What if the man is drunk as well ? For that matter, what if he’s drunk and she’s not ? Is it always and only the man’s responsibility ?
You can add blackouts to the whole discussion as well. FTR, I am a recovering alcoholic and can speak with some authority here. My longest blackout was around 7 or 8 hours long.
I started off at a party in one city. The last I remember, it was around midnight or so, and some people were getting ready to go swimming. The next thing I know, it’s about 7:30 am, I’m sitting in a Golden Griddle (the Canadian version of IHOP, I guess), surrounded by a MOUND of food. Pancackes, bacon, waffles, sausages, bagels, fruit, cereal etc. (the drunk should not visit buffets). I have a shopping bag full of porn magazines. I am also in another city. For you Canucks, I was in Burlington, and ended up in Hamilton.
So for a number of hours, I was completely functioning and carrying on, and I have absolutely no memory of it. I have been able to piece together some events (during which time everyone said I was acting relatively normal. Drunk, but normal), but there’s a good stretch of time missing.
Not offering any answers, just throwing in another piece of anecdotal info.
Aside from drugging someone, how do you get someone else drunk/high? A person is responsible for their own actions.
No argument re: unconscious. However, how is someone to know whether or not consent is informed? I don’t carry around a breathalyzer.
The way I figure it, if the person is an active participant in the sex act (removing their own clothes, performing sex acts on the other person, directly consenting, etc.) then you do not get to claim rape afterwards. “I was too drunk to know what I was doing” isn’t a defense for the guy who insert crime of your choice here, we treat him as a criminal who knew exactly what he was doing. The person who has imprudent sex because of intoxication should be treated the same way.
If the person does not actively consent or participate in sex, due to intoxication or any other factor, then I think a charge of rape is more than likely appropriate.
No argument here, but the question is, if both parties are legally unable to give consent, who is the victim of the rape, and who is the perpetrator? Should both be prosecuted?
Sua
I think that this was asked in the Pit thread, although I don’t think it was answered. Can one of the board lawyers explain why if I go out and kill a man whilst drunk I bear responsibility for his death, yet it’s assumed that I’m unable to give consent whilst drunk?
I’m just curious as to why there’s an (apparent) double standard.
I think that’s exactly what she’s talking about. Rufies, intentionally “too strong” drinks, overdosing a consentual drug, etc. It happens all the time.
A woman gets drunk. I mean blind, stinking drunk. She then proceeds to have sex with some guy she meets in the bar. In the morning, when she wakes up, she doesn’t remember meeting the guy. She’s been raped, correct? After all, she was intoxicated to the point where she wasn’t responsible for her actions, right?
How about if she wakes up and finds that, instead of having sex, she ran over a kid while driving home? Is she not responsible for that, since she was so intoxicated?
Why is she responsible for nailing the kid on the way home, but NOT responsible for having sex?
As an aside, this week’s episode of “How I Met Your Mother” had our hero trying to remember how he’d ended up in bed with a woman after a night of drunken debauchery. He’d gotten so drunk that he couldn’t remember how she’d gotten there, or even who she was. She, on the other hand, was apparently perfectly sober. Was he raped? Where’s the outrage that a character in a sitcom was raped?
Unless the drunk person can show, through bruises or other violent marks, that they tried NOT to have sex, it’s sex. It could have been rape, but there’s no way to prove who took her clothes off if you don’t remember.
Isn’t the proper question the state of mind of the guy? That is, did he reasonably think she was capable of consent, and did he reasonably think she gave consent? If he thought she consented, and was reasonable in thinking so, how can that be rape?
Legally there is not. A rape conviction can come about only if the victim denies consent or is physically incapable of denying consent. If you are passed out and some guy has sex with you, it’s rape. But if your somewhere before then and say it’s ok, then it’s not.
As for where the double standard comes from- it comes from the days of putting women on a pedestal. It comes from the days when we believed no reasonable girl would consent to sex and that women needed to be protected and stewarded over by the men they were around. It comes from the days when we believed that women were a little less capable of making reasonable decision than men are.
Luckly those days are gone and women can make their own decisions and being responsible for them. If you say yes, it’s not rape. No matter how much you regret it.
What if you say yes, get into the act, and change your mind and your partner doesn’t stop. What do you call it then? And what is your recourse against someone who wouldn’t stop?
I think it all depends on how drunk the person is.
Imagine these two scenarios:
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You meet a girl at a bar and buy her a couple of drinks. She starts to get flirty and invites you back to her place to “talk.” When you kiss her, she joins along. Soon you’re having sex and she never says no.
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You meet a girl at a bar and buy her a couple of drinks. She is staggering all over the place, leaning on you for support. You manage to get her into your car and she passes out. When you get her back to her place, she has to almost be dragged inside. You plop her on the bed and as you remove her clothes she doesn’t resist but just lies there.
Both girls might very well be drunk legally. In fact, given the way alcohol effects people differently, they might both be equally as drunk per blood alcohol levels. However I know that I have been the person in situation #1 and I would never be the person in #2 because I feel there is a huge difference here.
The problem, of course, is figuring out exactly what happened in court.
You are still liable for your affirmative actions while intoxicated because it was your choice to become drunk, and you understood the risk that you may act improperly or illegally while drunk. You assumed the risk of your own actions. But you have not assumed the risk of others’ actions towards you. The fact that you are drunk does not absolve others of the responsibility to act properly and legally towards you.
In a related issue, the idea that one cannot give consent whilst drunk is a long-standing one, and is by no means limited to rape. A contract made while one party is drunk is not valid. Marriage vows taken while one is stoned are not binding. Basically, if someone asks you to do something while you are intoxicated, you are not bound by that agreement.
Sua
Well, that would be saying ‘no’ and anything that happens after that is rape.
And completely unprosecutable, I’d imagine.
Eh, you’d like to think. I haven’t time to Google at the moment, I need to whack this post out and get the hell off to bed, but you may strike oil if you look for “thirty-second rapist” - which, yes, does mean he carried on for half a minute after she changed her mind, and yes, she did drag him off to court for it, and yes, he did get convicted.
Personally I think the better part of both reason and ethics is that if you want your sex toy to be equipped with a 100% reliable off switch, you want not a man but a vibrator. They’re cheap, easy to use, almost invariably effective, and they don’t make you pregnant, give you VD, snore, or mind if you get tired of them at a moment’s notice.
And if guys want a sex toy that you can fuck even if it’s saying “No, stop it, I don’t want to do this”, buy a real doll.
Ah, IC! ty lol
Unfortunately we’re up against a slight double standard there. Woman with vibrator = smart, sassy clued-up 21st-century chick in control of her own life and sexuality. Man with doll = sad hairy-palmed social misfit, and you wouldn’t go near it. :dubious:
I respond quite acceptably to the word “stop”. It’s just that if we’ve spent the last three hours leading up to it and it’s been “yes” all the way, and then she decides it’s “no” not even at the eleventh hour but about five past midnight, I’d like to be distinguished somewhat from the knife-wielding PVC-masked sicko who leaps out of the bushes on a complete stranger without provocation.
I’ve no idea where in the grey area the line actually falls, but I sorta feel that at some point it’s a case of “you’ve been shown less consideration than you will have felt entitled to expect, but you can deal with that yourself”, not “Poor dear, you’ve been the victim of a horrifying sex attack, we’ll jail him for you”.