What do you think of this...(possible rape)

[differentnameforthis]

Now I think this is rape. I appear to be a lone voice however, as most are calling those who fell for this stupid.

Opinions?

Rape?

Apologies, should have mentioned the site not linked it. But I am interested in what level of misrepresentation is rape as opposed to cruel/harmful/unpleasant.
Maybe a better example is a married man having an affair and his wife does not know. He is aware she will leave him if she finds out. Is he raping his wife during the period of the affair because she is giving uninformed consent?

Good grief.

This man targeted hundreds of women, with a premeditated plan, to deceive them into having sex with him. He succeeded with more than 1.

That is not minor.

ANYONE who argues that physical attraction and appearance are not fundamental in deciding whether to have sexual intercourse with someone is a bit odd.

The ENTIRE reason the women decided to have sex with him was because they thought he was a hot young model.

He was an ugly old man. The ENTIRE basis of their decision to have sex with him was a deliberate deception. A deliberate deception that he concocted and wanted to use as many times as possible with women with whom he had no other relationship.

This is not "oh he's a bit of a bastard" territory.

If you agree that this is reasonable then you reinforce the idea that men can and should do whatever it takes short of physical violence to "obtain" sex.

I really fucked up this thread with my 'cruel/harmful/unpleasant' huh.

Basil and Whirlpool your posts are amazing.

It's just... it staggers me. What reasonable person would see this story and be like 'oh it's just like if someone was cheating and still having sex with their partner. How unfortunate but I guess that's just life'.

I don't think you fucked it up shashka. I think a lot of us knew exactly what you meant.

The whole presenting of different scenarios is just to designed to minimise what he did, distract from what he did, try and catch us out. Show that really we are just trying to catch unsuspecting men out. When in fact this man was a malicious predator who did not give a shit about the women and ultimately felt entitled to stick his dick in them, no matter what.

Basil nailed it. Rape has always been defined by the rapists.

Agree with you scallops.

basil, I think you've really hit the nail on the head there. I'm certainly no expert, but it seems to me that the onus is always on the victim to prove that they didn't consent. That's quite scary when you really think about it.

AFAIK Canada doesn't have the offence of rape DadWasHere.

I think that may have been a follow on from the push to have it re-defined as Sexual Assault but am not v. well informed about it so may be wrong about that. There are degrees of sexual assault, the most serious of which would probably correlate with English law's definition of rape but again, I'm not well-informed enough about it to swear to it.

There is some merit in doing things that way as it does take away the cultural emotional baggage of rape - the baggage that says if it has happened to a woman, it must be because of something she did wrong. And also the baggage that says a rapist is a monster unlike other men and therefore that bloke from Accounts who has been accused of it, has obviously been the victim of an hysterical harpy with a penchant for false allegations because they're so common aren't they and the only reason the conviction rate is so low.

But I don't know if Canada has better reporting and/ or conviction figures than anyone else, so the name of the crime may not be a significant issue, I don't know.

What I do think is that there may be a case for having specific gradations of sexual crimes which may not be called rape. Rape is a very emotive word precisely because of its long history of being owned by the perpetrators of it and there is little doubt that 40 or 50 years ago, what this bloke in the OP did wouldn't be considered rape, while nowadays under English law it almost certainly is.

There was a case a few years ago where a woman successfully brought a case against a man in Cyprus who was HIV positive and didn't tell her he was, so he infected her with this life-threatening disease. She didn't prosecute him under a rape law, but under another law which I can't remember the details of now. There's a case that his offence should be a straightforward sexual assault offence (of a certain degree, like the Canadian laws) as it involved getting consent under false pretences.

All those people who are asking "would x be rape" what is your point? Are you wanting to have sexual assault law introduced in order to cover those scenarios? Because your point is right; there are a number of scenarios which are extremely borderline re consent, but current rape law, having been adapted from a perpetrator-inspired earlier version, may not cover those scenarios. Is your argument that we ought to get in there and draw up new sexual offences for the statute books in order to cover those scenarios, or is it just that because the potential perpetrators who originally drew up the laws didn't consider that rape, we all ought to let it go and accept that it's a normal part of sexual relationships and ought not to be covered by the criminal law?

I, personally, believe all sexual assults should be prosecuted and men imprisoned. I believe this was a case of sexual assult and am happy for the law to be changed to reflect this.
I have an intellectual curiosity on what we would define as informed consent.
In my example of an married man having an affair, I think this would be more emotionally damaging and painful than the case under discussion. However I have never seen that discussed as rape or sexual assult.

