I suppose FL's wall-poster means some combination of 'If she's drunk, and you're not, and you use that as an excuse to ignore 'no', you're a fucking idiot and yes, idiot, that counts as rape. And you shouldn't trust a drunken 'yes', because she might not mean it because she's drunk.'
The first part seems kind of obvious, but probably bears repeating in college (consent != more vodka). Not trusting a drunken 'yes' as good evidence of enthusiastic consent doesn't seem like a bad idea to get across, but I agree that the metaphor (a watch? a gift of her body? does it come with free wrapping paper?) could hardly be more outdated.
I dunno, this sounds like "what about the men?" to me. Yes, obviously, any drunk people having sex is probably a bad idea, except in pre-existing relationship situations where there is a somewhat assumed consent, but given the propensity of at least a substantial number of males to attempt and get girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, are the urinal signs really so out of line?
Case in point: have you guys seen the recent spate of Bacardi commercials proclaiming that Bacardi "gets the job done?" It's pretty clear that the "job" referred to in the job of getting women drunk so they'll sleep with you.
On the other hand, this is pretty much a by-product of the conception that males don't mind being sexually harrassed, or taken advantage of, which is provided as a foundation for the sort of clueless-frat-boy attitude of "what? you don't like it when I grab your ass in the bar?"
Obviously, men do mind, but they just don't seem to be willing to say it.
What silvana said; it's hard to fault a campaign that intends to say "hey, guys? getting her drunk doesn't count as consent" given how many frat parties seem to revolve around 'getting the girls drunk so we have a shot'.
And guys would mind being sexually harassed. Most of my guy friends who say they wouldn't mind a wolf whistle now and then never seem to imagine it coming from a 300 pound ugly chick who chases them down the block if they don't respond happily.
(I cross-posted with a bunch of people also making good points.)
Joe's right. While this:
I suspect most sex with at least one drunken partner is also sex with two drunken partners. This makes the application of blame difficult, on pain of violating a glaring double standard.
is formally true, it applies only to the situation where the sex is the result of a drink-fueled decision, whether well or ill-advised, between two actively consenting partners (even if either or both of them would have decided differently sober.)
I think the conduct being discouraged by the sign is sex between a a reasonably alert and functioning man, whether perfectly sober or not, and a woman who is either passed out or on the brink of it, so drunk that she can neither give nor successfully communicate her failure to give consent. This is a pretty gender-asymmetrical situation -- the odds that a woman is going to do much sexual with a passed-out man are (to the best of my knowledge) pretty slim.
Now, the sign still sucks, because (a) it should distinguish between the situations and (b) if you're going to put up a sign addressing the second situation only, it should be tactfully enough worded to make the point that only a complete shithead would even think about having sex with a woman too drunk to communicate consent, so that the sign is not intended to address the vast majority of men who aren't complete shitheads. Still, there's a real asymmetry in the situation that's not entirely reducable to misandry.
Not trusting a drunken 'yes' as good evidence of enthusiastic consent doesn't seem like a bad idea to get across
I agree, but, in college, I don't think I knew anyone who got together for the first time without the aid of alcohol. Maybe the rule should be something like, "Sex shouldn't be the first romantic interaction between two people." I really don't know.
The "gift" crap reminds me of my high school religion class. Lots of bad analogies, like "Your body is a pie and every time you're with someone you give away a slice. If someone gives you a gift of a pie and one of the slices is missing, it's not special anymore because they didn't make it just for you. You don't want to be there on your wedding night holding a pie with missing pieces."
Dubious how? Certainly you don't mean that any woman who drinks has to expect that men will have sex with her (cause she wouldn't have gotten drunk unless she secretly wanted sex); that would be an unfair reading, but I'm not sure what you do mean. (Also not so dubious re: frat parties, punch, and inexperience.)
SCMT: Sure, which is why the sign is bad. There's a difference between two people who are interested in each other who both get a little tipsy and one person who hopes that the alcohol will change her mind.
Oh! And my favorite: "Premarital sex is like a big canyon -- if you fall into it, you will be hurt. Some people will be tempted to get as close to the edge of the canyon as they can to peek in and see what's inside. Some people can get away with that, but others will fall in and be doomed. Don't peek over the edge of the canyon -- instead, go to the top of a high hill and stay up there. As long as you stay on top of the hill, you won't be anywhere close to the canyon and there is no way you can get hurt. And you'll be closer to God." This one even had illustrations.
How about: Not trusting a drunken "yes" unless it is, in fact, enthusiastic? Thinking back to my college days, the unpleasant stories I heard (some of which I'd call rape, some not) were along the lines of extorting consent from a girl who was drunk enough to have trouble enforcing her initial non-consent. Drunk people are stupid and easily confused, and it's not that hard to talk them into doing shit.
I don't have any moral problem at all with two drunken people pouncing on each other with gay abandon -- the moral problem is when a sober, or soberer, person persuades or compels a drunk into doing something the drunk doesn't want to do, and I still have have a problem with it even if the drunk is eventually persuaded to give formal consent.
I'd say it's dubious because these are adult women lifting their own glasses. I agree that taking advantage of a passed out or incoherent woman is rape, but getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker. Stating otherwise is infantilizing women.
I guess my irritation comes from my thought that the really fundamental point here is that women are moral agents and that's why it's so wrong to coerce sex via alcohol. But the way the sign is phrased (as well as the gift bit) actually undermine that point, even with the commendable goal of reducing problematic sex.
I'd say it's dubious because these are adult women lifting their own glasses. I agree that taking advantage of a passed out or incoherent woman is rape, but getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker.
Eh -- Labs works on a campus, which means that at least some of the women involved are just learning how to drink: how much they can drink and stay functional, what the signs are that they need to eat something before they have another drink, etc. Anyone who takes advantage of that ignorance (pressing sweet, heavily spiked punch, on an 18-19 year old, in the hopes that she'll get drunker than she meant to) is an asshole, and if you don't think that there are people who do deliberately try to take advantage of that ignorance, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
I don't think it does deprive women of agency to note that alcohol is used as a way to get around consent, ogged.
I don't think it's promoting an idea of women as virginal little flowers who would do nothing to sully their um, pistils except for the evil bees/men who tempt them with sweet nectar/alcohol to note that men often use alcohol to try to get laid, and hey, frat boy, if you're not reasonably sure the answer would be favorable if she were sober, put it away.
getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker
There's lots of fault to go around. Assuming the drunk person in question knew and understood the alcohol content of what they were drinking and its likely effect on their body, sure. But if a soberer person looks at the situation and says, hey, I'll bet I could talk (him/her) into something (s)he wouldn't do otherwise, that person is still an exploiter, though not a rapist. There are lots of degrees of wrong before one crosses the line into the criminal.
There are lots of degrees of wrong before one crosses the line into the criminal.
This too. It's easy to look at a problematic situation and say "It's not rape," and then dismiss it as not a problem. There's lots of room to be an incredible asshole before you break the law.
Anyone who takes advantage of that ignorance (pressing sweet, heavily spiked punch, on an 18-19 year old, in the hopes that she'll get drunker than she meant to) is an asshole, and if you don't think that there are people who do deliberately try to take advantage of that ignorance, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
Exactly the situation I was thinking of, actually. Punch is sweet and doesn't often taste alcoholic, and when you're 19, you often don't have a very good sense of your own limits, or that if you're matching the cute guy glass for glass, you're probably a lot drunker.
Right, and I don't think we disagree on much of anything here, but what was dubious was the expression "getting a woman drunk." Women get themselves drunk.
28: Now I'm really lost. You were taking issue with the phrase 'getting a woman drunk', because it implied a lack of moral agency; but what is 'getting a woman drunk' supposed to accomplish besides getting around the whole pesky consent issue?
I mean, if your point is just that sometimes women drink in order to feel more relaxed/less inhibited before having sex, fine, but I don't think anyone was conflating that with 'getting women drunk.'
The confusion/disagreement appears to me to be that some people in this thread (not ogged and not apostropher) are using the phrase "getting women drunk" to describe the intentions of some men, while others (ogged and apo) are using it note that describing a woman's actions as "having been gotten drunk" makes them totally passive, and is not apropos in many situations which aren't frat parties.
Yes, obviously, women get themselves drunk, but if you don't think that guys who perceive that they might have a better shot at sex with drunk women try to bring that state about, again, like LB said, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
People providing copious amounts of sweet-tasting alcohol to underage women who may not know their own limits are at least partially complicit in "getting women drunk." Peer pressure isn't irrelevant.
Frankly, a whole pie is too much for one person anyway.
My youth pastor got around the gluttony problem by exlaining to us that our bodies are like a bottle of coke. Having sex is like giving somebody a sip of coke. If you have sex with too many people, all your wife gets is the backwash left at the bottom of the bottle.
The problem is that, just as women are learning to drink in college, men are learning how to read signs from women. Early on, you are always going to overcall or undercall - you are an idiot. If you undercall, you'll never learn. So the bias is towards overcalling. In that case, the important thing seems to me to be sure that the damage from an overcall is minimal.
I don't think anyone was, and I know I wasn't, arguing that no (and I'm not trying to imply it's a small number of us either, it probably isn't all that small) man has ever tried to get a woman drunk so that she would be more likely to have sex with him, or that his doing so was morally unproblematic, or that "women are moral agents" means that nothing someone does with another consenually can ever be wrong. It can, at the very least, be a wrong towards a third party.
That last part is in relation to a flashback I'm having to an argument I had with a friend where he argued that there was nothing at all wrong with him having sex with someone who had (and planned to continue to have) a committed boyfriend because "women are moral agents." That boyfriend was also a soldier in Iraq (which I don't think should have had any added weight in my friend's moral calculus, but I could be wrong, and certainly should have has some weight in his prudential calculus).
I'm so glad my IRL friends don't read my online comments outside of my own blog, because they would not want me discussing this.
The confusion/disagreement appears to me to be that some people in this thread (not ogged and not apostropher) are using the phrase "getting women drunk" to describe the intentions of some men, while others (ogged and apo) are using it note that describing a woman's actions as "having been gotten drunk" makes them totally passive, and is not apropos in many situations which aren't frat parties.
Yeah. Let's move it back to the drunk-driving hypothetical. A (for some reason outside the problem) wishes B harm. They're having dinner together. B says, "I'm only having one drink -- I need to drive home." A pours B a second glass of wine, and B drinks it. A suggests an after-dinner drink, and when B says no, says "It'll be fine, I'll call you a cab, drink as much as you like." After six brandies, A walks B out to the parking lot, watches B get in B's car, screech out of the lot, and drive into a bridge abutment.
Now, while B wasn't compelled to make the bad decisions B made, and is responsible for the bad outcome, there is a sense in which A "got B drunk", and A is a very bad person. Not a criminal, but a bad, bad person.
Yeah, okay, no one held a gun to anyone's head and forced them to drink. So the women get themselves drunk and.... what's supposed to follow from that?
That they can't be taken advantage of because they knowingly had some drinks? That doesn't seem correct. That if they are taken advantage of, it's their own fault? Again, very dangerously close to 'it can't be date rape, because she was drunk and didn't say no/fight back.'
That if a drunk woman throws herself at you, it's fair game, because she got herself drunk, and you don't have to exercise any moral judgment?
I agree that "I was drunk" is a poor excuse for some actions that occur while drunk, and I think that all you're saying is that if a drunk woman chooses to sleep with someone, that's her choice, and we shouldn't belittle her choice by saying 'Oh, women only go after sex when they're drunk and confused.'
But to say that because the woman chose to have a drink she couldn't have been pressured into anything and bears responsibility for ALL consequences seems wrong.
The advice here (poorly given in the poster) is to young men. Given the campus culture and frat parties and how it's been pounded in that 'no' means 'no' (solution, have no chance for a 'no'), it doesn't seem like a bad idea to advocate a mindset that says, hey, the fact that she's drunk isn't an opportunity to score because she can't say 'no'.
