Yes, there really is.
Active, wiling , and unambiguous doesn’t have to be verbal. But laying there immobile is not consent, even if both people are sober.
If she goes to the party explicitly to have sex with him, even if she told him that was the plan, but them drinks too much and becomes incoherent, it’s still rape if he has sex with her.
Explicit is probably not a great word to use there. I agree with @MandaJo’s formulation, with the key really being on unambiguous. You can be unambiguous without expressing it in words.
Agreed. Because it’s not at all implausible that if she was sober she might have changed her mind. As said here, and it’s true, you can’t withdraw consent after the fact. But you can just before and during (in the sense that if anyone says “stop” you have to stop).
It’s not hard, people. Not only should you obtain explicit consent before you start, you should keep paying attention to your partner’s reactions and checking in with each other throughout the encounter to make sure you’re both still into it. Especially if you’re buzzed.
It’s called communicating and it makes sex way better.
And TMI - but I’ve had plenty of sexual encounters where one of us decided to stop before the “finish line” and it was never a particularly big deal. We just picked it up again in the morning.
That can also make the act difficult.
(Or becomes unable to say “stop”, of course)
@kanicbird
FUCK this stupid goddamned bullshit about next-day regrets causing women to make rape accusations. This is so unbelievably stupid. Do you people imagine life as a 1950’s B movie where a woman panics about her fragile-flower reputation because she had consensual sex? And that she’d be so devastated that she’d face the sheer hell of social scorn and accusations that reporting a rape involves?
You have no fucking clue what it’s like to report a sexual assault.
You have no fucking clue what it’s like to distress people who care about you by telling them about an assault.
You have no fucking clue what it’s like to have to tell strangers (cops, DA’s, etc.) what happened. I do. I was lucky in that cops believed me. They never caught the stranger who assaulted me. If they had, and it had gone public, I shudder to think of what I’d have had to go through. As it was, I terrified to leave my house and had anxiety attacks and nightmares for years.
You think victims find enduring all that preferable to trying to put truly consensual sex behind them? Fuck that nonsense.
I get that people get so scared about the randomness of sexual assault that they try to find a way to make it the victim’s fault or to imagine victims lie routinely, but it’s cowardly and despicable, and the hell that attitude creates for victims is unconscionable
What a loathsome piece of shit you are. You don’t belong here. You’re not wanted. I can only hope after you’re banned or flame out, you’ll do some serious soul searching and ask yourself what exactly went so wrong in your life that you felt the need to blame a survivor of sexual violence for her own rape. I’m trying to recall anything more egregiously cruel in my 14 years posting here, and I can’t. Good riddance.
Question: If a guy goes to the exact same party, actually this very guy, the one she intends to have sex with. And let’s say she even told this guy she plans to have sex with him (as per your example). But this man and that woman both drink too much and become incoherent (this is not excluded in your example) and as per your example he has sex with her, and also let’s just say for accurate fairness, and not to be sexist, she has sex with him, would that be rape? who raped who? Did they both rape each other? IMHO while it may not be ‘no harm no foul’, I don’t believe it’s in the best interest of humanity to have declared either one of them to have raped the other as doing so would seem to perhaps do greater harm to both parties.
And because this example is specifically possible in your example, your question simply does not provide enough information to make such a determination if it should be called rape or not. It is certainly possible for an incoherent person to engage in sex, and sleep sex is a thing as well which pretty much makes the person incoherent if they were being active while sleeping.
What troubles me is the automatic inherent misogynistic assumptions here that it is so common and ingrained in society that you don’t even list the condition of the guy. It’s very insulting to women and also very unfair.
OK would have helped if you asked directly instead of making up misogyninic ape shit that are an insult to women also while taking my post out of context and saying it means things it does not.
As I stated I see it the line is blurry. I don’t believe verbal or written or for that matter notarized consent is required in any sense but can be obtained. Nor does such consent, if obtained, guarantee it won’t be rape if sex were to happen. it is not something that can appear as such in a legal document or verbal agreement, it would be giving up bodily rights and thus not enforceable. Legally it may be very helpful in a defense I would admit, and it would establish a meeting of the minds at that moment of time, but such a thing simply can not be an iron clad consent agreement.
So if a hard line of rape must be drawn I would draw of rape the line at going forward with a sex act beyond an expresses objection. Though beyond that hard line there is the fuzzy line which will also include instances of rape. There are varying states of ability to consent or withdraw consent on both sides, there is intent of both sides.
If one was stone cold sober and the other was intentionally drugged by the former so they can have sex, that would almost certainly be rape, and legally it would be. Do I leave any fuzzy wiggle room? Yes, if this was the plan of the couple, to implement the above and neither party is objecting to what happened I would not call it rape.
Is it possible? In my mind, incoherent pretty much rules out initiating anything. I’d say the person performing the act is the rapist. The passive person is raped.
In the context of an ongoing relationship, such as marriage, partners are likely to have come to an understanding as to how to initiate, and how to consent, and probably don’t ask with words every time. So they might rely on implicit consent, because their relationship is established enough that implicit consent IS unambiguous. But for people who aren’t in that kind of relationship, yes, i think consent needs to be active, explicit, and unambiguous. Because without the first two it’s NOT unambiguous.
The legal line for “too impaired to consent” is not “tipsy and uninhibited”. It’s literally being too impaired to indicate consent. That’s per force too impaired to initiate. I’m very very comfortable saying that anyone who has sex with a person too impaired to consent (or to say “no”) has committed rape.
This, too.
I absolutely echo this. Thank you.
I didn’t accuse anyone. I related an experience that happened to me. I never turned him in to the police.
I did not wait 40 years to tell anyone. I’ve told other people about this event and never once did I name the man, especially since I can’t even remember his name.
I didn’t go to his house expecting sex. I didn’t go to his house expecting drugs. I was young and inexperienced. I never claimed to know that he drugged me.
But I do know that I was smashed. I can’t remember how I got to the bed. I just know that when I “came to”, he was fucking me and I didn’t want him to be doing so. Maybe you think I gave consent somehow, but I know I wouldn’t have because I never had sex on a first date, even with guys I liked more.
But I’m done talking to you.
Thank you to those of you who’ve reached out to me about this. Several of you have shown me some real kindness here.
I really didn’t mean to hijack the thread. Please feel free to return to pitting you know who.
I decided to avoid anger in the ATMB thread, but I have to get this off my chest here.
For fuck’s sake: would you guys not try to hijack MrDibble’s thread to make it about getting rid of the Pit? That’s clearly not what the thread is about. You have a thread for that.
There are a lot of people who would disagree with removing the Pit. But we most likely have consensus that this shit isn’t allowed. So please let’s not muddy the waters by making it yet another debate about whether we must remove this 20+ year old forum.
I don’t want to accuse anyone of doing this intentionally, but this is a common deflection tactic. There’s the will to get something done. You don’t want it done. So you try to hijack the topic to make it about a broader topic. People start disagreeing about that, and then the original problem is not dealt with.