Indeed. Why, anyone who said such a thing would be truly horrifying.
(“Public property.” Who the heck would advance such an idea? Point him out for me; where, exactly, is my opposite?)
Again – wow, the very idea of someone thinking you’d deserve what you get is abhorrent. What kind of monster would believe such a thing?
Then again, maybe you’re just bad at reading signals? Like, reeeeeally bad at reading signals? Like, maybe not a single person in this thread was implying what you’re inferring, and you simply can’t accept that “no” means “no” in the face of explicit protestations?
Keep in mind that for the most part I’m on your side, but the way you’re trying to spin this is silly. You’re acting like any advice is useless if it doesn’t take the chance of being raped down to 0%. Of course no matter what you do you’ll always be in some danger. Risk minimization is still a thing. Just because something can happen without me taking certain actions doesn’t mean that taking those actions can’t make it more likely. Waiting until the light is red before I cross the street may not protect me because somebody may run the light, but that doesn’t mean it’s just as unsafe as just crossing the street whenever I feel like it.
I agree that the advice is silly, especially since because most women know it already, but let’s not act like risk minimization makes no sense when the minimum isn’t 0. There’s a fine line that differs from person to person that separates “paranoid”, “safe”, and “reckless”. Each person has to determine when they’re going to take risky activities for themselves, whether that means locking themselves in a tower with a chastity belt or getting shitfaced in a group of known sex offenders (and anything in between) enhances their life the most is a call they can make for themselves. But it’s not like just because you can get assaulted just by walking down the street, that you might as well drink yourself into a stupor and go to a guy’s room alone. If you want to do that, hey, cool, and if something bad happens, not your fault. But at the same time, if a person is really concerned they can and should choose to take some actions and not others based on how much they like or need to do the action vs the risk of doing so.
The problem with such a position is cases like this.
In short, it’s about a pair of drunken idiots who had sex in public. In front of a crowd and at least one camera. Neither one could remember anything about it the next day. The girl was alerted to the incident only through Instagram, by which time she’d sobered up. So she made a rape compaint to the police, on the grounds that she was too drunk to consent.
The story is about a Grand Jury deciding otherwise, that no crime had been commited because she was walking and talking like a soberish person, hence the crowd gathering around to watch, rather than intervening against a rapist. So charges were dropped.
In a less rape-paranoid world she might have just decided not to get amnesiac drunk in future. In a more equal world, perhaps he would have made a complaint against her on the same grounds, rather than such a thing being unthinkable.
As long as people keep peddling paranoia about rape, incuding the subject of this thread with their “don’t drink, you’ll get raped” posters, this is the shit that’ll keep happening.
And yet again, we’re going to people who are behaving with an intention to rape, while ignoring the more common problem, which is people who are behaving with a plan and intention to have sex but end up raping because they don’t understand what real consent is.
Here’s a perfect example:
DigitalC “strongly feels” that he never raped anyone and wasn’t raped, but if he was blacked out drunk, how can he know that every partner was consenting? Actually consenting meaningfully, not just drunkenly going along because they were too impaired to make a proper decision? I don’t think it’s possible to know that.
And there’s the problem. DigitalC wasn’t acting with intent to rape, but he very well could have. And that’s true of many people who are raping after the oft-mentioned frat parties and other “adult socializing” occasions, it’s not their intention, they’re not predators, they’re drunk, their victims are drunk, and no one should be engaging in sexual activity under those circumstances.
So in addition to “don’t drink and drive” we need “don’t drink and screw” lessons, or more importantly, as I think I end up saying in every thread about rape we need to talk meaningfully about consent, what it looks and sounds like and who can and cannot give it and we need to start doing that with kids from the earliest ages.
This is my problem with this whole conversation. I say I got black out drunk and someone claims I might have raped someone without knowing. Hello? Are drunk women the only ones not responsible for their actions while drunk? I was as capable or incapable of consent as anyone I had sex with.
Hello? Are women the only ones who need to change their behavior to avoid that kind of situation? Because other than the response to the article in the OP, I don’t see any media sending the message that guys should moderate their alcohol intake so as to prevent this shit.
And that’s what pisses people off about this sort of “common-sense” advice. It’s always, always, ALWAYS about how women’s behavior can and should be changed. Changing guys’ behavior? Probably not even possible, because we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas, man.
Of course they are. Getting drunk and getting laid is why most of the men are out there in the first place. Obviously the ones that are uncomfortable with that result are the ones who shouldn’t be doing it.
Can I get a cite for this idea? I haven’t seen any evidence presented for this, and I think it’s long overdue.