What's so wrong with waiting for an enthusiastic 'yes'?
Well, I was in a frat, but then it was a coed fart, so the peer pressure tended to work toward not taking advantage of others.
Me too, kinda. The house had been founded as a PKA house, but got thrown out of the national when they elected a woman president. By the time I lived there it was just called a co-op, but we has a basement full of old pike songbooks, etc.
At MIT, the school made all the frats go alcohol-free shortly after I was there. I think a lot of schools are like that now, meaning that the classic 'frat party' is either at another location or in some sense underground.
The disanalogy to LB's example (in some cases, in the ones where the man's intention was to get the woman drunk it's spot on) is that some people get themselves drunk in order to lower their inhibitions, no non-suicidal people get themselves drunk for the purpose of increasing the chances of a car accident. This goes along with SCMT's point about undercalling versus overcalling (though I don't think I'd have used that terminology).
Arg, silvana. And dating is wrong, too, because there were no trial relationships ever in the past. People only got introduced to the person they were going to marry.
Your body is a bottle, a pie, a flower, and a gift, and it belongs to your daddy, and for god's sake, you have no say in what you do with it. Daddy does, though.
(insert screaming and attempts to pull out hair here).
This area is all so gray. I wish it weren't, but it is. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be a case-by-case, person-by-person issue.
Here are some hypotheticals that I have trouble with:
In situation (a), I'll assume that I'm the person getting drunk. Let's further assume that when I get drunk, I often make really bad judgments and even black out significant parts of the drunken period. I know this about myself. (Note: this doesn't actually happen to me; it's just for the hypothetical.) So, I go out one night, stay out absurdly late, and wake up the next morning with a woman in my bed I don't recognize, who may or may not have been as drunk as I was. Who's to "blame" here? I'd most likely blame myself, for drinking way too much. I'd also probably not be that damaged by the whole thing, since I didn't remember any of it happening (leaving out the possibility of VD and such). One thing I'm sure I wouldn't do is blame whoever the woman was for taking advantage of me. Then again, I am a man, and I'm not discounting the power differences involved in sex, and the propositioning thereof.
In situation (b), a woman, with exactly the same tendencies as me, undergoes a similar experience, with similar results. Can she reasonably claim she was raped, or at least taken advantage of? I suppose she can. Although, it should be noted, she has no idea how drunk the guy in her bed was when the sex decision was made (by whoever made the decision). Let's say she decides she was taken advantage of and accuses the guy in question of rape (I don't know how strong her case would be legally; this is just a hypothetical choice on her part.) I would feel that she is committing a real moral transgression here, especially since the guy may have been just as drunk as she was, and for all she knows, she could have invited him back to her place.
In scenario (c), a loutish man has been trying to get a female acquaintence to sleep with him for the past few months. She's always rebutted his advances. They go out in a group setting, and have many drinks. After about her sixth, she goes home with the guy, who has been buying her drinks and making no secret of his intentions. Where does the "blame" fall here? I think we would all naturally say that it falls upon the guy, but really, the guy wasn't pursuing a secret agenda; he'd been making passes at her for months. Now, she almost certainly wouldn't have gone home with him absent the six drinks, but is it rape? Is it poor judgment? Is it just a dumb, regrettable decision? Is it her "fault"? Again, the circumstances can be tipped one way or another so very, very easily.
Please tell me if I'm setting up strawman arguments here; I think these three scenarios are not entirely uncommon ones.
some people get themselves drunk in order to lower their inhibitions
Sure -- this is a topic simply dripping with grey areas, which is part of the reason (although I can see why it would be annoying) addressing it with exhortations to young men (preferably better worded than FL's sign) rather than with another form of regulation makes sense. In a lot of the situations we're talking about, the only way to tell whether there's any wrongdoing going on is to examine the intentions of the actors, and the actors are obviously the best qualified to know if their intention is to do wrong.
Most women don't get themselves drunk so they have no agency in having sex, either, w/d. I knew a couple girls in college who did ('If I'm drunk it's not a sin!'), but that's really the exception.
Another analogy (goal: to compare sex to as many inappropriate objects as possible). A and B are drinking. They don't know each other too well, but they're quite happy, and A is relaxed and imbibing freely. Suddenly, A announces A's desire to spend a lot of money on B and hands B A's credit cards. B hasn't even refilled A's glass. Should B go on a shopping spree?
Oh God, Silvana, that was horrendous. I couldn't bear to read the whole thing, but this paragraph stuck out:
"The answer to this question will bring us the answer to the propriety of courtship as a model for a daughter's pre-marriage relationship with a prospective suitor. For the crux of the courtship question is not empirical, but principal. I define courtship as the discovery of a life-partner for a daughter under the direct oversight of the father. Any man seeking to beg, borrow or steal a daughter's hand without her father's endorsement is seeking to gain, in unlawful ways, "property" not his own. Daughters are Daddy's girls in the objective sense, and this particular daughter rejoices in that truth. I am owned by my father. If someone is interested in me, he should see him."
This is a grey area, but I don't think you set up any strawmen.
In a) and b), I think the drinkers (Joe and the woman) are both primarily to blame for their own bad results.
In c), I think the guy is an asshole. Probably not rape (certainly nearly impossible to prosecute), but certainly willing to take advantage of someone who has rebuffed him in the past because she's not saying no at the moment.
Now, the line between a, b, and c is very vague, especially when the parties don't know each other; so like LB says in 61, it's really not a bad message to send to guys that they should err on the side of caution when determining whether she's interested, can't be bothered to protest, when she's drunk. There's really no harm in letting her take the initiative.
Because otherwise all the anti-date-rape info (which is what this poster is about, I'm guessing) can be about is telling girls how to avoid it. Don't drink, don't go to the frat, don't hang out with guys, and make sure you don't get drunk because then poor little boy just can't help himself.
Joe, I crossed with you, but I think my last comment addresses your issue. We're not talking about criminal/evidentiary standards for rape, here, we're talking about moral issues.
In (a) and (b), the blackout complicates it -- the subject doesn't know what happened. The other partner (female in (a), male in (b)), if they didn't black out, knows if they raped or otherwise molested an unconscious person, or coerced or aggressively persuaded a drunk into doing something they wouldn't want to do, or conversely, if anything that happened was freely (if impairedly) consented to by all parties. The moral status of the actors is governed by their intent when acting, regardless of how hard that is to know or prove later on.
In the third situation the guy is an asshole, but not a rapist, and the woman used poor judgment (assuming both that she actively consented, and that she wouldn't have if sober. If she didn't actively consent, and he had sex with her anyway, he's a rapist -- if she simply changed her mind, nothing bad happened at all.). Her poor judgment in getting drunk in the company of someone she knew wanted to take advantage of her relieves him of criminal responsibility, but he remains an asshole (to the extent that he knows that she will wake up unhappy about what she has done. If he honestly thinks that her drunken consent is evidence that she's actually changed her mind and wants to have sex with him, he's not even an asshole.) I'm not seeing a huge problem in resolving this one.
What's so wrong with waiting for an enthusiastic 'yes'?
Well, depending on the person, that may be a very long wait. I happen to know a strict Catholic who couldn't give an enthusiastic "yes" for a couple years even after we got married. The "sex is dirty"meme was firmly etched into her mind.
As practical advice, 69 is spot on. (That was actually what I was thinking with Joe's (c) -- they were in a group setting? What the hell were her friends thinking?)
The better advice is: bring a friend who will watch out for you.
Good advice, but as whose-fault-will-it-be prevention it's kind of useless. Your friend might get drunk, too. Or worse, if you went to the party without a friend, you're fair game (because if you were smart, you would have brought a friend).
Tripp, yeah, I know. But in the context of a drunken girl flirting with a guy whose hoping he'll get laid, I think it's good advice to tell him to slow down. If she really wants to jump him, and he stops, she'll let him know, ya know? What's the worst that can happen?
I think "enthusiastic 'yes'" is problematic. In my experience, everything both is and seems more enthusiastic when alcohol is added to it. Also - what Tripp said, a bit. I got into one longish relationship purely as a function of boredom. Alternatively, the situation in which both parties are interested, and neither will move off the mark is the stuff of boilerplate romances. I'm not sure that the early beginnings of relationships are always that enthusiastic. The rule should be no sex until later.
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you. Rather than saying "enthusiastic", think of it like this -- don't have sex with someone (to the best of your understanding at the time, recognizing that your understanding might also be impaired) unless you're sure that if if she were standing in her own bedroom, with the option of shutting and locking the door in your face and sleeping alone, that she'd invite you in. Consent achieved through pestering, confusing, embarrassing or frightening a drunk, while it may be sufficient to cover you against legal liability, is not sufficient to make you not an asshole.
There's a real problem in talking about this stuff with decent guys, in that women have more experience with the assholes than decent guys do. Even if only 2% (number invented for convenience) of guys would dream of attempting rape or lesser forms of sexual coercion, those guys seem to do it a lot, so a lot of women run into them. Bad behavior in this context can be a problem for women generally, without in any way being characteristic of men generally.
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you.
Which is often a huge problem in discussing issues of consent, one that goes unacknowledged; the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Maybe 'enthusiastic' gave the wrong sense to it. How about 'unambiguous yes' instead of 'absence of a clear 'no' '?
The hotel staff inform me that the following conversation was recorded on the security cameras:
BG offered throatily, "I'll ring for some peach schnapps." To which Weiner replied, "With you, darling, that won't be necessary." Indeed, his bunny slippers were looking distinctly less lop-eared.
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you
At my age (roughly yours), I no longer need to worry about these things. Nobody can handle the day-after effects of alcohol well enough to get well and truly drunk. But I think people are misdescribing how these sort of things go. An awful lot of mating, both long and short term, is a function of getting one party or the other to stop obsessing about Ms./Mr. Perfect and get on with Ms./Mr. Good Enough.
the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Exactly. The point needs to be made that if you're the kind of guy who is happily participating in a discussion like this, and if you're concerned by something you did that you thought at the time wasn't a bad thing to to do, it's almost certainly not what we're talking about.
But I think people are misdescribing how these sort of things go. An awful lot of mating, both long and short term, is a function of getting one party or the other to stop obsessing about Ms./Mr. Perfect and get on with Ms./Mr. Good Enough.
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
The point needs to be made that if you're the kind of guy who is happily participating in a discussion like this, and if you're concerned by something you did that you thought at the time wasn't a bad thing to to do, it's almost certainly not what we're talking about.
I'd have gone with, "'If you want it, I have some peach schnapps.' To which Weiner replied, 'Biscuit conditional! With you, darling, that won't be necessary.'..."
And now I'll go back to being disturbed about reading and suggesting a revision on this.
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
True story. At one of my frat parties, while playing a drinking game, the young hottie next to me who I've seen before, for maybe a month, but who hasn't ever said much to me says "Lets go upstairs."
To my room. Do we go? She is tipsy, maybe drunk, near as I can tell.
92 -- I think you do. If it had been a tipsy/drunk guy, and he asked the question of a girl he hadn't said much to in the past, it would go entirely unremarked, right?
I would say you wouldn't have been wrong to on those facts. I can see esthetic arguments for not having casual sex with someone who you have reason to suspect might regret it in the morning, but it's not clear whether those apply in this situation.
Doesn't seem to be wrong to go upstairs on these facts. She's tipsy-drunk, not hammered; she seems to be a pretty active agent (i.e., this isn't an unremarked groping).
92: a gentleman would probably say "no darling, you're drunk". A true gentleman would then not go on about the story to his mates incessantly for the next few weeks, but I would say that this would be above and beyond the call of duty.
Perhaps a catchy slogan for the urinals, covering both the sexual and hypothetical watch cases would be
"It is wrong to get by alcohol what you could not obtain simply by begging".
(I remember some dialogue from a Willy Russell play once that went:
You know, the hotel staff mistranscribed the security video tape. The conversation actually went something like this:
"If you want it, I have some some peach schnapps," offered BG throatily.
