No, I never said that. Some sexual assaults are rapes, but other sexual assaults are not rapes. Please stop putting words in my mouth.
If she was drugged in an attempt to rape her, that would be an assault. If she was not drugged, it was nothing.
If she had chosen to pursue the matter at the time, she could have gone to a hospital and gotten a blood test, which might have been able to detect a date rape drug.
I’m having trouble categorizing #3 as a sexual assault. From the description, I’m not even sure if there was any physical contact. There might have been physical contact when “he led her out of the room”, but I didn’t see any other description that I construed as physical contact. Entering the room without permission and refusing to leave when asked is boorish behavior and there may be something akin to breaking and entering, but I definitely don’t see that as rape (from the limited text copied.) Was there more detail somewhere that I missed??
@Ohiodad – in the MSU case the witness who was asked by the accused about the “roofies” voluntarily went to the school and volunteered the info. The complainant didn’t even know that guy. Wouldn’t it be prudent for a criminal investigator to put a message out to the general campus population that they were looking into possible criminal activity and anyone with any info should contact them? Why would that be so hard to do? Seems like just a basic starting point.
I find it hard to believe that you would not expect the police to do anything “unless I brought in a sample of the drink that I felt was drugged.” Your posts don’t indicate to me that you would take a response like that lying down.
I
Yes, I agree with you. It’s different when the genders are reversed.
But first, let’s be clear about what “attempting to have sex” meant in the case of #3. It seems to me that the girl (a) entered into his bedroom uninvited, (b) asked to have sex, (c) refused to leave until made to leave, then (d) started screaming that the guy was attempting an assault. I’m assuming she didn’t physically engage with him.
You seem to be changing the hypothetical when you switch to “started to have sex”. That’s very different. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be responding to.
I agree (a) is a much bigger deal for women than for men. It’s enough to get a no-contact order in the case of a male perpetrator. I explained why I don’t think (a) is necessarily a big deal in the case of a women entering into a man’s bedroom, but I agree it depends on what the social norms are in this exact specific environment of the frat house. I assume we agree (b) is a non-issue. (c) is again a case where there’s a difference between men and women. Much bigger problem when a guy doesn’t leave when asked then when a girl doesn’t leave when asked. If it’s a male perpetrator, maybe now I’m thinking no-contact order or probation (or more, if he’s a stalker). In the case of a woman who won’t leave the room, I’m having a hard time getting too worked up about it.
To me, (d) is the most interesting here. Now the tables are turned. It’s a much bigger deal for a girl to do it than for a guy. Interesting to me that no one is focusing on this … a false (albeit unofficial) sexual assault accusation used as a weapon of revenge. That’s the biggest deal to me of this whole incident (since I don’t think the girl mounted a serious sexual assault attempt) … it’s actually the only reason I hesitated about calling it minor.
Yes, of course men do have a right not to be assaulted, but there’s difference in what constitutes a credible serious assault attempt. Mainly because men are almost always much stronger.
Digression that might illustrate why we’re thinking of this differently – If you think your your weightlifter example.is a one where the tables are turned then I have to say that you don’t appreciate the physical disparity between men and women. Unless the women is armed, is a trained MMA fighter, is taking testosterone injections, or the guy is < 135 pounds or is physically / mentally impaired then it’s very unlikely even a woman like that could overpower a guy. I used to help train a woman who went to the Olympics (not weightlifting, but in a similar event, and she didn’t take too many steroids at least I think). She could protect herself against 80% of men, but she couldn’t overpower them. An amateur male weightlifter in her weight class could snap her in two. The disparity is overwhelming.
But now we’ve per-supposed that the female weightlifter is starting to have sex with the guy. Of course it’s now a serious sexual assault (a completed rape in fact). So now of course he should file charges, assuming anyone will believe him or take him seriously.
In the real world, most likely the woman will just turn around and counter-accuse him of rape, so he’d better have proof or forget about pressing a claim or he’s going to be the one expelled.
@cardinal fang, you are the one who asked if I would want the police to investigate if I thought someone drugged and then raped me, so I am not sure what words you believe I am ascribing to you.
@HarvestMoon1, it is a question of how much information are you giving the police. The assertion was that the statement constituted a clear case of assault, with no mention of physical contact, no indication of if there was a specific guy, no facts other than the woman felt she could have been drugged. On those facts alone, there is nothing for the police to do.
And as far as a generalized message, I guess it depends on what is the message. You want to send a blast email out to the campus and say the police are investigating a potential use of a date rape drug at thus and so place? Yeah, maybe that could work. And maybe it tips off whoever the bad actor is, and they hunker down for awhile. I don’t know. I assume you have to balance those and any number of other factors when you decide how broadly to send out an inquiry. I am not a professional investigator. I tend to believe you let people do the job for which they are trained and not assume they are doing it incorrectly without a particular specific reason.
I know this wasn’t directed at me but I want to answer anyway. What you describe was something that often happened to me before I was married. I don’t say that to brag, just to show you that it is something that is a lot more common than you think.
One of my friends favorite stories involves a party at my house that I shared with a college buddy. My buddy was very inexperienced (to put it nicely). We were all wasted and eventually I went to bed to give him a chance to be alone with a young woman that he had met that night who was visiting our next door neighbors but lived out of state. As it turns out she rebuffed him and told him she was going next door to sleep. The next thing I know, I wake up to a naked woman assaulting me. I wasn’t interested and tried to break it to her gently by saying that I didn’t want to jeopardize my friendship with my roommate. She didn’t think that was a good enough reason and really started sexually assaulting me in an even more major way. I finally got forceful and kicked her out.
I considered it very minor and it never even would have dawned on me to file charges. I think the reason I considered it so minor was because I could easily overpower her. I think the rest of your post #1755 is spot on with regards to the differences between guys and girls, and who is assaulting whom. Had a guy assaulted me like that I would have been freaked out.
