Thing is - we do.
Just last weekend I went and picked up my wife’s drunken friend and drove her home.
And it’s not the first occasion.
If I see someone too drunk to be making good decisions, then I will try to make sure they are safe and removed from situations they might regret later.
No one? What planet do you live on?
Certain segments of society to indeed promote rape by not punishing perpetrators, and do indeed blame the victim. One example, but by no means the only one, is the U.S. Army. It doesn’t take a whacko-extreme feminist to see this. It does, however, take a head buried pretty deep in the sand to not see it.
Off topic, but -
In general you are correct about women vs. men’s tolerance but there are a number of variables involved. Working detox I have seen emaciated alcoholics with blood alcohol levels up to .527 who were still able to walk and answer simple questions. One memorable soul asked for cigarette and a cup of coffee before we could get him to lie down.
If your conversant had built up a significant tolerance it is entirely possible that she was speaking truth.
“[Rape] victims have rights. Here. the victim also has responsibilities.”
Rape by women isn’t legitimate rape.
Not wild about some of the arguments advanced in defense of the article, but…
Yes, there is a widespread tendency to point out the faults of the victim in rape cases, and this feeds into all sorts of problems, including rare follow-through with law enforcement, low conviction rates in court, and ready-made rationalizations for offenders. It’s a serious problem, and people need to be careful about feeding into it even when their intentions are good and pure.
However, that shouldn’t *necessarily *rule out good advice to potential rape victims about prevention, especially advice about a factor that’s extremely common yet rarely discussed.
There are countless women all over the country who are self-conscious about preventing sexual assault. They avoid solitary walks down dark, deserted paths late at night; they carry pepper spray, rape whistles, etc. Yet many of these women think nothing of going to a party and having eight drinks. It’s just not at all common to link these two kinds of activities, even though the pepper spray and the route planning are *far less likely to prevent an actual assault then not passing out in the frat house. The latter isn’t a visceral, obvious danger in the same way that a darkened street is, so this is advice that stands to make an actual difference: college-aged women ought to be educated that effectively guarding against sexual assault is less about looking out for a violent attack from a stranger than it is about drinking in moderation.
It’s awful that this is the case, and fixing this state of affairs is ultimately more important than than the topic at hand, and we should be careful not to turn “educating” into “shaming” (especially when it comes to activities, like drinking, that carry a certain inherent opprobrium) … but still, good advice is good advice. There are women who take an active interest in promoting their physical safety, and we shouldn’t automatically scold someone who offers valuable and seldom heard how-to information just because we’re worried about how the society at large might interpret such things in aggregate.
Now I’m getting confused, back awhile the line coming from feminists was that rape had nothing to do with sex or the rapist being a horny guy, it was all about power 100%. No rapist ever raped to get off, but for power(whatever that means).
So now the official politically correct line is back to horny?
I think there is no point in telling rapists not to rape, they are predators who like victimizing. They are going to rape just as surely as a tiger will kill prey, the best thing to do is focus on preventing victimization.
Rape is largely about power, but that doesn’t mean it’s a power trip, or a desire to dominate the woman. Most of the rapes that happen are going to come about because a guy is looking to score and ignores signals to do so. It’s not the horniness that’s making them ignore signals though, in my opinion, the thing making them ignore signals is anxiety about social power more than their sex drive.
Consider how much of our culture is wrapped up in shaming men who can’t get laid. Even in many rape/creepy-dude threads on this very board a lot of the feminist side will resort to chastising guys who disagree with them for being unable to get laid.
What do you think this kind of pressure does to a guy worried about popularity? Where “40 year-old virgin” is a giant insult and men chest-bump each other for getting laid the previous night? It means that to win social approval they feel they have to get laid. Even insults like “tiny dick” are meant to cut due to an implied lack of sexual attractiveness. That idea that if you can’t laid for whatever reason, you’re lesser. Inferior. Mockable. So hey, you know, I think that girl really isn’t reluctant, she’s probably okay with it, because if she wasn’t… well, that would be too terrible to think about, none of my friends would like me anymore. I’d be made fun of for “striking out like a loser.” So, you know, I’m just going to go ahead and push the lines. I’m sure she’s fine with it, she seems kind of into me anyway. And hey, sex feels good, I’m sure we’ll both have fun.