"Biscuit conditional! And unnecessary, for if you'll have me, my bunny slippers are feeling distinctly less lop-eared," replied Wiener.
"If you don't mind my saying so, that was also a biscuit conditional, Weiner."
"So was that! And if you want a nice guy, I'm trying to be sensitive!"
"If you criticize my conditionals when we're about to make love, I'm tired of this liaison," sobbed BG, and stormed down to the hotel bar to order a shot of schnapps, neat, while Weiner was left alone with his slippers.
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
Well, hell. I haven't really been very clear, have I? Sorry about that; I have a head cold, and I keep running out energy to think clearly.
1. I absolutely agree with #79, at a minimum.
2. What I meant is that I re: Mr. Perfect/Mr. Good Enough -
I don't think people go to parties with clearly set predefined intentions about who to hook-up with or not. At best, they have something of a preference list. That list changes as the hour grows longer and the fifth grows smaller. Most vulgarly, for men, it's the case of beer goggles; I assume women have the same thing.
From the other side of the potential seminal transaction, you go in sure that the person you have a crush on would like you if they got to know you better, or got to know the person they were interested in better, or whatever. So you go in believing that your possible person's prior intentions are not set and not the sole measure of the validity of the transaction.
The party acts as a clearinghouse. Two people have been drinking, and they end up together. It strikes me as entirely possible that one person's preference line-up may have changed because of, among other things, alcohol. It's also possible that it changed because he got to know you better, etc. No one sorts that out at the moment of action, though.
In specific, I remember ending up with someone I did not intend to end up with because I felt guilty about prior flirting. I didn't feel comfortable going after someone else in front of her, and I felt a certain obligation to be friendly. That thought process + alcohol meant we ended up hooking up that night. We dated for a few months thereafter.
Well, I was going to say that someone wrote slash fiction about me but got bored and gave up. Now I'm the guy who can't score in slash fiction. Not an improvement, I think.
(FTR: The first four are bona fide biscuit--actually 3 might be an utterance modifier, and I'm not sure whether I think biscuit conditionals are utterance modifier conditionals. And "biscuit conditional" is a compliment, so no need for tears, BG.)
That all seems to me to fall under the heading of "Finding sex partners while drunk? Often a bad idea, despite the fact that it's an utterly conventional thing to do." While drinking can certainly lead to finding oneself in bed with someone one wouldn't have been in bed with without the booze, I don't think that relates to the issues of consent we're talking about without an intent to coerce on either party's behalf.
Because we're saying that an intent to coerce can (for purposes of moral opprobrium if not legal liability) include situations in which consent was obtained, if though coercive tactics (deceptive pushing of drinks on an inexperienced drinker, etc.).
There have been semi-persistent rumors that one person involved is a woman. (And I think the original security breach had to do with the domain that hosted the old e-mail addresses.)
Honestly, in this case, I think we have to go with "SB who denied it, supplied it." Although that would work better if there were a pronoun.
Seriously, don't do it, even Google-proof, is what I say.
Okay, seriously, I could show you hyperlinks that identify, with considerable circumstantial evidence, who/what he/they are. But also seriously, being as we respect pseudonymity here, I could see that I shouldn't. I could email you, LB, if you want.
They don't post that much. I click on the blogs I read like a monkey on crack, and I love Fafblog immoderately, but I only check them about once a week because there's not that much volume there.
A lot of their readership is probably by RSS. I get a crazy percentage of my Sitemeter hits via google image searches, but I know that a lot of my regular readers don't show up in Sitemeter b/c they're getting it through RSS or LiveJournal Friends page feeds.
IIRC, Sitemeter won't catch anybody who visits with JavaScript disabled, either. Something's weird with FB's meter, though. Every visit shows as referral: unknown.
44: I have a friend in almost the exact same situation, he sees nothing wrong with continually sleeping with a woman who's husband is in Iraq/Afghanistan (can't remember which). In his mind, cheating only occurs if you're the party in the preexisting relationship. Otherwise, fair game.
81: the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Yeah, this took me a while to get. Freshman year, we had a bunch of programs warning us that we were all potential date-rapists, and so I spent the whole year in a state of panic after each liason, wondering when the cops would come pounding on the door. It took someone explaining that the fact that I was worrying about it at all meant I wasn't one of those guys for me to relax.
A lot of Fafblog!'s readers probably take the RSS route, too, because their site will burn your eyeballs out more quickly than the Ark of the Covenant.
"the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Yeah, this took me a while to get. Freshman year, we had a bunch of programs warning us that we were all potential date-rapists"
That just seems a wierd thing to worry about. I can't say I've ever had that worry, and don't think I've ever met anyone who has said they had that worry.
Surely you know yourself and you know yourself-when-drunk well enough to know your not the kind of person that would do that sort of thing?
I realise the whole wierd drinking thing in the US means that many americans get to a pretty advanced age without acquiring the ability to judge their alcohol consumption and as such the whole "blacking out and not remembering what heinous thing they may have done" may be more common. This may slightly colour my intuitions here... [I may be wrong about this]
But seriously, I know myself well enough to know that the worst thing I'd do when drunk is talk a lot of boring incoherent crap ...
Lots of men in the US seem to have been traumatized by college date-rape education. I'm not clear on exactly why -- the bits of it I saw weren't all that ambiguous -- but it appears to be a common problem.
It's not about the blacking out or not remembering, actually. That almost never happens to me. It's a reaction to the message of "don't assume consent", I think. Being a not-that-wise 18 year old, I got the impression that anything other than a signed and notarized consent form was risking rape. I'm exaggerating, but only a bit. Also, since they didn't really take pains to distinguish between "drunk(ish) and willing" and drunk to the point of incoherence, the implication to me was "hands off if she's had any alcohol." Which messed with my head a bit.
I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, if anything people should err on the side of caution, but it caused a fair amount of stress for a little while, and from talking to other people it seems to be a rather common feeling.
For those who already had a general lack of confidence around (and experience with) women, the fact that any public discussion of sex was inextricably linked with the issue of date rape really did not help matters much. While erring on the side of caution is genuinely good, a pervasive sense of timidity and tentativeness is distinctly unsexy.
So the date-rape education stuff scared guys by not sufficiently making it clear that it was discussing "things which would be bad things to do, and would make you a bad person for doing them, despite the fact that you might be surprised to find out that they met the legal definition of rape" rather than "situations that can get you in trouble with the law", sounds like. Perhaps a disclaimer, in such educational materials that "If you can successfully avoid having sex with any woman who you have good reason to believe does not consent to such sex, there is essentially no chance that you will be disciplined or prosecuted for rape." (With "essentially no chance" intended to cover the theoretically possible entirely fictional allegation of rape.)
Given that this is a trivially easy standard to meet for anyone that isn't a sociopath, a disclaimer like that might reduce the tension levels around campus a fair amount.
I'm not a man, but I could envision another source of anxiety beyond fear of getting yourself into trouble with the law. If you're a young, insecure college student, it might seem sort of improbable that any woman would want to sleep with you, and in spite of recent decades' changes in sexual values you've still probably to some extent been socialized to believe that women never really want sex as much as men do. If you swirl some date-rape education into that mix, some college students might worry their own actual and potential actions are coercive even when they're not in the slightest, because on some level they think that the woman must not really want it, or if she does, doesn't want it with him.
What an odd link in that context, FL. The linked story is about an accusation of an attempted violent rape, and one with enough support to get to a trial, where the accused was found not guilty. Obviously, in light of the verdict, it's possible for the accusation to have been false, but it's not a situation that fits into the "innocent remark that got taken the wrong way" category.
And Tia, you have a good point. Possibly the educational effort that should be made is to encourage college boys to withhold sex from women that are insufficiently enthusiastic about the idea.
I personally was not so much worried about legal ramifications or any nebulous threat of prosecution. And I don't think I was bothered by any formal, university-sponsored date rape education stuff. (In fact, I can't recall ever being exposed to any such university-sponsored programs.) For me, the fact that date rape was such an all-pervasive topic made it difficult for me believe in the existence of the "enthusiastic yes" mentioned upthread.
some college students might worry their own actual and potential actions are coercive even when they're not in the slightest, because on some level they think that the woman must not really want it, or if she does, doesn't want it with him.
thus summarizing the insecurities of freshmen everywhere.
It's not even really a fear of legal ramifications (though that does play a part), it's more of a moral thing. And the fear isn't really of false accusations, it's of finding out that what you thought were acceptable actions are actually not. Which is an irrational fear for the vast majority of guys.
Yeah, I know it's not the best case, but I'm in a rush. Why then am I reading a blog? You all know the answers-- if you look within yourselves. Anyway, the underlying point is that it's not entirely unheard of for administrators to play fast and loose with due process when it comes to these sorts of allegations. Hence, "trust us" is not the most comforting advice when it comes from people with veto power on your degree. That isn't a case of an innocent remark becoming a major problem, but it might be a case where university procedure leaves something to be desired. To echo an argumentative strategy earlier on this thread, if you don't believe that colleges and universities make these kinds of errors, you haven't spent enough time at faculty meetings.
Agreement with 164 is not meant to suggest that I think things were better when sexual harassment/date rape was not considered to be an issue at all, and so nothing was done about it/them, even though no one was in danger of being fired/expelled after sketchy university procedure unless maybe they were accused of Communism.
I also note an interesting use of "enough" in "you haven't been to enough faculty meetings/frat parties." And that if Tia isn't going to supply slashes I will, dammit!
I agree with 164, but I think that it cuts both ways. After one of my Freshman orientation sessions, the woman sitting next to me and I agreed that if we were ever raped, we would not call our proctor/RA/ tutor or the campus police, but instead go straight to the city police. We figured that there was too much of an incentive for the university to cover up the crime statistics. I also think they could botch up evidence and things badly--because they are not law enforcement--thereby ruining any chance of prosecution.
I think we can all agree that it would be better for all involved if colleges and universities had stables of prostitutes of both genders for student use.
You know, on Tia's point, I have lots of somewhat confused thoughts. While I tend toward the moderately socially conservative in personal conduct and in what I believe to be well-advised, I think there's a huge social value in continuing the cultural change that allows for more direct expression of sexual desire by women for this very reason.
(Droning on about my cross-cultural experiences again -- everyone does know that I was in the Peace Corps, right?) In Samoa, premarital sex is strictly forbidden, particularly for girls, and forbidden in the sense that getting the crap beaten out of you (not all that infrequently to the point of death) is what's likely to happen if you get caught. On the other hand, the standard reason to get married is that someone's pregnant -- regardless of the rules, the kids are going to have sex. There is also a lot, and by American standards an insane amount, of rape and sexual violence. My understanding of a partial explanation for the higher levels of rape is that a girl or woman is under huge pressure not to say yes to extra-marital sex, and so the thought process "She'd consent if she could -- she really wants me to do this despite the fact that she's screaming and fighting to get away" is a much more persuasive one in the mind of the rapist.
Now, this is only applicable to modern-day America in the very mildest of ways, but I get the impression that what's bothering all the worried college boys is a (in almost all cases false) fear that they're falling into a very, very mild version of that same thought process. It's much less of a worry in the US, because of course here women and girls are free to seek sex out or to consent to it, and so it would be very hard to sincerely believe that one was justified in overriding resistance on the grounds that the resisting woman really wanted to consent but wasn't free to.
The solution here has to be, I think, to really work on the remains of the taboo keeping women from expressing their sexual desires. The situation that Tripp described in 70 still exists (women who won't consent enthusiastically to sex, even when they'd like to, and men's belief that any given woman is likely to fall into that category) and that's what creates a great deal of the ambiguity that upsets people about this issue. Really, if both partners aren't enthusiastic about the process, how much fun is anyone going to be having?
167 also strikes me as absolutely right. University police are there to protect the university's reputation rather than to enforce the laws. I could tell you a story about our own alma mater. But not in public. Just let me kick off these bunny slippers....
