I don’t know of any state that makes having sex with drunk people illegal, let alone qualifying as rape. Usually a person has to be so drunk they are incapable of consenting. That’s a really high level of drunkenness.
Of course, alcohol affects different people different ways, right? Even a drop can lead to incapability of consenting, as long as that’s what the woman believes the next day.
We are infantalizing our daughters with this approach. My mom, a first generation feminist, didn’t fight for this and was an extremely strong person.
I think it’s deeper than that. When women talk about men using terms like toxic, there is a deeper issue. With equality comes responsibilities and decisions. The same responsibilities and decisions that men have assumed for a long time so I get the arguments about a paternalistic society, I’ve lived it. But you don’t earn those responsibilities simply by declaring them to be so. And if you make a decision you live with it. By declaring at some point that something is no longer your responsibility, you give up the equality. That is my concern with what young women are doing these days and I do find it concerning. It’s an issue I have when two drunk kids have sex and the man is held responsible if the outcome is not what the woman desired. But like you 1Wife1Kid, I’m not willing to abdicate my position of equality and have always taken full responsibility for decisions I made, good and bad and I don’t need to “change” men to make myself feel equal.
@1Wife1Kid: Nope. Capacity to consent is an objective question, not a subjective one. Laws usually ask whether a person was in fact so intoxicated that they could not consent. Their testimony of course will be evidence of that. Rape laws also usually require that the accused know or should have known that the accuser was so intoxicated as to not be capable of consenting.
Rape and intoxication have exactly nothing to do with how strong anyone is.
Demosthenes, Evidently you missed my sarcasm throughout.
@1Wife1Kid: I did not detect any sarcasm in your statement that “legally speaking both are clear cases of rape.” Are you now taking the position that you didn’t really mean it?
Demosthanes, I have channeled rape culture activists throughout. That’s the type of comments they make.
@1Wife1Kid: Many people are wrong about the law, including the law on rape. That’s a good reason to educate them. It’s not a good reason to further spread their errors.
Tell that to this guy:
@Zinhead - that’s not about rape or sexual assault at all. And “vanishingly rare” doesn’t mean “nonexistent.”
@Marvin100 - Here is a survey of false accusations:
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2015/10/2/reported-rapes-nearly-doubles/
That ratio is about on one in five.
Yale has a similar ratio of false or unfounded accusations:
Sample size, and the Yale data’s “no adverse finding” =! unfounded or false, just not actionable.
I just looked back at the data released by Michigan State recently and the percentile was similar for unfounded and dismissed claims and of course the sample size is much, much larger than Yale or Harvard. I think that is a percentage on colleges of false or unactionable reporting that is believable. I would think that the percentage for the justice system is probably much, much, much lower because someone would have more fear of being accused of false reporting because filing a false police report is also criminal and the bar for reporting to the police is much higher than what is covered in a student conduct code. I doubt there are repercussions on college campuses for false claims so it’s reasonable to suppose that percentage is much higher than one or two percent.
Marvin, Harvard has about 14,000 female students, about half of total enrollment, right? With all the rape culture talk, and even after the DCL and subsequent sea change in college administrator mindsets and procedures, total number of sexual offenses (rape and others) as reported is still only 43? That’s that, like, hmm, 0.3%? Some culture, eh? And remember, these are reports and not confirmed cases.
@1Wife1Kid not sure I like or agree with your theory “because its a small percentage, it isn’t viable as a real problem”
IMO,
There is way more to “rape culture” than actual reported rapes. Plus many more that aren’t actually reported. You have no way of knowing the actual real numbers.
Just look at the news this last week, its been aflutter with the actual words “toxic masculinity” in respect to “locker room talk” that demeans women and contributes to a rape culture of objectifying women as sexual objects…
The reaction to what he tried to pass off as “locker room talk” has been nearly universal condemnation. This is a positive sign.
Perhaps the condemnation is a positive sign and not just theater, but even the existence of a term “locker room talk” implies that there is a whole lot of hating and demeaning women going on in locker rooms (and elsewhere).
runswimyoga,
Any criminal activity is a problem. Few criminal activities indicate a culture. That’s my point.
Criminal activities in a first world country are all vanishingly rare in statistical terms, reported disproportionately in the media to make it look like the country is coming apart at the seam, generating much angst which leads to completely wrong and draconian laws (e.g., 3 strikes. all drug laws or the kangaroo courts in college sexual assault tribunals).
Rape is a criminal activity which will never be eradicated, as we will always have some criminals among us. This is not condoning rape. This is merely stating that as the numbers show rape is not a general culture. It’s just a criminal activity practiced by a very small subset of the population.
Now, as you just stated, the proponents of the word rape culture mean it to include any male activity that is demeaning to women, even if such an act has absolutely nothing to do with rape. I am in firm disagreement of that kind of relabeling. First, it is really disrespectful to actual rape survivors to claim that a man making degrading comments in the locker room or a scantily clad female model on a billboard selling imparts the same level of physical and emotional harm as actual rape. Second, it desensitizes and trivializes rape. When all bad male behavior - and I will handily agree that there are many - equates to rape and makes the rape culture, it becomes so generic and ubiquitous that no young male will take it seriously, thus making it actually harder to stop actual rape.
Is there lots of bad male behavior around? Absolutely. Is there plenty of objectification of women going around? Absolutely, and it is catching up to objectification of men as well it seems from what I see on billboards and movies such as Magic Mike. Is rape ubiquitous? Hell no, it’s a criminal activity committed by a very small group of sociopaths. Most (99.8%?) of the men who make locker room jokes and use the female body to sell goods and services won’t commit rape.
So why not separate the issues, call them what they are, work to solve them (don’t think you can solve the objectification, as that’s big business), and leave rape, which is a criminal activity, to copes and lawyers, who are dedicated to solving it? Throwing around words like rape culture doesn’t help anyone in my view, as it is simply not true that there is such a culture which involves the actual case of rape, and not boyfriend behaving like a jerk.
By the way, there’s another problem with expanding the definition of rape. When people hear rape culture, they think of actual rape and focus their political initiatives on lowering incidence of rape. That takes away focus from boyfriend behaving badly which never gets solved. That’s the problem of crying wolf.
And there are lots of boyfriends behaving like a dick, lots of managers who won’t give woman equal pay for equal role, background, and experience, and lots of men who wouldn’t share in housework 50-50. These are real issues that women in college will face once they graduate, which will impact their lives far more than rape.
Of course the boyfriend behaving badly can be “solved.” Behaving badly varies by culture. In some cultures honor killings are not punished. In US culture many bad boyfriend behaviors, ones significantly less than honor killings, are punished. . . And so bad behavior in the US is less violent and less prevalent. There was a time when in the US a man was allowed to hit his wife. These things change.
Yes, but bad boyfriend behavior in the USA is quite different from and more subtle than physical violence or rape, and thus should be addressed outside the umbrella of the rape culture. JMHO.