'A woman who drinks to get drunk is deliberatly endagering herself and inviting rape' Oh my Gosh

[SuperTheoryofSuperEverything]

TThis is the opinion of my seemingly reasonable policeman uncle.

malificence do you think a man who gets very drunk and stabs someone to death, or beats up an old person, or robs a shop, cannot be held responsible for his actions?

The problem (among others) with the "they were both drunk, therefore equally culpable" argument, is that equates sex with rape. It is basically saying that rape is just a continnum of normal sex, with slightly less regard for the victim's feelings. Is that what people think rape is? Is that where this very widely held conviction comes from?

I think it is very dangerous to blur the difference between drunken sex that both parties may or may not regret in the morning, and a drunk rapist raping a drunk woman.

Two entirely different things.

I think it is also massively insulting to men to blur the difference between the two.

Beachcomber -- I think alcohol can be a causative factor without being a mitigating factor, if that doesn't sound too pompous?

I'm a bit uncomfortable about the idea that there exists a sub-category called 'rapists' who are completely distinct from other men. It's like saying that 'murderers' are a species apart from other humans. Sure, there are some men who set out to murder, just as some set out to rape. But lots of murders have alcohol as an aggravating factor, where the perpetrator's anger is fired up more than it would be if he were sober, and his impulse control and sense of cause and effect is much lower. If he ends up killing someone in his drunken state, he's just as much a murderer as the bloke who's been sitting at home planning it for months, and he deserves to go to prison for just as long.

He's a murderer, but he might not have been if it weren't for the influence of alcohol -- maybe he wouldn't have hit as hard, or he might have had just enough sense to walk away, or his mates might have had the presence of mind to pull him off if they hadn't also been off their faces.

The alcohol isn't any kind of an excuse for any of this, but it is clearly some part of the problem.

Reality - do you think if you are drunk enough to have no memory the next day, you are going to be conscious of what you are doing? I have only twice had big gaps in my memories of what happened and both times I was very, very, very drunk.
Is there really this area where you are fully conscious of your actions but won't remember it the next day?

I can see that the man of course doesn't know the exact state of the woman's consciousness, but he is going to be able to see pretty clearly that she is very drunk, enough to bring her capacity to consent into question.

This story is a good example of what I meant -- the perpetrators were clearly both nasty blokes, done time for robbery, but it does sound very much as if them all being completely off their faces on drugs played a large part in the whole thing escalating into murder.

Malificence - it's the difference between being responsible for what you do and what happens to you.
If a woman gets stinkingly drunk and sexually assaults a man, who is so drunk he can't push her off (though he would normally have been able to because he was stronger than her), she is responsible for that assault, he is not.

"I'm a bit uncomfortable about the idea that there exists a sub-category called 'rapists' who are completely distinct from other men."

I think therein lies a lot of the problem. I agree with your sentiment and didn't mean by my post to make Rapists out to be some category of psycho in the manner of the imagined 'stranger rapist'

In current society 'a rapist' is portrayed as a terrible terrifying sort of person, on a par with a murderer.

In reality a rapist is simply a man who has had penetrated a woman who has not consented to this act.

These men are not all terrifying psychos, most of them are pretty regular guys.

Which is hugely concerning really.

Reality in my view, in that situation, the woman might feel violated, so might the man. In practice, however much either / both of them might think "why the fuck did I do that?" it doesn't make it rape. I also think that questions like this muddy the waters. Because women do not go rushing to the police reporting drunken consensual sex to the police. And men do not go to prison for having consensual ill advised drunken sex.

If there is a time when it is the case that women are commonly going to the police complaining of rape in these situations, and men are getting arrested, then yes let's talk about it. At the moment, it muddies the waters by holding up very unusual situations (women don't report this sort of thing) as the norm, and trying to say "HA! You're unreasonable/extreme/think all men are rapists/are trying to crimialise normal sexual behaviour" etc.

While in real life, in the vast majority of cases, the woman has been unquestionably raped, and the man has unquestionably done something wrong (even if he personally doesn't call it rape eg thinks having sex with an unconscious person is fine).

SSM yes it's possible to have blackouts like that, I could walk and talk and interact long after my memory would fail IYSWIM. People who drink like that know the sort of things they do when drunk, waking up in bed with a man the first thing to think would be "what have I done this time" not "oh no I've been raped". It's just not how people normally respond.

We do seem, as a society, to have very mixed ideas of rape.

Rape is portrayed as being such a terrible crime that juries hesitate to convict a man for it.

Which, when you think about it, is totally fucked up thinking. Rape is considered to be so bad that it goes unpunished!

It is however, concurrently, considered to be an occupational hazard of being a woman and the sort of thing that nice men do when they are a bit drunk or a bit confused.

Seems to me that rape is always being defined by society as what it means to men. Which is also totally fucked up. Too bad a crime to convict a man of/no big deal something any man could do if he had too much to drink.

