I’m having a hard time understanding how a situation like this could hold up in court, unless the woman was outright lying. In these circumstances wouldn’t a lawyer advise against the woman pressing charges?
I don’t doubt that it has happened, given the reality of human nature, and it’s not fair. God no, it’s not fair. But it’s not fair that women get raped and sexually abused all of the time and not taken seriously by friends/family or the legal system. Which is inherently more unfair? In both cases, innocent people are suffering.
Men falsely accused of rape? = Happens all the time
Women falsely accused of lying about rape? = Happens all the time
So our legal system is fundamentally incapable of providing justice for everyone everywhere at all times. Why is this a surprise to anyone?
I don’t mean to belittle a traumatic experience such as rape or whatever you want to call it, but it seems to be the general thought in society as well as this thread that rape=fucked up forever. Got psychological problems? That’s because of the rape 20 years ago. Nothing can erase it and the pain is perpetual. Your computer breaks down? Rape.
Does anyone want to volunteer a rapish personal experience that did not lead to a life of misery? Or if you are miserable and fucked up now, it is NOT because of a long-ago rape?
[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
I’m having a hard time understanding how a situation like this could hold up in court, unless the woman was outright lying. In these circumstances wouldn’t a lawyer advise against the woman pressing charges?
[/QUOTE]
Actually, it holds up pretty well. A woman just has to say she was too drunk to consent (so even if she said “i want to” it doesnt count) and its rape. Just search “drunk rape” on google and there are bazillions of hits for news stories and such about it. Mostly on college campuses…where i happen to be.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
I don’t mean to belittle a traumatic experience such as rape or whatever you want to call it, but it seems to be the general thought in society as well as this thread that rape=fucked up forever. Got psychological problems? That’s because of the rape 20 years ago. Nothing can erase it and the pain is perpetual. Your computer breaks down? Rape.
Does anyone want to volunteer a rapish personal experience that did not lead to a life of misery? Or if you are miserable and fucked up now, it is NOT because of a long-ago rape?
[/QUOTE]
This is the reasoning behind why so many women categorize their rapes as ‘a miscommunication’ or, now, ‘gray rape.’ They weren’t traumatized physically, they were angry at or embarrassed for the guy who did it but didn’t call the cops or want him dead, and they didn’t want to be in the same category as ‘rape victims’ (or ‘survivors’) in our society. They read Lucky and couldn’t relate. They don’t feel broken or dirty, and they don’t need people telling them they’ll never heal (just as some molestation victims are fine, many women who get abortions are fine, and some people resent the term ‘recovering’ alcoholic rather than ‘former’ alcoholic). There are so many issues at play (obviously), especially this idea that women’s bodies are always, to some degree, public property. Whether they’re being groped in public, violated in private, or being told how they need to react to a crime.
One might ask what responsibility these women have to other possible victims (I wonder how they’d feel if, despite their ability to shrug an incident off, their little sister went to a party with the guy), and whether part of the reason for this view of rape victims as ever-tarnished is a self-fulfilling prophecy (the only women coming forward are the ones who can’t pretend they’re not traumatized).
ETA: If you’ve never read Lucky by Alice Sebold, read it. It will make you cry and scream.
[QUOTE=Musicat]
I don’t mean to belittle a traumatic experience such as rape or whatever you want to call it, but it seems to be the general thought in society as well as this thread that rape=fucked up forever. Got psychological problems? That’s because of the rape 20 years ago. Nothing can erase it and the pain is perpetual. Your computer breaks down? Rape.
Does anyone want to volunteer a rapish personal experience that did not lead to a life of misery? Or if you are miserable and fucked up now, it is NOT because of a long-ago rape?
[/QUOTE]
Well, I’ve never been raped (knock on wood and all that), but I was sexually assaulted (in public) earlier this year, by some random guy…it was scary, but I did my civic duty and reported it, and all that. After it happened, I was wondering if I was going to experience PTSD symptoms (remembering my abnormal psych class) but nothing happened, and I’m basically the same person. I always thought that if something like that happened, it would totally change me and make me jaded or more in tune with the world or something but I’m basically still me.
