This is the first thing I noticed and it colored the rest of her story in a bad light for her. After reading the words “selectively bulimic” I had a difficult time buying any of the rest of her story, especially when that statement was immediately followed with:
This paints her as #1-fucked up mentally to begin with and #2-one of those girls who thinks drinking means getting blackout drunk as fast as possible. This is a he-said/she-said situation to begin with and we’re only getting her side which by her own admission is “hazy” at best, possibly even totally imaginary.
I thought of that, but the way it was presented, the girl didn’t do anything other than say yes, but the guy did. Plus there’s the bias that guys can’t be raped by girls :rolleyes:
And I must admit that I tend to follow the policy that the story is accurate when making a judgment call. If it did not happen as stated, how can I make a decision on what it is? Anything could have happened. I’m not going to judge on scenarios I made up in my mind.
In other words, there’s an implied “Assuming what she says is accurate,” at the front of my previous post.
I’ve blacked out a couple of times in college. I woke up thinking the night had ended at one point, and then was told that it had not, ended there. I was up doing all sorts of things that I did not remember. Luckily I had enough wits to only drink to excess around people who cared about me and didn’t get into bad trouble, but I easily could have.
So, my opinion on this piece? She got way too drunk, had bad consensual sex with another drunk person, and now feels bad about it. Case closed.
If she got “way too drunk,” the conclusion is that she didn’t have consensual sex. Sex that isn’t consensual is called…
I assume the question in the thread title isn’t about whether the technical crime of rape occurred, but about whether or not we credit her claims in total, and so nobody really wants to hear the answer to the first. But accepting the facts as she provided them (we have, after all, no other set to go from unless we substitute our own notion of what must have happened), two things are true: 1. she said she didn’t want to have sex, and 2. she was blackout drunk.
Those are what you might call consent problems, I’d say. And if she didn’t consent, it’s rape. I understand the ever-present arguments that it cheapens the experience of ‘real’ rape victims, and I understand to some extent the scoffing that takes place when the person complaining fits into any one of about four thousand categories, of which drunk teenaged virgin who regrets it later is one, but sexual intercourse without consent is sexual assault.
Of course, but just because somebody doesn’t remember anything doesn’t mean they were even unconscious or even not responsive. She could have been an enthusiastic participant for all we know, even though there are holes in her memory. Not saying she was, just that with the story as stated even she doesn’t know. It’s impossible to say what the guy saw.
If the male was blacked out during the interaction he was then also raped, correct?
I don’t understand this argument that being drunk removes the ability to consent. If a drunk person is not responsible for their actions or words, why do we judge drunk drivers?
Does anyone know the actual legal details of giving consent in a state of intoxication?
Note, I am totally in agreement that it is rape if she was unconscious.
Probably not technically raped - but who really knows - she admits she doesn’t have clear memories, his memories are probably similar and there isn’t any evidence other than drunken memories. She could have been crying “no, no!” at the point of penetration - or been blacked out - which I think crosses the line too. But she could have also blacked out memories of screaming “do me! fuck me hard!” Certainly not provable. But she self defines it as rape, which I, personally think encourages her to play the victim and doesn’t encourage healing, but its her choice to define herself as victim rather than copping to her role in the incident.
It would be irresponsible for her to identify “Tony” as a rapist because I doubt he is. Although he certainly doesn’t sound like the type of guy I’d want my daughter wandering off into the woods with.
The words she should use aren’t “rape” but “taken advantage of.” Rape is too loaded for the situation.
So let me get this straight: Girl gets wasted and asks boy who she has a crush on to have sex with her, he complies, but she was raped. This woman has issues. Agreeing to “decide” she was raped; suicidal; selective bulimia; oppressive, religious family; being depressed about drunken sex from nine years ago. Yeah, major problems.
I had a boyfriend have sex with me when I was unconscious (seriously, what fun for him), and I don’t consider it rape. Did he take advantage? Probably.
As Zsofia pointed out, was she unconscious, or was she conscious but blacked out? It wasn’t entirely clear went down.
I don’t think that having sex drunk in the woods necessarily means you can’t be raped, even if you liked the guy initially. The book Speak has a similar premise, though the girl in that book actually does say no and remembers everything that happened.
But in the Salon.com case, I don’t think we know enough to really say either way. From what I read, it sounds like she was trying to get across that she just wanted to fool around but not have intercourse yet, and the guy was too drunk to understand. It seems less a case of rape and more of bad communication. I’m hesitant to call it rape because it doesn’t seem like the guy was in a frame of mind to know he was committing rape. If she’d said, “No, no, get off of me now” and he’d gone on, then I’d say that it was rape, clearly, no matter how drunk he was. But if they’re both drunk and she’s sending out mixed signals and he can’t pick up on them, then I don’t think I’d classify it as rape.
ETA:
How is that not rape, if someone had sex when you couldn’t consent?
I think you guys are reading this wrong. The author also seems uncomfortable by how she has classified what happened as “rape.” I don’t think she has really accepted this explanation, as much as she found it an easy and useful one to take. This piece is exploring her ambiguous feelings and a bit of an admission that “rape” isn’t exactly the right word.
Personally, I think we need to reinvent what was once called “being taken advantage of.” We’ve created a very black and white standard (which I think stems from an archaic need to assign or absolve ‘blame’ for women) which doesn’t see all the shades between “some guy jumped out of the bushes and raped me” and “I was crying ‘do me baby’ and begging for it.” Really there is a lot of stuff in between, some of it which is traumatic and can be talked about in that context, but which isn’t rape. I know I’ve been in some consensual-but-still-not-right situations that have had huge effects on my life. I wish there was a way to talk about it without having to say either “I was raped” or “I wanted it.”
