Who says there are no false accusations?
I don’t think that’s what she’s saying (she said “leaving out lying”). I think she’s asking if there are cases of misunderstanding that ought not be “counted” as rape–like the man really honestly believes the woman is willing, and the woman really honestly believes that the man knows and understands that she is unwilling.
I am sure this has happened. I think in some cases, it’s willful ignorance–deliberately not paying attention to signals/not giving her a chance to speak, or otherwise lying to himself–and that’s rape. It may be impossible to prove it’s rape, and the rapist himself may never really realize that’s what it was, but part of being an ethical human being is not allowing yourself the indulgence of willful ignorance–you have to face truth.
On the other hand, I am also sure that cases of actual, tragic misunderstanding occur. In those cases, I don’t think it’s fair to call the man a “rapist”, but I also don’t think it’s fair to tell the woman “Sure, you had sex against your will, but you weren’t raped, because he didn’t know that”. Her perspective/reality is not dependent on someone else’s experience, and finding out after the fact that he didn’t understand the situation is not going to somehow retroactively transform the experience.
Honestly, this is a trend I have noticed whenever we have one of those “was that rape?” threads. People find the question “was he a rapist?” much more important than “was she raped?” And I really do kind of think that’s indicative of “rape culture”–we want the male perspective to be the determining factor, not the female.
There is a thread on ENWorld about this. Someone who’d actually read the thing pointed out that those within were portrayed as monsters.
Who is the “we” you speak of?
The part you didn’t clearly and directly respond to, although you have given something of an answer: in your book, rape is a matter determined entirely by the woman’s perception of what occurred, is that a correct statement of your view?
While you seemed to allow for the possibility of misunderstanding, but then appeared to conclude that he is still a rapist, just unaware of it.
Your division, that between the question of whether she experienced rape vs. whether he experienced being a rapist, is really very important and central to this issue. Is it possible the answer for her can honestly be yes and the answer for him honestly be no (and not because he’s just in denial…)? What then?
With two sexually active, sober individuals it is difficult to come up with many scenarios where there is such gross misunderstanding between the parties, I readily grant. But the situation I find most troubling is one in which both or even just she is (willingly, by her own hand and choice) operating in an altered state. (and most especially when the parties are young- college age - both still easily incredibly stupid about how to behave in loads of ways so really hard to have big expectations of either one to “get it” on behalf of both) And in that altered state, she either agrees to sex or is hopelessly ineffective at making her disagreement clear. (Or, and I know a lot of people hate to hear this, but it doesn’t mean it isn’t real: she wants it but she doesn’t have the courage to own and act on her feelings in a sober state and uses intoxication as an excuse) I have lived this, I know many women who have lived this, I think it happens at least a thousand times every Saturday night across North America, at minimum.
And in the cold light of the following day, lots of feelings happen that can change the way she perceives her own behavior of the previous night and her experience of the sex. Including the simple and sad reality of a young woman saying yes to a fantasy of what sex is going to be, but finding the messy, often selfish and less than fabulous reality of it so distasteful it seems fair to her to name it rape, but of course it really isn’t.
It cannot be denied that this absolutely does happen. How often, with what details…harder to pin down. But the fact that it absolutely does occur must be acknowledged and factored into the discussion. It is no small matter to brand any man, and particularly a young man just beginning his life, as a rapist. Do you not agree?
How is it so easy for some people to see her perception of her victimhood as the only genuinely monumental issue, easily dismissing the very monumental matter of him being unjustly branded a sexual predator/criminal?
Sex is the most complicated, messy, confusing and generally fraught aspect of being a human being, for both men and women and ten times more so for those people who are really still just boys and girls. I think it is wildly unfair and unreasonable to lay all the responsibility for whether everybody is communicating perfectly at his feet, and hold him accountable no matter what her behavior has been. That’s just wrong.
Unless and until modern feminists are willing to address the issue from that larger perspective that recognizes the complexity, instead persisting in decrying feminine victimhood by beastly males, labeling the whole society a “rape culture”, they just come off as shrill and way too Andrea Dworkinish. And not at all honestly interested in real equality between the sexes. Blatant intellectual dishonesty like that just rips any legitimacy right out from under them.
It comes down to this: do we want to see a majority of our boys and girls, men and women, become healthy, sexually functional people? Or do we want to foster victimhood and distrust between the sexes, battling over which is the more put-upon?
(There is a whole 'nother layer of this that is too complex for this particular debate regarding victimhood itself, and the current willingness to portray women as fragile flowers that stomps all over the feminism I grew up with… but like I say…different thread, different day…)
This can be avoided when people absolutely refuse to have sex unless they are 100% sure the other party has definitely and clearly consented. That shouldn’t be hard – don’t do it unless you’re absolutely positive the other person is consenting to it.
Or at least to have the two perspectives cancel each other out, true. But then, if she was raped, it was not by the rape fairy, someone raped her and what do we call someone who rapes?