When women talk about their own rape encounters, they usually talk about men who know damn well what they are doing, as evident from the circumstances. While I have little doubt there are lots of men who have had sex with women who never consented and didn’t really want sex, these guys aren’t on the forefront of women’s minds when they discuss their experiences.
In my own experience (never been raped but I’ve been harassed/fondled), the menance is the guy who doesn’t care whether or not he has consent. Sure, these guys may play dumb and act as though it was one big ole misunderstanding. They may even rationalize their behavior by saying she really wanted it. But at the end of the day, they wanted what they wanted, and whether she wanted it too is irrelevant to them.
A common sex myth is that sexual deprivation leads men to rape. The hapless fool who doesn’t know what a consenting partner looks like due to lack of experience is a call-out to this myth, IMO. If sex deprivation is correlated with rape, we should consider the possibility that its confounded by social dysfunction. A guy who has problems relating to the opposite sex (because he hates women, for instance) very well might have a hard time procuring consensual sex. Doesn’t mean the deprivation leads him to rape. (And I’m not saying you’re arguing this, but it seems folks in this thread are going overboard with certain assumptions.)
It still leaves us with the problem of getting these people to understand that what they’re doing is rape and not okay, but I take back that a huge percentage of rapes are just Some Guy™ who is a little signal blind.
I don’t think there is much conflation going on, since we’ve reasonably established that rapists are the cause of rape. On the discussion of responsibility for rape, any blame falls on the perpetrator.
Meanwhile, there is a strong correlation with alcohol, and on the discussion of prevention (within a college setting), a focus on alcohol makes sense. If anything, people are getting the two types of discussion mixed up, and are equating the discussion of prevention, to victim blaming, when blame is largely an ascription after an incident has taken place.
Otherwise, I’ve seen numbers suggesting alcohol is involved in near 50% of rape cases, and 50-80% of those which take place on college campuses, depending on how the study was conducted.
The Rape Abuse & Incest National Network has drinking-related items listed twice, on the discussion of prevention in social settings. Meanwhile, NIH states (on prevention):
*At parties or in other social situations, take the following steps:
[ul]
[li]Go with a group of friends, if possible, or keep in contact with someone you know during the party.[/li]
[li]Avoid drinking too much. Do not accept drinks from someone you do not know, and keep your drink or beverage close to you.[/li]
[li]Do not go somewhere alone or leave a party with someone you do not know or feel uncomfortable with.[/li][/ul]*Sexual assault - prevention: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia
Instead of outrage, feedback suggesting a demand for more articles involving the opposite side, makes 100% sense and seems like a good response to this type of article and its author, IMO.
It may be better to leave anecdotal accounts out of this discussion, because those are unique to the individual. Ideally, we should focus on the the article, and try to argue points which don’t directly involve highly sensitive personal experiences. I have stories that would also directly apply, but they’re not best served here in advancing the discussion and certainly don’t need further scrutiny to prove or disprove anything. Just something to consider.
Please note this conclusion follows from several scientific findings.
Our discourse on rape would be greatly improved if we could make arguments based on evidence, not wild ass guesses, assumptions, and “common sense”. For some reason, rape seems to be ripe for armchair opinions, which explains why the internet is rife with articles like the one in the OP.
It’s interesting, because article reinforces the relationship, numerous times:
*“They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.”
“To rape again and again, these men need silence. They need to know that the right combination of factors — alcohol and sex shame, mostly — will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims.”
“The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking.”*
The article is consistent with published statistics on alcohol involvement in sexual abuse cases, and does the job of highlighting scenarios, alongside the research (though there are some understandable guesses and assumptions). It especially touched on changing the overall culture, which is key and could use more emphasis, as someone stated earlier.
Well, but careful. What we’ve got there is a cite that demonstrates that among self-reported rapists who got away with it, most offenses were committed by a small subset of that population. What you don’t have is any idea how many sexual assaults occurred where the guy (because only guys were interviewed in those studies) didn’t self-report. Whether or not “innocent mistake” is really what people are claiming is what’s going on, by definition those mistakes aren’t going to show up in that study.
On top of that, the questions asked didn’t capture all possible instances of sexual assault; only (roughly speaking) rape or attempted rape. If, for instance, I had sex with somebody who I absolutely know did not want me to, but I don’t feel like I threatened any use of force or used force, which are concepts of considerable controversy, I’m obviously not going to self-report myself as a rapist, and the person or people I victimized aren’t going to be contemplated by the blogger’s assertion about “most of the raping.”