By the way, I wanted to add that Boxer’s characterization in the O.P. has very little to do with the actual facts of the case.
Well, I would say that that’s correct. If a man continues to have sex with a woman after she says “no,” then that’s pretty much rape, yeah.
However, the ridiculous part of that scenario is what the guy is expected to put up with. Suppose he doesn’t want the woman rubbing all over him? Do her unwanted advances count as rape? What if he says “No” or “Stop it”? If she continues, even for a few seconds, is that rape?
What’s good for the goose is good for the gander, as they say… Whoever said that the sexist terminology used in these opinions is appalling is absolutely right.
I think that the rape is defined as sexual intercourse without consent. You didn’t rape her no matter what she may have thought. She probably could have tried to make a case for sexual battery however.
I’d also like to add that I remember reading that someone suggested that a standard should be that if you are told to stop once, continue. If you are told to stop a second time, stop post haste. The idea behind this was based on the fact that sometimes people say ‘stop’ even if they only mean to catch their breath or their hair is being inadvertantly pulled. To me this seemed like reasonable advice. Given the tone of many of these posts, I don’t know anymore.
Great – I now have this vision of Boxer as Alvin Hall.
Sorry for the hijack.
No. This is NOT reasonable advice.
If you’re told to stop, you better damn well stop. If it is only a hair-pulling or breath-catching stop you will be told to continue. But if it isn’t, you’re in trouble. And if I want to catch my breath but you continue anyway, I’d be very pissed that you didn’t stop when told.
Stop means stop, adam, no matter what the reason. You don’t get to second guess what the reason might be, or assume it may not be an ‘important enough’ reason. Just stop.
Thanks for all your comments.
What I was hoping for was more information about the case. I am skeptical about the value of the original morning news talk show item I saw. They tend to get things wrong, slant, or oversensationalize.
The URLs you put up were a lot better than the one I found. Thanks.
I most agree with one of the judges who called the whole incident just plain sad.
I find this whole concept kind of disturbing.
I’m no fan of rapists. Personally, I think shooting’s too good for them. Then again, I have my own idea about what constitutes rape.
If I attack Jane Doe, beat her stupid, and then stick my penis into any part of her anatomy, that’s plainly rape. I deserve to be taken out and shot.
If I convince Jane Doe that I will harm or kill her or her child or her mother or whatever unless she removes her clothing and permits me to stick my penis into her, that’s also rape. The lack of violence is irrelevant – violence was plainly stated or even implied. I still deserve to be taken out and shot.
Now, at the other extreme:
If I encounter Jane Doe, and she says she wants to have hot savage monkey sex, and then we go to her place and I stick my penis into her, well, I’m inclined to call that “consensual sex.” I deserve … um… well, at least I owe her breakfast or
something.
…but now we begin to combine the two.
What happens if Jane Doe grabs my meat whistle and tells me she wants hot savage monkey sex, right here in the elevator, and we slap the EMERGENCY STOP button and she hops on and we’re screwing away like mad minks, and suddenly she changes her mind and screams STOP, STOP, STOP?
Huh?
Now, plainly, this started out as consensual sex. But midway through, it ceased to be? How did we start out consensual, and end as rape?
Now, I can SEE this if she didn’t really WANNA have sex, but I was puttin’ the MOVES on her, and next thing we know, she’s flat on her back, and I’m IN her – but if she does NOT protest IMMEDIATELY upon penetration… is it rape?
I’m sorry, but I have a hard time thinking that we can go from Consensual to Rape, in ninety seconds, in the middle of a sex act that started out CONSENSUAL. Hell, at this rate, a woman can charge you with rape if she suddenly decides, midway, that you’re a lousy lay.
I anticipate being cursed out by feminists all over the board. In my defense, my sympathies are entirely with the rape victims, folks. Rape is an ugly thing, and I’m no apologist for it…
…but I’ve known more than a few women who would happily use this legal precedent for their own ends.
(“If you don’t immediately give my your credit cards, I’ll scream rape,” said the nude woman, lying beneath the semidrunk executive…)
("…and once I had him so hot and horny he couldn’t stand it, we got naked and started getting it on," said the coed to her roommate. “Then, once he’d really built up a rhythm, I screamed rape. Now he’ll go to jail as a sex offender, he’ll never make his graduation deadline, and no corporation in its right mind will ever hire him as anything other than a janitor. That’ll teach the bastard to break up with ME.”)