**Stoid ** brings up something we have seen in many rape-themed threads: whether the effort to eradicate a “rape culture” requires operating from a presumption that ALL rape claims are to not only be taken seriously, but that it’s wrong to subject them to skeptical questioning; and whether people being wrongly branded rapists is or is not trivial/insignificant in the effort to make sure rape is dealt with. I don’t see minds being changed much then or now.
Of course a popular trope on the side arguing against “rape culture” is to talk about women who had bad-judgment sex and then had others come and explain to them that they were actually raped. That is another whole can of worms – IMO, usually if someone feels raped there’s something real behind it.
Would we then have to recognize a category of accidental or inadvertent rape, but how would we treat those who incur in it? Already on the legal side of things there is the category of “statutory” rape, and that is a strict liability crime where absence of mens rea and honest ignorance of the facts is no excuse and the degree of felony is the same. What do we call what happened to those example people and what do we do about it? How does she get redress other than having him accused of a sexual assault? Indeed that’s one question I find not often addressed: what is being offered to someone who has been raped or who is at risk of rape, other than surer swifter and harder punishments, sanctions, penalties to the offender and to institutions that failed to protect her?
Certainly so! It’s a sure bet that it will be universally embraced as the natural and consistent behavior of everyone everywhere, right about the same time the monkeys fly out of my butt.
We can come up with completely fantastical scenarios to prevent nearly every imaginable unpleasantness that life has to offer, which is a cool way to kill some time when hanging out with friends, I guess, but it doesn’t have anything to do with meaningful solutions to the actual problems.
Especially when those problems are centered on the maddeningly complex matter of sex.
The concept of consent didn’t even really exist until recently – now, I think, lots of people think about it before they have sex. I doubt that we’ll ever get to the point that every single person always thinks about consent and takes it into account before having sex, but if we could get from virtually no one thinking about consent at all until recently to lots of people presently taking it into account, then I think we can continue to improve such that more and more people think about consent and agree that it is wrong to have sex with someone unless they clearly consent.
And I don’t think this has any contradiction with healthy and pleasurable adult behavior, except perhaps for those who specifically desire partners who do not consent.
Are you talking about a woman sincerely believing she was raped?
I could go all crazy over this, but it seems much less time consuming to simply ask you to explain what you mean, because the plain words make no sense in the universe in which I dwell, where consent has always been understood by everyone to be a crucial component of non-criminal sex. Since forever.
Care to clarify?
In the past, from my understanding, it was mostly about submission – wives submitting to husbands and so forth. Consent didn’t enter into it in the modern usage of the word, in which both parties are assumed to be fully capable of analyzing the situation and determining whether they desire such activity at the time and with the partner in question. Further, from my understanding, in the past it was about enjoyment – if a person showed physical signs of arousal and enjoyment, that meant it wasn’t and couldn’t have been rape. Now we recognize that physical signs of arousal or pleasure have nothing to do with consent.
So in terms of how consent is used now – that everyone has an absolute right to choose when and where and with who to engage in intimate activities with (or not), and consent cannot be assumed and it must be clear – I think a lot of progress has been made.
I think she was raped, I don’t think he was a rapist. I don’t have a problem with that as a logical statement. I honestly don’t understand why anyone does.
These are NOT the same. At all. The first is not rape; the second is. It may be that her partner had no way to understand that she couldn’t convey it; I am not saying he is a rapist. But if the whole time she’s engaged in intercourse she’s doing her best to say “no”, how can that not be rape?
It really sounds like you are trying to say that a woman’s right to feel violated or attacked should be based on what her attacker was thinking. That can’t be right. If I get assaulted by someone who sincerely believes that they are acting in self-defense, they may not be criminally liable, but I was really attacked, and learning that they were mistaken doesn’t lessen my pain and trauma. Why would rape be differen.
This is not at all the same thing as a genuine misunderstanding. You are conflating two entirely different issues.
Why does whether or not he’s a criminal get to be the thing that determines whether or not she’s entitled to the same sympathy and support other rape victims get?
Because if you mean to say that she was, in fact, actually raped VS. meaning to say that her perception and emotional responses to the event are to be respected as legitimate and real for her, whatever they happen to be, then there’s a problem, because rape is a real thing that is done to people by other people. It is illegal and there are serious consequences arising from being accused of it, including going to prison. So if you say she was, in fact, raped, but the person who had sex with her is not a rapist, there is a logic implosion.
No. Any person’s right to feel something is not subject to anyone else’s opinion opinions about it.
A person’s right, or perhaps the lack of one, to pursue criminal charges requires more than “feeling” raped. I’ve been kicking around this planet for some time, and it’s not all that hard to come away from lots of encounters feeling raped, both sexual and non. It doesn’t mean a rape occurred. If she indicated she did not want to be sexually touched by the person and they did it anyway, she was raped. If she was unconscious and she was touched, she was raped.
If she failed to express her disagreement with whatever activities were occurring, or chose to do so in a manner that could be rationally interpreted as something other than disagreement, then she wasn’t necessarily raped. She had a role to play in the interaction, which was to communicate her position about it, something that can be done any number of ways or combinations of ways. If she failed to do so (not was prevented or was in some way incapable) effectively, then it wasn’t rape and her feeling like it was is completely understandable, but not legally sufficient.