Great post, Basil.

Thanks for clarifying, carol.

Yeah I think it's a really difficult area because it involves a very intimate betrayal and there's an argument about how far the state should be involved in the personal betrayals between its citizens. And in a society where for millenia women have had no right to bodily integrity, it's really difficult for people to get their head round because the state by definition, is man-made and has male assumptions about what is merely a personal issue that its citizens should sort out for themselves and what is an issue the state should involve itself in.

Because of the (male-led) assumption that women had no right to bodily integrity, marital rape was for centuries simply not recognised as a thing - there was no such thing as rape in marriage, wives did not have the right to bodily integrity. Because women now have a slightly louder voice in the public sphere, we now do have the right to bodily integrity in marriage, at least in theory and the state now has the right to involve itself in rape in marriage. At the moment, the idea of the state involving itself in cases where women sleep with their husbands under false pretences and therefore their consent can be said to be compromised, feels outlandish because of the very deep-rooted male-led assumptions about privacy, personal relationships and consent; but 100 years ago most people would have felt the same about marital rape. Who knows, as women's perceptions of "consent" edge into public consciousness, they may also edge into the statute books.

Consent itself of course, is largely another male concept in terms of how it is used in rape law. Consent was defined as widely as possible in order to enable men to get away with rape: so marrying a man was consent, looking at him boldly when he was a higher class than you was consent, having a couple of vodkas with him was consent, kissing him was consent, getting into bed with him naked was consent; the definition of consent in law is theoretically getting narrower as women's perceptions make some in-roads into the legal concept of it, but it's still very much a man-made concept in that it was invented in order to enable men to rape women and not have it called rape. No decent person wants their partner to consent to sex: we want them to love it, to actively, enthusiastically participate in it, to be totally up for it and enjoy it. Consent is for medical procedures, not a great sex life. Consent is very much a concept born of the idea that women reluctantly allow men to access their bodies and merely consent to that access without any expectation of enjoyment. As the idea of women as human beings who might actually be expecting to enjoy sex takes hold, the very concept of consent itself might become legally outdated.

Oops sorry, cross-posted with Buffy.

Buffy, I agree with your instincts re it being a physical transaction

Basil, good post.

Carol - I think it is something to ponder. To go on having sex with someone when you have done something that you are all but certain would mean that they would withdraw their consent to sex is an additional and separate piece of bad behaviour to cheating on them in the first place (and then, say, making excuses to get out of sex)

I think if we were all given ten scenarios of deception, and a new crime definition of sex by deception, we'd wouldn't all put the same scenarios into the crime. That's why the "answer me" demands upthread riled me. But if we tore up the statute book, how would various crimes be defined today? Who knows?

The very word "consent" is interesting. I've been asked for consent for medical procedures, background checks, photographs to be taken. All things which were done to me iyswim. Even the word itself still implies sex as something that men do to women when women allow them too.

Back to this case - I'd like to make a medical analogy. If I consent to a medical procedure and it turns out the doctor lied about have the relevant medical qualification then that would be a crime (I assume), because having a medical qualification is fundamental to my decision to consent.
By it's very nature, sex is a physical act. A partner's physical features are fundamental to the decision to consent. Obtaining consent through deception on this fundamental thing is rape.

carol, I've recently helped a close friend live through that scenario. She's very religious and never had sex outside her marriage. She feels violated by the fact her husband continued to have sex with her despite knowing that she'd never have given consent if she'd known. She did at one stage say it felt like she'd been raped, that her right to decide when to have sex and who with had been taken away, because her husband wasn't the man she thought he was. For her, faithfulness was fundamental to her decision to consent. It's hard to put in to law though because it's so subjective.

Jessica I agree it is difficult, but we are happy to agree that showing a false picture is sexual assult, but not lying to your wife.

Also uninformed consent is a very different sexual experience to just consent. I am assuming that the wife in my scenario is an active happy participant because she is unaware of the deception, but that propably also applies to the OP case.

Also, the partner's actual physical features are not necessarily relevant to the OP case, because she was blindfolded and appears to have found the body she did touch ok

And, more generally, physical features are not necessarily important. Many people have happy fulfilled sex lived with long-term partners who are older, fatter, saggier and/or damaged than when they started to go out.

