Drunk consent

[powershowerforanhour]

I can't stop think about that thread about the killing of Natalie Connolly. Her blood alcohol level was in the "coma/death" bracket and the expert witness said he had never seen such high levels of alcohol and cocaine together. Even her killer admitted she was talking gobblegook and crashing into things and falling, unable to save herself from injury. Basically completely helpless. But the judge said he couldn't be sure that she didn't consent to the beating and violent sex that contributed to her death.
So how drunk do you have to be to be considered incapable of consent beyond reasonable doubt? If you're falling down, hitting-your-head drunk, incapable of coherent speech and not far off lapsing into coma and death but its considered that there is a reasonable possibility that you consented (to any sex let alone extremely violent penetration with an object and a battering) then how drunk is too drunk to consent? How far down the Glasgow coma scale do you have to be? Actually dead?

This is an extreme case, but there's a wider issue particularly for young people, can consent if you are drunk, and if you are both drunk, can the (usually male) recognise that the other person is too drunk to consent. The simple solution is don't get drunk, but back in the real world this is an issue on university campuses in particular, my dh had a tutee suspended for this, police weren't interested but university took it seriously.

I don't think there's any shared public understanding of what is meant by "rough sex". I'd be startled to learn that there are many people who consider what happened and that pattern of injuries to be consonant with "rough" rather than "extreme violence".

But the judge said he couldn't be sure that she didn't consent to the beating and violent sex that contributed to her death.

I think part of the difficulty is that we don't have a transcript of the proceedings that led the judge to intervene about the charges. We haven't had sight of the autopsy reports and any ambiguities or uncertainties within them with respect to timings.

I hate this - and I wonder if a major difficulty is that is uncertainty about her time of death? She doesn't seem to have had any clothing or covering and was lying on a floor. The alcohol etc. might have caused her to drop her body temperature but her suppressed motor responses (never mind the injuries and the bleeding and additional problems) will have meant (possibly) that she couldn't shiver involuntarily to even attempt to raise her body temperature.

Without the transcript and in the absence of any clarifying remarks from the CPS etc. - it's difficult to know if it is known when Natalie Connolly died and to what her immediate cause of death was (tho' it seems from the sentencing remarks that it must have been related to the intoxication).

I don’t understand why no one is questioning whether she drank all of that alcohol voluntarily.
It’s not unheard of, in fact fairly common, for rape victims to have their drinks spiked/be drugged, to facilitate their rapists actions.
Here we are told she is somewhat responsible because she was drunk. But it’s pretty likely that he forced her to consume that much and therefore should also be liable for her poisoning.

Alcohol is the most commonly given substance by rapists.

What the hell is wrong with men that they are happy to go ahead with a partner that is out of it ? Someone being drunk, even a bit squiffy, is a turn-off, not an excuse to rape.

Someone being drunk, even a bit squiffy, is a turn-off, not an excuse to rape.

Because it's about entitlement to power and to abuse without consequences and has vanishingly little to do with sex?

This is an extreme case, but there's a wider issue particularly for young people, can consent if you are drunk, and if you are both drunk, can the (usually male) recognise that the other person is too drunk to consent.

This is why the default needs to change to no-one consents. (I realise that technically that is the default, but in practise, it really isn't). Society can be changed - most of us would be horrified at the idea of driving drunk now, but two generations ago, it was fairly acceptable.

A person accused of rape should have to prove that they have consent. That way life continues as usual for everyone having consensual sex. The only people who are now in trouble are those who don't.

And yes, I hear the yell go up, about how terrible women could cry rape under this plan, but it seems to me, that right now, plenty of terrible men cry 'not rape'.

All that men need to do in order to not risk rape, is only have sex with women who they are sure really want to have sex with them - this doesn't seem to arduous to me.

Whereas under the current scheme, women are being raped, and men are lying about it, and there's not much that they can do to stop someone doing that to them.

Thiis is something that men have control over, and I say they should take that responsibility.

This is why the default needs to change to no-one consents.

I remember the discussion around this when I Blame the Patriarchy proposed that women should be considered as in a perpetual state of non-consent unless they decide otherwise:

women are currently considered to exist in a state of perpetual “yes!”. This is because “yes!” is consistent with global accords governing fair use of women. Victims of robbery or attempted murder don’t have to prove that they said no to being robbed or murdered; the presumption is that not even women would consent to being killed. But because penetration by males is what women are for, if we are raped we have to prove not just that we didn’t say yes, which is impossible to prove, but that we specifically and emphatically said no, which is also impossible to prove.
...
Women who typically are not eligible to opt out of consent include: women who drink in bars, women who walk alone, women who walk at night, women who use drugs, women belonging to certain castes, women who dress a certain way, women who don’t dress a certain way, women who are married to men, women who have had multiple sex partners, women who may have said yes last month, women who may have said yes at the beginning but who, three minutes in, found it disagreeable and changed to “no,” women who didn’t fight back hard enough, women who didn’t tell anyone or report it right away, women whose physical similarity to pornulated women aroused the defendant, women whose behavior at the party aroused the defendant, teens with a “reputation,” and prostituted women.
...
My wacky consent scheme flips it around. According to my scheme, women would abide in a persistent legal condition of not having given consent to sex. Conversely, men, who after all are constantly declaiming that their lack of impulse control is a product of evolution and there’s not a thing they can do about it, would abide in a persistent legal state of pre-rape.

Twisty propose a new product, the Smart Cervix with an entertaining raft of what would now be substantial GDPR issues:

An undetectable microchip records pertinent information regarding any “encounter” — DNA typing, location via GPS, audio, video, date, time, etc — and sends it (encrypted, of course) to a remote third-party database where it can be retrieved by the client (you) whenever some dickwad goes all 2009 on your ass.

blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/patriarchy-blaming-the-twisty-way/consent-or-the-legalization-of-womens-humanity/