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.
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.
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:
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.
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 <I>good</I> 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.
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.
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).
[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]