I think you are absolutely right. A lot of people have expressed similar thoughts in this thread. Somehow we went from a ‘‘don’t blame the victim’’ well-meaning mentality to this other extreme, which is, ‘‘If you don’t feel like a victim, something’s wrong with you.’’ I don’t even like the word ‘‘survivor’’ any more because of the way it totally annihilated all other aspects of my identity, and the way it seemed to be wrong for me to want to forget and move on. It took me a long time hashing and rehashing the past before my REAL problem became clear.
Me: I’ve been sitting here talking about this for 5.5 years now. I want to do Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy. I want to focus on my present life. I want to learn how to function in every day society.
Therapist: I don’t know if CBT would be right for you, because we don’t normally do it with victims of sexual abuse or complex-PTSD and other situations that are extremely complicated where you have a lot of feelings to work out… It is better for people who have just one basic issue to work on.
Me: Fine. Here’s a basic issue I want to work on: I’m not going to class because I’m too depressed. I want to graduate.
Therapist: It’s natural to feel overwhelmed when you’ve been through so much…
Me: Maybe. But it’s NOT natural to live your entire life on the couch because you can’t stop feeling sorry for yourself! Let me out of here!
And after about four months of CBT, I was functioning well enough to stop therapy.
I truly believe this attitude toward people who have been raped or sexually abused can cause a lot of harm.
I’m going to quote something I posted here right around the time I joined the board. It’s long, but for people who feel this way, it can be really validating.
[QUOTE=olivesmarch4th]
In “The Collapsible Woman: Cultural Response to Rape and Sexual Abuse,” Venessa Vaselka writes a very daring challenge to the commonly-held assumption that rape is the worst thing that can happen to a woman–and she investigates the cultural circumstances that have created these assumptions. She said it much more eloquently than I could ever do, so here are some excerpts:
Quote:
"The collapsible woman–one model of mental health for an unaccountable number of individuals. She is fragile, humorless, and diluted, bearing an uncanny resemblance to the sickly Victorian “angel of the house.” …Every major media piece on the subject of rape or sexual abuse presents us with the same vision of the collapsible woman. We see the same fight for sanity and purity and the same picture of life after the cathartic process of renewal. This can be seen as a support for violated women, or as a victim culture – but neither stance offers us much worth striving for. There has to be something better than the toaster prize of being called a survivor, an alternative to the role of this forever scarred, pain-haunted neurotic.
This deification offers nothing but a religion in which the pinnacle of holiness is the ability to break down at any moment, over anything, and call it a return to sanity. I’m not questioning real emotions: nightmares, tears, pain; they are the inviolable rights of every human. How though, from this, have we come to portray the ideal “recovering” woman as someone who can’t go to the grocery store without having her “issues” “triggered”? Sure, there are days, sometimes months, in the life of anybody who has been violated when the need to protect oneself from the callousness of the outside world is an absolute. We need, however, to hold up more than a skinless existence as an endpoint.
As a culture, we tell girls from the cradle that rape is the worst thing that can ever happen to them. We say it will destroy their lives and they will lose their sense of purity. We tell those who were sexually abused that it is natural to feel dirty. We do this because it’s true, and we’re trying to prepare them so they don’t feel alone when it happens. But aren’t we also setting them up to feel destroyed, to feel dirty and impure? How much are we training ourselves to crumble? The convenient words like “survivor” and “victim” don’t really change the messages we’re given. While there is no positive side to rape or abuse that could be emphasized, we need to tell another, fuller truth. We should say, “This may wreck your life for a while,” or “Sometimes you’ll feel dirty.” But we don’t, and we are left with the impression that there is no healthy response other than breakdown. It’s as if we see moving beyond trauma as denying its impact.
