I didn’t want to think this before, but the more you double down on this, the more it seems like you’re insisting that you habitually wake your girlfriend up at 3AM and demand a blowjob.
If that’s not what you’re saying, then it is completely unclear why you’re insisting on describing your own situation as being of a piece with the 3AM boyfriend scenario.
No one here advocates anything like what you put in quotes above. And no one here advocates getting rid of the reasonable doubt standard. I’m not sure what the relevance of mens rea is for what you’re saying so I’ll not address that unless you want to clarify.
So what are you advocating? Who are you arguing against?
I highly encourage you to read my earlier posts in the thread.
Once you have done that, I encourage you to reflect on the assumptions that lead you to believe that if person A is waking up person B in the wee hours of the morning for sex (or even skipping that step entirely and moving straight to the sex), A is a man and B is a woman.
I mean, I’m not hugely offended by y’all’s insistence that my partner is reprehensible and deserving of punishment (because the time where she skipped the asking step was not the only time we’ve had late-night sex where I started asleep), but the complete refusal to engage with the fact that this is happening to me and not robertaliguori seems oddly telling.
Or maybe I really am a victim and my relationship with my partner really is predatory. You tell me!
Hey, if everyone is in unified agreement that we shouldn’t treat sex crimes differently than other assaults, hurrah for agreement!
I did indeed pass over the post in which you were explaining who is doing what in the situation you’re discussing.
I am not sure what significant bearing that has on anything.
You are saying your girlfriend is a controlling asshole who regularly wakes up her partner demanding oral sex at 3AM? That does not seem to be accurate to what you seemed to want to describe, but for you to assimilate your case to the 3AM boyfriend scenario discussed by WF Tomba that would have to be what you’re saying. Is that what you’re saying?
Well, that’s because you have a picture in your head of exactly who wakes their partner up for early-morning sex (or skips that step), of their character (controlling asshole, obviously morally reprehensible) and hearing that an actual person who does that is the partner of someone with a clearly male user name doesn’t fit that pattern.
This is why actual-partner’s behavior and actions has no bearing on hypothetical-partner, despite being isomorphic-to-even-more-egregious-by-the-given-standard.
I’m saying that you’re being kind of transparently sexist, because it’s obvious to you that my partner has nothing to do with 3:00 AM asshole boyfriend, for the single and sole reason that you assume my partner is female and I am male. Hypothetical person A gets explicit consent before having sex late at night. They are Bad. Person B doesn’t get explicit consent before having sex late at night. They are Not Bad.
People in relationships where their partner is sleeping over are assumed to be adults. They are assumed to be capable of saying “No, I really need sleep.” and rolling back over, or even of deciding “I really don’t want to have sex now, but my partner does, so I’ll oblige them, since that’s what people do in relationships, and I know they will oblige me later.” Or they are capable of deciding that they’re tired of being woken up at 3:00 AM for sex and setting boundaries, and terminating the relationship if the other person keeps waking them up.
At least, I assume that people are assumed to be capable of doing this. Do you?
Jiminy christmas, son, we aren’t talking about your relationship, no matter how often you tell us we are. Nobody’s telling you your relationship is reprehensible. The actual, as opposed to greedily imagined, point of my post that amused you and caused you to resign, was that there are situations that fit the definition which nobody thinks are reprehensible, but that this is perhaps not the most important thing about the definition, because people like you – correct me if I’m wrong – are not in the habit of insisting that a prosecution take place when your relationship takes its natural 3 a.m. course. Insofar as this broken scheme applies to your relationship, it’s working just fine.
It might very well be outrageous that anyone would call your partner a predator and you a victim. What it isn’t is a thing that has occurred.
You’re wrong. That is to say, you’re wrong in the general case that wide-open laws around sexual misbehavior aren’t abused, and the relative prosecution of black men for rape in the U.S. in earlier decades speaks for itself.
And people are saying that a person X who is assumed to be male, and who has done something far less egregious than what my partner has done, is an asshole, morally reprehensible, and deserving of punishment. They have said that this is not the case of my partner. The only apparent confounding factor is that my partner is not assumed to be male.
Given that, it’s obvious why you’re not discussing my relationship (except at the meta level).
Let us stipulate that I am a rabid reverse-sexist. I will not argue to the contrary–you may assert it as often as you wish.
You said your situation with your girlfriend is comparable (and, lately, you said, actually worse) than what was described above as a controlling significant other who regularly badgers their partner for sex, sometimes waking her/him up at 3 a.m. demanding oral sex, even though the partner told him he/she had to go to work early and needed to get a good night’s sleep.
So do you mean to say that this accurately describes your girlfriend or not?
