In comments to a great troll beat-down by Sady of Tigerbeatdown, belmanoir quotes the troll and adds what might be the missing piece to an critically important puzzle (emphasis mine)
“Another thing, why is it always up to the guy to stay sober enough to stop the act? If I go home with a girl after drinking, and we both have sex wasted as hell, she can wake up and say that she didn’t want it. Then I go to jail. Where does that seem right at all? How about don’t get drunk enough to agree to sex with a random stranger unless you are prepared to accept the consequences? That’s how you ‘ask for it’.”
I think I love it so much because Tom is identifying the consequences of HIM getting drunk enough to agree to have sex with a random stranger as a POSSIBLE RAPE CHARGE and he doesn’t seem to want to accept that at all! By his logic, guys who have drunk sex are “asking” to be accused of rape. And I can’t help feeling like that wasn’t his point.
Because seriously, it stands to reason that if drunken women are “asking to be raped” then drunken men are “asking to be charged with rape.” The symmetry is beautiful not least because those most inclined to be… or at least to sympathize with… drunken men are going to be saying “now wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense!” To which the answer, obviously, would be exactly!
To be honest I think it actually is problematic that date rapists are pretty consistently as hammered as their victims. But it’s never been sufficient to say we should manage men’s alcohol consumption any more than it’s sufficient to claim we should manage women’s. Still you can say to men, as we evidently insist on saying to women “if you go out drinking then you’re asking for it.”
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More generally, though, I like belmanoir proposal that if drunken women1 are asking to be raped then, well, you’re asking to be charged with rape for having sex with drunken women.
What’s nice about that construction is that it works even in the Seth Rogan movie where his rent-a-cop rapes a profoundly intoxicated woman while he’s sober.
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Good informal metric: if someone’s too drunk for you to feel comfortable with them driving, they’re probably too drunk to competently either give or to discern consent.
That doesn’t mean they won’t consent when they’re hammered. It doesn’t mean they won’t attempt to discern it. It just means that, as with driving competence, they’re not going to be up for doing it competently.
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I think the biggest concern here is that it feels patronizing to make determinations about other people’s competence. But hello, car keys? Which wouldn’t be a metaphor in the first place if intoxication and competent decision-making played well together.
As for “well it was her/his decision, who was I to judge?” Doesn’t work for bartenders, and it only sometimes works for social hosts. So I’d say nope.
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Final point: yeah, you say, but you and/or your partner love tipsy sex. How do you get there if competent consent goes out the window? It’s hard to imagine anyone objecting if you and your partner(s), together, to get drunk and screw before you get drunk and screw.
[1: The discussion was framed in stereotypical gendered terms but the principle is obviously general. —fl]
Submitted by 2916 (not verified) on Fri, 2009-05-08 06:12.
To be honest I think it actually is problematic that date rapists are pretty consistently as hammered as their victims.
Is this actually true, though?
My understanding, largely based on a highly publicized and debated case that happened at Brown while I was an undergrad there, is that the idea of criminalizing "tipsy sex" is largely a smokescreen. The "she said" version of that wasn't a case of two people being somewhat impaired, it was a case of someone who was intoxicated to the point of vomiting and blacking out being raped by someone who was intoxicated to a lesser extent but still capable of action. (The "he said" version, which was more a claim of "tipsy sex," is less relevant because few people not made of straw argue that that's rape.)
The problem is that we look at inebriation as a binary; you're either sober or drunk. (Hence your informal metric, which doesn't really work for me; my own experience with alcohol is that I become an unsafe driver long before I find my judgment significantly impaired.) We assume that "both people are drunk" means that "both people are similarly incapacitated," and that's not necessarily true.
