@jonri:
“Please remember that there are many young women who are opposed to abortion and are not using contraceptives. Some of them think that premarital sex is wrong–and it’s because of their personal religious beliefs, not some idea that they are their father’s property. (They think it’s wrong for guys too.) Other young women think that sex is fine within a committed relationship, but not otherwise. Many of them are not using contraception (because they aren’t in a committed relationship). And then, there is the specter of STDs. There are young women who are sexually active and don’t think a committed relationship is necessary, but do think a condom is.”
You were making the (valid) point about the kind of powerful emotions that go around sex, and how a sexual encounter can engender all kinds of feelings and such.
Using this argument raises another question, one that we kind of have touched on, and that is how do these kind of things influence whether a young man is charged with sexual assault or not when the girl was let’s say drunk. What if (and please, this is a hypothetical question, I am not at the moment trying to question the validity of sexual assault/non consentuality as a concept), a girl is somewhat drunk, has sex with someone, then has the guilts afterword, is freaked out (for example, to make an extreme case, where the girl comes from a homophobic family and she had sex with another young woman), and to try and reconcile what happened with her family’s beliefs, she basically decides to file a complaint because after all, if the other girl took advantage of her, that would mean she wasn’t responsible for doing an ‘evil act’ ie having sex with someone of the same sex. The thing is, it may not even be a conscious decision, she freaks out, and in that state is firmly convinced it was non consensual. Should the school decide because said girl was drunk, the other girl was guilty? And things like this do happen, there was a case like this when I went to school back in the dark ages, at a halloween party this kid from a really conservative background found himself attracted to someone who was cross dressed, they had sex, and the kid freaked out…fortunately, the kid talked to a school counselor and calmed down, but for a while he was saying the other person had taken advantage of him, he was drunk, etc, to explain it away.
Today the other person could be charged with sexual assault if the person filing the complaint was in any way drunk, and it raises questions about automatic assumptions. Sex has incredible emotional triggers around it, and blanket policies that say if person A is drunk, person B has sex with them, person A files a complaint that they were taken advantage of, and B gets in trouble, it isn’t really addressing the issue of when A truly cannot consent, and one of the things that bothers me about the issue is from what I have read, in some of these cases the investigation doesn’t go much beyond “A was drunk, B had sex with A, A filed a complaint, B is guilty”, they don’t for example ask others what kind of shape A was in (in some cases, assuming the people they ask would lie I would guess). How do they determine the state of A, how do they define consensuality, how drunk for example does A have to be to charge B? Do we automatically assume that if A is drunk in some way, B has sex with A, A files a complaint, that A necessarily was not able to consent, simply because she says she didn’t or wasn’t able to? How do they determine that state (and I am seriously asking this as a question). Again, I am not saying that a large percentage of cases like this are filed by girls deliberately trying to get someone in trouble, rather I am saying how do the schools investigate these, how do they seperate out a girl who truly could not consent, and files a complaint, from a girl who in fact did consent, was able to, and got a case of the guilts the next day where filing a complaint made them feel better since they hadn’t had sex, they were sexually assaulted.
Again, you won’t find anyone more supportive of trying to prevent acquaintance rape, date rape, non consensual sex of all kindst, but I also am afraid that it is coming down to he said/she said and automatically assuming that the person filing the complaint is telling the whole story and the other person is guilty, that in effect, it is guilty until proven innocent. History is full of examples of when the pendulum shifts to try and right wrongs that have been done where it goes too far the other way, where for example there were those saying that almost any act of sex could be considered sexual assault given the power imbalance between men and women (this was back when they finally passed rape shield laws, and also forbid defense lawyers from trying to make the victim guilty because of her sex life, the way she was dressed, etc), and other rhetoric that frankly has gone the way of Pet Rocks.