The real problem is not that we treat rape as sex, but that we treat it as theft. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary describes rape as forced sex and also plunder – “robbing or despoiling” to be exact. You weren’t just violated, we tell a raped woman. You were pillaged. Something of intrinsic value was stolen from you. …we tell a woman clearly and loudly that if she was sexually violated, she has been robbed, and that the objects stolen were her purity and innocence. With the best of motives, we still say to her, “I’m sorry for your loss.”
The truth is, if you were raped or abused, nothing was stolen from you. The lowlife who did it threw his soul in the trash, but yours is intact. As long as we cling to the concept of rape or abuse as theft, we are ultimately led back to the belief that a woman’s worth and her sense of self lie in her sexual purity, and we can speak of her condition only in terms of ownership and loss. To imply that deep within every woman is something essential that can be seen or touched, a vessel containing the real her that can be stolen by someone else, is the absolute objectification of women.
…Idealizing a state of breakdown, however, rather than the strength it takes to get past one, traps women into believing that moving beyond the trauma is heresy. We need to be able to turn to each other and say, “Be a macha” and know that that means, “I’ll cry with you, hold your hand, and give you time. But I won’t watch you lie down.” Until we can whisper the truth–nothing was stolen from you, that was a lie–and honor women for both their compassion and their guts, we won’t stop unraveling. We will always be the collapsible woman."
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Superfreaknduper]
I wish we could. But unfortunately, as a guy, I can get charged, arrested and jailed for that “not rape”.
[/QUOTE]
Which is why guys have to pay attention and not handwave off things like “she’s really drunk” or “she wouldn’t normally give me the time of day” as not their problem.
And both men and women really have to stop using alcohol as a tool for their sexuality.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
No, I don’t agree, and neither does the law, at least in my state. Drunk PEOPLE (not women, PEOPLE) cannot give consent. That means she can’t give him consent and he can’t give her consent. If you’d like to change that, write your congressperson, not me.
Frankly, as I said before, I think that morally we’ve got the equivalent of two children fucking here. Neither one can legally give consent to the other, so it’s sort of a wash.
But while the law says a drunk person cannot give consent, it does not say a drunk person cannot rape. Legally and logically, they are both raping each other, although I agree that sounds really, really stupid. And yes, in reality, I’d whack them both with a trout and tell them to grow up, so I agree with you. But I am not a judge.
And, once again, we return you to your regularly scheduled thread. Which is not about drunken sex.
[/QUOTE]
Cite? And dont give me some contractual capacity cite. I am talking about a criminal statute that says it is illegal to have sex with a person drunk at their own volition. Am I raping my wife if we have drunk sex? If you’re correct about the law I am. A drunk person can’t give consent. if she’s drunk, and I’m having sex with her, by your understanding of the law, I’m raping her. I think you’re probably wrong.
Yeah, well, I should shut up anyways. I don’t have any really reputable ‘‘experience’’ to speak of. My idea of a rollicking good time is snuggling on the couch watching Star Trek on DVD.
catsix, even though I’m generally in agreement with your attitude that if I don’t want to have sex with a guy I don’t go to his place and make out with him, I have to ask, are you actually arguing that going to a man’s home means that I’ve agreed to have sex with him? Because… no.
I think age might be a consideration here. I’m 36. I’m pretty much either going to have sex with you or I’m not. There’s not a lot of halfway at my age. But it was a whole different story when I was 20.
It depends on where and when the question is asked. At a party or a bar where alcohol is being consumed, it is night time, and this is someone I just met? I would assume ‘Wanna go back to my place?’ means ‘Wanna fuck?’ and answering ‘Yes’ to the first will be taken as a ‘Yes’ to the second.
I’m 29. For at least the last 11 years, the question of going to someone’s place either at a party or at a bar meant sex. I’ve used it myself on several occasions. The loosest possible example was at a party during college where after much drunken flirting the question was ‘Wanna give me a tour of your house?’
The guy obviously understood perfectly, because he barely nodded at the rooms in the house and led me directly to his bedroom. These subtleties seem to be common enough that I’ve never had to explain one, nor been surprised when some guy I went home with was interested in more than watching cartoons.
