# Yes means Yes, dumb idea. Women should quit lying about 'rape."
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922
**Category:** The BBQ Pit
**Created:** [September 30, 2014, 1:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922 "2014-09-30T01:00:24Z")
**Posts on this page:** 11
**Page:** 14
### Author:  [@MyFootsZZZ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MyFootsZZZ)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2014, 9:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/261 "2014-10-03T21:00:34Z")
> [@Spice\_Weasel](#):
>
> When I was in college I had two guy friends (really a friend + an acquaintance) who had a bitter unending rivalry toward one another. Basically Friend A had a female friend who was spending time alone with Friend B, and according to her, Friend B got pushy.
>
> Friend A confronted Friend B and not only did Friend B categorically deny that anything had happened, he henceforth despised Friend A for daring to suggest that he’d been inappropriate toward this girl.
>
> I have no goddamn idea what really happened and I stayed the hell out of it. But one thing I arm reasonably confident about is that Friend B truly did make that woman feel uncomfortable and refused to consider his role in making her feel that way. He was a pretty handsy/physically aggressive guy, not intentionally, but I definitely had more than one moment in our acquaintanceship of thinking ‘‘whoa buddy, that’s awfully familiar of you considering we just met.’’ I think it’s unfortunate that rather than examining his own behavior he let it ruin a friendship.
>
> I guess this speaks more to **Ascenray** ’s point that you don’t have to be a monster to be a sexual aggressor, you just have to be a little bit clueless.
Just for the record, sex wasn’t even on my radar when accused.
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### Author:  [@Spice\_Weasel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spice_Weasel)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2014, 9:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/262 "2014-10-03T21:08:13Z")
> [@MyFootsZZZ](#):
>
> Just for the record, sex wasn’t even on my radar when accused.
Sorry, I was really more responding to **Ascenray** , I wasn’t trying to draw a parallel between your story and mine. I was not trying to imply that you did something inappropriate.
This shit is just so fucking tragic, it kills me.
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### Author:  [@MyFootsZZZ](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MyFootsZZZ)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2014, 9:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/263 "2014-10-03T21:28:21Z")
No harm done.
I really feel like if I chat anymore in this thread, I’m going to regret something I say… so
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### Author:  [@Bruce\_Wayne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bruce_Wayne)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2014, 10:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/264 "2014-10-03T22:09:29Z")
> [@Kimstu](#):
>
> I think the same process of adjustment will lead to general acceptance of the notion that having sex with someone incapable of consenting to sex, even if you’re not trying to be violent or hurtful to them, even if you know them personally, even if previously they were or seemed willing to consent to sex with you, makes you a rapist too.
>
> But it’s likely to take a while for people to wrap their heads around it.
I believe that particular adjustment has already been made. I can remember GHB in the middle to late 90s being referred to as the “date rape” drug and have heard references to “roofies” going back even farther. From my vantage point having sex with an unconscious, sleeping or otherwise incapacitated person has always been considered rape by society at large. In that regard this law changes nothing.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2014, 10:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/265 "2014-10-03T22:43:13Z")
> [@Bruce\_Wayne](#):
>
> I believe that particular adjustment has already been made. I can remember GHB in the middle to late 90s being referred to as the “date rape” drug and have heard references to “roofies” going back even farther.
You have a point there, but I think that to some extent this is an adjustment that was (at least partly) made and then, oddly, unmade.
About twenty years ago [a documentary was made about the media “trivialization” of “date rape”](http://www.mediaed.org/cgi-bin/commerce.cgi?preadd=action&key=201):
> [@](#):
>
> Date Rape Backlash: Media & the Denial of Rape
>
> How did date rape shift from a “shockingly frequent… outrage,” as Newsweek once called it, to a controversy over “crying rape,” as New York magazine later labeled it? Susan Faludi, bell hooks, Mary Koss, Katha Pollitt, Neil Malamuth, and others, analyze a classical case study in media “backlash.”
