<p>“Okay, so everything I wish for is included in Title IX. The issue then is that the colleges are not applying it correctly? Because a lot of these lawsuits seem to indicate that–including the case filed and won by the UCONN women. It’s not just the accused getting hurt by incorrect or incomplete application of Title IX.”</p>
<p>Title ix as applied to campus rape is pretty much a cluster.</p>
<p>Schools get sued and investigated (by the feds and by the girls) for not expelling enough guys and giving them inadequate punishments. Because they are male dominated patriarchal institutions, even though female students often comprise 60% of the students on campus.</p>
<p>But then some data shows that those outcomes are often consistent with the wishes of the victims. So are schools being responsive to victims? Maybe. Or they could be handling things in that way to sweep things under the rug to protect their own university interests. So the schools get sued and investigated for that too.</p>
<p>But then schools also get sued by guys claiming the schools trample their rights in biased kangaroo courts. Strangely, the girls often claim those kangaroo courts are biased against them!</p>
<p>And then by handling these matters, the schools also get criticized for undercutting the criminal justice system. Perps don’t get convicted and sent to jail. Because the schools are treating rape as if it is a conduct violation rather than a crime.</p>
<p>No one thinks schools are good at this. But then they keep asking/requiring schools to do more and more of this. Even though female college students are at lower risk than women who are not college students. And even though the rate of sexual assault has declined by 50% over the last decade or so. </p>
<p>The category being young men who are too drunk to notice that their partners don’t and/or can’t consent? </p>
<p>I really really detest some drunk guy’s defense that he was too drunk to realize he shouldn’t drive, and my sympathy for the same guys when they say they were too drunk to notice they were raping someone is miniscule. People who drink are responsible for what they do when they are drunk. And if some guy accuses a woman of raping him when he was too drunk to consent or didn’t consent, fine. Women, just like men, are responsible for what they do when they are drunk.</p>
<p>JHS: Thank you. This thread has made me really think how fortunate some of us are to have survived our early years as well as we have.</p>
<p>I am not worried about the young men and boys I know ending up in the situation you describe, and then potentially having their lives ruined. For a long time, I thought all these kids were just a little too uptight about sex and worried we had frightened the fun out of it for them. Now I think they just somehow learned to put themselves in someone else’s shoes in a way we never did.</p>
<p>There are different ways to take advantage. In the 70s (at least where I lived) women couldn’t take advantage of men by having a sexual relationship with them. Now I understand that having sex with someone when they are serious about you and you aren’t serious about them is also dishonorable. The kids I know try their best to avoid that sort of situation. Of course, it isn’t always clear-cut or avoidable. But the effort seems truly admirable to me.</p>
<p>The last couple of nights I’ve been dreaming about this thread. And they aren’t good dreams.</p>
<p>What? Why would universities have anything to do with rape kits? I’ll back read the pages I missed this afternoon, but each state is slightly different and every state is different about what funds are used to pay the costs of the forensic exam and rape kit. In some states the accuser could potentially end up with a small unpaid balance, although I believe federal laws at one point did not allow that (you don"t pay to have your house dusted for fingerprints if you[ve been robbed). But this is serious stuff…and unless a universities has an attached hospital they are not qualified to be involved in “rape kits.” </p>
<p>-- I agree with alh that the level of moral behavior I observed with my kids and their friends in high school and college was, in general, much higher than the levels prevailing when I was in high school and college. They really tried not to hurt anyone, and not to risk hurting anyone.</p>
<p>-- In telling the story of my friend’s blackouts, I was not suggesting that he was not responsible for anything he might have done during those periods. I was only responding to people who were questioning whether it was possible to be that drunk and to have sex. In my case, the answer would be no, and I wouldn’t believe it was possible if I hadn’t known this guy who did that a number of times.</p>
<p>-- In telling my own story, I was trying to soften the cliche of sober, predatory man and drunk, out-of-control woman, while acknowledging that the adult world could easily have seen things that way. Subjectively, it was more like sober, bedazzled boy with low enough self esteem that he was willing to accept very second-rate attention, and sophisticated, jaded girl who calibrated her drug abuse to give herself permission to get some touch from the available source without the need for emotional reciprocation. Adult me is very critical of myself for going along with it; teen me thought the world was magical. (I wrote a poem about it a year later, however, that shows slightly older teen me knew perfectly well to be ambivalent.)</p>