Had I done to the girl what she did to me it would be different (but should it be, in theory?). Had I jumped into her bed (assuming here that she didn’t want it) and woken her up I wonder how it would be classified by different women. What would you do if the guy immediately said “I’m sorry. I misread your signals” and stopped everything right then and left as he continued to profusely apologize? How about if the guy kept trying to kiss you (or more) and said “come on. I know we had a connection. I promise you will like it”?
I do appreciate the physical disparities between a man and a woman. I was trying to find an atypical case where the woman could overpower the man, and he knew it. Your examples of her being a trained MMA fighter, or having a weapon, are better examples. The point is, if a woman (other than the MMA fighter) is the potential victim, she knows before he lays a hand on her that he can overpower her if he wants. The same would be true of a male victim, if the assaulter is a male MMA fighter. The potential victim knows, before the guy lays a hand on him, that his assailant can overpower him if he wants to. And that makes the entire interaction different.
But then are we having different rules for men and for women? Women can assault men because the man could fight her off?
I think they’d feel pretty much the same way you’d feel if a guy with the build of an NFL linebacker hopped in your bed, woke you up and started initiating sex. (Assuming that you didn’t want this sex.)
I also have a question for the lawyers about the tweet and the no contact order. I see @Hanna 's point about the written note going in all the mailboxes but I can’t make a determination if it is a good analogy or not. I would need to know more about how many Twitter followers that he had. Even then that does not tell us a lot because I often skim right over my feed and only see something if it happens to come up in the few minutes per week that I get on there. If one of my friends posted something on Twitter I would likely never see it unless they specifically tagged me. I would bet that the sender did not tag many (or any?) of his friends. In that case I would put the analogy more along the lines of writing a note and putting it in the mailboxes of a few friends on campus. To me that is not contact, but I do not know enough in this case to say for sure.
My question to the lawyers concerns whether intended dissemination matters. If the guy wrote in a private journal and a friend found it and told the girl about it I can not believe any judge would say that he had contacted her. Writing a note and mailing it to 10 friends? How about 100 people? Doesn’t that even depend on who the 100 consist of? 100 of her closest friends is a lot different than 100 random people across the country, which is even different than, say, 100 of his frat brothers.
CF, the point being made earlier is many guys don’t view a woman going into a guy’s bedroom and try and have sex with him without consent as assault. We can read what the guys are saying in this thread.
Then the argument is spun. The guys say we don’t view what the woman is doing as an assault. Therefore, when the men do the same thing, there is no assault. Equal rights.
The problem with that argument is equal rights doesn’t mean genders are the same.
And my point is, they’d view it as assault if a guy went into their bedroom to try to have sex with them, so how could they believe it is not assault if that same guy goes into a woman’s bedroom?
The thing about the guy tweeting that makes me think the tweets were directed at the girlfriend is, he didn’t say, “My ex is a psycho b*. She should go herself.” Rather, he said, "If I could only say one thing to you it would probably be ‘Go **** yourself you piece of shit.’ #butseriouslygof*yourself #crazyex.” He uses the pronoun you, not the pronoun she, showing he is directly addressing the ex.
Mistaken post
CF, I agree with you. I usually do. And I like agreeing with you. You are almost always right. 
I agree with you on the tweets too.
I agree with the senator. The schools have to be able to get rid of the assaulters. I think she was a prosecuter.
@TV4caster – but would you have seen or heard about a tweet that made derogatory references to you from the many, many mutual friends that you hypothetically shared with that person? Especially if your friends knew of a major conflict that involved law enforcement and a no contact order between you and the person who tweeted?
@dstark - I don’t see why you would write this. Respectfully, I don’t think you aren’t reading too carefully and are presuming bad faith on the part of the people posting here. I think almost everyone is saying that conduct that could cause a woman to be afraid will not cause a man to be afraid, and there should be harsher penalties for male perpetrators than female ones in case #3. I’ve even proudly anointed myself a “sexist pig” for taking this position The only person who has possibly taken a contrary view is CF, and I think she might just be doing it to sharpen everyone’s thinking.
Also, I don’t think you are hearing people when they say that the definition of “assault” is being mangled. Several times people have switched scenarios mid-paragraph and no one has accused them of bad faith. It is very reasonable to say that if there is no physical contact, no threats, no brandishing of weapons etc. then there is no assault by most people’s understanding of the term. Trespassing maybe, but not assault. No one here is Webster or Humpty Dumpty who gets to decide what words mean. If people are taking a position with respect to case #3 (where there is no assault), then it is unfair to write what you did.
With respect to the tweets, here is the scenario as I understand it. The boy is tweeting to Friends A,B,C, The girl and the school told him that she sees everything that is sent to A. Even after being told this, he then said some more bad stuff about her in a tweet to A,B,C. The question is - does that constitute contact and/or violate the order?
Please help me understand this because I don’t really understand how Twitter works, and again I think this is causing problems with people talking past each other.
Al2simon, why would I write that? Because it is true.
I wasn’t talking about you.
I know you read JohnDoe4’s posts. 
There are people here who agree with JohnDoe4.
Have you ever read anything from the a voice for males website? Links are posted in the sexual assault threads from that site.
Ever read the biography of the guy who founded that site? What he says about women? What’s posted in that site?
I am going to change tracks for a second. I can’t believe a woman would have anything to do with that site.
@HarvestMoon1 re: 1776
Probably, but who knows for sure.
I will say that if he had not used the hashtag “crazyex” (or whatever it was) that he could have been talking about the Starbucks barista who he felt dissed him while serving him. I feel that without that one word that he would have been ok.
Actually, I guess he was ok anyway since the judge already ruled in his favor.