Letters to the Editor
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Seriously
What would be so difficult with requiring all women to carry a warning sticker on their forehead saying "WARNING: I cannot be counted on to be trustworthy and to not have you thrown in jail if you displease me at any time".
Jus sayin
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@ RammyH
In answer to your last question, we don't know. That is why there are juries. In my opinion, the judge was wrong. When a rape kit is done in a hospital a blood alcohol level should be done on the victim. Assuming the elasped number of hours since the alleged rape, experts on either side could then testify whether the victim was so impaired as to be incoherent.
The whole point of the law is that it gives the juries the opportunity to consider just such evidence. Drunkenness should not imply consent -- uless you want to live in a world where you can be raped if you drink too much. Do you?
Many, many years ago I had a boyfriend who had the bad luck to run into a landmark tree when he was drunk. I visited him in the hospital the next morning offering him more sympathy than he probably deserved. While I was in the room, a nurse entered and took some blood from him for a blood alcohol level. The room stank of beer. My then boyfriend tried to protest but to no avail. Even that late in the game, the test utimately showed he had been driving drunk. He was convicted of drunk driving and had to pay to the county an insane amount of money for the damage to the tree.
He later admitted to me that he blacked out and could remember nothing.
He had been way too drunk to be driving.
There are ways to establish just how conscious someone is at the time of a sexual assault.
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rape of men
fetboy - I've known men who experienced unwanted sexual contact from women when they were too drunk to consent, including the "sitting on his pole" (ugh, what a euphemism) scenario, and others. None of them did press charges out of shame and fear of not being taken seriously. But they psychological effects were similar to those of women I've known in the reverse situation.
I absolutely support taking male-male, female-male, and female-female rape as seriously, legally and culturally, as male-female. (I notice female-female has not come up at all so far!) When I was teaching alcohol education classes to college students who had been in trouble for underage drinking, I spent significant time on the issue of alcohol and consent, including acknowledging that men can be victimized, that women can victimize, and that the law does not adequately address "but what if they're both drunk"?
And the bottom line I gave them was: when in doubt, don't go there. If the sex won't be available when both of you are sober, or at least less drunk, then don't have the sex because it is too dangerous, even if you only take a self-centered position of "what might happen to ME if I have sex with this person?" This is a message that men, unfortunately, need to hear more than women (speaking in generalities) because they are put in the role of pursuer, active partner, etc. and supported by a culture that sees sexually active men as "studs" and scoring with multiple women as a recreational activity. Women need to hear it too, clearly, but the over-focus on women whenever the topic of rape comes up suggests to me that in fact it is men's roles in sexual consent and negotiation that needs to be clarified and driven home.
The responsibility for stopping rape rests, ultimately, on rapists. There is a disturbing undertone to many of these letters that seems to suggest that men cannot be expected to control themselves, that they are too dumb and horny to not fall on any woman whom they perceives as sexually availble, and that they're not sophisticated enough to take in information beyond "female, breathing, in proximity" to help them decide if a particular sexual opportunity is a good idea (or is, in fact, even an opportunity).
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AKAKA
People should care about others. Men should care about the feelings and sexual readiness of women they encounter, whether it be a brief encounter initiated in a bar, or whether they are paying for sex, or whether this is a woman that they love and are thinking of marrying. Alternatively, women should also care about the feelings of men in the same manner. However, no one need become a sacrificial creature in order to grant to other human beings a simple minimal caring for others just because they are human beings.
Assenting to behavior implicitly by not objecting to it is the extent to which many, if not most, women engage in the courtship ritual. 'Sacrificiality' thus is a ruse if most women decide to cede their active role in courtship. If women told a man "yes, I want you to fuck me.", then there would be no doubt, would there. But most women have a problem with liking men they have to speak in such a way to-- at least when they barely know the man, but still want to get laid (in the bar scenario we are discussing).
Every single religion that I know of has something similar to The Golden Rule about treating other people decently as we ourselves would like to be treated.
It is the basis of most of my arguments on Salon, that women (especially feminists) mistreat men as a matter of policy, but still expect men to treat them better than that.
In other words, decent people don't think only about themselves and their own needs and their own appetites. They also think of others. For decent people, their fellow human beings never become a source of prey.
Prey as in the guy making moves on a girl because, god knows, if he does not, NOBODY gets laid tonight? Tell me how often women make moves on men? Not on men they absolutely MUST HAVE NOW, but on typical men in bars who the women want to take home for the evening for mere random sexual encounters.
I do not know the answer, I do not frequent bars to find women.
Also, AKA, we both know there are scads of NON-DECENT men and women everywhere. Ideals are nice to work towards, but they are ideals.