(Students also sometimes get away with a wrist-slap for some pretty serious financial frauds. I mean, things involving dummy organizations and the like.)
Re 167-- there have been rumors here (before my time, but fairly well-documented, from what I can tell) of the administration sweeping a rape case under the rug. By shocking coincidence, the offender's last name is also the name of a building on campus. What are the odds?
169: Of course, what cuts the other way is that it's a lot harder to get people to understand date rape in a culture where everyone expects that a) young women will have sex and b) that some young women may regret having sex later. Too many times I've heard (more in high school; hopefully they got educated later), "All that date rape means is that she regretted it in the morning." "What, she didn't fight back? Oh, right, it was rape."
Which I think is part of the reason that some of the young men get really obsessively weirded out over this; date rape and regretted casual sex get conflated, and they're worried that the administration, their friends, her friends, won't be able to tell the difference. This leads, I would expect, to them tending to give real date rapists the benefit of the doubt; "it could be me if my ex wanted to ruin my life."
Which is why we need a better sex education. By the time I was a senior in high school, we knew all about STDs, diagrams of various body parts, and that 1 out of 8 women get raped in college, and that 'no meant no'. Beyond that? Well, guys were out to get sex and women were going to hold it from them. I can't help but thinking it would have been much better for the message to say, hey, women want sex just as much as you do, if you take it slow and she wants more, she'll let you know. It wouldn't ruin all the awkwardness of freshman year of college romances, but it sure would make it easier for the good guys to relax (and have no sympathy for the bad guys.)
I've heard that some of the more liberal churches are doing sex education that goes beyond the basics of plumbing. It's the kind of stuff that wouldn't be appropriate for schools, but it talks about sex and relationships and the meaning of it all without making kids feel guilty.
Dr. O'Connor and Miss Galt clutched each other on the edge of the roof of the university library, their blond tresses intermingling in the wind, as the deranged mob of zombie gender studies professors and union organizers marched ever closer. Blood dripped from their mandibles, for they'd just finished feeding on the flesh of a management communication class in the business school. But still they wanted more, and the two ladies had only a 2x4 with which to protect themselves.
"This may be the end, Miss Galt." The pixieish Dr. Connor leaned her head into the bosom of the Amazonian Miss Galt. Miss Galt enveloped her, kissing the top of her head and breathing her sweet verbena perfume. "It may be an illusion," the professor continued, "but I feel so safe with you."
"I'll die defending you, Dr. Connor," said Miss Galt. "It would be such a shame for the world to lose an intellect like yours."
They could see the whites of the zombies' eyeballs. Miss Galt decided to engage the mob in a contest of wits: "I've been a deranged mob of zombie gender studies professors and union organizers and you do not know what you're talking about. Our nubile porcelain flesh is not at all delicious." But she was not sure if she spoke the truth as she throught she felt Dr. Connor's lips brushing against her nipples.
The mob did not respond, but only continued on their inexorable course.
"There's no hope" cried Dr. Connor, "I only hope that tomorrow the campus newspaper does not claim that we deserved it because I was so beautiful, my hair was so golden, and I dressed in such beautiful skirt-suits, and was thus a minion of the patriarchy," when suddenly she saw a dark object in the sky traveling towards them.
"It's a bird," Miss Galt.
"It's a plane," said Dr. O'Connor.
"It's, it's...a man in a pink fur-lined cape astride a giant flying Koran?" wondered Miss Galt.
"Now we're truly done for!" screamed Dr. O'Connor. "He must be the commander of the forces of political correctness. His armies will be worked into a frenzy! No amount of tender pink flesh will be enought to sate them."
But the caped man, the initials GAL emblazoned across his chest, merely alighted on the ledge of the roof and fixed his eyes upon the mob. Two red hot beams of light shot from his eyeballs, and the mob was engulfed in a fiery force field. One by one, they fell on their backs and began moaning in pain...or was it pleasure?
It hardly mattered, for the man ushered the two ladies onto his Koran, and flew them high above the clouds. Their clothes grew damp from exposure to the moisture and clung to their skin. The air was so thin they were forced to gasp for breath.
"What is your name? And what strange weapon did you use on them," asked Dr. O'Connor.
"I am Gayatollah Abu-Labs, announced the man in the pink cape. "And I must not speak of my methods; the matter is not fit for ladies' ears."
"Why Gayatollah," sighed Miss Galt, "I had no idea Muslims could be so...forceful--for the right cause that is."
"Yes Gayatollah," squealed Dr. O'Connor, "You are very forceful. I've been looking for a man like you all my life."
"Dr. O'Connor, I saw him first!" snapped Miss Galt.
"Ladies, ladies!" Gayatollah ejaculated, "I don't fly that way. But I have looked hard and deep into your soul, and I think your true passion lies elsewhere."
Dr. O'Connor looked at Miss Galt, her eyes misting. Miss Galt felt a strange new stab in her loins....
I'm not sure that we've advanced past the persuasion/coercion boundary that Tripp referenced. I agree that women should be comfortable expressing their desire, and I think parents of daughters everywhere should teach their charges that there isn't anything wrong with giving up the rhythm nice and easy.
Thesis: posting weird signs above urinals is morally obligatory, because it leads to an increase in aggregate mirth. Tia's post is simply the clincher. Discuss.
Coming in late and cautiously, but date rape rules must have a bad effect on women who enjoy fliting and playing hard-to-get in a flirty way. Likewise shy women who initially send off mixed or negative messages even though they actually might be interested eventually.
Short version linked here. It's a parenthesis in the middle of a long comment.
Slightly longer version -- if you read Coming of Age In Samoa, Mead was both a good and accurate reporter of anything she saw with her own eyes (there's a 'day in the life of a Samoan village' section that's dead on), and insanely, laughably wrong about anything she didn't. The Samoan sense of humor is both incessant and based on the deadpan put-on -- she managed to live in Samoa for a year without figuring that out, and wrote a book as if absurd jokes were accurate reports of daily life.
You want to see bathroom walls covered with "Whiskey Dick?"
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:24 AM
Having sex with a drunk person is illegal?
Uh oh.
How many married couples should be carted off to jail?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:32 AM
I reject the drunk/sober duality; there are many subtle levels.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:35 AM
Point (b) makes no sense. As with the watch, you're giving the gift back once you're done with it.
Except maybe in Kansas.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:38 AM
I suppose FL's wall-poster means some combination of 'If she's drunk, and you're not, and you use that as an excuse to ignore 'no', you're a fucking idiot and yes, idiot, that counts as rape. And you shouldn't trust a drunken 'yes', because she might not mean it because she's drunk.'
The first part seems kind of obvious, but probably bears repeating in college (consent != more vodka). Not trusting a drunken 'yes' as good evidence of enthusiastic consent doesn't seem like a bad idea to get across, but I agree that the metaphor (a watch? a gift of her body? does it come with free wrapping paper?) could hardly be more outdated.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:40 AM
I dunno, this sounds like "what about the men?" to me. Yes, obviously, any drunk people having sex is probably a bad idea, except in pre-existing relationship situations where there is a somewhat assumed consent, but given the propensity of at least a substantial number of males to attempt and get girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, are the urinal signs really so out of line?
Case in point: have you guys seen the recent spate of Bacardi commercials proclaiming that Bacardi "gets the job done?" It's pretty clear that the "job" referred to in the job of getting women drunk so they'll sleep with you.
On the other hand, this is pretty much a by-product of the conception that males don't mind being sexually harrassed, or taken advantage of, which is provided as a foundation for the sort of clueless-frat-boy attitude of "what? you don't like it when I grab your ass in the bar?"
Obviously, men do mind, but they just don't seem to be willing to say it.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:40 AM
Oh, yeah, and I'm totally with Cala on the "gift" thing. Gross.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:41 AM
What silvana said; it's hard to fault a campaign that intends to say "hey, guys? getting her drunk doesn't count as consent" given how many frat parties seem to revolve around 'getting the girls drunk so we have a shot'.
And guys would mind being sexually harassed. Most of my guy friends who say they wouldn't mind a wolf whistle now and then never seem to imagine it coming from a 300 pound ugly chick who chases them down the block if they don't respond happily.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:48 AM
(I cross-posted with a bunch of people also making good points.)
Joe's right. While this:
I suspect most sex with at least one drunken partner is also sex with two drunken partners. This makes the application of blame difficult, on pain of violating a glaring double standard.
is formally true, it applies only to the situation where the sex is the result of a drink-fueled decision, whether well or ill-advised, between two actively consenting partners (even if either or both of them would have decided differently sober.)
I think the conduct being discouraged by the sign is sex between a a reasonably alert and functioning man, whether perfectly sober or not, and a woman who is either passed out or on the brink of it, so drunk that she can neither give nor successfully communicate her failure to give consent. This is a pretty gender-asymmetrical situation -- the odds that a woman is going to do much sexual with a passed-out man are (to the best of my knowledge) pretty slim.
Now, the sign still sucks, because (a) it should distinguish between the situations and (b) if you're going to put up a sign addressing the second situation only, it should be tactfully enough worded to make the point that only a complete shithead would even think about having sex with a woman too drunk to communicate consent, so that the sign is not intended to address the vast majority of men who aren't complete shitheads. Still, there's a real asymmetry in the situation that's not entirely reducable to misandry.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:48 AM
Not trusting a drunken 'yes' as good evidence of enthusiastic consent doesn't seem like a bad idea to get across
I agree, but, in college, I don't think I knew anyone who got together for the first time without the aid of alcohol. Maybe the rule should be something like, "Sex shouldn't be the first romantic interaction between two people." I really don't know.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:50 AM
It should also be noted that "getting a woman drunk" is itself a dubious description.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:51 AM
The "gift" crap reminds me of my high school religion class. Lots of bad analogies, like "Your body is a pie and every time you're with someone you give away a slice. If someone gives you a gift of a pie and one of the slices is missing, it's not special anymore because they didn't make it just for you. You don't want to be there on your wedding night holding a pie with missing pieces."
I only wish I was making that up.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:52 AM
Becks -- I also heard the "stained t-shirt" formulation in my years as a Baptist.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:55 AM
Wow, that's terrible, Becks. It also seems really stupid, since most people are happy to get any pie at all.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:56 AM
Dubious how? Certainly you don't mean that any woman who drinks has to expect that men will have sex with her (cause she wouldn't have gotten drunk unless she secretly wanted sex); that would be an unfair reading, but I'm not sure what you do mean. (Also not so dubious re: frat parties, punch, and inexperience.)
SCMT: Sure, which is why the sign is bad. There's a difference between two people who are interested in each other who both get a little tipsy and one person who hopes that the alcohol will change her mind.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:58 AM
Oh! And my favorite: "Premarital sex is like a big canyon -- if you fall into it, you will be hurt. Some people will be tempted to get as close to the edge of the canyon as they can to peek in and see what's inside. Some people can get away with that, but others will fall in and be doomed. Don't peek over the edge of the canyon -- instead, go to the top of a high hill and stay up there. As long as you stay on top of the hill, you won't be anywhere close to the canyon and there is no way you can get hurt. And you'll be closer to God." This one even had illustrations.
Posted by Becks | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:59 AM
Hmmm, pie. I agree with ogged. Any pie at all is good.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:59 AM
I mean it seems to deprive women of agency.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 10:59 AM
To 10:
How about: Not trusting a drunken "yes" unless it is, in fact, enthusiastic? Thinking back to my college days, the unpleasant stories I heard (some of which I'd call rape, some not) were along the lines of extorting consent from a girl who was drunk enough to have trouble enforcing her initial non-consent. Drunk people are stupid and easily confused, and it's not that hard to talk them into doing shit.
I don't have any moral problem at all with two drunken people pouncing on each other with gay abandon -- the moral problem is when a sober, or soberer, person persuades or compels a drunk into doing something the drunk doesn't want to do, and I still have have a problem with it even if the drunk is eventually persuaded to give formal consent.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:00 AM
Becks went to junior high in Afghanistan.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:00 AM
Dubious how?
