It depends on the evidence, I suppose. Such a woman is not a false accuser, assuming the facts of your hypothetical, but the police and prosecutors may choose not to pursue the case just the same.
The best way to avoid those situations, in my view, is for people to understand that consent can be withdrawn, and if it is withdrawn, the activities must cease. That doesn’t mean one needs superhuman powers of levitation, or something, but it means if someone says “get off of me!”, you must get off of them, and if someone says “stop it!”, you must stop it.
Repeating myself, and I guess talking past everyone, but regardless of how you feel about a guy and a girl in a longterm relationship having some recalcitrant, slow-starting sexual encounters, that is not at all the scenario that is at issue in literally any sexual assault prosecution. It is 0% of the real world problem being addressed by the legal definitions of sexual assault issues, no matter how you feel about the issues or the definitions. And in literally every sexual assault situation where there’s any kind of dispute or potential for prosecution, the people involved by definition do not agree that the thing you’re talking about has happened. The problem of the sexual assault that everyone agrees isn’t a sexual assault is a problem that had already solved itself before you thought of it.
It seems to me that this matters. It seems to me that it doesn’t matter at all to a lot of you. But these conversations are not ones that the people who develop policies about addressing the issues have never thought about before. It’s just that they also think about, for instance, the guy in his early 20s who goes on Tinder dates 4 times a week and, on a regular basis, uses the “seduction” techniques he learned on the internet to buffalo women back to his place. And they have thought about the fact that if your analytical framework for that encounter is the same as the one you use for ma & pa in the bedroom after the kids go to bed, when pa’s got a lot on his mind but ma knows what he likes and can get his attention, then the Tinder guy will get away with sexual assault like it was his job, which probably he thinks it pretty much is. The fact that you can conjure up a scenario where the technical definition is violated but you aren’t morally outraged is interesting and important. There’s also the converse. I don’t know why that isn’t interesting and important.
This is an excellent point. They’re probably also thinking about the controlling boyfriend who regularly badgers his partner for sex, sometimes waking her/him up at 3 a.m. demanding a blowjob, even though the partner told him he/she had to go to work early and needed to get a good night’s sleep.
But when ma and pa find out that the law that criminalizes that guy’s abuse also technically makes their healthy sexual behavior a felony, even if there’s no chance they will ever be prosecuted, they feel a chill on their spines.
It’s probably not true that their healthy sexual behavior is made a felony, in most jurisdictions, which ought to help. Anyway, people are technically guilty of all kinds of things all the time, and presumably they don’t get any special chills about those things.
In my jurisdiction, the definition of criminal harassment is:
Now think about that. Tickling: crime. Repeating a silly joke the other person thinks is dumb: crime. Drawing a cock and balls: crime. Singing an annoying song: crime.
But I’m willing to bet that nobody gets any chills about that, even though – technically – people commit that shit all the time. I’m willing to bet nobody feels in their gut that there’s a serious problem here. I think they just go well, yeah, but that’s not really what the law’s for; I’m not actually gonna get in any trouble. So there’s a difference. I think I know what it is, and I’m constantly told I’m wrong. But I don’t know what the competing explanation is.
Well, to put a really fine point on it: cultural misogyny.
I think that a lot of people believe that the sexual assault cases that are actually prosecuted (i.e., not the hyper-technical cases that would be analogous to a jail sentence for drawing a cock and balls, but the cases that are more analogous to “real” harassment) are bullshit, but they don’t say that. They talk about it in much less controversial ways, about how technically X Y and Z could happen, and that’s what’s wrong with the law, but in reality what they’re concerned about is the fact that they don’t think the Tinder serialist or the 3 a.m. boyfriend or even the guy who has been out loud actually told “NO, stop doing that” are really doing anything wrong, because they think men are entitled to a certain amount of presumption and it’s a woman’s job to steer clear of it if she doesn’t like it.
The problem is that sexual freedom is an essential component of women’s freedom. Patriarchy limits female sexual expression. As Naomi Wolf said, “Orgasm is the body’s natural call to feminist politics.”
Probably the best solution is to prohibit men from using Tinder. That would both allow women to express their sexuality, while protect them from the danger of being seduced by men.
I haven’t been able to follow exactly what it is you’re trying to say you appear to be leaving out in a lot of clarifying detail.
Bolding mine. Pardon?
You were also kind of mushy and the way you are characterizing things so that I’m not really sure what it is you’re saying someone is doing and whether that’s right or wrong. For example:
What about that guy? Why do you put seduction in quotes? what do you mean by “buffalo”?
What sexual,assault? What did Tinder guy do? You have not specified any kind of sexual assault.
Whom you have described as using seduction techniques he learned on the internet, which on the face of it doesn’t indicate sexual assault, so no, so far you haven’t convinced me he’s done nything wrong,
And what did he do?
