Who carries the most blame in these three scenarios of sexual conflict?

What you’re saying doesn’t really make any sense at all to me.

You say “Jake can do some mental kung fu. It is all in his head.” You realize that the sensations of pain from being slapped in the face are also “all in your head”, right? The brain processes the signals from the slap just like it processes the effect of being told something bad by someone else. It doesn’t process them in the same way, but it’s still going to have an instantaneous reaction to them. This notion of “emotional choices” that you’re throwing around really does not apply to this situation.

If your doctor told you that you had a brain tumor and you were going to die in four weeks, could you just do “mental kung-fu” to negate the psychological impact of this news? You’re really going to tell me you can make “choices” as to what emotion you feel when you find out about that?

  1. Taehoon is 100% to blame. He lied, and lying isn’t cool. What he did or did not pay for has nothing to do with how much sex he is “owed.”

  2. John is to blame. You don’t rape people. Nobody owes you sex, even if they are watching TV on your dime. I don’t understand why he didn’t initiate divorce a long time ago. if the situation is that bad, it’s his own fault for sticking around.

  3. Jake is 100% to blame. Assault is never called for. Suji did a really screwed up thing, but assault is not an appropriate response. Furthermore, I doubt this came out of the blue. John almost certainly had some idea that Suji was capable of doing this sort of thing. Trying to buy her off with expensive gifts was kind of stupid.

What’s wrong with getting drunk?

Nothing at all. Personally I am a big fan. But when you ask me who is to blame for the decisions I make when I am drunk…well Lordy, Lordy it’s me.

Even emotions aren’t all in the head. Our sensations go all throughout our body. Much of the processing is done in the brain parts of which are within our skull, but not all. From my understanding, the whole is not a sum of its parts. It all works together.

If my doctor told me that, I could do enough mental kungfu not to kungfu the doctor. Using your example, why do more people hit women who have slept around than doctors who give terminal news?

To be straight though, if you want to play the nihilist game, I can play. We can reduce everything to their basic parts. Everything becomes simply perspective. All emotions are equal because they are chemical soup.

From my understanding, however, there are emergent properties from this soup to which people add some value. This is why I would agree with you that if a man spent 50 years psychologically abusing a woman, I would say that this would be more serious even if she slapped him. I’m not disregarding the chemical soup–don’t worry.

You’re damn right he’s a victim. His girlfriend is such a selfish whore that she cheated on him and was probably all smug about it afterwords. I know you didn’t include that, but she had to have something to send Suji into a rage and being sorry doesn’t seem like it should cause a rage.

Fuck no. You keep harping on permission and “it’s her body.” So I’m warning you right now, if you turn this into some kind of abortion analogue, you are going to piss off a lot of people.

But she wouldn’t be asking permission, before it happens she has to tell him because it’s THEIR relationship. His answer can then guide her actions:

Option 1: Yes! An open relationship sounds great. I’ve wanted to throw it in Sally at work for a while now.

Option 2: What? Are you crazy? Get the fuck out!

Now it’s her choice because she’s either in an open relationship where the rules of sleeping with other people are known or she’s single and she can do what she wants. But in an exclusive relationship, it’s not her choice because it’s their relationship.

100% to blame for what?

The OP doesn’t even clearly say what you’re supposed to be assigning blame for. Why did you assume that we were to assign blame for the act of slapping the other person, but assign no blame for the act of cheating?

Do deceivers and and the deceived get equal blame?

I guess I don’t think that letting a trusted friend get you a hotel room when you have some reason why it’s difficult to get home to be an inherently bad decision, drunk or sober.

100% to blame for slapping her.

I assumed we were talking about the assault, because the cheating isn’t really controversial. Obviously Suji was in the wrong there, and I can’t imagine anyone finding a good way to defend her.

If someone tells a story like “Who is to blame…a thief is stealing a car radio and the car’s owner shoots him,” I’m going to assume we are talking about the shooting because obviously nobody should be out stealing car radios.

That would be true if she’d actually made any decisions for which blame should be assigned. It’s not her fault Taehoon subscribes to the “no means yes” school of politeness.

No I don’t care what happens when they get there. If they both flop into bed and fall asleep and all is innocent and child like, it is still her fault for getting drunk and going there. What the other fuckwit does doesn’t matter. If she isn’t there it doesn’t happen. But it isn’t her fault what the fuckwit does.

