This thread is intended to examine the ramifications of my OWN reply to THIS thread, which is about the “Jedi mind trick,” and how one would use it if it really existed. Someone else said he would not use it do get people to do things they wouldn’t ordinarily do, such as “suck me off, Jessica Alba.”
I disagreed. It seemed nonsensical to me to have/acquire such an ability without doing things like this, since the ability has few other purposes beyond coercion. But it occurred to me after I posted this would probably fit the definition of rape.
So, I got to thinking about other scenarios wherein a woman does something “she would not ordinarily do.” I think many of us have seen/been in such situations. Hypothetical: A woman is out with her friends on a day where she got fired/broke up with long-time boyfriend/what have you. A fairly attractive man starts hitting on her, buying her drinks, flattering her, etc. Now, she went out with no intention of doing anything with anyone, but the guy’s charm, flattery, and alcohol loosen her inhibitions enough so that she goes home and sleeps with the guy.
So, if using the Jedi mind trick would be rape, what is the above scenario? We’ve all seen it happen; clearly she would not have slept with the guy except for deliberate action that he took to bring it about; is that not what using the Jedi mind trick achieves, as well? You can say she "chose’ to be with the guy in the other scenario, except that her “choice” was really dictated by the guy making himself available and hitting on her weaknesses. If the Jedi mind trick only works on the weak-willed, than using it would seem to be no more amoral than this type of psychological compulsion.
Good question, but that’s kinda what I’m getting at. At what point does one person’s will end, and the other person’s will begin? Is it coercion if you gently nudge a person down a path, or just plant an idea in their head they might otherwise never have had?
That’s kind of what I’m wondering, too. This just seems like a woman having sex and a man having sex, when both want to. I think if we get into the “well, maybe deep down she didn’t really want it or was too vulnerable to say yes,” it gets kind of nebulous. How do we ever know if there’s consent?
Well, the barest definition to me would seem to be that consent exists when a person does something without any visible sign of coercion, or feeling coerced. Sound reasonable?
But that definition eliminates the Jedi mind trick as coercion! Those it is used on are not aware they are being manipulated, nor is there any visible manipulation. Yet, they are NOT acting on their own free will.
Yeah, I think the fact that there is no Jedi mind trick pretty much changes your scenario. If being charming and nice and sexy = manipulation, then isn’t most sex rape?
I don’t know if the JMT is rape because I don’t know exactly what the other person’s mood it. Did those stormtroopers really end up wanting to let the heroes go? If so, then Jessica Alba wouldn’t be raped. If not, the she is. If she wants it, it’s not rape. I don’t care *how *she came about to wanting it.
Heh, that would be me on the Jessica Alba front :). And yes, I’d definitely say the Jedi Mind Trick thing is rape, but then I have a fairly wide definition of what rape is.
Taking advantage of a girl that is in a weakened state (whether because she’s drunk, or sad, or feeling extremely lonely…) as in your scenario is rape, in my mind - and I did turn down sex a few times on those grounds. Obviously it’s not the same as gunpoint, violent rape, but it still isn’t “ethical”.
Pressuring a girl into saying yes, as in “come on, you say you love me, prove it”, to me that also count as rape. Fucking a girl who’s afraid you’ll leave her if she says no ? Yup, rape-ish, or at least something that’d make me think a lot less of myself.
Seduction is one thing, manipulation is another. Let’s put it this way : if there’s a chance she’ll regret it in the morning, Mr. Happy will not cry tonight. It’s that simple.
In your above scenario (sad drunk girl), I’d probably flirt with her, but not seal the deal and ask to see her again some other day, when she’s sober, had time to think about it etc… Which is probably one of the reasons my sexual headcount is in the single digits but hey, at least I can look myself in the mirror every blue-balled morning.
Is it rape if a girl does it to a guy, too? If a guy goes out after a nasty break up, gets hammered and sleeps with a strange girl, has he been manipulated? I just feel like in these scenarios, it’s the woman who is seen as vulnerable or not in a good state to be deciding things. People make bad decisions for all kinds of reasons, but if a woman, for whatever reason, decides this guy seems awesome/sexy and willingly goes with him, I just think it’s really infantilizing to say to her, “No, you don’t really think that, that’s your loneliness/vulnerability/weakness talking.” I mean, if a guy lowers his standards because he hasn’t had sex in years, has he been taken advantage of?
