I feel as if I’m wandering into a minefield but there are some scenarios that I think are not compatible and I need to interject, or rather give my opinion.
When a woman gets drunk and decides to drive, then causes an accident in which people die, that is her fault. She took that decision upon herself and no one else is to blame. She will pay in whatever way the prosecuting attorney thinks fit.
When a woman gets drunk and leaves a bar with a man and they go to to an aforementioned place, he had better be god damned sure she wants to fuck him because if there is a sliver of doubt you should not touch her. Got it?
Chick drives drunk= she took the responsibility on herself
Chick gets drunk and date raped= he took the responsibility to be a decent human being and failed
So if a man gets drunk and throws himself at a woman, does she have to delicately put him to bed on the couch to make sure he’s okay? Does she have an obligation NOT to do anything that he might regret? If they have sex and he’s in a relationship/married (as another poster posited a few pages ago), should she have known better? If he regrets cheating on his loved one and feels awful about what they did, has he been raped?
I’d say no. I’d say that if either a man or a woman is in this situation and they willingly got drunk and willing had sex, it’s not anyone’s responsibility to treat them as an incapacitated child who’s incapable of knowing what they want.
Has anyone seriously suggested that if a woman is drunk and coming onto a man he’s obligated to not have sex with her? If she’s falling down and semi-conscious,* of course* he shouldn’t have sex with her, but if they’re both tipsy and have both made it clear that they want to have sex, I don’t see how that’s rape.
Oh God. I feel like this is getting nowhere. Are we all reading the same thing??
In Order:
No, but it would be nice
No, but it would be nice
Probably, but it’s not legally wrong, just morally problematic
No, and neither would she have been, if genders were reversed
I guess it’s not your legal responsibility, but it would be nice if people of BOTH sexes would try and be respectful of others, and not take advantage of a drunk person you know would not otherwise consent to sex with you. It isn’t rape, but it is shitty behavior.
What is wrong with not being an asshole to the person you want to fuck? Just because you can, legally, and it isn’t rape, doesn’t make it a nice thing to do. Instead of trying to get over on people, why not have sex with people who like you, really, and want to be with you whether they are sober or not? Is this such an unreasonable standard?
ETA: I think this is getting missed somehow, so, to clarify: If you are with someone, and you both very much want to have sex, and you like each other, blah blah blah, and then you have a few drinks, there is nothing morally, ethically, legally, or otherwise wrong with having sex with that person.
Again, the women who consider their experiences ‘gray rape’ are not the ones who simply had drunken or bad sex and regretted it (which is fine for another thread), but the ones who didn’t think they’d put up enough of a fight or said ‘No’ forcefully enough, were molested in their sleep/drunken state by a roommate, friend or guy they were not prepared to have intercourse with, or, for the most part, did think what the guy did was wrong but didn’t feel traumatised enough by it to bring him to court. These aren’t the ones crying ‘Rape!’, they’re the ones who can’t equate their friendly, good-looking, charming neighbor sodomizing them at a party halfway during consensual intercourse with the stories on the news about thugs in alleyways.
So part of the problem doesn’t seem to be that these women are blaming guys for their behavior and bad decisions, but that they still feel that the men in their lives have some sort of ‘right’ to fuck them unless they make an active effort to stop them. Sadly, this means they must sometimes sacrifice their own possible well-being (STDs, future emotional problems, screwed up sex lives) for the reputation of some guy whose life they don’t want to ruin.
Walking back to his place doesn’t seem like a decision to do anything but… go to his place. Kissing him means she decided to kiss him or to kiss him back. Oral sex = oral sex. And I think things have stopped right there enough times in the history of humankind for intercourse not to be the next, unavoidable step.
Some years ago, I was living with a former lover with whom I had severed the romantic relationship. We were still living in the same apartment (largely for financial reasons because our lease wasn’t up yet but was in both of our names and the rental company refused to let either of us break the lease and neither of us could afford what amounted to double rent on a new place and the old place we still had leased). It was absolutely, perfectly, crystal clear to everyone and their dog that we were no longer dating.