Of course, I’m not excusing the people who rape. Having an excuse doesn’t mean your action is excusable, but when so much of our culture ties up your worth in how sexually attractive you are to your preferred gender… well, it’s going to cause some problems when you’re faced with the reality of a situation where you may fail at attaining that worth. It may not make guys hold you down and fuck you, but it’s very good at introducing that little bit of cognitive dissonance. Ignoring somebody wincing, interpreting a glance as consent, passing off her being tense as “nerves”. But a large part of it is about power, not power over the victim, but power in the sense of social power. Your worth in the eyes of your peers. Largely the same reason people try hard drugs, start smoking, or binge drink the night before a test. To impress people.
You can tell men not to rape people all you want, but the danger isn’t so much men raping people. It’s them convincing themselves that what they’re doing isn’t rape at all, and I don’t think you’re going to solve that cognitive dissonance until you tackle the social problems that tie a man’s ability to attract women into having sex with them to their worth. Because as long as they have to worry about being chastised by their friends for not scoring last Friday and losing that social currency that comes with it, they’re going to be awfully tempted to look the other way when a woman’s body language isn’t coming up roses.
I don’t know why people are acting like women haven’t been taught, from the moment they are born, that they are potential rape victims even when they are fully sober. That alcohol increases one’s vulnerability is not earth-shattering news at all. Whoop-tee-doo to Yoffe for stating the obvious. Maybe her words will chasten some impressionable girl to stick to soda pop (yeah, like that won’t get her labled as a weird freak).
This is what have folks raising their eyes, in addition to her very outdated idea that women are the gatekeepers of society’s morality, whom men should look to for responsible drinking habits. The Temperance Movement called. They want their rhetoric back.
(If both men and women have been lectured to their whole lives, why aren’t we seeing declines in rape? Maybe we need to do less lecturing to kids who just want to have fun and more…I don’t know? Prosecution of the bad guys? Something’s not working.)
Might be goal post moving, there might be less violent forcible rape but things like date rape are now included in the statistics. I don’t know.
Seriously, in your mind, what is violent forcible rape and what is date rape? And why would you consider grouping these two things together to be “goal post moving”?
A much better guess is that women simply feel more comfortable reporting rape than they used to.
Well, according toBJS stats (warning: PDF) rape is on the decline by 58%, from 5 reports/1000 females in 1995 to 2/1000 in 2010. Also, 64% go unreported (2005-2010), which would put a dent in prosecution and conviction rates. Even so: 10% of burglary reports result in an arrest and 12% of reports of rape. Hate crime is at around 1% of reports leading to an arrest.
Stop imagining my motivation, please I hate emotional topics like this.
I think they should be grouped together under rape, my point is that in the past date rape was excused or considered not “real” rape. So it wasn’t included in the statistics, but now it is, so it can look like rape has stayed at the same levels or even increased.
That’s my problem with the outrage as well - its overly idealistic.
Look ladies - don’t get blotto unless you are around people you trust in a safe place. Is that fair? Maybe not, but its reality. And frankly, while most men don’t need to avoid rape (although I know one straight guy who was on the receiving end of a blow job from another guy he didn’t ask for when he was too drunk to protest), getting that blotto around people you don’t trust isn’t a great idea for guys either - probably more likely to get robbed than raped.
At the same time, we can stop having the threads about how UNFAIR affirmative consent is and I’ll start feeling better about not having to give the advice not to get blotto unless you are in a safe place around people you trust. Because I shouldn’t HAVE to give the advice, it should be 1) common sense and giving the advice is really patronizing and 2) unnecessary because there shouldn’t be guys who say “she’s drunk, now is my chance.”