[Doh! I should have been a bit more discriminating in my blanket statements. I tend to look at it in terms of threshold drunkenness, not maximal. Someone can remain capable of action well past the point where they're capable of competent decision making. (Again, the car-keys metaphor wouldn't be s metaphor at all otherwise.) But be that as it may, intoxication on the part of perpetrators is an issue because intoxication *facilitates* perpetration, not because it serves as an excuse. And what I'm really excited about is the metric on the part of victims because there's clear precedent: if someone is intoxicated by the standards of car-key withholding (or, in bartender/host terms, by the standards of liability) then we should respect the individual enough not to trust the competence of their consent. Or lack thereof. But getting the message to the Seth Rogans and other MRAs of the world about erring on the side of caution wouldn't be a bad thing at all. Thanks! --fl]
Submitted by 2916 (not verified) on Sun, 2009-05-10 14:38.
I wonder if it's a matter of differing mental images of "intoxicated by the standards of car-key withholding"? A quarter-century or so ago (the first few years I was old enough to drink legally), "too drunk to drive" was pretty drunk, and the notion that one could be somewhat intoxicated but not too drunk to drive was still common. That's been gradually shifting downward, in part from a realization that it's not just impaired judgment but impaired reflexes/reaction time (which happens at a lower level of intoxication) that makes someone unable to drive safely. I'd much rather ask someone to hand over their keys at a point when their reflexes are impaired but they still have the competence/judgment to recognize it.
Sunflower
[Well, except that clinical experiments suggest judgment begins to decline before reflexes do. But in general, yes. Asking sooner rather... for keys or anything else... is probably a good idea. Thanks, Sunflower. --fl]
Submitted by 2916 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-05-11 06:54.
It's a reasonable metric, all right. But there's one massive difference between driving and sex: No one is *trying* to get their companion too drunk to drive safely.
[Agreed, Sungold. But... thing is there's that MRA paranoid thing about "false rape charges." Yeah, it's bullshit, but it's leverage-able. And not even that far off: saying "it's date rape if someone is too drunk to drive -- even if they say yes" would tend to be... clarifying. Heck, it would even be clarifying for the subset of people who wait till they're tanked to say yes. Point being not to inhibit drinking, period, but to reverse its polarity in the context of acquaintance rape. --fl]
Submitted by 2916 (not verified) on Mon, 2009-05-11 12:51.
Yes, I get your point and it's a good one, especially with regard to reversing the polarity.
But my point was a slightly different one. I was just pointing out that there's a subset of guys who will intentionally get a woman too drunk to resist, and so your helpful metric is necessary but not sufficient. We also need cultural change. By now it's socially unacceptable to intentionally get a friend too drunk to drive. Plenty of guys have little compunction admitting they buy girls drinks in order to lower their resistance.
[No, that's perfect, Sungold. Of course deliberately incapacitating anyone with alcohol or drugs in order to rape them is... well... rape! Changing the polarity changes the *perception* of that from "boys will be boys" to "wow, that's actionable sexual assault." Which is exactly what MRAs *worry about* of course.... which makes it *exactly the point!* --fl]
Submitted by 2916 (not verified) on Tue, 2009-05-12 17:29.
Oh, well, Figleaf, if we're specifically targetting the "false rape" crowd, I'd set the bar even lower - like, say, "if you suspect she might have had half a glass of wine in the last year...." I dunno if it'd actually work, but if it did, it'd mean women would have far fewer troglodyte advances to fend off!
I was questioning it more as a general principle (as I think JFP was doing, though we haven't discussed it yet), which is kind of taking it out of context. There's certainly a range of intoxication in which I'm more likely to have poor judgement about how I exercise my decision to consent/decline, but I'm still fully able to choose to consent or decline - my judgement isn't necessarily perfect even when I'm stone-cold sober (as witness the fact that I have an ex-hubby).
Bottom line is, there's a potential risk of "negative outcome" in engaging in sex with someone who's been drinking ('swhy I developed a policy of telling attractive-but-intoxicated prospective partners that I'd be open to sober propositions). Those (of any gender) who aren't self-absorbed realize that, the overwhelming majority of the time, the worst-case "negative outcome" is more on the order of getting a helping of, "Oh, god, I can't believe I slept with you," with one's morning coffee, and make their own choices accordingly; so I guess it is those who don't parse anything short of rape charges as "negative outcome" ('cause the no-sex class always say stuff like that the morning after, right?) we're aiming at here.
Sunflower