NYT article: ‘Willing to Do Everything,’ Mothers Defend Sons Accused of Sexual Assault

Parent Cafe
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IMO, I think most women, and yes, especially mothers, are in the dark about what goes on in the minds of boys/men, and what kinds of things are said about women in everyday “locker room” talk. Except these days, it’s not just in school, or in the locker room - it’s pervasive all over the internet in online forums, porn, etc. The objectification of women is real, no matter how sweet and respectful one thinks their male child is. I’d like to hear some male opinions about this, but I don’t think I’m wrong. I’ve worked around men my whole career, I have a son, and I’m married to a man, so I’ve got a lot of anecdotal evidence to base this on. I’ve also been the recipient of three obscene anonymous letters from different young men (different places/different times of life) and they were so filthy that I was horrified - and they made me realize what ugly thoughts could lurk in the heads of seemingly “nice” boys (all the boys I knew were considered "nice young men, and unless some deviant stranger had entered my social sphere, the letters had to have been written by “nice” young men that I knew - they were placed in my locker, my bag, and in my dorm message box). And this was way before the internet was invented.

I’m pretty sure that women, IN GENERAL, are not as sexually obsessed or driven as men. We think of sex in terms of romantic love, not as a conquest or the satisfaction of a need. I don’t think men, young or old, understand this difference.

That’s why I think that all parents should have many discussions with their sons about sexual relationships (not just sex) starting with being respectful when they are young, and then about subjects like objectification and consent as they get older. Because the messages they are hearing outside the home are NOT about being respectful and/or treating girls/women like real people with feelings. They need to hear that women are not made solely for the enjoyment of men, and that women don’t ever “owe” them sex. They need to be taught specific ways to behave in certain situations - because being raised to be a respectful young man just isn’t enough of a tool kit (no pun intended) to help them make good decisions when alcohol is involved and/or hormones are raging. They need to understand that unwanted sex isn’t just an uncomfortable experience - it’s very a traumatic experience.

That being said, I’m sure these young men who committed these assaults knew what they did was wrong. Yet did it anyway.

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@toomanyteens “Well duh @Much2learn but memories fade in the light of day after a night of partying”

That is true, but not related to my point that in most cases, what consent is is reasonably clear cut.

As you are pointing out, what is not always clear is the “s/he said, s/he said” component. Typically one party claims the other consented and the other denies it. It is not so much a disagreement about what consent is, and more of a disagreement about what actually occurred.

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Hmmm where are the women in all this? It is not OK to consume a bunch of vodka with your BFFs, head off to a party, paw some guy, head off under your own steam to a dark corner and have riotous hot monkey sex, send texts to your friends and a messages to the guy about how you can’t wait to do it again…and then 3 or 6 months later file Title 9 charges and folks you have your heads in the sand if you don’t think that happens. It is never Ok ever to do this. At minimum it will be an unfounded accusation for the accuser and a nightmare for the accused and at worse your name will be part of some potential lawsuit. And if you don’t think sons, fathers and mothers are fed up with college tribunals that begin with an assumption of guilt then you have your head in the sand or your nose in Jezebel 24/7. The best we as parents can do is encourage our kids to not have ambivalent sex and warn them of the potential downside like we warn them of the downside of MIPs, DUIs, unwanted pregnancy and a host of other things along with hoping that during this period of legal breathing time we can start to put some definition around really ambiguous situations and language and the meaning of equality under law and move forward.

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@ JHS said

In mine, it is. And I’m not talking about roofies either–though many people think that at least 2 frats at my alma mater routinely roofied young women for about a 2 year period.

In your world, is it possible to “get a guy drunk” to the point he dies of alcohol poisoning if he didn’t want to be that drunk? If so, then you must think that the young man who died as the result of his hazing at Penn State had a death wish. And remember Matthew Sunshine? He died of alcohol poisoning after a stupid contest in which he was downing vodka shots against an opponent–except, unknown to him, his opponent was drinking water. I don’t think he intentionally drank enough to kill himself.

Unless you think that they both drank enough to die intentionally, why do you think it’s not possible to get a young woman drunk enough to rape her when that it wasn’t her intent to have sex? --or to have enough to drink that she wasn’t aware of what was happening?

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@Much2learn yes you are probably right about that

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I don’t think the stereotypes offered by leastcomplicated hold true anymore, at least not in the junior high and high school sets I know. Several of the girls are the aggressors, can be even predators, and are quite conquest-oriented. You would be horrified by what is posted publicly by them comparing the performance of their conquests. Both genders should be taught the importance of respectful relationships.

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In the vast majority of cases, it doesn’t matter if it is pretty clear or not, because no one complains. In the cases where someone complains, I think it often turns out not to be clear-cut at all.