If not, then your point fails to hit, since your point relies on the description being accurate to your own situation.
If however it does accurately describe your girlfriend, then that at least makes minimal sense of your argument for me, and I can see how your remarks seem plausibly relevant. Even then, though, the argument doesn’t work, since it depends on the weak inference that since you don’t wish to complain about your girlfriend, one also should not complain about the badgerer in the hypothetical.
The technical term for someone who thinks the sexes deserve differing treatment is ‘sexist’. And now you know!
Again FYI, ‘girlfriend’ is not the term my partner prefers, but hey, my partner’s not here.
And ‘controlling’ is a meaningless emotion-word, as is ‘badgers’. And while it’s not really regularly because the work itself isn’t regular and the late-night deadline celebrations are even less, no one’s claiming that a regular rate of 3 interruptions a week pushes Hypothetical Guy into vile territory.
You wanna give me some hard numbers and targets? What specific behaviors are necessary to count as controlling? How many times in what timespan makes something regular badgering? Is demanding oral particularly pernicious, or is the guy who does the same thing for a different orifice A-OK?
Tell you what; you tell me exactly what makes Hypothetical Boyfriend’s actions evil, we’ll compare it to stuff that’s happened in my own life, and I can tell you whether or not I’m in a LRT with a morally-vile rapist-in-all-but-legalisms. It will be fun! It’s not like the standards you are proposing have jack-all to do with how actual people in actual relationships actually have consensual sex, after all!
Hmm. Actually, some people here seem to be having trouble doing reading comprehension and comparing person A, who has late-night sex with their partner, with person B, who who has late-night sex with their partner, so let me make that explicit; it is the case that the standards you all are proposing have nothing to do with how actual people in actual relationships actually have consensual sex. And introducing an actual case of people doing some of what you’ve said is clearly described as not-evil.
And nope, you don’t get to go backsies and assume that Hypothetical Girlfriend is complaining, or isn’t actually happy to have some late-night fun and go back to bed with a REM cycle to spare, because you said nothing about her choices, assumptions, or long-term choices before you condemned Hypothetical Boyfriend.
Of course, my case is not universal. There are plenty of actual non-hypothetical people who are not happy at all to be woken up at 3:00 to be propositioned for sex, or to find sex has started before they wake up, even in the confines of a long-term relationship. But you don’t know that about an arbitrary couple. You don’t know who’s consented to what, who’s happy with what, and who’s unhappy with it. And claiming that a specific (male) person is evil for taking actions, and not because their partner is unhappy with them, while steadfastly refusing to explain why a specific (female) person is not evil for similar-or-more-egregious actions, is sexism. Sexism-sexism. Reverse-sexism is when you don’t determine the worth of people’s claims, actions, or experiences based on their sex, because doing the opposite is sexism.
Yeah right. What’s the cowgirl position? Let me guess, you’re sitting around a campfire eating baked beans and farting, oblivious to anyone’s feelings, letting er rip with especially stinky ones.
The rule is pretty simple. If someone doesn’t like it they ask their partner to stop. Nothing complicated about that.
He’s advocating douchebaggery. He’s arguing against a male fantasy.
Bolding mine. The whole point of the hypothetical scenario I constructed is that the guy is evil because his partner doesn’t like what he’s doing and he doesn’t care. That’s why I characterize his conduct as “morally reprehensible”, and that’s why I included emotional language such as “badgering”. I carefully constructed the scenario to make a point that you are obstinately refusing to see.
By the way, I think it’s weird that you are attacking other posters for what I said.
A famous quote from Montgomery Burns quoting Homer Simpson: “In case you can’t tell, I’m being sarcastic.”
What do you want me to call your partner?
You seemed to assume some meaning for them when you asserted an equivalence between your situation and the scenario described using those words.
The meaning I assumed for them was, in a relationship, a person is controlling if the person is happiest when the person is functionally the final arbiter of decisions made by the other person in the relationship, and a person is badgering if the person, in talking to another person in an attempt to get the other person to do something, the person refuses to stop making this attempt only for reasons for which the other person’s own desires are not primarily relevant.
You are saying you didn’t have these (or any particular other) meanings in mind when you asserted the aforementioned equivalence. This makes it very difficult to know what you meant when you asserted the equivalence. It appears that whatever you meant, it was not determined by the words you actually quoted. We’re therefore left at a loss.
Given my observations above, none of us reading your posts can possibly have any rationally supported idea as to what you actually mean by calling any of these scenarios similar. It has been demonstrated that you have not explained yourself.
Partner’s fine.
And hey, in the midst of disagreement, thanks for taking the time out to ask this, seriously.
These are fair definitions, thank you for providing them.
