@dstark, although I joked about it, I REALLY resent you calling anyone here a “slut” because they chose to have sex before marriage, including casual sex when they wanted to. Maybe that was a label applied by you and your friends. If so, shame on you.
When I was in college, in the early 70s, we did not call women “sluts.” Sure, a person who had very frequent one night stands would probably be considered to have questionable judgement, as was a girl on my hall one year who had frequent LOUD sex with several ongoing partners. Most people had one boyfriend at a time, or experimented judicially when not attached. And they didn’t make everyone in the vicinity an unwilling participant. Some things are just uncool.
@HarvestMoon1 , you said “on the record,” which to me implied a legal proceeding. I don’t take anything at face value either. From what is known of the report, it would appear that they found witness corroboration of at least some of the details of his story. I don’t think it is quite a matter of “he and his buddies are all lying but she can’t prove anything.”
So an incident like this requires a 96 page report from the school plus an investigation from the police. Plus two lawyers retained by the students.
Our tax/tuition dollars at work.
I would cut the gal some slack. She didn’t report this incident – she was outed by some teammates to a coach. Thereafter the zero tolerance wheels kicked into gear and could not be turned off.
Sounds like the kids on their own had done a good job in handling this appropriately.
Anyone find it troubling that the school and the cops barged into this situation uninvited without the consent of the victim? I do.
“We never, ever felt the need to “pre-party or pre-game” mostly because the drinking age was 18. Alot of us turned 18 our senior year of high school and so headed for college with a pretty darn good understanding of how much we could drink before turning into sloppy, puking, unattractive drunks or worse “targets” for predatory males”
That was by no means universal. Prior to the 1984 minimum age drinking act (up your state to 21 or lose federal funds), there were plenty of states where the legal age was already 21, including large states like IL, CA and PA.
The terminology of pregaming is new, but I don’t see much different. We drank vodka in our day, too. Plenty of people didn’t have a sense as to when enough was enough, and got drunk, whether deliberately or accidentally. Honestly, the frat parties of today don’t sound all that different from the frat parties of 30 years ago, except now there is social media.
@Consoloation do you resent this poster as well who wrote this in the Prep School Rape thread? As far as I can tell I was the only one who called her out on it. Radio silence from every other woman on the board.
@HarvestMoon1, I freely admit that I have not read all of the interminable Prep School Rape thread. I have no recollection of that post. But I don’t approve of calling any women slutty or easy or whatever the insult of the moment is, and have not done so IRL.
I will also freely admit that my hackles are raised when it is said by a man in reference to the behavior of a specific person here, even if he is saying it shouldn’t be.
When I was in college, it was impossible for a frat boy to rape someone, because we hadn’t yet defined acquaintance rape as rape. Acquaintance rape was defined as just another bad sexual experience for the girl involved, just one of those things that happen when girls get drunk or just aren’t careful about their circumstances…
I have no idea if there is more or less drinking. I can’t imagine drinking more than we did, but we kept it to the weekends usually.
^In this thread you have brought up biases and, of course, we all have them.
Your initial post #151, before editing, stated this was a thread about, “false accusation” not rape.
Rape has been redefined in my lifetime. One thing some of us have been exploring is the definition of rape. It is pretty clear to me neither on this board nor in society at large is there agreement on the definition.
In the 70s, at my college, women were supposed to just get over coerced sex and not ruin someone else’s life. That bothered me then and has continued to bother me.
In the 70s at my college it was impossible to define an athlete humping and penetrating with a digit, an unconscious woman outside beside a dumpster as rape. That we now do seems like significant progress to me. Getting there took a whole lot of questioning of widely accepted cultural norms.
Re Consolation #118: Sorry, I did not mean to come off as condescending. Myt remarks were not addressed to the forum at large, but were a direct response to the post by momofthreeboys arguing the position “if she was drunk, it’s her own fault; if she is blaming the young man, it’s just a convenient way to deal with it mentally.”
I can agree that the comments of momofthreeboys may apply in some cases. However, based on my experiences as a college professor, it seems to me that the cases I am describing dwarf the cases she is describing (or prescribing) in terms of number.
I have no specific view on the UVA case, for lack of factual knowledge.
I believe 100% in “innocent until proven guilty” when it comes to the courts. I also believe that a person’s technical legal status is not necessarily his actual moral status. There is an obligation to treat him in civil and criminal matters according to his technical legal status. But in my view, that is as far as it goes.
I am reasonably sure that I will never be empaneled on a jury in a rape case. About 20 years ago, I was in the jury box as a potential juror, and was asked if I knew rape victims personally, and then I was asked about the outcomes in both cases. At that time, I knew 2. Now, I know more than a dozen–I have not actually counted them up.
@HarvestMoon1, I haven’t read the last 100+ posts, so that explains it.
@alh, I went to a women’s college, so our socializing in what we would now call “male spaces” was perhaps more selective and less common. Our social lives weren’t dominated by on-campus–or off campus–fraternity parties.We would go to parties in Cambridge, at dorms, houses, frats, mixers. Sometimes we gave parties and invited guys. People met guys in a variety of social interactions. We went to places and events of all kinds in Boston and Cambridge. Lots of times guys came to visit us on our turf, not the other way round. And the atmosphere strongly reinforced female empowerment. Perhaps that is why it was more common for us to experience things on our own terms.
Also, although we did drink, it was legal at age 18, and we didn’t “pre-game.” Although we certainly drank too much at times, the level of binge-drinking reported on today’s college campuses wasn’t the norm. People smoked a lot of pot, which does not render anyone insensible. The idea of doing 5+ shots of hard liquor before going out was simply unknown to people I knew.
Also, HarvestMoon1 makes a good point about the related thread: Sorry about not calling out the poster who called the girls who “behave badly” “slutty.”
This is wrong on many levels.
Personally, I subscribe to chastity before marriage and fidelity afterwards, and I very rarely drink. However, I would not consider someone who has different practices to be behaving “badly,” provided that he/she was not deliberately hurting someone else. Other people, other views.
I agree that coerced sex is most definitely rape . That said , no one has proven that was the case in this particular situation . Because of that , I will refrain from calling the male student a rapist. It’s clear by reading some of the posts here , that refraining from labeling this particular individual is difficult .
Consolation: I don’t believe your experience of women’s spaces and female empowerment was a nationwide norm in the 70s. Though it sounds really nice. I have to wonder how much of a norm it is today.
Yes, I edited because I quickly realized that “false accusation” suggested that Haley Lind instigated the charge, when in fact there were others who started the process.
I don’t take anything at face value either. From what is known of the report, it would appear that they found witness corroboration of at least some of the details of his story. I don’t think it is quite a matter of “he and his buddies are all lying but she can’t prove anything.”