It’s not just “he said, she said,” although there’s a lot of that. It’s how much alcohol did one or both consume, and what that means to the quality of their consent and the quality of their evaluation of the other’s consent. It’s what one felt vs. what he or she communicated. (Coerced consent is not consent, but it’s not at all impossible for one party to feel coerced and the other party not to think what he’s doing is coercive. In some of those cases, reasonable people may agree that it was or wasn’t coercive; in others, there may be legitimate reasons why people’s perceptions may differ.)

Surprisingly often, there is objective evidence of consent – mainly text messages, dms. But a party who consented (in writing no less) may say she withdrew consent later. And she may be completely right, or she may have failed to communicate the change effectively in a timely manner. Cases can involve second-by-second analysis of who did what when – and that’s rarely going to be clear-cut.

People can also disagree about exactly what was covered by consent. In medical malpractice cases, where there is almost always a substantial written consent form, the scope of consent can still be a major issue in light of subsequent events. How much more is that going to be true when there’s no written, signed, and read (!) sex contract? People who don’t know each other well and who come from different places (or who watch different porn) may differ substantially on what is “normal” sex, what’s covered by “Yes! I enthusiastically want to have sex with you.” More, because they are young and inexperienced and in a new, broader context than their high school may have been, they may have no idea that it’s possible to disagree about what’s included in the basic sex package.

Finally, some of these cases come up in messy ways. One case arose because over Christmas break the woman’s mother read her journal entries from September and decided her daughter couldn’t possibly have consented to sex, when that possibility hadn’t previously occurred to the daughter. A number of cases are initiated by people with whom the designated victim has talked, often long after the fact, based on their interpretation of what the victim told them. In a fair number of cases, there is a substantial, long-term relationship between the principals, and the claimed sexual assault occurred, not at the beginning or end of that relationship, but sometime in the middle. (And not an ongoing pattern of abuse, either; just one or two bad moments in a relationship that seemed satisfactory at the time but later fell apart.) In theory, context like that doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t matter, but I think to most people it matters some.

Note that I am trying really hard to present these kinds of issues without blaming the victim. My main point has been that there are 5,000 things that can go wrong in a sexual relationship between people in their late teens. Sometimes you can assign fault to one or the other, or both, for whatever happened, and sometimes legitimately, even though someone really feels hurt, it’s not a question of anyone being at fault.

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However, it is certainly possible that a naive new freshwoman going out to drink at a party may get more drunk than she intended to, due to a combination of inexperience with alcohol, not knowing how much alcohol there is in mixed drinks, etc. (even if added date-rape drugs to her unattended drinks are not in the scenario). That probably increases the risk of “bad sex”, some of which may cross the line into illegality and/or be difficult to remember the details of later, as well as the risk of being victimized by an actual sexual predator.

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@jonri Until the last few years, I had never heard of college kids dying of alcohol poisoning. I have said many times that I don’t think it’s physically possible to drink more than some of my friends and I drank as college freshmen. We drank to unconsciousness many times, but no one ever made it to the ER.

The cases you are citing all involved both coercion and conscious assumption of risk. The boys who died knew they were being gotten ridiculously drunk, and went along with it because it was presented to them as a requirement to get something they wanted very much. If someone did that to a woman to get her to have sex that she wouldn’t have had without it, that’s predatory. And if course I agree with you completely that it’s predatory to spike a woman’s drink, or drug her, without her knowledge. I’m not saying that never happens, because I know it does. But that’s way beyond what anyone means by “getting someone drunk.”

I think women have agency. For the most part, when they get drunk, it’s because they decide to get drunk, not because they are gotten drunk by someone else. I am really shocked you seem to believe otherwise.

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It’s 2017. It’s long past time to bury the myth that men get women drunk. Women get themselves drunk or not 99.999% of the time, although I suppose there’s some case somewhere of a women being forced to consume alcohol prior to sex or some girl being too clueless to know the difference between vodka and water.

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Which is why I think the message for kids is to watch out for each other. My youngest and his friends absolutely go drag their friends away if they think they are headed down the wrong road with some woman. I have been in their presence when the phone rings and they jump up and say bye Mrs. momofthreeboys, we are off to rescue John Doe before he does something he’s going to regret. Floored me the first time I heard that because I really thought guys didn’t really care who their buddies hooked up with. I would hope girls would go extricate their friends if they are about to do something they might regret. I have also been with the guys when the phone rings and they say “bye Mrs. momofthreeboys the girls are bored and want us” and I think oh my goodness look how fast those guys were up and off the couches.

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What bothers me is what sometimes happens after women perhaps make a conscious decision to get drunk. There is the young man in the OP’s article carrying an unconcious women from her friend’s bed to his own room to rape her, Brock Turner, the Vanderbilt case. There are eyewitnesses or video in these cases and that is just lucky. Otherwise they would be he said, she said, or the woman would have no idea what had happened. I have no idea if those cases are aberrations, but it just doesn’t seem so. The unusal thing, it seems to me, is there is proof the women were unconcious. I just have no idea how unusual these situations are these days on college campuses.