It doesn’t. Offering succor to someone who is feeling awful, no matter why, is not something I have the slightest interest in preventing or otherwise interfering with. My concern is with public and legal processes that have an effect on other people.
Here’s an extreme scenario I’d be curious to get people’s opinions on. And while it is extreme, it isn’t made-up, it happened to one of my closest friends.
Man and woman are into each other, heading down the road to sex. Both passionately kissing, touching, stripping, just sailing happily to intercourse, no hesitation. Both parties are sexually active and experienced adults.
Both parties have gotten completely naked, very willingly. He’s between her legs, his diamond cutter penis an inch from her vagina. She suddenly decides no, she doesn’t want to fuck. She doesn’t want to do any of it anymore, starting with the no fucking. She looks him in the eye and says: “I changed my mind. I want to stop now. I’m done.” This is the first sign of any kind she has given that she’s not on board with it. He says something dismissive, in a nice, sexy way, something like, “you tease!” and plunges into her vagina and strokes once or twice, and because he’s wildly turned on and also is a premature ejaculator, boom, has an orgasm. All in the space of seconds.
Now by law, he raped her. No question. She said no, he went ahead. it was two seconds, two strokes, and he (understandably, in my opinion) didn’t think she was serious. But by law, it was rape.
She decides to take him to court over it.
Do you believe it would be just to convict him of sexual assault? Not would it be technically correct, but would it be just?
Yep, definitely, if it happens just as you posted it. Very just. That doesn’t mean life imprisonment would be just – a judge should take into account the circumstances, timing, etc., when handing down a sentence.
But yep – that’s definitely rape, in both a legal and moral sense, from my understanding, and it would absolutely be just to convict him. It would also absolutely be just for the woman to decide that she didn’t want to pursue charges, or to laugh it off, if she so chooses. But if she honestly feels that she was raped, and those are the facts of the case, then it’s absolutely just for her to go to the authorities, and for the authorities to pursue and ultimately convict him.
I think that would be just as a rape charge/conviction and I don’t think that’s a great example, but I like the points your making in this thread Stoid.
I guess I don’t really care about the criminality/conviction aspect. It’s simply a fact that many, many rapes will be forever impossible to prosecute because there won’t be enough evidence to move beyond “reasonable doubt”. I think the reason why we need to talk about “rape culture” is that we need to prevent rapes, not punish them.
I care that men and women learn to be aware of and respect their own and other’s bodily autonomy. I care that men and women do not reduce the body of the person penetrated into an object. I think that right now we still have a culture that often fails on those metrics. Whether or not something was “rape” is rooted in that, not whether or not some individual can or should be prosecuted.
A man believes that by pushing a particular button, he will cause a woman to be given a million dollars. He believes this for good reasons, and could not have been expected to think otherwise. But when he pushes the button, the relevant machine explodes instead.
In such a case, the woman was killed, but he was not a killer.
Concerning your point about rape and crime, there is no logical implosion if we do not assume that all instances of rape are instances of crime. (Just as we should not assume, in the scenario just described, that the instance of killing was an instance of crime.)
The “rape” in “rape culture,” btw, is not referring to the crime of rape.
Exactly, with an added dose of "wtf Stoid?! Sorry to escalate but seriously, this is clear cut.
Those are worthy goals, but you should very much care about the criminal/conviction aspect because the very word rape is defined by its criminal aspect:
Cite
"unlawful sexual intercourse or any other sexual penetration of the vagina, anus, or mouth of another person, with or without force, by a sex organ, other body part, or foreign object, without the consent of the victim. "
So how do you propose we prevent them in the first place?
stoid has brought up some good points and in the case above I would say that indeed, a rape has occurred because consent can (and should be able to) be withdrawn at any time. Does that mean you can say no after the fact? I would say not.
First of all, yes, it would be just. Second of all, she doesn’t “decide” to take him to court over it.
I think you’re laboring under a number of misapprehensions about sexual assault in the world – to put a name to it, I think you believe that opinions about these kinds of scenarios meaningfully inform our real-world approach to defining what sexual assault is, when in reality, they don’t help much.
I believe this because you’ve said a lot of things, but for an example, you typed the sentences
and the thing is, as long as we are imagining scenarios where we apply the labels “very willingly” and “suddenly… no,” we’re wasting our time vis a vis trying to address sexual assault in the cold, hard, sad reality you’ve been mentioning. Everything that is complicated about sexual assault is neatly shucked away by conjuring up a scenario where we have certainty about the capital-T Truth of this unfathomable lightning-quick change of heart. We’re assuming a particular perspective on the trickiest part, setting up the facts that way, and then saying “now, in a situation with these facts, wouldn’t you agree that …?”.
Along these same lines, I would be interested to know which of those two parties is among your closest friends, except that I’m pretty sure I don’t need you to tell me.