Was Bristol Palin raped?

[darleneoconnor]

according to this bristol palin was so drunk when she conceived her son that she doesn't remember having sex.

Sounds like rape to me.

Then she was basically 'forced' to marry her rapist? WTF! Sometimes America sounds more like the middle east!

Quite a few forums are discussing this, with some

disgusting rape myths on this forum

HRH, I don't know, or much care, whether you are telling the truth. But I do find it comical that you dislike the fact that people are questioning your story when the whole point of it is to point out that teenage girls cannot be trusted and often lie.

Trillian,

People are talking about instances of women lying to counter the strange arguments that seem to be being put forward saying that we must always believe what women say, and if a man and a woman say two different things it is always the man who is lying.

Not sure if you've notced, but an allegation of rape has not been made.

If Bristol had said that she had been raped I would have been much more inclined to believe her, because falsely accusing someone of rape is very serious.

Saying that you were drunk and don't really remember what happened (when actually you wanted to drink the alcohol and wanted to have sex) doesn't seem like a big deal, so it is more likely that it is a lie.

I'm not even saying that she did lie, just that it is possible, and there are good reasons why she might have.

Both women and men are equally capable of lying and both women and men are more likely to lie in situations where it would be more damaging for them to tell the truth.

For that reason alone, I don't see how anyone can say that a woman who says she can't remember having sex when it would be more damaging to her to admit that she had consensual sex (Reality and HRH's examples) would never lie.

In the case of Bristol Pailin, I agree with pretty much everything that SGM has written, in that it would be far more damaging for her to admit that she freely had sex than it was to say she was drunk.

I am not disagreeing at all that if someone has sex with you without your consent, or when you are too drunk to consent, that it is rape. However I cannot agree that women never lie when it may be more damaging to them if they tell the truth.

But surely up until this memoir, everyone thought Bristol Palin had freely had sex? So she had actually nothing to lose or anything to be damaged by everyone continuing to think that.

I'm not saying women lie.

I'm saying people lie.

Bristol Palin is a person, who has every reason to lie.

You are the one applying a strange sexist view by saying that women do not lie.

Nobody is saying that women never lie. Just that the chances of a woman telling the truth about an incident like this are 90-95%. Normally, when the chances of something happening are so high, in general terms, people tend to talk about it as a given.

But when we're talking about teenage girls and rape (in the interests of fairness of course), people keep focusing on the less than 1 in 10 chance that it didn't happen. You have to ask why, if it's not misogyny.

That's the thing isn't it. It's not even an uncommon scenario. I've heard lots of women talk about how they lost their virginity to a man who "took advantage of them" when they were drunk.

HRH...uncalled for.

Women can lie. Women can lie about a whole range of things, including saying that they only had sex becasue they were drunk.

It doesn't mean that all women who say they only had sex because they were drunk are lying or that they are all telling the truth.

I don't see why its anti-feminist or misogynistic to say that.

HRH, if you'd had the intelligence and courtesy to recognise that no one has said that women never lie, you wouldn't have had to slander your step daughter on the internet.