Not to defend the oaf, but inviting a randomly met fairly drunk man into your apartment while you change clothes is giving a signal (esp to a horny drunk) that you might be willing to to move to a more advanced level of intimacy.
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I discovered while chatting to some female colleagues a while back that they thought nothing of allowing some random guy they’d met in a pub to come back to their home for the night on the pretext that he’d missed his train. Not for sex, you understand, just as somewhere to stay for the night. Both of them related bad experiences with pantsless oafs in this situation, but seemed to think it was all a bit of a laugh. These were women in their 40s, by the way.
Good bloody luck in court when it turns really nasty, ladies.
Can you describe what direction this vibe was in? Did it feel like she was uncomfortable / embarrassed, perhaps that you might be seeing through her deceptions? Was it that she seemed to have changed how she relates to you now that you have acted at least once as her heroic rescuer?
And, yeah, a big ditto to the recommendations that both these ladies be promptly given their own copies of the Gift of Fear, followed in a week by a pop quizz on the strategies rapists use to get women into “safe to initiate attack” circumstances. Your story is a textbook depiction of “the fear of not being nice” letting a woman paint herself into a very vulnerable corner.
Everyone has different levels of various mental abilities. Some people are idiots subconsciously too, and even those who do well in certain situations don’t do well on others. A lot of intuition is nothing more than irrational bias. The best scam artists are the ones who do things that cause people to subconsciously trust them.
If you haven’t found a situation yet where your subconscious misled you, then you just aren’t paying attention.
It seems totally plausible to me. Indeed, I’ve been in quite a few situations that very clearly could have ended in really bad stuff happening, and reacted by doing what it took to make the situation end quickly. Hell, last month on a late night taxi ride (yeah, not smart, so kill me) the taxi driver decided to show me his “man-thing that women love” and I was just so tired of this shit happening that I couldn’t even be bothered to muster up much of a reaction other than “eww gross” and a vague “I hope he doesn’t try to rape me, because however that turns out it’s going to be a pain.”
Part of it is that there is a line between “this could be a problem” and “this is a problem.” Taking decisive action (calling police, yelling stuff, whatever) puts the situation firmly in the second category. There are more repercussions than a night at the police station. What if he tries to take revenge? What if he becomes a stalker? You really, really, really don’t want to become memorable. Sometimes it really does seem best to get the problem away, let him sleep it off, and hope you ever run into him again.
And if we do take decisive action, we are going to want to do it in a public area if at all possible. She felt the risk, but also felt like she had some control of the situation. So she used that control to move to a public place. There, she decided to take decisive action. In this case, it worked. She didn’t get raped. And hopefully she didn’t have any other consequences from this incident. It was risky, but it worked.
There is also this feeling like “I got myself into this mess, I need to get out of it.” She knew she made a bad choice by inviting him in. It’d suck to bring all kinds of people into this when it’s essentially a problem you created. So you try to solve the problem on your own. Once again, the big impulse here is “make the problem go away.”
Finally, remember this is all depressingly common. Women get in situations like this all the time. Unfortunately, every time a man does something like this you can’t pull out all the stops. You stop being able to muster up the energy for it. So you weigh the risk, look at your experience, and decide if you can manage it. I’d venture that most women have been in near-date-rape experiences, and so they have some idea of how these things play out.
I’ll go further than that. Why let him in her car the first time?
Really, she takes some drunk guy whom she just met to her apartment, where she tells him she’s going to change her clothes? That is an incredibly dumb thing to do - if it really happened. She could have been robbed, raped or murdered.
It seems likely that Alice isn’t telling you the whole truth. The story doesn’t make sense. The inconsistencies have already been pointed out here by the OP and several others.
If I were in your position I would tell Alice that I didn’t believe her, and that if she ever again wants me to come rushing to her rescue again, she’d better tell me the truth now.
I don’t think it matters what part of this you believe. Any way you slice the story it turns into a Judge Judy episode. This woman/child will get your not-daughter-in-law in trouble which may occur in your house.
::nod:: I’ve made scenes. Didn’t work. Cuss them out? It’s just noise to them. Hit him in the nuts? Either my aim was off or he was too drunk to feel it. Walk away, run away, climb over, under and around things to get away? They just keep shambling towards you. Guys will do whatever they want. Women have very little control over what happens. Deciding you don’t want to be a victim is cute, but all it really means is you don’t hold yourself responsible for what will happen.
I think that is more or less what I’m saying, yes, but I should have made things clearer. These women were talking about on some occasions inviting a stranger not just into their home, but to actually sleep on or in their bed with them, supposedly without the intention of having sex.
This is also taking place in Britain, where maybe attitudes and courts are different. A recent survey (http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/world/rape%20survey/159090) claimed that a third of respondents thought women who behaved flirtatiously - which to a rather dense man might include being invited into her home to stay overnight - were “asking for it”.
I have heard it said that for a rape victim the court case can be much, much worse than the actual rape itself - again, this may be a British thing. I do think trying to prove rape in the sort of circumstances my colleagues were describing would be very difficult unless there were pretty severe injuries.
Edit: I don’t personally for one moment believe that a woman who behaves in this way is “asking for it”. I do, however, believe it’s very unwise behaviour.
These situations do bring up the practical question for juries of just how far past the edge of common sense should a woman (or anyone) be entitled to go re physical intimacy with relative strangers and still have a plausible claim of being raped. If a woman is drunk and invites a drunk man into her bed to cuddle nakedly, and later she wakes up to find his penis in her mojito soaked vagina and cries “rape” it’s going to be pretty difficult to sustain that claim without claiming that you are borderline retarded in some fashion.
This little fact makes the whole thing highly plausible to me. We’re not talking about a savvy woman who has decades of experience dealing with 1) alcohol and 2) creepy situations. We’re talking about a dumb kid a couple of years out of high school. Good on you for getting Alice and Cindy out of that situation.
Why would it matter whether or not they intended to have sex? I’m sure most women have been in a situation where they fully intended to screw a guy – then had their minds changed by a messy apartment, rude comment, horrible foreplay, etc.
And? Again, just because you consent to kiss someone doesn’t mean you want to have sex. Just because you, say, have oral sex, doesn’t mean you want intercourse. Just because you consent to vaginal penetration doesn’t mean you’re up for anal. (I understand this isn’t necessarily your POV, so this isn’t directed at you.)
Count me in with the posters who don’t think this situation sounds fishy or even rare. I’ve certainly felt uncomfortable with a man, or even feared for my life, and my first instinct wasn’t always to call 9-1-1. There is that little voice that asks (perhaps in place of the police or friends): What has he actually done? How did my own actions or words fail to prevent it? What are some possible consequences of the cops showing up? What friends do we have in common, and who will they believe? It doesn’t help if you’re aware that you’ve made mistakes up until that point, ones that will bring your ‘innocence’ into question e.g. giving someone a lift or letting them inside your home. There’s a snowball effect. I’ve spoken with college girls who hooked up with or dated their rapists – just to pretend the rape didn’t happen, or to give themselves some sense of control.
Tracy Lord posted a thread a few months back about feeling really uncomfortable after letting a guy in to her place and having trouble making him leave (and some posters thinking she was being overly dramatic and shouldn’t have gotten herself into that situation in the first place). He didn’t take off his pants or force himself on her, but he also ignored her requests. Not quite the same thing, but the difference may only lie in the man she was confronted with.
Gotcha. I was confused as to which was Skald’s kin. Nonetheless, it still seems plausible. Did Alice act stupidly? Yup. But we’ve all acted stupidly at some point, and some folks don’t learn from their early experiences.