<p>I am not saying that is a typical situation, although I bet it still happens sometimes. Generally, no one complains to the authorities about rape in that circumstance, but generally, no one complains to the authorities in any circumstance.</p>
<p>“The system is “gendered” because more women than men bring charges.” I think it may be perceived as gendered in part because we still have the time-eternal awareness men tend to be stronger than women. And maybe some hang over that their sex drives are far stronger, at this age, than women’s, which, last time I checked, are reputed to take a few more years to peak. Obviously, some of us disagree or see women as equally interested. But it’s still the state of some thinking.</p>
<p>As for drunkenness not proving lack of consent, if you mean she could have garbled out, “Yes, Yes, YES!,” it still leaves the possibility her judgment was impaired. </p>
<p>“The category being young men who are too drunk to notice that their partners don’t and/or can’t consent?”</p>
<p>I was talking about the post by JHS. I don’t recall that post noting that it was speaking of a boy too drunk? You move very fast CF and misunderstand posts, at least mine most of the time, in the zeal to convince everyone of your point of view. </p>
<p>The function that relates drunkenness to consent produces a broad array of outputs. As I understand the criminal standard for consent, there would be no question consent was present in the Occidental situation where the girl could text a friend “Iamgoingtohavesex” then leave her own room and travel to another floor and find the right room (with some help) where a boy was waiting to have pre-arranged sex with her. From any kind of moral standpoint, the fact that anyone who knew her at all thought she was out of control and needed protection makes consent highly dubious, except that no one really knew her much (because no one had known her more than two weeks), and the boy in question didn’t know her at all except as an attractive girl who had shown up in his room earlier that evening already fully lit up and started hitting on him.</p>
<p>Having read what people said about the case at CC, I thought Occidental was completely unjustified in expelling John Doe. I no longer think so. Now I think the whole situation was a difficult, unclear case. Jane Doe was clearly very drunk. She was stumbling, slurring her words, vomiting. Those are undisputed facts. Was she so drunk that a sober person in John Doe’s position would have thought she couldn’t consent? I don’t think the answer to that question is obvious. </p>
<p>Mamalumper, JHS wrote about two cases. The first was his 16-year-old sober self, dazzled by an older girl who came on to him, or who welcomed his attentions, when she was high and drunk. The second was a drunken classmate, who drove around while drunk, having booty calls, crashing his car and losing things like his car and his glasses.</p>
<p>I didn’t think you meant that these disputed sexual assault cases involved a sober young men and a drunk young women coming on to him, because from what we’ve heard, almost all the cases involve two students neither of whom is sober. </p>
<p>Even though I came of age in the 70s it still was uncommon for women to call boys or invite them over except for the annual Sadie Hawkins dance. Even if you wanted to play tennis or do something social you’d hang out and “hope’ they asked you or that you just 'happened” to meet up and decide something. Now it’s very common for girls to call and text boys and ask them to do this or that or the other thing. I think that’s OK. Last night my #3 who is home from college got all showered and cleaned up after dinner and when I asked him what was going on he smiled and said “the girls called.” I remember when my oldest drove 25 miles in an ice storm because “the girls called.” I think it’s good that we have gotten to a point where women are comfortable taking the lead in relationships and social life. But if we accept that men and women can equally take the lead in a relationships then we have to accept that we can also be open to examining the circumstances equally and not simply assume that the male takes the lead in all things sexual. It’s going to take continued evolution. Men have had centuries of advances and rejections and learning to deal with signalling and women will get there I’m sure. Fortunately some kids get some of this out of the way in high school, but plenty go off to college pretty naive about the opposite sex and have to learn it on the fly so to speak with the addition of the freedom they may not have had in high school. i think it would be a huge error in judgement to go into any misconduct 'situation presuming guilt or innocence in this day and age. </p>
<p>I think it’s great that young women are more willing to take the lead in relationships. (And I wish young women would pursue my son, since he doesn’t look like he’s going to pursue any of them in the near future and I’d like grandchildren.) I’m not sure how that has relevance to what we’re discussing here. It’s not obvious to me how young women’s willingness to pursue young men comes into play when a young woman alleges that she did not give consent.</p>
<p>Young men could say they didn’t give consent to sex with young women. They could say that, but they typically don’t say that.</p>