I'd say it's dubious because these are adult women lifting their own glasses. I agree that taking advantage of a passed out or incoherent woman is rape, but getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker. Stating otherwise is infantilizing women.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:01 AM
I guess my irritation comes from my thought that the really fundamental point here is that women are moral agents and that's why it's so wrong to coerce sex via alcohol. But the way the sign is phrased (as well as the gift bit) actually undermine that point, even with the commendable goal of reducing problematic sex.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:01 AM
I'd say it's dubious because these are adult women lifting their own glasses. I agree that taking advantage of a passed out or incoherent woman is rape, but getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker.
Eh -- Labs works on a campus, which means that at least some of the women involved are just learning how to drink: how much they can drink and stay functional, what the signs are that they need to eat something before they have another drink, etc. Anyone who takes advantage of that ignorance (pressing sweet, heavily spiked punch, on an 18-19 year old, in the hopes that she'll get drunker than she meant to) is an asshole, and if you don't think that there are people who do deliberately try to take advantage of that ignorance, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:06 AM
I don't think it does deprive women of agency to note that alcohol is used as a way to get around consent, ogged.
I don't think it's promoting an idea of women as virginal little flowers who would do nothing to sully their um, pistils except for the evil bees/men who tempt them with sweet nectar/alcohol to note that men often use alcohol to try to get laid, and hey, frat boy, if you're not reasonably sure the answer would be favorable if she were sober, put it away.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:06 AM
getting drunk to the point of making a bad decision is the fault of the drinker
There's lots of fault to go around. Assuming the drunk person in question knew and understood the alcohol content of what they were drinking and its likely effect on their body, sure. But if a soberer person looks at the situation and says, hey, I'll bet I could talk (him/her) into something (s)he wouldn't do otherwise, that person is still an exploiter, though not a rapist. There are lots of degrees of wrong before one crosses the line into the criminal.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:06 AM
Frankly, a whole pie is too much for one person anyway.
Posted by ben wolfson | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:08 AM
There are lots of degrees of wrong before one crosses the line into the criminal.
This too. It's easy to look at a problematic situation and say "It's not rape," and then dismiss it as not a problem. There's lots of room to be an incredible asshole before you break the law.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:09 AM
I don't think it does deprive women of agency to note that alcohol is used as a way to get around consent
I didn't say it did.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:12 AM
Anyone who takes advantage of that ignorance (pressing sweet, heavily spiked punch, on an 18-19 year old, in the hopes that she'll get drunker than she meant to) is an asshole, and if you don't think that there are people who do deliberately try to take advantage of that ignorance, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
Exactly the situation I was thinking of, actually. Punch is sweet and doesn't often taste alcoholic, and when you're 19, you often don't have a very good sense of your own limits, or that if you're matching the cute guy glass for glass, you're probably a lot drunker.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:15 AM
Right, and I don't think we disagree on much of anything here, but what was dubious was the expression "getting a woman drunk." Women get themselves drunk.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:19 AM
28: Now I'm really lost. You were taking issue with the phrase 'getting a woman drunk', because it implied a lack of moral agency; but what is 'getting a woman drunk' supposed to accomplish besides getting around the whole pesky consent issue?
I mean, if your point is just that sometimes women drink in order to feel more relaxed/less inhibited before having sex, fine, but I don't think anyone was conflating that with 'getting women drunk.'
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:20 AM
I meant what the apostropher says in 30.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:21 AM
Anybody want a drink?
Posted by Ugh | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:24 AM
The confusion/disagreement appears to me to be that some people in this thread (not ogged and not apostropher) are using the phrase "getting women drunk" to describe the intentions of some men, while others (ogged and apo) are using it note that describing a woman's actions as "having been gotten drunk" makes them totally passive, and is not apropos in many situations which aren't frat parties.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:26 AM
Yes, obviously, women get themselves drunk, but if you don't think that guys who perceive that they might have a better shot at sex with drunk women try to bring that state about, again, like LB said, you haven't been to enough frat parties.
People providing copious amounts of sweet-tasting alcohol to underage women who may not know their own limits are at least partially complicit in "getting women drunk." Peer pressure isn't irrelevant.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:27 AM
I don't have any moral problem at all with two drunken people pouncing on each other with gay abandon
I can't believe this was let slide uncommented...
Posted by mike d | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:30 AM
Well, I was in a frat, but then it was a coed fart, so the peer pressure tended to work toward not taking advantage of others.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:31 AM
"Coed fart". Geez.
Sorry, Ogged.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:32 AM
Ummm
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:32 AM
A coed ogg apostropher, ogg.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:32 AM
I can't believe this was let slide uncommented...
We ish havin' a sherious dishcusshin here, quiet you.
Posted by Ugh | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:32 AM
Frankly, a whole pie is too much for one person anyway.
My youth pastor got around the gluttony problem by exlaining to us that our bodies are like a bottle of coke. Having sex is like giving somebody a sip of coke. If you have sex with too many people, all your wife gets is the backwash left at the bottom of the bottle.
Also not making this up.
Posted by Sam K | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:35 AM
The problem is that, just as women are learning to drink in college, men are learning how to read signs from women. Early on, you are always going to overcall or undercall - you are an idiot. If you undercall, you'll never learn. So the bias is towards overcalling. In that case, the important thing seems to me to be sure that the damage from an overcall is minimal.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:35 AM
I don't think anyone was, and I know I wasn't, arguing that no (and I'm not trying to imply it's a small number of us either, it probably isn't all that small) man has ever tried to get a woman drunk so that she would be more likely to have sex with him, or that his doing so was morally unproblematic, or that "women are moral agents" means that nothing someone does with another consenually can ever be wrong. It can, at the very least, be a wrong towards a third party.
That last part is in relation to a flashback I'm having to an argument I had with a friend where he argued that there was nothing at all wrong with him having sex with someone who had (and planned to continue to have) a committed boyfriend because "women are moral agents." That boyfriend was also a soldier in Iraq (which I don't think should have had any added weight in my friend's moral calculus, but I could be wrong, and certainly should have has some weight in his prudential calculus).
I'm so glad my IRL friends don't read my online comments outside of my own blog, because they would not want me discussing this.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:36 AM
The confusion/disagreement appears to me to be that some people in this thread (not ogged and not apostropher) are using the phrase "getting women drunk" to describe the intentions of some men, while others (ogged and apo) are using it note that describing a woman's actions as "having been gotten drunk" makes them totally passive, and is not apropos in many situations which aren't frat parties.
Yeah. Let's move it back to the drunk-driving hypothetical. A (for some reason outside the problem) wishes B harm. They're having dinner together. B says, "I'm only having one drink -- I need to drive home." A pours B a second glass of wine, and B drinks it. A suggests an after-dinner drink, and when B says no, says "It'll be fine, I'll call you a cab, drink as much as you like." After six brandies, A walks B out to the parking lot, watches B get in B's car, screech out of the lot, and drive into a bridge abutment.
Now, while B wasn't compelled to make the bad decisions B made, and is responsible for the bad outcome, there is a sense in which A "got B drunk", and A is a very bad person. Not a criminal, but a bad, bad person.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:38 AM
Yeah, okay, no one held a gun to anyone's head and forced them to drink. So the women get themselves drunk and.... what's supposed to follow from that?
That they can't be taken advantage of because they knowingly had some drinks? That doesn't seem correct. That if they are taken advantage of, it's their own fault? Again, very dangerously close to 'it can't be date rape, because she was drunk and didn't say no/fight back.'
That if a drunk woman throws herself at you, it's fair game, because she got herself drunk, and you don't have to exercise any moral judgment?
I agree that "I was drunk" is a poor excuse for some actions that occur while drunk, and I think that all you're saying is that if a drunk woman chooses to sleep with someone, that's her choice, and we shouldn't belittle her choice by saying 'Oh, women only go after sex when they're drunk and confused.'
But to say that because the woman chose to have a drink she couldn't have been pressured into anything and bears responsibility for ALL consequences seems wrong.
The advice here (poorly given in the poster) is to young men. Given the campus culture and frat parties and how it's been pounded in that 'no' means 'no' (solution, have no chance for a 'no'), it doesn't seem like a bad idea to advocate a mindset that says, hey, the fact that she's drunk isn't an opportunity to score because she can't say 'no'.
What's so wrong with waiting for an enthusiastic 'yes'?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:38 AM
Well, I was in a frat, but then it was a coed fart, so the peer pressure tended to work toward not taking advantage of others.
Me too, kinda. The house had been founded as a PKA house, but got thrown out of the national when they elected a woman president. By the time I lived there it was just called a co-op, but we has a basement full of old pike songbooks, etc.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:40 AM
all your wife gets is the backwash left at the bottom of the bottle.
Perhaps, but my first wife did get the deposit back on the bottle, at least.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:40 AM
You're only worth $0.05 ($0.10 in CT), mon apo?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:43 AM
Well, I think the drinking dynamics at my fraternity are about to change radically in any event.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:45 AM
You're only worth $0.05 ($0.10 in CT), mon apo?
I'm a pretty big bottle, Cala.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:47 AM
Doesn't it seem a little weird that drinking in the fraternity is fine (and presumably unpunishable in most cases), but selling the drinks isn't?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:47 AM
Worse than the "body as gift" thing.
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:48 AM
At MIT, the school made all the frats go alcohol-free shortly after I was there. I think a lot of schools are like that now, meaning that the classic 'frat party' is either at another location or in some sense underground.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:50 AM
The disanalogy to LB's example (in some cases, in the ones where the man's intention was to get the woman drunk it's spot on) is that some people get themselves drunk in order to lower their inhibitions, no non-suicidal people get themselves drunk for the purpose of increasing the chances of a car accident. This goes along with SCMT's point about undercalling versus overcalling (though I don't think I'd have used that terminology).
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:53 AM
Arg, silvana. And dating is wrong, too, because there were no trial relationships ever in the past. People only got introduced to the person they were going to marry.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:53 AM
drinking in the fraternity is fine
Not if you're under 21, as most of them are.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:56 AM
Your body is a bottle, a pie, a flower, and a gift, and it belongs to your daddy, and for god's sake, you have no say in what you do with it. Daddy does, though.
(insert screaming and attempts to pull out hair here).
Posted by silvana | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:57 AM
Re: 56 you just slip out the back, Jack
I call foul.
Posted by Sam K | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:57 AM
This area is all so gray. I wish it weren't, but it is. The more I think about it, the more it seems to be a case-by-case, person-by-person issue.
Here are some hypotheticals that I have trouble with:
In situation (a), I'll assume that I'm the person getting drunk. Let's further assume that when I get drunk, I often make really bad judgments and even black out significant parts of the drunken period. I know this about myself. (Note: this doesn't actually happen to me; it's just for the hypothetical.) So, I go out one night, stay out absurdly late, and wake up the next morning with a woman in my bed I don't recognize, who may or may not have been as drunk as I was. Who's to "blame" here? I'd most likely blame myself, for drinking way too much. I'd also probably not be that damaged by the whole thing, since I didn't remember any of it happening (leaving out the possibility of VD and such). One thing I'm sure I wouldn't do is blame whoever the woman was for taking advantage of me. Then again, I am a man, and I'm not discounting the power differences involved in sex, and the propositioning thereof.
In situation (b), a woman, with exactly the same tendencies as me, undergoes a similar experience, with similar results. Can she reasonably claim she was raped, or at least taken advantage of? I suppose she can. Although, it should be noted, she has no idea how drunk the guy in her bed was when the sex decision was made (by whoever made the decision). Let's say she decides she was taken advantage of and accuses the guy in question of rape (I don't know how strong her case would be legally; this is just a hypothetical choice on her part.) I would feel that she is committing a real moral transgression here, especially since the guy may have been just as drunk as she was, and for all she knows, she could have invited him back to her place.