One night he got hammered (as he so often did - one part of the reason he was my former lover at that point) and let himself into my bedroom. It was 4am, I was passed out cold, and am not coherent when awakened anyway. He proceeded to fuck me - I woke up, pushed at him, told him to knock it off and go away. He ignored me. He was a lot bigger than me, had the leverage on his side, and he didn’t stop until he was finished. Whereupon he rolled over and went to sleep. In my bed. Couldn’t be awakened. And believe you me, I tried to wake him the fuck up.
At no point did I consent. In fact, I objected repeatedly.
Was I raped?
I think so. However, I made several decisions leading up to that situation that your scenario implies served to alleviate his responsibility in the matter. We were still living under the same roof, after all. We had a past intimate relationship. I should point out that when my former lover woke up and was confronted with the incident, he refused, categorically, to even consider that it might have been rape.
Granted, he turned out to be precisely the sort of shitheel who actually believes that “do anything you have to to get into a girl’s pants, because if she ain’t screaming and struggling and covered with bruises when it’s over, it wasn’t rape” bullshit.
I’d also like to mention that I did not report him for rape. This decision had nothing to do with any confusion on my part about whether or not I was raped - I know damn well I was. At no point did I want that sex, I voiced my objections aloud, and attempted to physically extricate myself from the situation and failed. At a certain point I stopped struggling, but that was because it hurt less that way. Bad enough I should be raped, worse I should inflict unnecessary pain on myself in the process.
I didn’t file a report because I didn’t want to deal with the inevitable reprecussions of such a report. At that time, I was a gainfully employed law student in my middle-twenties. I also wasn’t particularly traumatized by the experience. I was wicked pissed at him, but not mentally or emotionally scarred. I did not need therapy. I did not need to be informed how big a victim I was. I did not need my relationship with him, my life decisions, my financial circumstances, or my sexual history examined in detail.* I didn’t want everyone I knew assuming that because I’d been raped, I was automatically traumatized and scarred for life. I did not want to explain a million times what happened. I didn’t want to fracture beyond recognition my social network (which would have been inevitable - he and I were part of the same social circle). I certainly didn’t need people informing me repeatedly how damaged I must be from the experience and how I’d never have a healthy relationship with a man again. If people tell you something often enough, you start to believe it. I didn’t want or need to wind up traumatized and emotionally scarred just because I heard a thousand times I should be. I didn’t want to have to shoehorn the time it would take to file and follow through on a criminal charge into my absurdly-overfilled schedule (I was a full-time law student and working three different jobs to make ends meet - my schedule was well and truly ridiculous). I didn’t want my friends and loved ones tempted into rash and illegal behavior in retribution for the assault. Hell, I didn’t want the gentlemen in my social circle to feel that I couldn’t possibly be interested in dating them because of the assault.
In short, reporting the rape would have had vastly more of a negative impact on my life than the actual rape did. Why would I do that to myself?
*Yes, Bricker (and other Doper attorneys) I am aware that those questions (particularly the ones about my sexual history) are not supposed to be asked of a person reporting a rape, but “not supposed to be” and “aren’t” are not the same. I was also aware that those sorts of questions are, in fact, routinely asked - and in this situation, when my attacker and I had a previous relationship, they would most certainly be asked. Hell, they’d have had to be asked just to determine if it was a legitimate accusation or a false one. The Rape Shield laws limit the sorts of information that can be introduced, and the sorts of questions that can be asked at trial. Those laws don’t do a freaking thing to limit the extent to which a rape victim will have to rehash his or her sexual history during the investigation. A person reporting a rape is free to refuse to answer, but the questions are still going to be asked. Probably a number of times by different people with varying levels of solicitation to the needs of the reporting person. They’re totally reasonble questions to ask if you’re investigating a rape allegation, after all. I’m totally in favor of the Rape Shield laws, but I can also understand that they’re not an absolute bar to having to discuss your sexual history to investigating officers, counselors, ADAs, and other assorted members of the law enforcement community.