So which is it?

And what about the women?

What about how we feel about rape - we are the ones it happens to after all, surely we are the best placed to tell society how it should be dealt with and viewed.

yy, beachcomber, exactly.

I was a bit uncomfortable with some of the posts earlier, saying that people should tell their ds's not to be rapists, rather than advising them to be careful about not drinking to excess and not engaging in sex unless they are sure the woman is consenting.

I have no idea whether rapists who set out to rape are a minority or majority, but there must be a sizeable proportion of men who don't set out to rape, just as presumably many murders aren't planned in detail, but who nonetheless do commit these acts in circumstances fuelled or exacerbated by alcohol and/or drugs.

It's nonsense to discount the role of substance abuse in these scenarios -- being drunk or drugged doesn't excuse the perpetrator, just as it doesn't make the victim responsible for the crime committed against them, but it must be a powerful catalyst for a vast number of crimes, including rape.

Crossed posts. I was yy-ing to your earlier one, but agree with the later one as wel.

Good post beachcomber.

pollymorfic I'm just not sure. I really do wonder if drink is a red herring. A few pints does not turn a decent bloke into a rapist. What it might do is loosen the inhibitions of a man who thinks that getting his rocks off is more important than how the woman on the receiving end feels about it. That is how he is drunk or sober... He has a sense of entitlement that doesn't only appear when he has had a few.

The person who assaulted me simply felt like having sex with me, and the fact that I didn't want to was just not important to him. He wasn't a generally horrible person, we were good friends, he was an ex boyfriend. i trusted him and always felt safe with him, there was no warning whatsoever that one day when he was feeling horny he would simply decide to be selfish.

Getting ridiculously drunk is of course risky behaviour for anyone, and rape is not actualy the biggest risk. You're more likely to hurt yourself by doing something stupid when drunk, such as climbing up scaffolding or running across the road without looking. Or you might lose your purse/keys, and you might be a more appealing target to a mugger or someone who wants a fight. Let alone the risk (if you are an inexperienced drinker) of drinking so much that you actually die of it...

I agree with Polly in that I too feel uncomfortable with 'just tell your son not to be a rapist - problem solved'.

I intend to tell my son to get verbal consent in the case of a one-night-stand, and to be aware that consent given when paralytic or when coerced is not consent.

I don't see that there is anything wrong with telling boys to make absolutely bloody certain it is what the girl wants.

So I guess I see that there is potentially a sliver of grey area.

Well quite, SGB.

"I intend to tell my son to get verbal consent in the case of a one-night-stand, and to be aware that consent given when paralytic or when coerced is not consent."

I think that is exactly the sort of thing people mean when they say 'tell your son not to be a rapist'.

I guess it is shorthand for saying dispel rape myths and teach our children about respect and boundaries and so on.

We are also fighting against the objectification of women and the commercialisation of female sexuality, unfortunately. Plus boys have to fight against the mainstream idea that it's cool and normal to be a sexual predator if you are a man.

All these sexual stereotypes are doing a lot of damage.

True, Beachcomber, but my concern is not just that he doesn't rape anyone. It's that he isn't accused of rape. While I realise that is anathema to most of you, my feeling is that if you believe the stats, hundreds of guys a year ARE falsely accused of rape. Now he is statistically highly unlikely to be one of them. But he is even less likely to die from taking a dodgy E, or from being caught in a rip, or being stabbed by a mugger. But I'm still going to make him aware of those risks.

As for my daughter, the risk of her being sexually assaulted is a great deal higher than the chance of my son being falsely accused of rape, I realise that. And there is very little I can do about that.

IWouldNotCouldNotWithAGoat wrote - "if you believe the stats, hundreds of guys a year ARE falsely accused of rape."

Which statistics?

Wikipaedia

Says people have said anything from 2-50%, although studies in the US and UK came up with 8%.

IWouldNotCouldNotWithAGoat false rape allegations are rare. Generally they don't get too far.

yesmeansyesblog.wordpress.com/2010/09/09/false-rape-allegations-are-rare/

I think it is really dangerous to inflate figures for false rape allegations and I wonder at the motives of those who do.

Such inflated figures allow the myth that women routinely lie about rape to be perpetuated.

They also cause worry to people such as yourself with regards to their sons.

I sort of understand your concern, but in the wider debate about rape, the number of rapes which go unreported is massively hugely higher than the number of false allegations. Giving unmerited weight to this idea of false allegations just means women will be less likely to report rape because they know they are being considered a liar from the outset.

I know exactly what you are saying, but I will still be warning my son that the danger does exist, just as I will be warning him that he could be one of the 5 people a year* who die after taking a dodgy ecstasy tablet

*I have no idea what the actual number is but presume it's very low.

Naturally I am much, much, much more concerned that my daughter will be the victim of sexual assault.