I don’t have anything to contribute to this discussion other than to say this post is insightful and makes a tremendous amount of sense to me. I’ve spent my entire life certain that men who are aggressive or embittered towards women are that way because they aren’t good at getting the attention of the opposite sex. I’m still not certain that isn’t occasionally true, but thanks to your post I see how this lopsided social pressure to get laid can lead to some ugly realities, especially for teens and young adults. More so for competitive types who tend to compare notes after a party. Sex does for a tumultuous ten years or so, rule the world. And in that tumultuous ten year period people aren’t as empathetic and logical as they will be later.
(On the flip side is the bullshit prize women get for clinging to their virginity which is equally unjust but not relevant to this discussion)
You can surely get widespread agreement on this. But such guys have always existed, and nothing in view seems remotely likely to change that.
So as a means of addressing the problem, this looks doomed to failure.
No one claims that it addresses the whole problem, and there is no single piece of advice that anyone can give that addresses the whole problem of rape.
That’s incomplete, and doesn’t address the whole problem. What about sober women who get raped? What about men who get raped?
Why are you blaming the victims?
Regards,
Shodan
I’ve read this several times, and while all the words are English, I can’t figure out what you’re talking about.
I’m talking about rape as in the crime of sexual assault on someone who did not, or cannot, give consent.
I’m not talking about a predisposition for other things, and I don’t understand what you’re driving at or why you’re asking. My WAG is that men who are prone to sexually assaulting other people probably have an inclination to sexually assault someone whether they are sober or drunk. In other words, rapists may get drunk, but getting drunk isn’t why rapists rape. Rapists rape because they are rapists.
I’m not at all insulted by it, and I think it might be more effective than you do. It goes without saying that some rapes (I won’t make up a percentage) must be committed by people who are irredeemable monsters and on whom education would have no effect. But I’m also sure that’s not all of them, which means that you could change the behavior of some men if you communicate to them what rape really is: if they think rape is attacking someone in a dark alley, they may not realize that having sex with someone who is blind drunk or who says no and then gets quiet is still rape. Read any discussion of rape and you’ll find people are more likely to imagine a random savage assault than an acquaintance rape.
That doesn’t educate people about what rape is or their responsibilities when they’re with someone else.
No, there isn’t. But Yoffe wrote about only one aspect of the problem, and as noted, it’s an aspect that is addressed all the time anyway. Her focus was only on the behavior of women and how they can “end up being raped” (or how her imaginary son could “find himself accused” of rape). If rape on campus usually occurs when both the man and the woman have been drinking, why is the piece called “College Women: Stop Getting Drunk?”
I believe what bengangmo is talking about is the idea expressed in your last sentence. “Rapists rape because they are rapists” seems to cabin the issue to a sort of criminally degenerate subset of the population, as if there’s a class of monsters out there called rapists which can be meaningfully isolated by that definition. But I think the other way to look at it - the more empirically sound one, as it turns out - is to say that rapists are rapists (or sexual assaulters, really, let’s say) because they commit sexual assaults. And, it turns out, lots and lots of sexual assaults happen under circumstances created by people to whom lots and lots of people would not apply that categorical “rapist” tag. Circumstances like, say, the ones msmith was referring to.
So there’s a problem there. If we say that rapes are committed by people who are predisposed to committing rapes, and we have a particular idea in mind about who those people are, then we have a built-in reason to dismiss events of sexual assault as not really sexual assaults because they weren’t committed by the right kind of people. You may be “biased against rapists,” but maybe your conception of a rapist doesn’t match up with the people actually committing the rapes.
Which is definitely a different question from whether the author here deserves to be condemned, but I think goes a long way toward explaining where the “outrage” comes from.
Yep, which is why we need to continue giving women patronizing advice about not getting drunk - even if its patronizing and even if it implies blame for their own victimization. Because not getting raped in the first place is more important than feeling like someone is blaming you after the fact.