Even if we agree women should take care and not drink to unconsciouness, these young men don’t really have any excuse whatsoever in my mind for their behavior. I don’t think any of those young women would have consented to the situation in which they ended up, regardless what was in their minds when they began drinking that night. So I guess some of us mothers of sons do need to tell our sons “don’t ever have sex with unconscious women (or men)”

It isn’t clear to me if any of these women were drugged. I don’t believe it is impossible.

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Oh women have zero trouble getting themselves lubricated with alcohol. That has been true for decades. These days they even drink together…before the party starts which feels like a newish phenomenon. No one should kid themself about that fact…it is dangerous to believe otherwise.

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Something exactly like that happened to a young woman I knew (and knew her parents, too). She was a senior, a year ahead of my older child in high school, but worked at a job with my younger child, and played the same sport he did. So she became something of a mentor to him at their school, where he was a freshman. I really appreciated what she did for him, and he worshiped her. She was both a jock – in a non-team sport, no team-related carousing there – and a serious academic.

Her first week of college, she wound up in the ER with alcohol poisoning. And that’s exactly what all of the adults who knew her said about it.

What my older child said was, “The only thing surprising about that is that it didn’t happen every weekend last spring. She has been drinking heavily for a long time.”

In any event, no one has any trouble at all saying that the innocent freshman who gets soused by mistake, passes out, and wakes up to find someone had intercourse with her has been raped.

The tougher case is the innocent freshman who gets soused by mistake – without anyone trying to souse her – but doesn’t get so drunk that she passes out, and instead – judgment certainly impaired to some degree – decides she wants to have sex with someone who’s available and who wants to have sex with her. And they do. And then the next morning she feels really bad about it, guilt-ridden, disappointed with herself, and decides it was a mistake (because, really, it was). I think under many college policies, she has a very good chance of getting her partner disciplined severely for sexual assault. Most of the time, 99% of the time, that doesn’t happen, because she doesn’t bring that case. But sometimes she does, or her parents do, or her roommate, RA, or random friend does. So in some small, essentially random percentage of cases, some boy gets slammed. Or maybe he only gets slammed if he handed her a drink at some point, but not if he didn’t. That’s a bizarre system.

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^what percentage of the cases are those types of cases? This is what I absolutely can’t figure out.

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@JHS wrote

As I understand your previous post, you said that it never happened that women were gotten drunk by someone else.I was refuting that. I do NOT think that in most cases in which college age women get drunk they do because someone else got them drunk. However, most of the time when college women get drunk they are not sexually assaulted.

I am limiting the discussion to the cases in which female college students got drunk and were sexually assaulted. I think that in this subset of cases, it’s more likely that someone pressured a young woman into drinking more than she intended and/or targeted her when she got drunk.

I think there’s a reason that the majority of sexual assaults on campus occur during the first 6 weeks of school and involve freshman women and upperclass men. I think that within this subset of events, it is not at all unusual for a women to have been “gotten drunk” by someone else or to have gotten herself drunk and then been targeted by a predator. Is it “most” cases? I don’t know. But I think it is common.

I think it’s a lot easier to push a first year female into drinking from one of these stupid beer “funnels” or playing beer pong; they are less likely to realize how much booze is in some of the mixed drinks and “punch” served at frats; are less vigilant about watching their drinks to make sure nobody refills and/or tampers with them and don’t think about alternating water and booze or eating something to slow their alcohol absorption rate, etc. And they are less likely to have close personal friends who will keep an eye on them and get them back to the dorm safely if they overdo it.

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I do think a lot of our reaction has to do with personal experience. At my state flagship in the mid 70s, if you were a drunken woman, without attentive friends, at a party at most fraternity houses, you were probably going to be raped, though we couldn’t call it that because the whole concept of acquaintance rape hadn’t yet been invented. On the other hand, honky tonk country bars an hour from campus were pretty safe places for drunk women. It sounds like Yale was a pretty safe place for drunken women at that point in time.

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From the Michigan link,

What’s unstated in the Michigan link is the 1 in 12 number asks about behavior since age 14.

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Yes and on many campuses first year students are drinking illegally but seems like that is never a consideration except maybe in Utah and everyone howled how unfair it was that the accuser also got punished for underage drinking. They howled that it was a chilling affect against reporting…so maybe unis need to unpack their thinking. If the accused is under age then wack them too then start the trust but verify on the base accusation. Sort of like where I live…you leave your keys in the car and you get your car stolen. You are a victim of theft but you also get a ticket for leaving your keys in the car which is considered a public nuisance. Doesn’t take away your victimhood but maybe you won’t leave your keys in the car anymore. I still think there is much colleges could easily do to deter underage drinking in addition to the cops passing out MIPs in the absence of a lowered drinking age. Won’t stop the hormones but might slow down the trip from keg to bed for both young men and women.

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Could we please stop comparing the rape of women to stealing cars or theft of property!