Well, if the male didn’t consent, he was raped. Different things.
Who said anything about a drunk person not being responsible for her actions? Intoxication generally doesn’t remove responsibility. What it can affect more readily is capacity to consent. No consent is what makes it sexual assault, not just being drunk.
Consent is consent whether there’s intoxication or not. It’s a very fluid and difficult analysis in any event, but there’s not a special rule for consenting when drunk. Either the person had the capacity to give consent and did so, had the capacity to consent and did not do so, or had no capacity to consent because of the extent of the intoxication, and so by definition did not consent.
There’s this idea about considering something rape that, in my experience, gets to some platonic ideal about what it means to be raped. It’s very hard to deal with in a legal context, because as with any other criminal statute, there are things that are rape and things that aren’t. In common parlance, though, rape has a truckload of emotional connotations, and people get very upset when the technical definition and the emotional gravity of a situation are at odds. I think this is one of those cases - people are angry at the idea that this woman would get the emotional “credit” as a rape victim, and so they say she wasn’t raped on those terms. But if she didn’t consent, that’s a sexual assault.
I’m still on the fence with drunk sex. I don’t think it’s morally right to have sex with someone who is extremely drunk. But usually both people having drunk sex are drunk, and I am not comfortable with labeling the man in the equation a ‘rapist’ when I hear the details of most such stories.
She says she lost consciousness but in that state she can’t be sure of that. If she was totally passed out and he still penetrated her, I’d be comfortable calling this one rape. But there’s no way to know for sure what happened here.
I also have a hard time understanding people who have such trouble with impulsive behavior when intoxicated. I went through a phase where I was drunk a great deal in mixed groups, but I never did anything I regret - never had a drunken sexual encounter because it always seemed like a bad idea (and had the good luck not to be forced into anything).
IMHO she was raped but not by him, but by the religious authority figures and her parents. We all have a desire for love and connecting to each other and we are suppose to search for love (which is God) as best we can. It is the guilt that was laid upon her that prevented her from experiencing and pursuing love when she was obviously ready.
It is additionally evil that the blame fell on her and now this guy - accused of rape of all things, who both are innocent and just doing what is natural and will help us find love.
As she had interest in him, it is a shame that false accusations now have separated them, and for her most likely bond her more tightly to those who have caused her that trouble.
I am going to take a bold stand here and basically reject all first person “I was drunk and got taken advantage of” stories. If you are drunk enough to the point of unconsciousness or semi-lucidity, you are also too drunk to accurately remember what transpired. Waking up the next day and saying “I was raped/taken advantage of/assaulted” is simply a way of shifting blame in my mind. It allows someone to transform from a person who got drunk and screwed some guy to a victim.
If what she lays out is correct, whether it’s rape depends on the jurisdiction. She consents to sexual activity, specifically says no to penetrative sex, he penetrates her anyway.
Let’s ignore the booze aspect for the moment. Presuming this happened in Pennsylvania, you have the lack of consent, but you also need an element of force. I think a prosecutor would run into trouble on that, unless she would testify she tried to push him off. Now, had it happened in New Jersey, it’s definitely rape, because under NJ law the force element is satisfied by the act of penetration absent consent.
The drunk thing is somewhat different. She never gives consent, according to her version, and in fact she specifically denies the consent. In general, the drunken consent is a tough one, but I’d say for myself if I am ever drunk enough not to be able to notice she is too drunk to consent, I doubt I would be capable of performing anyway.
The repeated comments of her blaming the alcohol are somewhat disturbing. It’s important to remember that a victim of a crime isn’t always blameless, but he or she is always a victim of a crime. If I am drunk off my ass, and give my car keys to a total stranger who says he wants to sit in it and listen to the radio, I am a fucking idiot if he steals the car. But my drunkenness doesn’t alter the fact that he stole the car. If I decide to take $5000 out of an ATM, leave it hanging out of my back pocket, and walk through a crack house drunk at 5 a.m. and someone takes it, I have still been robbed, despite the fact I am, again, a fucking idiot. Similarly going into the woods drunk with someone at a high school party and willingly participating in masterbation might not be the most sensible thing to do if a person doesn’t want to have sex, but it doesn’t alter whether there was rape involved.
Where there is a rape victim, there must be a rapist. While we know virtually nothing about the boy in question, I would be highly reluctant to treat him as a rapist for moral or legal purposes based on this account. Even taking this story as a completely honest attempt to relay the events in question, we cannot assess the degree to which the alleged victim communicated her lack of consent or the degree to which the alleged perpetrator decided to ignore those signals - the information is simply unavailable. All we know is that the victim initiated a sexual interaction with an intoxicated other party, communicated ambiguous consent, and was sufficiently intoxicated herself to not remember the encounter. Plainly the details matter, but we do not have them and, absent them, we have no reason to assume the worst.
Villa:
There is a distinct difference between theft, as you portray it, and rape. If, in your intoxication, you are mugged, it is theft. If, in your intoxication, you give a crack addict a gift of $5,000, it is not theft if he chooses to keep it. If, in your intoxication, you are forced to have sex against your will, it is rape. If, in your intoxication, you consent to sex…life is complicated. If, in your intoxication, you mean to not consent to sex but give ambiguous consent to an intoxicated partner who isn’t likely to pick up on subtlety…life is still complicated.