"
Somwhatever the other two guys are supposed to be guilty of, it is not persisting with sexual acts after being told no, is what I ger from this, and yes, I continue to wondder what it is we’re supposed to be seeing here.
Well yes, both men and women are entitled to presume that if the person they are with is participating and not saying no (which from what I can piece together as I just described is probably the situatio) you’re right, you’re right she should steer clear of people who don’t obviously don’t understand her seemingly vanishingly subtle communication.
I am a little amused and a lot resigned that my partner has been classified as a 3 A.M. boyfriend and that it’s my job as a responsible woman to steer clear of such things.
Calling a lot of the sex people have consentually rape is bullshit. Legally enshrining that sex to be rape is bullshit. And holding to that standard in some cases while counting on prosecutorial discretion to only happen in the cases of real assault is the bullshittiest bullshit that took a shit.
Do you think otherwise? Was I raped? What should happen if I chose to go to law enforcement?
I’ve asked people here several times and have yet to get any answer much less a straight one: What’s your alternative? What’s the definition of rape which you propose that makes sure the people you think were raped are counted as having been raped, the people you think weren’t raped are not counted as having been raped, and prosecutorial discretion isn’t overly relied on in deciding who gets prosecuted and who isn’t?
Or are you guys hinting that there can be no finally satisfactory definition because “sex is complicated”? Well then aren’t you just in the same bed as Jimmy Chitwood in thinking that whatever the legal definition is, it’s going to have to technically apply to some difficult cases, and somebody (the purported victim, or maybe sometimes the prosecutor) is going to have to show some judgment?
Personally, I choose to bite the bullet, follow the same standards of evidence, mens rea, and reasonable standard of a doubt for rape as I do for other crimes, accepting that because many rapes are not provably nonconsensual beyond a reasonable doubt, many rapes will not be successfully prosecuted. I accept this as a trade-off in large part because rape is unique in not only being really difficult to prosecute in many cases, also tramples hard on people’s sacred values in the way mere theft or assault don’t, and so I think we need the full court press of evidence and standards, especially when we look at what has happened to historically-disadvantaged people accused of rape.
Are you also a little amused by the fact that you’ve decided to make this about you even though I don’t even know what you’re talking about? I said 3 a.m. boyfriend in direct response to WF Tomba, who was talking about… a boyfriend at 3 a.m.
so I make reference to “the 3 a.m. boyfriend.” Your takeaway is
even though obviously ain’t nobody talking about you or your partner or classifying anything about you as anybody, because who gives a shit, and now in order to pretend we’re still having a conversation about the subject at hand, I have to go through this little charade of reminding you what the conversation is about while you tell me I can’t follow the discussion.
[QUOTE=robertliguori]
Hell, let me bring up one story from my past. My significant other does costume design work, and works odd hours to meet deadlines. Every work has its own unique technical challenges, and identifying and creating a unique solution to a novel problem is quite a rush, especially when sleep-deprived. The result of this is my partner is quite likely to be a bit het up and eager to celebrate in the early hours of the morning. On one particular occasion, I woke up into a sex act.
[/QUOTE]
Since I was the one who introduced the “3 a.m. boyfriend” into the thread, let me state for the record that I was not thinking of robertliguori’s partner when I made up that hypothetical example, and I don’t think robertliguori’s partner did anything particularly wrong. I was trying to come up with an example of conduct that might be a borderline case as far as the law is concerned, but which would seem clearly morally reprehensible and deserving of punishment.
If some retard decides to withdraw consent 2 seconds before his girlfriend orgasms, should she go to prison? Become a convicted felon? A registered sex offender? Have her life thrown in the garbage?
You may not be aware, but there’s a neat little X button on your browser window that will solve this problem.
Shouldn’t you? Care, I mean? That is to say, if you were trying to get your thoughts in line with reality, and someone was bringing up real-life examples of cases where things characterized as anywhere from reprehensible to rape were actually happening, shouldn’t you want to talk about that?
Because sighing and going on all huffily about how self-centered I am makes it look like you want the inconvenient world of facts to go away so you can go back to your nice, clean hypothetical, where the 3:00 AM sex-initiator is of course of course reprehensible and deserving of punishment for asking for sex.
Why is this the case? I mean, not the sighing and the huffiness, that’s obvious. Why is hypothetical sex partner reprehensible and deserving of punishment and actual sex partner obviously doing nothing wrong?
Mens rea, reasonable doubt, etc. It’s not perfect, but just like having to prove that someone had criminal intentions when they committed assault by stumbling into you in a crowded bus is really hard (and thus makes malicious prosecution have quite a hurdle to jump.), having it there and not jumping straight to “Charged with assault? Put him on a registry! Look at the violent criminal recidivism rate!”
Of course, the problem there is that the harm done by malicious stumble-into-ers under the cover of plausible deniability and reasonable doubt is enourmous, gas-giant-sized worlds smaller than the harm done by rape, but as I’ve said before, I don’t think the sacred value paradigm actually helps.