C’mon, folks… can’t we come up with a better definition of “rape” than THIS?
**
Only if you don’t stop when she says “stop”.
I would advise anyone worried about being charged with rape to make sure they don’t violate rape laws. It’s not really that difficult.
It is when the laws start turning out like this one… how many seconds does a guy have to pull out in a case like this one? 5 seconds after she says stop? Two? Less?
What about the language of the law? Do women have more leeway if a man says “NO,” even in the middle of the act? Does the woman have more time to get disengaged? Does she have to stop at all? Since the law refers specifically to men, it seems, this would be unclear.
Sorry, when rape laws become as reactionary and uncertain as these, when new legal precedents are set on the whim of morning-after guilt, then no-one is safe.
I agree that this was simply a sad situation… it makes me even more glad than I already was that I no longer have to worry about this sort of crap.
That sounds like crappy advice to me. I would think that if you were indavertently pulling her hair, she would most likely say something along the lines of “Ow, you’re pulling my hair!” If she asks you to stop, then stop for crying out loud. I mean, just leaving aside the issue of rape for a moment, how about just the issue of common courtesy?
This is a similar situation to one a friend of mine had IRL. C. is notorious for her one night stands. Brags about them, even. Her MO is to go to a bar alone, get drunk to the point of barely being coherent, pick up some guy, and take him home for some hot monkey love. (She’s always shocked and disappointed that the guy is either gone in the morning, or never calls her again. She’s almost 30, and IMO should know better.)
One Saturday morning, C. was at my door, crying. It seems she got hammered the night before at a bar, picked up an equally drunk patron, and took him home for sex. He was gone by the time she awoke in the morning. She recalls the first time they had sex, and said she was totally willing. But since she found TWO used condoms, she claims she was raped. I said that if she was raped, she should call the police. Unfortunately, she couldn’t recall even his FIRST name, or what he looked like.
IMO: rape? No. Stupidity and regret? Yes.
The person asked to stop must stop immediately. That’s a slightly, but only slightly, subjective term, but I don’t think you have to worry about anyone using a stopwatch.
I agree that any rape laws that do not provide equal protection to people regardless of sex need to be changed.
I’m surprised you cannot distinguish between “morning-after guilt” and “He wouldn’t listen to me when I wanted to stop”. As often as people claim that mere whim can now be the sole grounds for a rape case, I challenge you to find anyplace in the US where the law actually supports this.
So, a single thrust after she says ‘no’ is rape? I don’t even get the chance to comprehend the statement, I just have to stop immediately. If I slow down and say ‘what?’ I’m now a rapist, lovely. I didn’t know I had it in me.
One of the nice things about sex is the release of your inhibitions. If having sex means being on guard for instantaneous withdrawal the whole time just in case the word ‘no’ is spoken, thanks, but no thanks.
There needs to be a line drawn between rape and mistakes or misunderstandings during sex. This ruling kind of blurs that line.
That’s a gross mischaracterization. The legal standard that was applied in the case was whether a reasonable person would have understood the girl’s withdrawal of consent. She repeated her desire to go home 3 times, and John acknowledged what she said by saying things to the effect of “just give me another minute”. Whether you agree or disagree, the court ruled that a reasonable person would have understood that she wanted to stop having sex.
Your example, where the man doesn’t hear what the woman said, has nothing to do with this. Slowing down and saying “what?” could not possibly be construed as comprehension of the situation. On the other hand, if she said “Stop, I don’t want to do this anymore” repeatedly, and you just pretended not to hear her and just kept saying “What?”, and continued humping for another 15 minutes, I would consider you to be a first-class a-hole. [Sorry for the run-on sentence from hell].
Hmm… the case in the OP sticks out like a sore thumb to me. The fact that she (from what I can see) never clearly said “no” or “stop,” and the fact that she never raised more than a vague objection, strikes me as decidedly whimsical lawmaking.
Think of it this way: You say the standard is that (A) the woman must say “no” and (B) the man must “immediately” withdraw. I can agree with that, depending on what you mean by “immediately.” How, then, is it that a boy is going to jail for not acting on (B), when (A) was never clearly accomplished. In this case, it seems to me that the girl was uncertain at the time and regretted it later. At the very least, what the girl conveyed was uncertain. Your own standards of law were not met.