In scenario (c), a loutish man has been trying to get a female acquaintence to sleep with him for the past few months. She's always rebutted his advances. They go out in a group setting, and have many drinks. After about her sixth, she goes home with the guy, who has been buying her drinks and making no secret of his intentions. Where does the "blame" fall here? I think we would all naturally say that it falls upon the guy, but really, the guy wasn't pursuing a secret agenda; he'd been making passes at her for months. Now, she almost certainly wouldn't have gone home with him absent the six drinks, but is it rape? Is it poor judgment? Is it just a dumb, regrettable decision? Is it her "fault"? Again, the circumstances can be tipped one way or another so very, very easily.
Please tell me if I'm setting up strawman arguments here; I think these three scenarios are not entirely uncommon ones.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:57 AM
some people get themselves drunk in order to lower their inhibitions
Sure -- this is a topic simply dripping with grey areas, which is part of the reason (although I can see why it would be annoying) addressing it with exhortations to young men (preferably better worded than FL's sign) rather than with another form of regulation makes sense. In a lot of the situations we're talking about, the only way to tell whether there's any wrongdoing going on is to examine the intentions of the actors, and the actors are obviously the best qualified to know if their intention is to do wrong.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 11:59 AM
Most women don't get themselves drunk so they have no agency in having sex, either, w/d. I knew a couple girls in college who did ('If I'm drunk it's not a sin!'), but that's really the exception.
Another analogy (goal: to compare sex to as many inappropriate objects as possible). A and B are drinking. They don't know each other too well, but they're quite happy, and A is relaxed and imbibing freely. Suddenly, A announces A's desire to spend a lot of money on B and hands B A's credit cards. B hasn't even refilled A's glass. Should B go on a shopping spree?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:00 PM
Before anyone tears me to pieces, I'm dashing off to lunch.
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:01 PM
Oh God, Silvana, that was horrendous. I couldn't bear to read the whole thing, but this paragraph stuck out:
"The answer to this question will bring us the answer to the propriety of courtship as a model for a daughter's pre-marriage relationship with a prospective suitor. For the crux of the courtship question is not empirical, but principal. I define courtship as the discovery of a life-partner for a daughter under the direct oversight of the father. Any man seeking to beg, borrow or steal a daughter's hand without her father's endorsement is seeking to gain, in unlawful ways, "property" not his own. Daughters are Daddy's girls in the objective sense, and this particular daughter rejoices in that truth. I am owned by my father. If someone is interested in me, he should see him."
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:04 PM
This is a grey area, but I don't think you set up any strawmen.
In a) and b), I think the drinkers (Joe and the woman) are both primarily to blame for their own bad results.
In c), I think the guy is an asshole. Probably not rape (certainly nearly impossible to prosecute), but certainly willing to take advantage of someone who has rebuffed him in the past because she's not saying no at the moment.
Now, the line between a, b, and c is very vague, especially when the parties don't know each other; so like LB says in 61, it's really not a bad message to send to guys that they should err on the side of caution when determining whether she's interested, can't be bothered to protest, when she's drunk. There's really no harm in letting her take the initiative.
Because otherwise all the anti-date-rape info (which is what this poster is about, I'm guessing) can be about is telling girls how to avoid it. Don't drink, don't go to the frat, don't hang out with guys, and make sure you don't get drunk because then poor little boy just can't help himself.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:11 PM
"Sir, I've come to ask for your daughter's pie in marriage."
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:11 PM
The property metaphor in that essay is bad, but my God, the age difference!
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:12 PM
Joe, I crossed with you, but I think my last comment addresses your issue. We're not talking about criminal/evidentiary standards for rape, here, we're talking about moral issues.
In (a) and (b), the blackout complicates it -- the subject doesn't know what happened. The other partner (female in (a), male in (b)), if they didn't black out, knows if they raped or otherwise molested an unconscious person, or coerced or aggressively persuaded a drunk into doing something they wouldn't want to do, or conversely, if anything that happened was freely (if impairedly) consented to by all parties. The moral status of the actors is governed by their intent when acting, regardless of how hard that is to know or prove later on.
In the third situation the guy is an asshole, but not a rapist, and the woman used poor judgment (assuming both that she actively consented, and that she wouldn't have if sober. If she didn't actively consent, and he had sex with her anyway, he's a rapist -- if she simply changed her mind, nothing bad happened at all.). Her poor judgment in getting drunk in the company of someone she knew wanted to take advantage of her relieves him of criminal responsibility, but he remains an asshole (to the extent that he knows that she will wake up unhappy about what she has done. If he honestly thinks that her drunken consent is evidence that she's actually changed her mind and wants to have sex with him, he's not even an asshole.) I'm not seeing a huge problem in resolving this one.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:13 PM
Don't drink, don't go to the frat, don't hang out with guys, and make sure you don't get drunk because then poor little boy just can't help himself.
The better advice is: bring a friend who will watch out for you.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:13 PM
Cala,
What's so wrong with waiting for an enthusiastic 'yes'?
Well, depending on the person, that may be a very long wait. I happen to know a strict Catholic who couldn't give an enthusiastic "yes" for a couple years even after we got married. The "sex is dirty"meme was firmly etched into her mind.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:14 PM
As practical advice, 69 is spot on. (That was actually what I was thinking with Joe's (c) -- they were in a group setting? What the hell were her friends thinking?)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:16 PM
Does Labs know to a certainty there aren't similar signs in the women's restroom? I think he owes us a research trip.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:20 PM
The better advice is: bring a friend who will watch out for you.
Good advice, but as whose-fault-will-it-be prevention it's kind of useless. Your friend might get drunk, too. Or worse, if you went to the party without a friend, you're fair game (because if you were smart, you would have brought a friend).
Tripp, yeah, I know. But in the context of a drunken girl flirting with a guy whose hoping he'll get laid, I think it's good advice to tell him to slow down. If she really wants to jump him, and he stops, she'll let him know, ya know? What's the worst that can happen?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:20 PM
I think "enthusiastic 'yes'" is problematic. In my experience, everything both is and seems more enthusiastic when alcohol is added to it. Also - what Tripp said, a bit. I got into one longish relationship purely as a function of boredom. Alternatively, the situation in which both parties are interested, and neither will move off the mark is the stuff of boilerplate romances. I'm not sure that the early beginnings of relationships are always that enthusiastic. The rule should be no sex until later.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:21 PM
As practical advice, 69 is spot on.
At the Mineshaft.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:25 PM
(Is the apostropher a special beer bottle that you can get a $1.25 for?)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:26 PM
I guess you'll have to buy me and take me home to find out.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:31 PM
Get a room, already!
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:32 PM
I think "enthusiastic 'yes'" is problematic.
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you. Rather than saying "enthusiastic", think of it like this -- don't have sex with someone (to the best of your understanding at the time, recognizing that your understanding might also be impaired) unless you're sure that if if she were standing in her own bedroom, with the option of shutting and locking the door in your face and sleeping alone, that she'd invite you in. Consent achieved through pestering, confusing, embarrassing or frightening a drunk, while it may be sufficient to cover you against legal liability, is not sufficient to make you not an asshole.
There's a real problem in talking about this stuff with decent guys, in that women have more experience with the assholes than decent guys do. Even if only 2% (number invented for convenience) of guys would dream of attempting rape or lesser forms of sexual coercion, those guys seem to do it a lot, so a lot of women run into them. Bad behavior in this context can be a problem for women generally, without in any way being characteristic of men generally.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:34 PM
I thought you and Weiner had booked all the rooms. With bunny slippers!
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:35 PM
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you.
Which is often a huge problem in discussing issues of consent, one that goes unacknowledged; the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Maybe 'enthusiastic' gave the wrong sense to it. How about 'unambiguous yes' instead of 'absence of a clear 'no' '?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:42 PM
I thought you and Weiner had booked all the rooms
The hotel staff inform me that the following conversation was recorded on the security cameras:
BG offered throatily, "I'll ring for some peach schnapps." To which Weiner replied, "With you, darling, that won't be necessary." Indeed, his bunny slippers were looking distinctly less lop-eared.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:45 PM
Re: 80. Yeah, I knew that would rebound in my face, but I still had to say it. And no, no goddamn bunny slippers.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:46 PM
I think you're a decent guy who is looking at a rule that covers a situation you wouldn't be in, and worrying that it might apply to you
At my age (roughly yours), I no longer need to worry about these things. Nobody can handle the day-after effects of alcohol well enough to get well and truly drunk. But I think people are misdescribing how these sort of things go. An awful lot of mating, both long and short term, is a function of getting one party or the other to stop obsessing about Ms./Mr. Perfect and get on with Ms./Mr. Good Enough.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:47 PM
Lop-eared!
(Peach schnapps? Ew.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:48 PM
the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Exactly. The point needs to be made that if you're the kind of guy who is happily participating in a discussion like this, and if you're concerned by something you did that you thought at the time wasn't a bad thing to to do, it's almost certainly not what we're talking about.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:49 PM
But I think people are misdescribing how these sort of things go. An awful lot of mating, both long and short term, is a function of getting one party or the other to stop obsessing about Ms./Mr. Perfect and get on with Ms./Mr. Good Enough.
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:52 PM
The point needs to be made that if you're the kind of guy who is happily participating in a discussion like this, and if you're concerned by something you did that you thought at the time wasn't a bad thing to to do, it's almost certainly not what we're talking about.
We're not talking about voting for Reagan?
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:53 PM
You have to get a woman drunk enough to forget about Mr. Perfect?
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:54 PM
Did you get someone drunk and talk them into voting for Reagan? Otherwise, no.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:54 PM
I'd have gone with, "'If you want it, I have some peach schnapps.' To which Weiner replied, 'Biscuit conditional! With you, darling, that won't be necessary.'..."
And now I'll go back to being disturbed about reading and suggesting a revision on this.
Posted by washerdreyer | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:55 PM
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
True story. At one of my frat parties, while playing a drinking game, the young hottie next to me who I've seen before, for maybe a month, but who hasn't ever said much to me says "Lets go upstairs."
To my room. Do we go? She is tipsy, maybe drunk, near as I can tell.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 12:57 PM
92 -- I think you do. If it had been a tipsy/drunk guy, and he asked the question of a girl he hadn't said much to in the past, it would go entirely unremarked, right?
Posted by Joe Drymala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:00 PM
I would say you wouldn't have been wrong to on those facts. I can see esthetic arguments for not having casual sex with someone who you have reason to suspect might regret it in the morning, but it's not clear whether those apply in this situation.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:00 PM
Note to self: peach schnapps for BG, bunny slippers for Cala....
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:01 PM
Doesn't seem to be wrong to go upstairs on these facts. She's tipsy-drunk, not hammered; she seems to be a pretty active agent (i.e., this isn't an unremarked groping).
So, do you want to go up the stairs?
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:04 PM
I don't know where I got the reputation for liking peach schnapps. I don't actually think I've ever had any. (Can't stand raspberry stoly though)
When I was in the 8th grade, I had some peach sparkling wine in France that I thought was quite good. I don't know whether I would care for it now.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:05 PM
Arg.
There's supposed to be a 'the only question is, so...' in there.
Arg.
I am not hitting on Tripp (note to Tripp's wife.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:05 PM
So put away those bunny slippers, Tripp!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:09 PM
Forget the bunny slippers; I feared he might disappear to 'Sweden'.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:11 PM
92: a gentleman would probably say "no darling, you're drunk". A true gentleman would then not go on about the story to his mates incessantly for the next few weeks, but I would say that this would be above and beyond the call of duty.
Perhaps a catchy slogan for the urinals, covering both the sexual and hypothetical watch cases would be
"It is wrong to get by alcohol what you could not obtain simply by begging".
(I remember some dialogue from a Willy Russell play once that went:
"ya wanna come home with me?"
"what for?"
"a pizza and a fuck"
"what kind of pizza?")
