Boy, did I miss a lot.
I agree with you on the general principle that many women who feel they have been raped may have not technically by the legal definition been raped, or expressly stated ‘‘no’’ in such a way that their supposed assailant really knew what the hell was going on–in fact, in situations where both parties are plastered, I’d wager it happens a lot.
However, I have to call a logical fallacy on your reasoning here. It presupposes that there is 1 rapist for every raped woman. People who commit crimes generally do it more than once, so no, every man in the world would not have to be a rapist for those statistics to pan out.
The only thing that really seems to be in question here has nothing to do with the OP, and that’s whether a woman who is drunk can be considered to have given consent. This is where we truly, IMHO, get into gray areas, and things have to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Men cannot be unquestionably held as responsible for the actions of women, because that is insulting and patronizing to women, and unfair to men.
This is what I wonder: Why is it that a sober man having sex with a drunk, horny woman somehow elicits more sympathy than a drunk guy who has sex with a sober girl? (Both are sleazy, but neither rape, if you ask me. Because we are working from ingrained stereotypes that women don’t really want to have all that sex and men really will take it any way they can get it. Dumb.
The average guy is not a rapist. Sometimes things can be incredibly subjective where a woman may feel violated and the guy could have no idea. It doesn’t nullify the violated feelings of the woman, but neither does it make her sexual partner a rapist.
Personally, I think this is why lots of women consider themselves to have been raped when it may not seem statistically likely. There is such a strong emotional component to these experiences that objective reality becomes a moot point. To a certain extent, just the idea that you could be helpless and in control of a man is traumatic in itself–because it’s not just this isolated singular event, it is a part of a vast cultural narrative of subjugation and fear that goes back thousands of years.
I once read a very eloquent and hopefully illustrative anecdote by a woman who had been arguing with her boyfriend and was pissily ignoring him. Eventually he got fed up with her cold shoulder treatment. He came out from the shower, grabbed her, threw her down on the bed face first, and held her there. He didn’t rape her, he didn’t threaten her, he didn’t hit her, he just completely immobilized her and ignored any of her pleas to let her up.
After five minutes or so, he did let her go, but she felt after that point their relationship had changed forever. He had told her in so many words that he was capable of dominating her and would do so if she ever pissed him off again.
This woman wasn’t raped. No illegal acts were committed, but she still felt a sense of personal violation. He basically took the historical narrative of women everywhere–helplessness, subjugation, disregard for basic bodily integrity–and threw it in her face.
I would imagine that if a woman had a sexual experience, where inadvertently or not her partner acted in such a way that made her feel she was out of control, she might add ‘‘I feel violated’’ to ‘‘I had sex’’ and construe it as rape.
I am in no way condoning it if she should chose to prosecute or even call the guy a rapist. I’m not even saying he’s anything less than a stellar upstanding guy. I’m saying that experiences like this cannot exist in a vacuum. If she genuinely feels violated, she’s no more a manipulative liar than he is a sadistic rapist. She’s probably just responding to a cultural narrative of victimhood that many women have been aware of and indoctrinated with since time immemorial.
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