How many 50 year olds would have physically fancied thier current partners when they were 20?

I think it's a question of conditional consent. I consent to sex with DP on the condition that he hasn't had sex with anyone else since we've been together. If he ignores that condition then he doesn't have my consent, so it would be rape.

In the OP case, the question is "was the consent conditional on him being the man in the photo?" I'd say that (for the woman in question) it was conditional on that. Therefore, the man didn't meet the conditions of her consent so it is rape. Unless the man had reasonable belief that her consent wasn't conditional on that. But as he's used the same deception many times, and never bothered to ask her if consent was still given if he wasn't the man in the photo, I'd say he didn't have reasonable belief.

What we really shouldn't be doing is telling women what it's okay or not okay to make a condition of your consent. If you want your consent to be conditional on the partner having lots of money, that's your choice, and if someone doesn't meet that condition and deceives you into sex then it's rape.

Jessica, I think a lot of the problem is that lots of people simply don't believe that women have the right to set conditional consent.

They think once a woman has consented to sex, she loses the right to place any conditions on that consent. Look at George Galloway - he actually declared that once a woman was "in the sex game" then consent to anything in that sex game (in this case, putting your penis into her while she's asleep, or without a condom when she'd made it clear that she didn't want sex without a condom) could be assumed. This was while he was an elected representative, he actually purported to represent women-voters while declaring unabashedly, that his female constituents did not have the right to place conditions on their sexual consent.

But he wasn't declaring some kind of extremist pro-rape position - his views are widespread and bog standard.

Someone in my workplace declared that in this case, it was "still consensual" and it's possible for her to think that even though it was the wrong man: that idea that once a woman has consented to sex with a man, any sex, with any old random, in any situation even one you've made clear is unacceptable to you, is consensual, is very deep-seated - going back to that thing of who defines rape and who defines consent. Rapists define it in such a way as to enable them to rape while not having it called rape and the rest of us tend to go along with their definition. One would almost think that we're anxious to facilitate their rape and not inconvenience them by making it difficult for them.

"Also, the partner's actual physical features are not necessarily relevant to the OP case, because she was blindfolded and appears to have found the body she did touch ok

And, more generally, physical features are not necessarily important."

WTF?

The women reported him to the police! If what he looked like didn't matter, and they were perfectly happy, then why would they have done that?

Because women are malicious and like to report men to the police when they don't think they have actually done anything wrong?

If looks didn't matter then he would've been able to show his own photo wouldn't he.

These arguments are utterly ridiculous.

People aren't blindfolded in sex because they don't care what their partner looks like. That's not the point of it at all Have you no imagination? Fucking hell.

I find it really disturbing the knots people will tie themselves in to let men off.

This man concocted a plan to trick multiple women into having sex with him. he targeted hundreds of women. He formed relationships with the women based on him being a hot young model. And they agreed to fuck him, on his terms (were these terms that the women came up with or were they introduced, persuaded, cajoled by the man over a period of time). Either way, they agreed based on the fact that he was a superfit young man. This was a total lie, a lie he perpetrated in order to get women to consent who he knew full well would not consent otherwise.

It is a fucking sorry state of affairs when people say, nope nothing to see here, nothing should be done, i mean come on they were stupid, and anyway they were blindfolded so what does it matter that he was a completely different person to the one he said he was, no problem, carry on.

basil, do you think that it's linked to the idea that men 'need' sex and that we shouldn't be making it hard for them? And that this "lying to get sex" is very common, so applying the definition of rape to that scenario means we all know many more rapists than we previously thought?

But BUT if he had struck up a relationship with one woman, shown her a fake photo, been honest about everything else about himself, and she had been saying please please do this, and he was saying no I don't want to (because of the photo), and she said go on please and he said well OK then

I very much doubt this would be in court.

The fact that this was a deliberate deception on his part, targeting hundreds of women, with the sole aim of getting them to have sex with him when he knew they wouldn't otherwise, around something as fundamental to sexual attraction as age and physical appearance, and that he succeeded with more than one woman, and they were affected enough to report him to the police.

This is all really key and to try and say Oh Well if he's guilty then say my DH says he's washed the dishes and then we have sex and then it turns out he only did half of them and he knows how much I hate that then he'd be a rapist and have to go to prison... Um no. Why attempt to minimise what this man did and draw comparisons with situations which are quite obviously not of the same order at all.

Whirlpool I am very very much with you on all fronts