'If a woman is drunk a man should not be prosecuted for rape'

[YouBetterWerk]

Wanker barrister on This Morning saying this right now. Great woman with counterpoints at least.
I just threw my cornflakes at the TV.

If you unpick those assumptions even a little bit, quite quickly you get to the idea that once women have had sex, their "no" is somehow less valid.

That is not what I'm saying at all. Quite the opposite. If you're relaxed about casual sex, the experience of waking up beside someone whose name you can't remember isn't a novel one why would you accuse a man of rape if it wasn't in fact on this occasion rape?

I was once involved in a discussion on another board where someone tried to claim on grounds of probability that if a woman had had more sex then her claim of stranger rape was less likely to be true (?!). Which was agreed by the majority and the comment was recommended by a depressing number of people, so you can get an idea of the sort of "logic" in play...

Until someone commented that a virgin would have more incentive and therefore be more likely to lie and make a false accusation. The men on that discussion tied themselves in knots and couldn't decide which type of woman was more unreliable. But basically it boiled down to a belief that all women lie, all women want to make it look like they've had less sex, and no woman can be trusted.

StillLost I think Buffy was agreeing with you. She was saying how ludicrous those assumptions are.

But yep. The "All women lie" thing is just depressing. AAARGH. How do people get such toxic ideas into their heads? It just becomes so pervasive, often they don't even overtly know that they are working from that belief and it just forms an undertone for everything.

It's like if you think small children are always manipulative - you will interpret their actions differently. For example a child trying to explain will be interpreted as "cheeky" or "trying to have the last word".

If you assume all dogs are aggressive - you will be scared of dogs because you interpret any gesture as aggression - a friendly hello becomes a lunge, a gentle sniff becomes "it's going to bite me".

We do have to challenge these assumptions. Unfortunately the person the assumption is about can't be the one to challenge it. The only way, in fact, to challenge it is to purposefully act the opposite. Have more sex, and be open and proud about it. Be honest to a fault. (Suddenly I understand the sex positive movement...) Problem is, that interferes with our agency. And just talking about sex and telling the truth doesn't help if the person doesn't believe you anyway.

I agree with the prosecutor. And I say that as someone who has been a 'victim' of this.

Oh boy another one. Popcorn! Get your popcorn here, roll up!

I'm so glad the balance is swinging from "she was drunk so obviously she consented" to "she was drunk so she couldn't consent"

I used to work on a university bar and you would SEE the creeps in the corner, carefully nursing a pint or even a soft drink very slowly whilst watching to see which girl got steadily more drunk. It was predatory and they were clearly targeting the most vulnerable girls - usually buying them more drinks to ensure they were completely incoherent.

Luckily for us this meant we were able to throw them out because we didn't allow people to buy alcohol for someone we wouldn't serve due to drunkenness (not sure if this is law or just our bar). We also had an Angel service to get girls home who had lost their friends rather than just sending them out into the night but I doubt we caught every instance.

This is the type of man who pulls the "catatonically drunk sex isn't rape" card - the men who swoop in on naive, vulnerable freshers knowing that they'll be too impressionable or scared to say anything the next day when they wake up not knowing where they are and who they're next to. Knowing that plying girls with alcohol means they can get away with rape scot-free and that people will even stand up for them.

I am in favour of casual sex if that is wanted. I think people judging the people who are attacked and complain think those people have no experience of sex. There is a difference.

No means no.

Yep. It's creepy beyond belief. We had a few friends over for New Year. A mixed group, 8 of DH's uni friends (mostly male), a female friend we both know from school and FF's friend.

FF and one of DH's friends (I'll say Male Friend MF) had a bit of history and were really on/off all week, will they, won't they, kind of thing. OK fine.

Then one night another friend who is a total flirt got drunk and came on to FF. She was a bit drunk so kissed him back, but then said actually no, I like MF, I don't want to do this. All OK. He backed off. She didn't feel wronged or anything.

