Via Amanda Hess of Washington City Paper here’s a cool discussion about alcohol and consent from an organization called SAFERCampus. There’s a lot of good stuff in a single paragraph so I’m slightly reformatting it for clarity.
[T]here is so much defensiveness about alcohol and consent, as though it’s a really really complicated thing. And ya know, I think that for people who are aren’t raised to think about sex as a shared experience in which two people are actively, positively participating, it can actually seem that complicated.
But the reality is that it doesn’t have to be. Having sex with an incapacitated person should be widely understand as rape.
Two drunk people having sex should be aware enough of the other person to have a sense of what is or isn’t consent because they’ve been raised to respect other people, and it’s second nature to them to check and make sure their partner is involved.
I understand this is reductive; that it’s real nice to think about this sexual utopia where things are simple, but perhaps not a realistic picture of how things are now so what’s the point. But I think that we overcomplicate consent; people say that defining consent is making something natural more complicated than it needs to be, but really isn’t something only complicated when it’s unclear?
Wouldn’t the actions themselves be less complicated if we had the complicated conversations beforehand?
It kills me that it’s not obvious that sex is a shared experience between active participants! For all the talk about heartfelt-edness and intimacy and ultimate-icy our actual expectations of sex are barkingly unilateral. And it doesn’t just go one way — not only does institutional thinking from the original Code of Hammurabi to, say, Details Magazine encourages men to be insecurely selfish in their expectations about heterosexual sex, institutional thinking represented by, say, Cosmopolitan Magazine encourages women to be… insecurely selfless about their expectations! No hilarity ensues.
Once you get it that that’s the status quo, though, a heck of a lot of other stuff about “date rape” and “gray area” rape starts to make sense. Particularly the parts about “too unconscious to say no means yes.”
Here’s an experience a friend
Submitted by Thaddeus (not verified) on Tue, 2010-07-20 19:48.Here’s an experience a friend of mine once had.
My friend once went out of town with his band and at a party he met a woman. Both he and her got intoxicated – but not roaring drunk, lose all control intoxicated. She apparently started hitting on him (and this was confirmed by a couple of women – mutual friends – who were at the party). They made out on the porch for an hour before they went up to her room. They spent the night together having what by all accounts was fairly loud sex. Early next morning, my friend had to leave as the band was headed back home while his newfound paramour kept sleeping. He left a nice letter with his name and address for the woman (this was pre-internet by the way), telling her how much fun he had and asking her to get in touch.
Two months later, out of the blue, he receives a letter from the woman telling him how horrible she felt about it all and basically accusing him of taking advantage of her and of committing date rape. The guy read the letter to me because he was honestly confused. “She showed every sign of being ready and willing and enjoying it all. Hell, at one point she was asking me to slap her on the ass and I wouldn’t do it. She even got sort of pissed off because I wouldn’t do it.” This guy considers himself to be a feminist and was one of the men who organized a date rape seminar at our co-op. I have every reason to believe him. A nicer, calmer, less macho guy you couldn’t want to meet. He was very seriously freaked out by the whole thing, wondering if he had halucinated it all, etc. He sent a letter back to the woman and never received an answer. A few months later, he met one of her housemates and went out for a beer and a chat. One thing lead to another and the housemate basically confirmed that this woman had done similar things on many occasions.
A second story…
A few years ago, I met a woman who was taking a summer class here in town. She was an out and about lesbian and claimed to hate heteronormativity. I became very good friends with her and some of her classmates. A few weeks into the class, she told the whole gang about how the year before she’d been given a rape drug in a bar and then had been date raped.
The last week of class, the whole group went out to a gay bar where this women proceded to get drunk and started hitting on every gay man in the club, including my roommate (who later criticized me for bringing “a het woman who couldn’t take a hint” into the bar”). After this caused a few scenes, we all piled into a taxi and went to another bar, this one straight. There, this lesbian snogged onto one of her classmates and started making out with him in public. This went on for two hours. Another classmate who had taken her story of date rape very seriously kept on trying to pull her away, gently, and was publically insulted by the woman for his efforts. He asked me to keep an eye on her as bar time came around “because, you know, the trauma she went through before”. I walked the lesbian and her classmate (who was now covered in hickeys) back to her apartment. She invited him up and she seemed totally lucid – drunk, yes, but far from out of control except for her newfound public bent for heterosexuality. I pulled her aside and said “Look, I’m not your mom, but you DO know what you’re doing, right? You go up there with him and he’s going to want sex.” She clucked her tongue and said “Yeah! DUH!”
So I went on my merry.