And these questions, minus the “jedi Mind trick” part, illustrate exactly why the word “rape” has no real meaning any more. I say this as an attorney who has done lots of prosecuting…“rape” can mean anything from the above scenario to knife-point level evil. I’ve seen actual rapists get off by confusion of the term, and innocent people nailed to the wall in a similar manner. We need a spectrum of terms and corresponding crimes to avoid this sort of thing…sorry if this veers too far into GD territory…
I never claimed to be perfect, and I’ll freely admit that I have something of a Knight In Shining Armor complex. I’m just trying my best not to be an asshole. I guess I’d rather be a patronizing jerk than a scumbag, if you will.
But for the record, the one time I did cave in to a girl who pushed me into having sex with her when I didn’t really want to, I did feel raped, and I did feel like shit for a long time.
Okay, fair enough. It’s probably better to be safe. I do think that, as JackofHearts points out, we have to be careful to actually apply the word “rape” more…well, carefully. If everything is rape, then where are we?
I feel like I’ve had sex under situations where I didn’t want to (or in some cases, really didn’t want to), but I still consented. But in one of those cases, I’d just refer to it as manipulation/coercion, but definitely not rape. I felt really bad afterwards, maybe in some ways “violated,” but legally and practically, what happened to me wasn’t rape since I did consent.
But how can it be consent if you don’t want to ?
Not in the legal sense of consent I mean. I’m sure there’s no legal way to go at it, at least not in a practical sense, it would be too easy to argue “I said yes but I meant no” in court. But then, what’s ethical and what’s legal aren’t the same. Just because it’s legal doesn’t make something right (and vice versa).
The fact that the coercer didn’t use bodily harm but emotional or chemical means as his leverage for coercion doesn’t change the fact that coercion happened. In a sense it could even be worse, in that… well… **you **did say yes, didn’t you ? It’s all your fault, **you **made the choice, **you **shouldn’t have drunk that much, you’ve got all the guilt etc… whereas you can rationalize a gunpoint rape by not having any choice in the matter, other than dying that is.
And we do treat roofies incidents as rape, so why not plain ol’ smashed, or clearly-not-100%-mental-strength ? Call it abusing a situation, using someone, manipulation, call it whatever you want, I still contend it’s a shitty thing to do.
Not sure if I’m making a lot of sense. It’s always hard to rationally discuss a gut feeling :/.
EDIT :
That is one fucking great picture :). Thanks for sharing.
What, seriously? This coming from the guy who felt violated when gay men saw him naked in the shower? How messed up is your sense of morality if you’re perfectly willing to screw someone without caring if it’s rape or not but freak out at someone you don’t want to looking at you? Please tell me you were joking with that last statement.
Anywho, given that I said I’d use the JMT in the same way I guess I should think about this some more. Would I actually be willing to use it to get someone I knew for a fact wouldn’t want to have sex with me (for example, a straight guy) to do so? I’m thinking about this quite hard and actually faced with the hypothetical I really don’t know. I’ll have to be honest and say that maybe I would, because I don’t know how I would be changed by access to such a power. I’m not naive enough to think it wouldn’t affect me but obviously can’t say unless it happened exactly how I’d act. I’d like to think I wouldn’t do anything that I knew would hurt or permanently distress someone but power corrupts, you know?
In my experience, most men are very vulnerable to young, attractive women. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen such women exploit this weakness in order to manipulate men into having sex with them. And as a previous poster justly mentionned, loneliness makes people even more vulnerable to seduction, and many of these women deliberately choose to target celibate men.
In our day and age, I can’t believe we still let this happen. Those manipulative rapist females should all be rotting in a cell, where they belong.
If she wants it (and he wants it), how can it be rape? (Leaving aside statutory rape.) If she wants to have sex, by definition, it’s not rape, is it? He just said that if she wants to have sex, he doesn’t consider it rape, so clearly he does care.
You’re right about that. In a practical sense…I’m not sure what it was. I didn’t really want to. I was in an okay mental state–I mean, I was perfectly sober. It was more like I didn’t feel like having sex. I just wanted to go to sleep, and my boyfriend (now ex, luckily) just kept badgering me and finally I thought it would make him shut up if I just did it, and just got it over with. Midway through, I realized I really didn’t want to be there and I left, so I did have the ability to say no…It was just a bad situation. There definitely is a spectrum of lack of consent. This wasn’t all the way rape, but it was less consensual than enthused sex.
but hey, at least I can look myself in the mirror every blue-balled morning.