Comment by DoreenMichele
4 years ago
General PSA from someone who has studied such things:
1. Alcohol is the number one date rape drug and it's problematic in part because men tend to have a much higher tolerance than women.
2. Date rape frequently involves two people from different cultures with different social expectations. This often fosters terrible misunderstandings.
3. It's always problematic to "try a case" in the court of public opinion. Probably better to try to use a piece like this as a jumping off point for general discussion of the problem space and not an attempt to determine what "really" happened in this instance.
4. It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves. Trying to talk about that is not, per se, blaming the victim anymore than it is blaming the victim to say "It's a bad neighborhood. Make sure you lock your car."
5. When someone is a habitual offender and genuinely a predator, their victim can do all the right things and still get assaulted.
6. Whether a woman did or did not do all the right things, a man choosing to assault her is still on him, just like you are still a thief even if someone failed to lock their car.
I continue to appreciate your appraisals and summaries, thank you.
Your comments on tricky topics tend to lean more toward actionables, rather than the perpetual rehashing same arguments the rest of this comment section is filled with.
I'm curious if you or anyone else can share more detail or some examples regarding cross-cultural differences in societal expectations.
I've got some guesses about what this might mean, but I haven't studied this, and don't have any personal experience here.
A fairly obvious one: If you are from a culture where sex before marriage is permissible and you are a woman, men from cultures where women are expected to remain virgins until the wedding night may see you as "a loose woman."
In such cases, they may even feel entitled to have you and get very mad if you try to tell them no.
People from very conservative cultures tend to wildly misinterpret the actions of women from more liberated and empowered cultures. Her behavior may be viewed as promiscuous or as leading him on when she's doing no such thing.
Some cultures expect a man to have to pursue a woman pretty hard before she says "yes." I read one article where a man from such a culture was sort of frustrated or disappointed when his lady from another culture gave it up too easily in his view. He wasn't happy at not having to "work for it."
I hadn't thought about this before but it seems to ring true. Even in the U.S. this spectrum exists. There are women who expect explicit consent i.e. "is it ok if I kiss you?", and other women who find that a turn off and expect more sexual assertiveness (aggressiveness?).
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You just forgot to call them backward societies.
How about the classic Ask vs Guess from metafilter:
https://ask.metafilter.com/55153/Whats-the-middle-ground-bet...
I wonder when is something is legally considered rape. Like what you read in the article, when there was a lot of manipulation, but not really a "no", and a bad feeling during an afterwards.
> I wonder when is something is legally considered rape.
Its kind of weird that this hairsplitting curiosity about consent always comes up exclusively in the context of rape and not other crimes with the same “without consent” rule, like battery (particularly since rape is, ina sense, just battery where the “harmful or offensive touching” element involves specific configurations of genital contact.)
But its actually pretty simple: if the other party didn’t actively intend for the specific interaction to occur, there was no consent. All the other things people ask about (except to the extent that they involve factors that legally either negate consent if known to or caused by the other party or which create a legal incapacity to consent independent of knowledge of the other party, which can include intoxication , youth, threats of violence, and other factors) tend to be things that play more of a role in the practical ability to convince a jury one way or the other than the ground truth of whether the offense occurred.
TBF, I think a lot of people don't actually know what battery is. Internet definition:
the crime or tort of unconsented physical contact with another person, even where the contact is not violent but merely menacing or offensive.
Most people hear of that only in the form of assault and battery. I always have to look it up because my mind wants to say "That phrase repeats itself. Surely, battery means being battered."
As for when is it legally rape? That depends a lot on the jurisdiction. Different places have different laws and there is lots of debate about the merits of some of those laws.
So basically when a boy makes to first move to kiss a girl, it's already against the law?
edit: Why am I downvoted? This is a real question. Sorry for my european ignorance.
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> Its kind of weird that this hairsplitting curiosity about consent always comes up exclusively in the context of rape and not other crimes with the same “without consent” rule, like battery
It isn't weird at all. There is no reasonable expectations of getting consent for battery outside of very specific scenarios.
It seems more complex than even what the law says, as in the end it is up to a judge/jury to make the call.
I don't know about Germany or the US, but Poland has (a) fairly strict anti-rape laws, and (b) a number of cases presented in media, where the court's final opinion was something along the lines of "meh, what's the big deal?".
I'm not sure that this is a general characterisation (might be) but certainly illustrates the law vs. decision maker split.
From what I can gather in the instances of other crimes, the same is true in e.g. US. You cannot shoot unarmed people running away from you, but then courts let people get away with it.
At the end of the day, the main sniff test, only somewhat moderated by law, seems to be "does this look like rape to me".
"It's good to think about what women can do differently to try to protect themselves."
Okay, here are some suggestions. I'm expressing them strongly, because some women don't seem to have understood these things.
1. Don't fuck people that you don't want to fuck. 2. Don't spend time alone with a man that you don't want to fuck, because that man very probably does want to fuck you. 3. Don't share a bedroom or sleep with with a man that you don't want to fuck. 4. Don't go on a "date" with a man if you already know that you don't want to fuck him. 5. Don't get drunk alone with a man that you don't want to fuck. 6. Don't continue fucking a man that you regret fucking the first time. 7. Don't go out of your house by yourself, if you are not an educated adult woman who understands that most male creatures by nature want to have as much sex as possible with as many different attractive young females as possible, and men will attempt to do so by various means ranging from courtship to rape depending on their moral standards. 8. Don't communicate with people that you don't want to communicate with. Tell them loud and clear to stop, block them, or report repeated unwanted communication which is harassment. 9. Don't allow someone to harass you (repeatedly after being told not to). Tell them not to, loud and clear. 10. Don't ignore all of the above, which is very widely known to almost every adult, then publicly complain that a bad man took advantage of you, a helpless and vulnerable victim, and also expect to be respected as an equal.
Yes, I feel sorry for the woman who had a bad and traumatic experience with this man. I have had bad experiences too. But I don't understand how a woman could grow up in this world, with access to caring parents, news, internet, and education, and yet still fall into a trap like this.
It beggars belief, to the point that I would suggest that this was possibly not "date rape", but rather a consensual sexual encounter that the woman did not enjoy and/or regretted. At least I think there is some reasonable doubt. There is a far far way from a regretted relationship or one night stand, to date rape. If in fact this was more of a regretted relationship, I think it is not acceptable to destroy a man's reputation and career by broadcasting the whole experience to the public and judging him guilty of unclear accusations without trial.
Men are not perfect, we are not always nice, we can be manipulative, and we might go to great lengths to get what we want. Women are also like that.