The next day, we met for breakfast, along with the guy who had tried to “save” her earlier. She was covered in hickies herself and her comment was “Wow, I must have ate something that disagreed with me last night! Look at how I’ve broken out!” Her girlfriend was going to meet her at the airport, so we decided to level with her about what we’d seen her do the night before. She didn’t remember a single thing after we’d arrived at the gay bar and couldn’t believe our story. I finally had to say, “Honey, those are hickies on your neck, not a rash, and anyone can see that. Now if you still want to have a girlfriend tomorrow night, I think you better sit down and figure out a better story than ‘I ate something that disagreed with me’.”
I had to admit, after she left, that I wondered if this wasn’t going to be the genesis of another someone-put-something-in-my-drink-and-raped-me story.
I have seen a few other stories like the two above unfold. I have no idea at all how common they are in comparison to the cannonic “I-went-to-a-frat-party-and-got-raped” story that’s the stereotypical campus date-rape myth. I personally know three women who have been date-raped and I have every reason to believe their stories. However, I also have heard several stories like the ones I relate above.
Fig, society tells young women not to be a slut and to only have sex when they are in love. Alchohol is a great lowerer of inhibitions. These two things we both know to be true. And we also know that there are plenty of sleazy guys out there who wouldn’t blink twice at the idea of having sex with an incapacitated woman.
But it should be obvious that given a mix of false morality and alchohol, many women – maybe a small minority, but still a significant one – are going to use booze to circumvent their socialization regarding sex. In the first story above, the woman in question had been raised in a very sexually repressive household. In the second story, the woman self-identified as a lesbian and was in a loving relationship with another woman whom she classified as “the only person who ever really cared about me”. Both, for various reasons, wanted to have sex with men and both used booze as an excuse to do that WITHOUT EVER BECOMING INCAPACITATED. And both used “date rape” as a convenient excuse to hide what went on from themselves and others, afterwards.
Am I feeding the myth that “women secretly want it”? No. Because if I swap the gender around and say “There was this big macho homophobic jock who got drunk at a party and ended sleeping with a guy”, I’d wager people would quirk their lips and say “My, my. Isn’t sexual a repression a sad thing and look at how people’s true colors come out under the effects of alchohol.” No one would call this “date rape”, even if the jock said he’d been “taken advantage of” later.
This post isn’t a defense of date rape. What it IS is an explanation of why I don’t immediately believe every story of date rape without other evidence to back it up or without knowing the victim very well indeed. Sexual repression, false morality, immaturity and alchohol are an explosive mix and, when they come together in a way which embarasses or discomfits, it’s the easiest thing in the world to blame the whole thing on an evil, seducing Other who took advantage of this situation.
Gay men were acused of that all the time back in the bad old days. They were supposedly these evil, powerful seducers who made “normal” men (and particularly boys) lose all notion of morality and self. Like Camille Paglia, I think we should be very cautious in intentionally blurring the line between bad sex and rape. You say “hey, stop to make sure that’s what they want” and I agree. But that’s presuming the individual you’re with is acting in a sane and honest manner. Unfortunately, given the way sex is socialized in our society, that isn’t always the case. PLENTY of people out there – men and women – we’ll cheerfully say “Go for it baby!” and then regret it the next morning.
First of all, there is no
Submitted by Laura (not verified) on Mon, 2010-11-08 00:57.First of all, there is no evidence of the woman in your second story using date rape as an excuse. You assume she is going to do that, because you assume she lied the first time, but you don't know that, so I find that a bit problematic. I'm not really sure what your point is, other than, yeah, alcohol lowers inhibitions. True. That doesn't change the fact that when people go beyond the point of lowered inhibitions to being incapacitated, they are unable to give consent. That's still very straightforward.
Like the original post argues, it could, for people who don't have a healthy understanding of what sex is, seem to not be straightforward, and that's the entire point of the post.
Even if you are entirely correct in both of your stories, they're individual stories. Maybe they're exceptions, those will exist. But saying that sometimes, maybe, people could possibly rephrase their "regret" as date rape because they're repressed does not change the parameters of rape in any way, and just serves to falsely complicate a fairly simple issue – which, again, is exactly the point of the original post. And, frankly, it provides fodder for victim-blaming and rape-excusing, whether or not that's your intention.
The stories you have shared
Submitted by Tiggs (not verified) on Mon, 2012-01-30 18:48.The stories you have shared only exemplify how important it is not to have sex with people who are under the influnce of drugs and/or alcohol. Some people can seem completely in control and still be so intoxicated they have no recollection of events the next day. That alone is reason enough not to sleep with someone you do not have a previous sexual relationship with while they are drinking. The fact that she is a self-described lesbian and was wanting to sleep with a man would tell me that she has had too much to drink and is not capable of making an informed decision about what she is doing sexually.
I would also like to state that this goes for men and women. I personally will not have sex with someone who has been drinking. Even if it isn't rape, if someone is unwilling to have sex with me when they are sober I am not willing to have sex with them once they have lowered their inhibitions with some sort of mind altering substance.