>
> By the early 1990s, solid research and overwhelming evidence had prompted a growing awareness of the epidemic nature of date rape, especially on college campuses. But, starting in 1993, the media used the anecdotal comments of one young woman, Katie Roiphe, to undermine efforts to stop this continuing crime against women.
Katie Roiphe is definitely the name I associate most strongly with the oh-quit-making-such-a-fuss backlash over “date rape”. Some pertinent observations from a [1993 review by Katha Pollitt](http://www.interactivetheatre.org/resc/notbadsex.html):
> [@](#):
>
> Katie
> Roiphe, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard alumna and graduate student of English at Princeton, argues that women’s sexual freedom is being curtailed by a new set of hand-wringing fuddy-duddies: feminists. Anti-rape activists, she contends, have manipulated statistics to frighten college women with a nonexistent “epidemic” of rape, date rape, and sexual harassment, and have encouraged them to view “everyday experience”- sexist jokes, professional leers, men’s straying hands and other body parts- as intolerable insults and assaults. […] As Roiphe sees it, most students who say they have been date raped are reinterpreting in the cold grey light of dawn the “bad sex” they were too passive to refuse and too enamored of victimhood to acknowledge as their own responsibility. […]
>
> Roiphe is right to point out that cultural attitudes toward rape, harassment, coercion, and consent are slowly shifting. It is certainly true that many women today, most of whom would not describe themselves as feminists, feel outraged by male behavior that previous generations- or even those women themselves not so long ago- quietly accepted as “everyday experience.” Roiphe may even be right to argue that it muddies the waters when women colloquially speak of “rape” in referring to sex that is caddish or is obtained through verbal or emotional pressure or manipulation, or when they label as “harassment” the occasional leer or off-color comment. But if we lay these terms aside we
> still have to account for the phenomenon they point to: that women in great numbers—by no means all on elite campuses, by no means all young—feel angry at and exploited by behavior that many men assume is within bounds and no big deal.
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### Author:  [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 12:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/266 "2014-10-04T00:59:51Z")
Yes, it’s going to take a while.
> [@Anaamika](#):
>
> I feel like the attitude of “Well if I don’t read her reactions right I might miss out on sex” is a big part of the problem inasfar as the non-violent rapes and molestations. Well, so fucking what? Yes, some women do play games. You know what men can do? Refuse to play them, absolutely. If she says no, even coquettishly? Don’t have sex with her. She’ll learn eventually that games don’t work for her. It’s not the end of the world if you don’t have sex! Just leave. Trust me, if she wants to fuck you enough, she’ll find a way to tell you. We get horny too.
Exactly. Why try to have, as **Spice Weasel** puts it, “plausible deniability” for something that both parties _actually desire_. There should be no need for “playing hard to get” as a way to test how driven is he, this is not a reality-TV game show, and the notion that sex is the reward for knowing the right game moves and making them persistently until you crack the defense is something people should get over.
Sure, as stated by **Fotheringay-Phipps** , for some women it is “about feeling really really desired by a strong powerful man” (I happen to disagree with him that this is just “what comes naturally”, instead feeling it is to great extent socialized behavior, but that’s another debate). Well that’s a nice fantasy, but if we’re talking fantasies I have one of being really really desired by hot young co-eds: I don’t expect it to get out of the realm of fantasy and don’t hold women to it when looking for companionship, I’d be a damn fool and a pathetic one if I did.
I do agree though that in the overwhelming majority of normal consensual sexual encounters this should cause no real major trouble.
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### Author:  [@kidchameleon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kidchameleon)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 1:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/267 "2014-10-04T01:56:26Z")
> [@raventhief](#):
>
> That did not really answer my question. Why is a man violating YOUR social norms by extending a hand (note, not forcing you, or bullying you - just extending his hand and then dropping it if you say no) a rude action that is offensive, but a man violating MY social norms by refusing to shake my ungloved hand is NOT being rude or offensive? Why do your norms trump mine?
Because that’s what hypocrites do.