The next night, a third guy came and engineered a situation where he was alone in the room with FF. Started acting all creepy. Grabbed her hand and placed it by his head, just some sort of weird stuff that she didn't really know how to react to. She was really freaked out and made it clear with body language that she wasn't interested, but he didn't go so she hid in the toilet and then texted MF to come and rescue her. He did.

The thing was the way that the rest of the group reacted to hearing about this encounter. They all shrugged it off saying "He's harmless! He doesn't know how to chat up girls. He just sits in the corner with a pint!" Indeed, most of them seemed to find it funny, as in, lol, what a cock up he made of that!

I'm really convinced that he singled her out due to the fact she'd had encounters with two of the group and he had decided she must be "easy". I'm pretty shocked that everyone just seemed to think that was fine. I'm more shocked that having been told how creepily he behaved, they all laughed it off saying he's harmless because he doesn't know how to chat up girls

Just left me - again - in the totally stark jarring realisation that women and men seem to inhabit two totally separate worlds a lot of the time.

It's so depressing the way so many men don't recognise that behaviour as predatory BB and laugh it off and actively gaslight women who point out that this is not just someone being incompetent at chatting up women, it's downright predatory behaviour.

It's to do with the fact that they don't want to recognise that "one of the lads" is a creepy predator, so they've constructed a narrative which enables them to see him through this prism of "bumbling incompetent" rather than "sexual predator". And of course that's all tied up with the idea of rapists being scary monsters in balaclavas in bushes rather than "one of the lads".

It comes from the same place as David Osborne's view - that it can't possibly be horrible and traumatising to be raped/ assaulted by one of the lads, like it would be to be raped by one of those "othered" men in balaclavas who aren't like us (well, he's a good bloke, innee?) so we shouldn't be prosecuting the lads, only the othered type (or "real" rapists) as they would probably describe them).

Yes. That is exactly it. It's so bloody frustrating and quite impossible to get across.

In my experience (which on this topic is extensive) men who are shit at interacting with women are mainly shy, lovely chaps who just need to spend a bit of time in mixed company to get the idea women and men really aren't that different.

Any bloke who is off on his own with a woman is patently not shy around women. I suppose you could define being a rapist as being the ultimate expression of "shit at chatting up women".

I think if someone says that within earshot I'm going to reply "shit as in they have to resort to rape?".

I agree with the prosecutor. And I say that as someone who has been a 'victim' of this.

Sorry, what?

" Men don't notice this stuff often, and when they do notice it they don't see it for what it is, how intimidating and threatening it is."

Not only do they not see it for what it is, when women tell them what it is and how it is, more often than not they dismiss what we are saying.

There seems to be a kneejerk tribal loyalty to other men, based on the very deeply socialised, unacknowledged misogyny lots of people carry around in them, which values men's perspective over that of women. Particularly when it comes to male violence against women or systemic sexism. Lots of men don't mind listening to women and engaging with them as equals about neutral stuff, but go near anything like this and their unconscious misogyny suddenly comes to the fore and they revert to a starting point of women being unreliable witnesses while men are the default reasonable viewpoint. And they don't even know they're doing it.

It's not just men who dismiss it though, which is even worse.

A friend of mine, who has been subjected to rape and other abuses, is doing a course in a "caring" subject; one of the things they have to cover is Domestic Violence. Apparently in their refresher class (i.e. they've already supposedly learnt this stuff) she was the only one who could accurately define what consent and rape are - the rest appeared to subscribe to the views that "women ask for it" "women who don't leave abusers don't deserve sympathy" and "well if they stay, they obviously don't mind that much". Shocking stuff.
Consent seems to be the biggest issue here - too many people don't seem to understand what consent actually is, nor when it is absent!

It is not difficult to understand the difference between an attack and a not-an-attack, in my experience.

Do you mean for you, Breezy, or do you mean for others to understand the difference in your experience based on what you tell them?