That’s ridiculous. There’s obviously not a clear line. Here’s a scale:
1: Your partner is stone cold sober and explicitly gives full verbal and written consent for every act
2: Your partner has had a glass of wine and gives verbal consent to have sex in general
3: Your partner has had two glasses of wine and initiates sex, but no discussion of consent occurs
…
…
98: Your partner turned you down for sex, then you kept getting them beers with the conscoius and malicious intent of getting them drunk enough that they would verbally consent to sex in their drunken state
99: Your partner turned you down for sex, then you kept getting them beers with the conscious and malicious intent of getting them drunk enough that you could rape their unconscious body
100: Your partner turned you down for sex, then you roofied them and raped their unconscious body
1 is absolutely clearly not rape. 100 absolutely clearly is. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t going to be cases in the middle there where reasonable people can disagree about whether it’s rape, or “how much” it’s rape (if that makes any sense).
Claiming that there’s an unambiguous bright line dividing rape from not-rape when inebriation is involved is just silly.
Like I said, he might as well just be honest and say “I’m sorry I got caught.” It’s not like we need a Captain Crunch Decoder Ring to glean this message from the stuff he does say.
Yes, essays are required (and Stanford required them back in the 80s when I applied). I had to write for every school, and my child had to write for last year’s admissions cycle as well.
Interviews were required for most schools, though not for Stanford. Stanford is doing interviews now, and they are done by alumni (they keep asking me to do them, I am too busy posting on the Dope).
That’s not what I said, but it doesn’t matter, perhaps that’s how we like to fuck. Drinking and screwing are both legal. Rape is a morally repugnant action and MsRobyn’s absurd position isn’t defensible.
I’m sure most rapes could be characterized as “20 minutes of action,” more or less . . . from the rapist’s POV. From the victim’s POV it’s that 20 minutes plus a lifetime of remembering it (if she can).
Just want to offer that maybe this judge IS an incompetent douchebag, prejudiced in favor of his alma mater.
I’ll offer the slim possibility, however, that maybe he just fucked up this judgment call out of countless judgment calls he makes in his career.
If he’d let him off with probation, hells yeah, I’d be with you. But a felony conviction, 6 months, and sex offender status - while you think it insufficient, it ain’t nothing. I’m curious - what do folk feel WOULD have been an appropriate sentence? I’m serious. Sentencing guidelines and practices have always stricken me as odd, and often not well proportionate to the acts committed.
I tend to think the sentence somewhat light, but I’m not sure exactly what sentence I think would have been appropriate. I’ll certainly agree that the judge got this one wrong. But must of us occasionally get something not perfect in our jobs. Unless I knew more about this judge’s sentencing practices over time, this one sentence is not enough for me to accuse him of more.
California, BTW, has a “yes means yes” consent law, meaning that someone has to give clear consent to having sex.
If you and your spouse/significant other/whoever go out, have a few beers/glasses of wine/drinks and bump uglies after, have a good time since you’re probably expecting to do it. If you decide to fuck someone at a party who’s too drunk to stand up, it’s rape no matter how you slice it.
Okay, but that’s not what you said earlier, nor what I was talking about. The times I blacked out, I was not too drunk to stand up according to multiple witnesses. It’s about whether the memory is stored. Researching it some more, it appears that it’s genetic (some people are more likely than others to black out), and has partly to do with how quickly the BAC level rises, rather than how high it is. So one person can be visibly drunker than the other, but the less drunk-seeming person doesn’t remember a period of an hour or two the next day.
ETA: That California law, which goes way too far IMO, appears to be for college campus policy, not for the legal definition of rape as a criminal matter.
Since we’re talking one-night stands and party hookups, the line is absolutely clear : you don’t know how that person reacts to alcohol (I know at least one girl who can’t walk straight after a lone pint), you don’t even know how much they’ve had before, and keeping it in your pants for one night is hurting who exactly ?! If there’s the least bit of doubt, you don’t do it, period. There’ll always be some doubt in a wild party setting where booze or drugs are in the mix. So you don’t do it. Simple as that. And you *especially *don’t do it when it’s quite obvious they’re lit up.
The sitch is obviously not the same with a regular partner, or a person you already know is otherwise very much into you (e.g. a shy guy/gal who plucked up the liquid courage and/or excuse) etc… But a random hook-up ? Play it safe and gentlemanly, for their sake as much as your own.
So let’s just be clear. You are essentially saying that millions of college students and other young people are raping each other every weekend. Not only that, but male and female, they are planning their weekends around raping and being raped. Which also means that the many thousands of “meet market” bars–whose whole raison d’être is to provide a venue for people to go and get drunk and “hook up” with other drunk people they just met–have a business model oriented around facilitating violent criminal activity. (Plus of course the many more thousands of keg parties, but most of those are already breaking the law by serving minors.)
I’m not saying this assertion can’t possibly have any merit, but it is an extraordinary claim–and you should own it as such.
ETA: Some gay people might even argue that this moral standard is particularly judgemental against male gay culture. Another thing to think about.
I apologize for the snark. I would put, though, there is a difference between a couple in a long-time committed relationship and a couple, at least one of which doesn’t know the other’s name, who just met at a party. Further, I’d bet if your wife overshot a bit and was totally unconscious, activities would cease and you sure as hell wouldn’t be dragging her out back by the dumpster.
Drinking and driving are both legal; in combination, not so much.
Do you have a cite? I tried googling Brock Turner and pine needles and all I got were some stories about witches casting a hex on him involving pine needles.
Whelp, I don’t.
I think his reasoning is just plumb ass-backwards.
Per the article:
Isn’t that exactly why the public needs to stand up and demand a change? That is a disgraceful state of affairs that needs to be properly addressed and changed, not joked about.
No, if done properly, it would lead to *fairer *sentences and no more easy breaks for criminals from the privileged classes.
But I thought blacks and Latinos already get harsher sentences. How can giving a privileged, snotty-nosed frat-boy rapist a fair punishment for his horrendous crimes somehow mean things will get tougher for those folks who already got the rough end of the stick?
And maybe acknowledge the victim as a living, breathing, feeling person, and not just treat her as either
a) A dainty piece of broken china forever shattered by a cruel monster, or
b) A loose floozy who was clearly asking for it
depending on the class of her assailant.
Or, y’know, what **Kobal2 **said in far fewer words.
Irrelevant; we are discussing a case that clearly falls in the solid black region beyond the vague grey borderlands. It’s like arguing that since the tax code is too complicated for anybody to know for sure exactly what is deductible then the IRS should be OK with me claiming dependent deductions for my cats.
I think we all agree about this case, which makes it not all that interesting to discuss. I think my tangential question gives us more to chew the fat over.
I don’t think either **SlackerInc **or BPC are trying to bring the boogeyman of “false allegations” into the discussion/rant.
They are pointing out that issues regarding consent and sex can become grey when any degree of intoxication is involved. That’s precisely why you have judges and juries to interpret grey cases. This does NOT mean that being intoxicated should be a defense against culpability for committing rape, or that a person too intoxicated to say “no” should be considered a willing partner.
In any case, it is irrelevant to the case in point, in which there is no doubt that Brock Turner’s actions were rape, out and out.
So maybe discussion of “booze+sex+(consent?)=grey zone?” would be better suited to GD (although it would probably end up back in the pit before long).
This is a pitting of a horrible rapist and the people who don’t seem to think his crime is all that bad.
(It seems a few strange creatures have decided, for whatever reason, that this is also a nice placed for them to drop their comically partisan turds. How very odd they are. Let us be careful not to tread in them.)