Posted by dsquared | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:19 PM
You know, the hotel staff mistranscribed the security video tape. The conversation actually went something like this:
"If you want it, I have some some peach schnapps," offered BG throatily.
"Biscuit conditional! And unnecessary, for if you'll have me, my bunny slippers are feeling distinctly less lop-eared," replied Wiener.
"If you don't mind my saying so, that was also a biscuit conditional, Weiner."
"So was that! And if you want a nice guy, I'm trying to be sensitive!"
"If you criticize my conditionals when we're about to make love, I'm tired of this liaison," sobbed BG, and stormed down to the hotel bar to order a shot of schnapps, neat, while Weiner was left alone with his slippers.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:19 PM
I don't stop by here nearly enough.
Posted by Ugh | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:23 PM
This, I don't follow at all in the context of the discussion.
Well, hell. I haven't really been very clear, have I? Sorry about that; I have a head cold, and I keep running out energy to think clearly.
1. I absolutely agree with #79, at a minimum.
2. What I meant is that I re: Mr. Perfect/Mr. Good Enough -
I don't think people go to parties with clearly set predefined intentions about who to hook-up with or not. At best, they have something of a preference list. That list changes as the hour grows longer and the fifth grows smaller. Most vulgarly, for men, it's the case of beer goggles; I assume women have the same thing.
From the other side of the potential seminal transaction, you go in sure that the person you have a crush on would like you if they got to know you better, or got to know the person they were interested in better, or whatever. So you go in believing that your possible person's prior intentions are not set and not the sole measure of the validity of the transaction.
The party acts as a clearinghouse. Two people have been drinking, and they end up together. It strikes me as entirely possible that one person's preference line-up may have changed because of, among other things, alcohol. It's also possible that it changed because he got to know you better, etc. No one sorts that out at the moment of action, though.
In specific, I remember ending up with someone I did not intend to end up with because I felt guilty about prior flirting. I didn't feel comfortable going after someone else in front of her, and I felt a certain obligation to be friendly. That thought process + alcohol meant we ended up hooking up that night. We dated for a few months thereafter.
I'm not sure that's much clearer.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:24 PM
Well, I was going to say that someone wrote slash fiction about me but got bored and gave up. Now I'm the guy who can't score in slash fiction. Not an improvement, I think.
(FTR: The first four are bona fide biscuit--actually 3 might be an utterance modifier, and I'm not sure whether I think biscuit conditionals are utterance modifier conditionals. And "biscuit conditional" is a compliment, so no need for tears, BG.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:27 PM
That all seems to me to fall under the heading of "Finding sex partners while drunk? Often a bad idea, despite the fact that it's an utterly conventional thing to do." While drinking can certainly lead to finding oneself in bed with someone one wouldn't have been in bed with without the booze, I don't think that relates to the issues of consent we're talking about without an intent to coerce on either party's behalf.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:33 PM
If we're requiring an intent to coerce, I can't imagine what's controversial here.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:36 PM
I'll never forget about Mr Perfect.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:51 PM
Because we're saying that an intent to coerce can (for purposes of moral opprobrium if not legal liability) include situations in which consent was obtained, if though coercive tactics (deceptive pushing of drinks on an inexperienced drinker, etc.).
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:53 PM
Well I hope we all agree with 109.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:55 PM
Well, of course. There are people who dare to disagree with me? (Bow before Giblets! BOW!!)
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 1:59 PM
I KNEW IT! Anyone want to take bets on the composition of the Fafblog?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:00 PM
Cala,
Arg.
I am not hitting on Tripp (note to Tripp's wife.)
Ah. Well, I suppose the approximately one minute of fantasy you gave me is at least something.
Truth is my wife laughs at people hitting on me. She thinks it is funny.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:00 PM
I only wish I were that funny.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:01 PM
The line is between persuasion and coercion, and coercion includes the indirect method of coercing someone to have alcohol.
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:04 PM
Apparently the humor is in my reaction - getting all puffed up and thinking I am "all that."
Posted by Tripp | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:07 PM
So does 114 mean "I wish I were hitting on Tripp"?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:10 PM
I think it means she wishes she were Tripp's wife. Or Tripp.
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:11 PM
Whoops, 114 was a response to 112, which appeared to take my claim to be Giblets seriously.
While your wife may laugh when people hit on you, I merely sit back and admire their acumen.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:12 PM
I thought Fafblog were out(ed).
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:12 PM
Really? Who is/are it/they?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:12 PM
[cue vague mumblings about "some guy named 'chris' from Brown"]
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:14 PM
I thought Fafblog were out(ed).
I was told it was North Carolina production, but I never got that confirmed.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:15 PM
I'm not Fafblog, either.
Posted by Standpipe Bridgeplate | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:16 PM
I was gonna write out his whole name. Am I not allowed to do that?
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:17 PM
I'm not entirely comfortable, if they haven't announced it themselves, or acknowledged it somewhere, with outing them (again) here.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:19 PM
If you googlep/r&00$f it, I don't see why you shouldn't.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:19 PM
Although, given that I'm not going to know the name, I also don't see why you should. But it's one guy rather than a trio of brilliant weirdos?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:20 PM
Ogged has given sufficient clues to google it. Apparently not an NC product.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:21 PM
There have been semi-persistent rumors that one person involved is a woman. (And I think the original security breach had to do with the domain that hosted the old e-mail addresses.)
Honestly, in this case, I think we have to go with "SB who denied it, supplied it." Although that would work better if there were a pronoun.
Seriously, don't do it, even Google-proof, is what I say.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:22 PM
Okay, seriously, I could show you hyperlinks that identify, with considerable circumstantial evidence, who/what he/they are. But also seriously, being as we respect pseudonymity here, I could see that I shouldn't. I could email you, LB, if you want.
Posted by slolernr | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:23 PM
The "vague mumblings" was about the cicumstantiality of all the evidence I've seen. But if it is just one guy, that's one talented guy.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:25 PM
I googled, and don't really need to know any more. Still, a truly, truly funny guy.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:27 PM
As Fafnir points out somewhere, Chris is the guy who will get to ride on the motorcycle, if he cheers up.
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:28 PM
Fafblog only gets 2500 visits/day?!
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:30 PM
They don't post that much. I click on the blogs I read like a monkey on crack, and I love Fafblog immoderately, but I only check them about once a week because there's not that much volume there.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:32 PM
A lot of their readership is probably by RSS. I get a crazy percentage of my Sitemeter hits via google image searches, but I know that a lot of my regular readers don't show up in Sitemeter b/c they're getting it through RSS or LiveJournal Friends page feeds.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:42 PM
Ah, ok, I didn't know how Sitemeter works.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:43 PM
IIRC, Sitemeter won't catch anybody who visits with JavaScript disabled, either. Something's weird with FB's meter, though. Every visit shows as referral: unknown.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 2:45 PM
(late to the party here)
44: I have a friend in almost the exact same situation, he sees nothing wrong with continually sleeping with a woman who's husband is in Iraq/Afghanistan (can't remember which). In his mind, cheating only occurs if you're the party in the preexisting relationship. Otherwise, fair game.
81: the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Yeah, this took me a while to get. Freshman year, we had a bunch of programs warning us that we were all potential date-rapists, and so I spent the whole year in a state of panic after each liason, wondering when the cops would come pounding on the door. It took someone explaining that the fact that I was worrying about it at all meant I wasn't one of those guys for me to relax.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:09 PM
ack, forgive the awkward sentence structure there.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:10 PM
he sees nothing wrong with continually sleeping with a woman who's husband is in Iraq/Afghanistan
Now that's low. He should be sleeping with a woman whose husband is Assistant VP of Marketing for Wal-Mart.
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:11 PM
Awkward sentence structures are fine, one-of-many-Matts. The whose/who's thing, though, is a horse of a different color.
Posted by apostropher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:13 PM
A lot of Fafblog!'s readers probably take the RSS route, too, because their site will burn your eyeballs out more quickly than the Ark of the Covenant.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:19 PM
And aesthetically speaking, I think it's cheating to read Fafblog! from the RSS. The searing pain is part of the performance.
Posted by Armsmasher | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:21 PM
Yup. That's why I rarely visit the site (same with the bandarlog).
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:22 PM
142: My thoughts exactly. People have been getting metaphorically screwed by Wal-Mart for years, it's about time someone made it literal.
143: I'm grammatically color-blind.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:22 PM
Me are ungrammatically colorblind. Except for the colorblindness bit.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 3:38 PM
"the nice, decent guys are worried that they might turn out to be date rapists (and the assholes never seem to worry).
Yeah, this took me a while to get. Freshman year, we had a bunch of programs warning us that we were all potential date-rapists"
That just seems a wierd thing to worry about. I can't say I've ever had that worry, and don't think I've ever met anyone who has said they had that worry.
Surely you know yourself and you know yourself-when-drunk well enough to know your not the kind of person that would do that sort of thing?
I realise the whole wierd drinking thing in the US means that many americans get to a pretty advanced age without acquiring the ability to judge their alcohol consumption and as such the whole "blacking out and not remembering what heinous thing they may have done" may be more common. This may slightly colour my intuitions here... [I may be wrong about this]
But seriously, I know myself well enough to know that the worst thing I'd do when drunk is talk a lot of boring incoherent crap ...
Posted by Matt McGrattan | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 8:01 PM
Lots of men in the US seem to have been traumatized by college date-rape education. I'm not clear on exactly why -- the bits of it I saw weren't all that ambiguous -- but it appears to be a common problem.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 8:34 PM
It's not about the blacking out or not remembering, actually. That almost never happens to me. It's a reaction to the message of "don't assume consent", I think. Being a not-that-wise 18 year old, I got the impression that anything other than a signed and notarized consent form was risking rape. I'm exaggerating, but only a bit. Also, since they didn't really take pains to distinguish between "drunk(ish) and willing" and drunk to the point of incoherence, the implication to me was "hands off if she's had any alcohol." Which messed with my head a bit.
I'm not saying this is necessarily bad, if anything people should err on the side of caution, but it caused a fair amount of stress for a little while, and from talking to other people it seems to be a rather common feeling.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 5-05 8:50 PM
Re 150 & 151:
For those who already had a general lack of confidence around (and experience with) women, the fact that any public discussion of sex was inextricably linked with the issue of date rape really did not help matters much. While erring on the side of caution is genuinely good, a pervasive sense of timidity and tentativeness is distinctly unsexy.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:07 AM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:13 AM
So the date-rape education stuff scared guys by not sufficiently making it clear that it was discussing "things which would be bad things to do, and would make you a bad person for doing them, despite the fact that you might be surprised to find out that they met the legal definition of rape" rather than "situations that can get you in trouble with the law", sounds like. Perhaps a disclaimer, in such educational materials that "If you can successfully avoid having sex with any woman who you have good reason to believe does not consent to such sex, there is essentially no chance that you will be disciplined or prosecuted for rape." (With "essentially no chance" intended to cover the theoretically possible entirely fictional allegation of rape.)
Given that this is a trivially easy standard to meet for anyone that isn't a sociopath, a disclaimer like that might reduce the tension levels around campus a fair amount.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:23 AM
[redacted]
Posted by [redacted] | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:39 AM
I'm not a man, but I could envision another source of anxiety beyond fear of getting yourself into trouble with the law. If you're a young, insecure college student, it might seem sort of improbable that any woman would want to sleep with you, and in spite of recent decades' changes in sexual values you've still probably to some extent been socialized to believe that women never really want sex as much as men do. If you swirl some date-rape education into that mix, some college students might worry their own actual and potential actions are coercive even when they're not in the slightest, because on some level they think that the woman must not really want it, or if she does, doesn't want it with him.
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:43 AM
What an odd link in that context, FL. The linked story is about an accusation of an attempted violent rape, and one with enough support to get to a trial, where the accused was found not guilty. Obviously, in light of the verdict, it's possible for the accusation to have been false, but it's not a situation that fits into the "innocent remark that got taken the wrong way" category.