It’s my home state (and city) too. And yes, it’s true. A woman can accuse a man of rape, and unless the accusation is so blatantly false as to be on the face of it unbelievably, the accused will be arrested. And for the rest of his life, well, you know that question on job applications? Have you ever been arrested? And if so, what for? He’ll have to answer that he was arrested for rape.
No, he ***shouldn’t *** be able to press charges. Yes, he should be laughed outta the joint. And given the same set of circumstances (please keep that in mind), so should the woman.
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.
I’ve been flamed for this one before, but I have never in my life been asked by a guy I just met in a bar if I wanted to go back to his place and not considered that the question actually was ‘Do you want to go back to my place and have sex?’
Anyone note that in Spit’s example, the woman in question told him flat out she never said ‘No’ in any way shape or form to the guy, but still considered him a rapist?
The law does say PEOPLE, but if you found one case in which a sober women was convicted of raping a drunk man, not only would i be surprised, i would give you $5 dollars. And i would suspect that the number of charges pressed in such a case is VERY skewed towards women accusing men.
second bolding:
This thread is about “gray rape” and the consensus (I think) has been made that the instance given in the OP is not at all gray rape, its just straight up pure rape. What I think gray rape IS however, is drunken sex that a person wakes up after and goes “sh*t i shouldn’t have done that” and presses charges. Because any instance where a woman is passed out and you have sex with her, that is NOT drunk sex, because not only is she drunk, but unconscious…thats a huge difference.
I agree. I’d be shocked if any man actually walked down to the police station and filed charges in such a case, much less took it all the way to court. Than again, I’m shocked when women do it, too.
This thread is about (or rather, was started about and the OP is struggling to keep it on topic while it wanders everywhere) an article in Cosmo magazine which coined (or popularized) the phrase “gray rape” to refer to cases in which people feel like they were sexually violated, they said no, pushed people away or were passed out, but they, for whatever personal reasons, have decided NOT to call it rape. Drunk and denied is not on the menu.
You could call it that, sure. I like your definition a lot better than Cosmo’s, actually, but it’s not what the thread is “supposed” to be about. I’d even join your bandwagon to have that be the meaning, and to get different laws around consent while both partners are under the influence written. Because logically and morally, I *agree *with you. It’s that pesky law thing that doesn’t. But you’re still using the term “grey rape” to refer to something rather different from the Cosmo article, book it’s based on, or the OP’s use. When the OP started the thread, a whole bunch of us signed on to debate the situations described in Cosmo, not the both-people-drunk-issue. It’s enough of a different circumstance that it’s off topic, I think. IANAMod, of course. I’m not telling anyone to knock it off, but I do think we should be clear that it’s not “grey rape” as defined in Cosmo or the OP. Defining your terms in the debate, and all that.
What about a guy at a party (that you ask to ‘go upstairs’)? What if you’re with a group of friends? Or you do want to go back to fool around, but aren’t sexually active (not having/have never had intercourse)? I can think of several situations I’ve been in like this, and not once did I have sex. Luckily, all the guys, even the strangers, were gents. Not one tried to push things further than I wanted them to go, despite my occasional drunkenness. I have absolutely no qualms about quashing the myth of ‘the sure thing.’
Can’t we just call that ‘‘not rape’’? Why dignify the absurdity of such behavior by giving it a name that implies it might in some way be sorta kinda like actual rape?
No way. That totally and utterly depends on the lifestyle of the people in question. If I was talking to a guy at a party and he wanted to leave, I would not assume he wanted to have sex with me. I would assume he was interested but that it’s a pain in the ass to make any kind of meaningful connection at a loud and noisy drunk-filled party.
I don’t doubt that there are people who take that, ‘‘Do you wanna come back to my place?’’ thing as an invitation for sex, but there are a world of people who don’t.
Besides, it doesn’t really matter. It’s not like you get to automatically have sex once the two of you DO get home. The law still applies, no means no, yadda yadda.