This still doesn’t make sense to me. She was drunk and tired and so she went to a hotel. I don’t see that as much different than, say, her being hungry and going to a restaurant. It’s not something that calls for blame, because it’s not something that is wrong to do.

She was drunk and decided to essentially trust that her friend would take care of her. Her friend abused that trust. She didn’t walk down a seedy alley, she didn’t pass out naked in the middle of the club, she agreed, perhaps unwisely, to a friend’s suggestion. So what the other fuckwit does does matter. If you invite me to your house for Thanksgiving dinner and you rape me, it’s my fault for going to your house for Thanksgiving dinner! If I’d never gone there I would’ve never been raped. And had I never walked to work one morning I never would have been mugged.

She didn’t do anything wrong and I don’t get why you feel the need to attribute any blame to her at all.

I think there’s an obvious distinction between one outburst of mild physical violence and a pattern of abuse. Women slap men in anger all the time and no one gets their panties in a wad about it. Men slapping women is so horrible because there’s generally a pattern of abuse and control there - but if it was just the same sort of outrage gesture (not using the man’s full strength) it’s not the worst thing ever. By all means, it’s wrong, but so is cheating on some guy who’s working his ass off for you - like by an order of magnitude more I’d say.

Hell, I’d rather have had the shit beat out of me with a lead pipe than the emotional pain of some of the breakups that I’ve had.

In the first example, Hyemin is perhaps 20% to blame for the resulting problem, while Taehoon bears 80%. It is obvious that Taehoon was being deceptive and trying to take advantage of his friend while she was inebriated. Hyemin however, bears some responsibility for placing herself in a compromising situation through her own choices. She chose to get inebriated, and she chose to go to the hotel rather than insisting on being taken home, crashing at her friend’s house, calling a cab, or asking another friend or to give her a ride. This case is the least clear cut, because nothing bad really happened, everyone was just made uncomfortable.

In the second example, John bears 100% of the responsibility for his actions. Despite the fact that Sussana is most likely an insufferable twat, that doesn’t give him license to rape his spouse.

In the last case, Suji is 100% to blame for her actions and the resulting confrontation it caused. However, Jake is also fully responsible for his actions in slapping her. It doesn’t matter what happened, he made the choice to hit, just like she made the choice to sleep around. They are both responsible for their own mess.

You can’t assign blame in a binary manner because there is more than one thing at play here. It is Suji’s fault that the fight happened at all, but just because she was the one whose actions caused it doesn’t mean that Jake is excused. He could have done any number of other things like hitting the wall, throwing all her stuff in the street, or pissing on her shoes. Regardless of his choice of retaliation he bears responsibility for his own actions.

How is “crashing at a friend’s house” less dangerous than going to a hotel? We’ve already established that the friend is an untrustworthy creep. It’s not her responsibility for psychically guessing he was going to try to pressure her into sex.

Odd questions.

Bizarre surrejoinders by OP.

Here are septimus’s answers:

(1) Girl 2%. Don’t drink, don’t be stupid. Boy 4%. Learn how to flirt with sober women. But no crime, no time. Next case.

(2) Girl 90%. Boy 94%. They should have sought counseling before, or perhaps divorce.

(3) Girl 99%. Boy 1% (more if the slap actually broke her nose or something). We need details of their verbal monogamy contract to judge this one. I don’t know if their relation will or should survive, but boy’s expression of anger here may be necessary just for it to have a chance.

Hope this helps. :smiley:

Wow. So he slapped her because it was good for her? Sometimes what a relationship needs is a good slapping?

All of these situations could have been potentially “compromising.” You could argue that her friend saw her asking him to driver her home as a come on, or she could have been raped by the taxi driver, or her other friend could have saw that as an invitation, etc. Getting a nearby hotel room with a trusted friend who agreed on some ground rules seems like one of the safest of these options.

I think the only situation where people won’t blame a woman for unwanted sexual contact (remember, she made it clear she wasn’t interested in sex and he agreed) is to sit at home, sober, with the doors locked and windows drawn. Anything short of that can apparently be construed as a come-on.

Sometimes a relationship needs a stake to the heart, but not a slapping.

All three men are 100% at fault for what they have done to the women. And two of the three women are at fault for their grotesque behaviors.

Hyemin didn’t hurt anyone. There is no “fault” to be had.

John is a rapist with a horrible wife.

Jake is an abuser* with a horrible wife.
*He didn’t do something horrific, just bad. He was provoked and is possibly a better person than his wife, but still.