It is for this reason that I labelled this case “morning-after guilt”… that’s what it sounds like to me. Make no mistake, the boy in the case was a jerk, and had the girl said “no” clearly, he may well have continued anyway. If that were the case, he would, equally clearly, be guilty of rape.
This ruling, however, blurs the standards of clarity. It makes things more uncertain, not less. It expects men (specifically) to be able to comprehend a woman’s wishes, even when the woman has not conveyed them clearly. It also places unfair standards on men unequally.
And you don’t see a problem with this?
I agree with what Cheesesteak said here:
This is absolutely correct. The ruling in this case is a step backwards. It does not clarify the law, it makes it less clear.
Well, from reading the opinion I don’t think there’s a very good case for arguing that the young woman ever consented in the first place. But either way, I think her objections were clear enough to be understood by a reasonable person. “I gotta go home now” is a bit ambigous on its own, but if someone says “No, I have to go home” twice in response to requests for more time to “finish up” then I don’t think there’s much room for doubt as to her meaning.
And you don’t think an opposite ruling would blur the line even more dangerously? The victim verbally objected three times, and I don’t see how her objections, when taken together, could be interpreted as anything other than an expression of dissent. Do you want to send the message to people that making three verbal objections just isn’t enough, or say that there’s some script victims must follow? That not only places an unreasonable burden of responsibility on frightened victims but encourages the escalation of genuine misunderstandings to violence.
If I sincerely believed that a decent person who had simply misunderstood my intent would not hold off after my verbal objections I wouldn’t even bother with verbal objections in a situation where I felt uncomfortable. I’d cut right to defending myself with force, something that’s hard to misinterpret. But that’s not something I’d like to have to do. And from the other perspective, I’d much prefer being told “I’m not ready for this” or “No, I have to go now” to being kicked in the gut if I were the one who had mistakenly pushed my partner too far.
I agree with this, anyway… she never clearly consented. Which is part of the problem.
That’s your opinion… I disagree. Obviously, neither of us were actually there, so neither opinion is worth terribly much. shrug It’s all in how we’re picturing the situation in our heads, which probably has little relation to how it went down for real. I still say that her intentions were ambiguous at best, both in terms of consent and denial. She frankly seemed very passive-aggressive about the whole thing.
What I think is being ignored here is that there is a degree of personal responsibility for the woman that is being ignored. I know that this is somewhat un-PC, but it seems to me that the woman bears some responsibility to make her feelings clear to the person she’s with. If saying “I should be going soon,” doesn’t make the message clear, then rather than simply repeating the same thing, isn’t it her responsibility to rephrase to something more clear? Saying “No, I mean stop, NOW,” is certainly more clear than repeating “I should be going.”
I guess all I’m saying is that the person (male or female) who wants to end a sexual act that is already going on bears a measure of responsibility for making their desires as clear as possible. My feeling is that this girl failed in that responsibility, for whatever reason. The ruling absolves her of that responsibility. YMMV.
Who cares what you would ‘like’ to do in the situation? We’re not talking about you being uncomfortable, or a bit unhappy, we’re talking about felony rape. If you are mere seconds away from being raped, you had better damn well use whatever means at your disposal to defend yourself. You don’t just depend on a guy understanding your ‘intent’ as your only protection from rape.
The thing I hate about this is the decent guy who misinterprets your signal is charged with felony rape, the same crime as the guy who drags women into the woods and rapes them. The women in the second scenario are fighting tooth and nail to protect themselves. In the first scenario, they might just be whining about going home…
If you really really wanted the sex to stop NOW, you would make it very clear, very fast. I think about this way… If a woman is in the throes of passion, and gets a bad muscle cramp, her request to her lover won’t be “Excuse me, can you please stop for a moment? I seem to have a muscle cramp.” It would be “AAAAACK! STOP! STOP! GET OFF! GET OFF!” with a healthy portion of pushes and shoves to make it clear. Apparently, though, she needn’t be bothered to even go that far to prevent a rape.
So, a man is not free to enjoy the sexual experience, he must be on guard for the slightest hint of a change in the woman’s mind, otherwise he is a rapist? Sorry, cant buy that. Sex involves passion. if you are in a passionate state, “stop” doesnt necessarily register immediately. Besides, many women say things like “no” “stop” etc… all throughout the sex act and if you actually stopped, they would look at you funny. You need to understand that where you may only say stop when you absolutely mean it, others use it as a play term as if they are being ravaged rather than a willing participant; all in fun of course.