Well, in the one case, I was badgered, since I had no actual desire to start having sex at the time (being quite sound asleep.) So, one out of two? And heck, I don’t know my partner’s mind; for all I know, my partner wants to make more decisions, but compromise more out of a desire to be a good partner. That still fits controlling, since it’s about desire and not action.
And it’s good to know that as long as a relationship is otherwise egalitarian, or if it doesn’t exist at all (in the originally-mentioned Tinder scenario), no partner’s being controlling and so there’s no harm to be done.
I don’t think so. I think that you’re striking out at random for reasons to explain why behavior in one context is Bad and Wrong while the exact same behavior in another context isn’t without having to actually say “It’s entirely based on the specific people.”, because that would give plausible deniability to almost everyone who did it in the Bad and Wrong context. I think that pretending that the real problem you have with the 3:00 AM boyfriend is the controlling and the badgering when you describe him in the same breath as the seducer who is described as equally evil for doing neither of these things is what says to me that these are not the real objection to 3:00 AM boyfriend.
Heck, I could go on about the seduction bit as well, only I’ve never used Tinder, and I’m sure that being seduced in person is not rationally supported to share the context, so I can’t ask if 2nd Girlfriend was morally equal in weight to Seducer.
Now, all that being said, I do think we are going to have to agree to disagree on this, so I think I’ll be out for a bit.
I have no idea what you’re talking about here–not I nor anyone else described one and the same person as both the badgering boyfriend and as the seducer. Those were two separate scenarios.
It’s wrong to be controlling of another person w.r.t. sexuality and it is wrong to badger someone for sex. Gender is not relevant to this.
Different relationships are different. Different people have different tolerances. But it is tolerance. You tolerate things that are not good. This goes for the hypothetical guy, and it goes for your partner if there really is a parallel like the one you intimated. Again: gender is not relevant to this.
What gender can be relevant to is causal factors in a particular context. Gender has no conceptual relevance to the concept of the wrongness of the action. But it can of course have a lot of relevance in particular cases as to how people are likely to react etc.
I have actually been badgered for sex by a woman, in fact it went further to physical restraint. That was wrong of her to do. Yet she and I are still friends, as it happens, and as it happens she has actually apologized for it. I didn’t really need the apology and was happy to freely forgive, as it happens in my case, because it didn’t really bother me in any serious way. But if it had bothered me, that would have been reasonable. What she did was technically a criminal act, and had she done it to someone other than me, it could have been reasonable for her to have to deal with police and lawyers over the matter. Different relationships are different.
What she did was wrong no matter who she did it to. As it happens, she did it to someone who was very close to her, who liked her a lot, and who did not feel threatened by the actions. So, in this particular case, it was a “no harm no foul” kind of thing. But that doesn’t mean that what she did was morally justifiable or legally okay. It just means she was easily forgiven by me.
It is absolutely possible for there to be a relationship in which a man does something like this and yet is reasonably and easily forgiven. This does not change the fact that it’s possible for there to be a relationship in which a man does something like this and yet is not reasonably or easily forgiven. As I have repeatedly emphasized: It is the victim who gets to control this. The victim gets to decide how to react to what has happened to them. Any other principle is wholly and blatantly unjust, and not only that will clearly perpetuate the ability of rapists to get away with what they do because their victims don’t have the appropriate power to demand justice.
That’s fine and fair enough. Here is a parting shot but also actual, seriously meant advice: Study up on the distinction between necessary and sufficient conditions. You may already know the phrases, but your posts here routinely confuse the two, rendering a lot of your reasoning questionable.
This is where you go entirely off the rails. Again FYI. You’re going to find unlimited contradictions between what people are talking about and what you’re insisting they’re talking about just as long as you’re always wrong about what they’re talking about.
[QUOTE=Frylock]
What she did was technically a criminal act, and had she done it to someone other than me, it could have been reasonable for her to have to deal with police and lawyers over the matter. Different relationships are different.
[/QUOTE]
I take it you don’t subscribe to the belief that it is an inherent injustice for any technically criminal act to escape prosecution.
I have been inclined toward that viewpoint myself, but this discussion has led me to reconsider it. Crafting a criminal code so perfect that it could be applied to every human action, without causing either over-incarceration or impunity, may be impossible.
Another point: I think it’s much more likely that an assault of the kind you described will fail to do serious harm when the aggressor is a woman and the victim a man, than for any other gender combination. Men are more likely to have the ego strength and self-esteem needed to brush off such an experience. So the fact that men virtually never report sexual assaults by women to the authorities is not necessarily a social problem that needs to be corrected.
I think that’s an extraordinarily sexist assumption, and equally dangerous for men and women.