[QUOTE=catsix]
It depends on where and when the question is asked. At a party or a bar where alcohol is being consumed, it is night time, and this is someone I just met? I would assume ‘Wanna go back to my place?’ means ‘Wanna fuck?’ and answering ‘Yes’ to the first will be taken as a ‘Yes’ to the second.
[/QUOTE]
Well, hey, since I did actual research to answer that question in t’other thread, I might as well post the relevant portion of it here.
In my state, at least, there’s very specifically no such thing as an “implicit yes.” The absence of “no” is not “yes”. And yes, a woman can change her mind at any point, including after penetration. “According to Illinois state law, there is no implied consent. The absence of an explicit “Yes” is a “No,” according to state law. The Illinois Criminal Sexual Assault Act, 720 ILCS 5/12-17, defines consent as “freely given agreement to the act of sexual penetration or sexual conduct in question. Lack of verbal or physical resistance or submission by the victim resulting from the use of force or threat of force by the accused shall not constitute consent. The manner of dress of the victim at the time of the offense shall not constitute consent.”” (from here).
So legally and morally, when I agree to go upstairs with you, I’m consenting to go upstairs with you. I’m not consenting to “go upstairs with you” nudge nudge wink wink nowotImean?
And, from Anecdoteland, I’ve gone to plenty of guy’s places at their invitation, with or without alcohol, without the intention nor the action of having sex. Maybe you need to find cooler guys to hang out with.
[QUOTE=WhyNot]
And, from Anecdoteland, I’ve gone to plenty of guy’s places at their invitation, with or without alcohol, without the intention nor the action of having sex. Maybe you need to find cooler guys to hang out with.
[/QUOTE]
Well, as catsix pointed out, bars are a different story. Getting drunk at a bar or nightclub and going home with someone generally equals sex. Going on a date with someone and then going home could just mean hanging out, making out, oral sex, etc. Bars are generally a different milieu.
Wonderful, but I’m not talking about statutes. I’m talking about differences between what men and women see as the meaning of words in conversation, and the fact that I still can’t believe there are actually women who are shocked to find out a guy who asked to take them home after flirting and drinking all night in a bar might actually want to have sex.
Actually, I think the kind of guys who don’t want sex in that situation are dreadfully boring and anything but cool. I’d just be aggravated that some dude wasted my time.
I consider the whole ‘Want to go home with me?’ question between people who just met and are getting drunk and flirty at a bar or party (as in they met there, not that they are on a date) is rather like the subtle toe-tapping in the restroom. It may not sound like it to the unfamiliar and the naive, but it’s an invitation for a hook-up.
[QUOTE=catsix]
I consider the whole ‘Want to go home with me?’ question between people who just met and are getting drunk and flirty at a bar or party (as in they met there, not that they are on a date) is rather like the subtle toe-tapping in the restroom. It may not sound like it to the unfamiliar and the naive, but it’s an invitation for a hook-up.
[/QUOTE]
I’m in the college scene as of now, and if you take “want to go home with me”/“back to my dorm” and just going back…well your out of luck. It may not be sex your consenting to, but you aren’t keeping all your clothes on either.
[QUOTE=Superfreaknduper]
I’m in the college scene as of now, and if you take “want to go home with me”/“back to my dorm” and just going back…well your out of luck. It may not be sex your consenting to, but you aren’t keeping all your clothes on either.
[/QUOTE]
Uh, “out of luck”? As in “it doesn’t matter what I think I’ve agreed to I don’t get to keep my clothes on”?
If so, you do realize that you are claiming that you will commit a crime, don’t you?
[QUOTE=jsgoddess]
Uh, “out of luck”? As in “it doesn’t matter what I think I’ve agreed to I don’t get to keep my clothes on”?
If so, you do realize that you are claiming that you will commit a crime, don’t you?
[/QUOTE]
“out of luck” as in 99.9% of the time that you heard that and thought “well, i really wanted to see the houses decor and take a tour and talk” you would be wrong with his intentions… in no way implying your going to get raped… just that there was some serious mis-communication.