And Tia, you have a good point. Possibly the educational effort that should be made is to encourage college boys to withhold sex from women that are insufficiently enthusiastic about the idea.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:52 AM
Re 156: You've hit the nail on the head, Tia.
I personally was not so much worried about legal ramifications or any nebulous threat of prosecution. And I don't think I was bothered by any formal, university-sponsored date rape education stuff. (In fact, I can't recall ever being exposed to any such university-sponsored programs.) For me, the fact that date rape was such an all-pervasive topic made it difficult for me believe in the existence of the "enthusiastic yes" mentioned upthread.
Posted by My Alter Ego | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 8:55 AM
some college students might worry their own actual and potential actions are coercive even when they're not in the slightest, because on some level they think that the woman must not really want it, or if she does, doesn't want it with him.
thus summarizing the insecurities of freshmen everywhere.
It's not even really a fear of legal ramifications (though that does play a part), it's more of a moral thing. And the fear isn't really of false accusations, it's of finding out that what you thought were acceptable actions are actually not. Which is an irrational fear for the vast majority of guys.
Posted by Matt F | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:00 AM
Is it just me, or is Erin O'Connor offering a seriously twisted reading of the blockquoted paragraph in this entry here?
(Relevance: The link in 155 prompted me to look at her main page, and that reminded me why O'Connor is on my "mistrust" list.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:02 AM
160: I don't even have to click the link to know that the answer is "yes." Real question: what's with Labs and mendacious women?
Posted by ogged | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:04 AM
I'm sending out the Tia slashfic Batsignal....
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:08 AM
Erin O'Connor or the Galt: who is a more appropriate receiver of Abu Labs' superkoranic powers?
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:12 AM
Yeah, I know it's not the best case, but I'm in a rush. Why then am I reading a blog? You all know the answers-- if you look within yourselves. Anyway, the underlying point is that it's not entirely unheard of for administrators to play fast and loose with due process when it comes to these sorts of allegations. Hence, "trust us" is not the most comforting advice when it comes from people with veto power on your degree. That isn't a case of an innocent remark becoming a major problem, but it might be a case where university procedure leaves something to be desired. To echo an argumentative strategy earlier on this thread, if you don't believe that colleges and universities make these kinds of errors, you haven't spent enough time at faculty meetings.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:13 AM
Agreed with 164. 163: Why can't we have both?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:23 AM
Agreement with 164 is not meant to suggest that I think things were better when sexual harassment/date rape was not considered to be an issue at all, and so nothing was done about it/them, even though no one was in danger of being fired/expelled after sketchy university procedure unless maybe they were accused of Communism.
I also note an interesting use of "enough" in "you haven't been to enough faculty meetings/frat parties." And that if Tia isn't going to supply slashes I will, dammit!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:29 AM
I agree with 164, but I think that it cuts both ways. After one of my Freshman orientation sessions, the woman sitting next to me and I agreed that if we were ever raped, we would not call our proctor/RA/ tutor or the campus police, but instead go straight to the city police. We figured that there was too much of an incentive for the university to cover up the crime statistics. I also think they could botch up evidence and things badly--because they are not law enforcement--thereby ruining any chance of prosecution.
Posted by Bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:30 AM
I think we can all agree that it would be better for all involved if colleges and universities had stables of prostitutes of both genders for student use.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:34 AM
You know, on Tia's point, I have lots of somewhat confused thoughts. While I tend toward the moderately socially conservative in personal conduct and in what I believe to be well-advised, I think there's a huge social value in continuing the cultural change that allows for more direct expression of sexual desire by women for this very reason.
(Droning on about my cross-cultural experiences again -- everyone does know that I was in the Peace Corps, right?) In Samoa, premarital sex is strictly forbidden, particularly for girls, and forbidden in the sense that getting the crap beaten out of you (not all that infrequently to the point of death) is what's likely to happen if you get caught. On the other hand, the standard reason to get married is that someone's pregnant -- regardless of the rules, the kids are going to have sex. There is also a lot, and by American standards an insane amount, of rape and sexual violence. My understanding of a partial explanation for the higher levels of rape is that a girl or woman is under huge pressure not to say yes to extra-marital sex, and so the thought process "She'd consent if she could -- she really wants me to do this despite the fact that she's screaming and fighting to get away" is a much more persuasive one in the mind of the rapist.
Now, this is only applicable to modern-day America in the very mildest of ways, but I get the impression that what's bothering all the worried college boys is a (in almost all cases false) fear that they're falling into a very, very mild version of that same thought process. It's much less of a worry in the US, because of course here women and girls are free to seek sex out or to consent to it, and so it would be very hard to sincerely believe that one was justified in overriding resistance on the grounds that the resisting woman really wanted to consent but wasn't free to.
The solution here has to be, I think, to really work on the remains of the taboo keeping women from expressing their sexual desires. The situation that Tripp described in 70 still exists (women who won't consent enthusiastically to sex, even when they'd like to, and men's belief that any given woman is likely to fall into that category) and that's what creates a great deal of the ambiguity that upsets people about this issue. Really, if both partners aren't enthusiastic about the process, how much fun is anyone going to be having?
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:36 AM
167 also strikes me as absolutely right. University police are there to protect the university's reputation rather than to enforce the laws. I could tell you a story about our own alma mater. But not in public. Just let me kick off these bunny slippers....
(Students also sometimes get away with a wrist-slap for some pretty serious financial frauds. I mean, things involving dummy organizations and the like.)
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:37 AM
Re 167-- there have been rumors here (before my time, but fairly well-documented, from what I can tell) of the administration sweeping a rape case under the rug. By shocking coincidence, the offender's last name is also the name of a building on campus. What are the odds?
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:44 AM
The offender's last name was "Hall"?
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 9:47 AM
169: Of course, what cuts the other way is that it's a lot harder to get people to understand date rape in a culture where everyone expects that a) young women will have sex and b) that some young women may regret having sex later. Too many times I've heard (more in high school; hopefully they got educated later), "All that date rape means is that she regretted it in the morning." "What, she didn't fight back? Oh, right, it was rape."
Which I think is part of the reason that some of the young men get really obsessively weirded out over this; date rape and regretted casual sex get conflated, and they're worried that the administration, their friends, her friends, won't be able to tell the difference. This leads, I would expect, to them tending to give real date rapists the benefit of the doubt; "it could be me if my ex wanted to ruin my life."
Which is why we need a better sex education. By the time I was a senior in high school, we knew all about STDs, diagrams of various body parts, and that 1 out of 8 women get raped in college, and that 'no meant no'. Beyond that? Well, guys were out to get sex and women were going to hold it from them. I can't help but thinking it would have been much better for the message to say, hey, women want sex just as much as you do, if you take it slow and she wants more, she'll let you know. It wouldn't ruin all the awkwardness of freshman year of college romances, but it sure would make it easier for the good guys to relax (and have no sympathy for the bad guys.)
Posted by Cala | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:10 AM
Well, yes. Exactly.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:16 AM
I've heard that some of the more liberal churches are doing sex education that goes beyond the basics of plumbing. It's the kind of stuff that wouldn't be appropriate for schools, but it talks about sex and relationships and the meaning of it all without making kids feel guilty.
Here's a description of what the UCC is doing.
Posted by bostoniangirl | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:22 AM
Dr. O'Connor and Miss Galt clutched each other on the edge of the roof of the university library, their blond tresses intermingling in the wind, as the deranged mob of zombie gender studies professors and union organizers marched ever closer. Blood dripped from their mandibles, for they'd just finished feeding on the flesh of a management communication class in the business school. But still they wanted more, and the two ladies had only a 2x4 with which to protect themselves.
"This may be the end, Miss Galt." The pixieish Dr. Connor leaned her head into the bosom of the Amazonian Miss Galt. Miss Galt enveloped her, kissing the top of her head and breathing her sweet verbena perfume. "It may be an illusion," the professor continued, "but I feel so safe with you."
"I'll die defending you, Dr. Connor," said Miss Galt. "It would be such a shame for the world to lose an intellect like yours."
They could see the whites of the zombies' eyeballs. Miss Galt decided to engage the mob in a contest of wits: "I've been a deranged mob of zombie gender studies professors and union organizers and you do not know what you're talking about. Our nubile porcelain flesh is not at all delicious." But she was not sure if she spoke the truth as she throught she felt Dr. Connor's lips brushing against her nipples.
The mob did not respond, but only continued on their inexorable course.
"There's no hope" cried Dr. Connor, "I only hope that tomorrow the campus newspaper does not claim that we deserved it because I was so beautiful, my hair was so golden, and I dressed in such beautiful skirt-suits, and was thus a minion of the patriarchy," when suddenly she saw a dark object in the sky traveling towards them.
"It's a bird," Miss Galt.
"It's a plane," said Dr. O'Connor.
"It's, it's...a man in a pink fur-lined cape astride a giant flying Koran?" wondered Miss Galt.
"Now we're truly done for!" screamed Dr. O'Connor. "He must be the commander of the forces of political correctness. His armies will be worked into a frenzy! No amount of tender pink flesh will be enought to sate them."
But the caped man, the initials GAL emblazoned across his chest, merely alighted on the ledge of the roof and fixed his eyes upon the mob. Two red hot beams of light shot from his eyeballs, and the mob was engulfed in a fiery force field. One by one, they fell on their backs and began moaning in pain...or was it pleasure?
It hardly mattered, for the man ushered the two ladies onto his Koran, and flew them high above the clouds. Their clothes grew damp from exposure to the moisture and clung to their skin. The air was so thin they were forced to gasp for breath.
"What is your name? And what strange weapon did you use on them," asked Dr. O'Connor.
"I am Gayatollah Abu-Labs, announced the man in the pink cape. "And I must not speak of my methods; the matter is not fit for ladies' ears."
"Why Gayatollah," sighed Miss Galt, "I had no idea Muslims could be so...forceful--for the right cause that is."
"Yes Gayatollah," squealed Dr. O'Connor, "You are very forceful. I've been looking for a man like you all my life."
"Dr. O'Connor, I saw him first!" snapped Miss Galt.
"Ladies, ladies!" Gayatollah ejaculated, "I don't fly that way. But I have looked hard and deep into your soul, and I think your true passion lies elsewhere."
Dr. O'Connor looked at Miss Galt, her eyes misting. Miss Galt felt a strange new stab in her loins....
Posted by Tia | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:33 AM
We have a winnah!
Posted by Matt Weiner | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:36 AM
I'm not sure that we've advanced past the persuasion/coercion boundary that Tripp referenced. I agree that women should be comfortable expressing their desire, and I think parents of daughters everywhere should teach their charges that there isn't anything wrong with giving up the rhythm nice and easy.
Posted by SomeCallMeTim | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:36 AM
Wonderful, Tia. So how about Lizard Breath's analysis and critique of Margaret Mead now?
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:43 AM
Thesis: posting weird signs above urinals is morally obligatory, because it leads to an increase in aggregate mirth. Tia's post is simply the clincher. Discuss.
Posted by FL | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:44 AM
Coming in late and cautiously, but date rape rules must have a bad effect on women who enjoy fliting and playing hard-to-get in a flirty way. Likewise shy women who initially send off mixed or negative messages even though they actually might be interested eventually.
Posted by John Emerson | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:52 AM
John-
Short version linked here. It's a parenthesis in the middle of a long comment.
Slightly longer version -- if you read Coming of Age In Samoa, Mead was both a good and accurate reporter of anything she saw with her own eyes (there's a 'day in the life of a Samoan village' section that's dead on), and insanely, laughably wrong about anything she didn't. The Samoan sense of humor is both incessant and based on the deadpan put-on -- she managed to live in Samoa for a year without figuring that out, and wrote a book as if absurd jokes were accurate reports of daily life.
And Tia is a lunatic genius.
Posted by LizardBreath | Link to this comment | 10- 6-05 10:54 AM