Department of Justice Canada, Section 273.1(2) of the Criminal Code reads as you said. However, Section 273.2 reads:
I interpret this as meaning that, if the “accused” is (willfully) intoxicated, the accused cannot accept consent. That is not quite what is aid the first time, and I apologise for that. Please feelf ree to challenge my interpretation, with opinion or other statutes.
A guy and a girl go out and end up having sex. She considers it to be a one night stand situation. A couple of night later, the girl goes to a frat party with some “friends”. Due to the proximity of the girl’s birthday, she is assured by her friends that they will take care of her if she drinks. She drinks a lot–she is very intoxicated–and friends take care of her by picking her up off the floor, holding her hair while she vomits, getting her more alcohol–the whole works. Anyway, the aforementioned guy happens to be at the same party. He sees the girl, decides the sex was good enough to try it again and offers to take over babysitting duties for her. The girl’s friends, knowing that the two of them have gone out, assume that they are dating and gladly turn over responsibility to him, despite the drunken objections by the girl. Next thing the girl remembers is waking up in bed with aforementioned guy, realizing that they have had sex.
Is this rape? Date rape? An unfortunate occurrence?
I don’t think anyone can answer that question based on the information you’ve given us, evilbeth. Did she also make “drunken objections” when the guy attempted to have sex with her? Was she passed out at the time?
She has no idea. She remembers nothing–not leaving the party with him, not having sex, nothing. The only info forthcoming from him is that she seemed conscious “a few times.”
I think one of the reasons I hate seeing the word ‘rape’ thrown around with such abandon these days is that I see rape as a particularly loathsome crime. I’m one of those people who thinks that rapists deserve the death penalty, though perhaps after castration via cheese grater and a year or so of torture.
If both of these are true, it is rape. She is obviously intoxicated(on the floor and vomiting) and he knows this(offers to watch over her in her incapacitated condition). And the 2 pertinent facts are observed by witnesses. Should be a fairly easy case if some physical evidence can substantiaite that sex actually occured.
His saying that they did wouldn’t count as he could be lying, and he could could change his tune if charges were filed.
But what if she sobered up somewhat later, and it was after that she had sex with him? A person can go from stumbling and puking to drunk but functional pretty quickly, ESPECIALLY if they puked up most of the alcohol they had in their stomach. How long was she with this guy?
Badtz I know you read my post, since you quoted it. Did you happen to miss the part where one of the very few things I remember saying was “no”??? And repeating it?
And as far as ‘maybe you consented later on’. Fuck that. At the ‘no’ it was no, and it should have ended. That whole ‘no means try a little harder’ bullshit is just that.
And, while I’m at it, thanks a fucking lot to even suggest that maybe I consented and just don’t remember it. I said NO. repeatedly. Pushed him the fuck away. repeatedly. Fuck. And it was a totally loathsome act. and the sick fuck that did it bragged to our mutual friends later on, too. and when my period didn’t come for two months afterward, and my state didn’t allow abortions anyhow, yes, it was a thrill a minute. Especially discussing with the health care worker did he wear a condom? had no idea. Yes, it was a fuckin’ thrill. And of course, the health worker couldn’t even do a pregnancy exam on me 'cause I was under 18.
Oh, yea, sure that was consensual. And as far as the ‘drunk’ part. I was with friends. You know, those folks whom you’re supposed to be able to trust. A male gets drunk and no one puts on him this whole thing of ‘gee you shouldn’t have gotten drunk. Yes, drunk and driving you’re held responsible. But, don’t you kinda expect your friends to not hurt you even if you are drunk? Don’t you kinda expect your friends to not steal from you, even if you are drunk? Silly me, I expected my friend to not put his dick into me just cause I was drunk and couldn’t fight him off (tho’ he outweighed me by a good 100 pounds, so that probably couldn’t have happened well anyhow).
Didn’t something like this happen at a Rhode Island college within the last few years? I seem to recall an incident where both parties were drinking, the next day the girl claimed it was rape, stating that she had given consent but it was under the influence and he should have known better? I think the university agreed that he should have known better…
I don’t think any official action was taken against him, but he was the target of quite a bit of harrassment and ended up dropping out…
Reading this thread sparked some kind of memory…maybe I dreamed it.