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### Author:  [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 4:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/268 "2014-10-04T16:04:20Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#):
>
> Yes, it’s going to take a while. Exactly. Why try to have, as **Spice Weasel** puts it, “plausible deniability” for something that both parties _actually desire_…
Because women face social stigma (from some men, and from some other women), if they’re perceived as the kind of girl who ‘gives it up’ too easily, or who’s too overtly enthusiastic about sex. That’s the simple reason. Unfortunately.
Mind you, I don’t think that’s a \good\ thing, at all, I think it’s a very bad thing, which at the extreme leads to nonsense like veils and chastity belts. And I think we’d all be better off if women were supported in being free and open with their sexual desires to the same degree as men. However, the stigma against, for a lack of a better word, ‘easy’ women possibly has evolutionary roots, as well as cultural ones, so getting rid of it is going to be harder than a lot of people think.
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### Author:  [@Kimstu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kimstu)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 4:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/269 "2014-10-04T16:51:47Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#):
>
> Because women face social stigma (from some men, and from some other women), if they’re perceived as the kind of girl who ‘gives it up’ too easily, or who’s too overtly enthusiastic about sex. […]
>
> And I think we’d all be better off if women were supported in being free and open with their sexual desires to the same degree as men. However, the stigma against, for a lack of a better word, ‘easy’ women possibly has evolutionary roots, as well as cultural ones, so getting rid of it is going to be harder than a lot of people think.
What’s shocking is that AFAICT we **did** at one point in the not-too-distant past get closer to getting rid of it than we seem to be now.
Around thirty-plus years ago, to the best of my recollection, in the period between the attempt to pass the Equal Rights Amendment and widespread concerns about AIDS, young people considered it ridiculously old-fashioned as well as offensive to attempt to stigmatize a woman as a “slut” or a “whore” just for choosing to have sex (as long as it didn’t involve cheating on a partner).
When I was in college, calling a woman a “slut” for having sex would have been like calling someone a “spic” for being Hispanic: i.e., the attempted insult would have been regarded as much more damaging to the person who said it than to the person it was said about. Nobody but vile bigoted pigs would even dream of saying such things, we thought (and I still think so).
So the most horrifying thing about slut-shaming, to my mind, is not merely that it exists but the way it seems to have made a comeback when we thought it was well launched on the way to nonexistence.
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### Author:  [@JRDelirious](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JRDelirious)
#### Post date: [October 4, 2014, 5:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/270 "2014-10-04T17:38:59Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#):
>
> Because women face social stigma (from some men, and from some other women), if they’re perceived as the kind of girl who ‘gives it up’ too easily, or who’s too overtly enthusiastic about sex.
And men who do stop and back down if they don’t get enthusiastic agreement face a negative perception of their own for being the kind of guy who “gives up too easy”, lacking initiative and confidence.
Which is why it’s in the interest of both genders to at least try, even if it does take more time and effort, to move in the right direction or at least to create awarenes that it does not _have_ to be this way (we act contrary to things with alleged “evolutionary” roots every day).
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### Author:  [@Fotheringay-Phipps](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fotheringay-Phipps)
#### Post date: [October 6, 2014, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/yes-means-yes-dumb-idea-women-should-quit-lying-about-rape/699922/271 "2014-10-06T14:35:14Z")
> [@JRDelirious](#):
>
> Sure, as stated by **Fotheringay-Phipps** , for some women it is “about feeling really really desired by a strong powerful man” (I happen to disagree with him that this is just “what comes naturally”, instead feeling it is to great extent socialized behavior, but that’s another debate).
A couple of points, for clarity:
[ol]
[li]The statement about “feeling really really desired by a strong powerful man” was in response to Spice Weasel referencing rape fantasies that some women have. The statement about “what comes naturally” was in response to a separate quote, about how women sometimes act more reticent than they might be feeling. These are very likely related, but they are not the same.[/li][li]“What comes naturally” does not preclude “socialized behaviour”. In the first sentence of the paragraph in which I made that point I introduced it by saying “… part of human nature (whether cultural or inherent)”.[/li][/ol]
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