Ozy Frantz started a nice conversation about whether "drunk sex" is rape. Since the possible cases under discussion range from one or both parties having only half a glass of wine all the way over to both parties are incompetently black-out drunk I thought I'd reiterate my position.

As for the “tipsy” vs. “drunk” vs. “wasted” distinctions, my hard and fast rule is “if someone is drink enough for you to ask for their keys because they’re too drunk to realize they shouldn’t drive then they’re also too drunk for meaningful consent.

Similarly if you’re drunk enough to realize you shouldn’t drive then you’re also drunk enough to realize you shouldn’t try to accurately determine whether someone else is consenting.

Either way, that’s where I draw line between “tipsy” and “drunk.” It’s also the point where red flags ought to start going up for a) one’s self, b) one’s prospective paramours, and c) friends, onlookers, family members, and especially hosts and bartenders.

I say “especially bartenders” in part I used to be a bartender. In a college town. Where “spinning” drunk women into “consent” was all too often considered par for the course rather than what it actually was.

Which, incidentally, is exactly why “but I do that so it can’t be rape” is such a dire total fucking bullshit metric. As is, incidentally, “but everybody does that so it can’t be rape.” Because you know what… it sure as shooting can be. Not always. Not necessarily. But, yeah, you hear someone say anything like that and it should send up a big red flag.

So I've been thinking a lot (a lot) about issues of consent, of sexual abuse, of "gray areas," of stereotypes and assumptions, and, especially, about accountability. Last summer, here on this blog, at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz, and in various comment threads around the intertubes, I started digging deeper into what I saw as just one or two incidents of violent sexual assault I experienced as a child -- one at age four at the hands of a ~12-year-old neighbor girl, one around age 14 at the hands of a ~17-year-old neighborhood bully.

The more I've been digging into it the more I've come to realize that, you know, I grew up in a culture that was pretty rife with sexual abuse -- enough so that I only really registered the above-mentioned incidents. But the kid who was the closest thing to a best friend in elementary school? Duh, let's see, he and his sister were foster kids who's father taught them all about "corn-holing" and "fuck-rubbers?" Gee, only this summer did it occur to me to wonder why they were foster kids? The core of the new-to-town teens I hung out with in late high-school and after I dropped out but before I left home? The variously emancipated and/or runaway boys and girls who at times seemed voraciously sexual(ized) but spoke in fluent 70's-era "sexual liberation?" The ones who's attitudes and behaviors deeply influenced much of my own early sexual aspirations? It only recently occurred to me that a contemporary assessment would be that they'd been groomed to the nines both by adult influences. And speaking of grooming and sexual abuse, how about the handful of distinctly predatory adult "youth counselors" (inside a much larger group of entirely decent, appropriate ones) who advocated boundary-crossing in ways that, while not necessarily unsound advice overall, nevertheless advanced their own "hands on" agendas with various "promising young people?"

Let's not even talk about the barkingly predatory "pre-date-rape" alcohol, cocaine, and Quaalude drenched college music bar culture I lived and worked in where it seemed at the time to be perfectly "cool" for more experienced bar patrons and bartenders to take over-intoxicated young men and women home to "crash." Where what this year would be called morning-after gaslighting was considered just helping the erstwhile partner get "perspective."

And all that's got me wondering where have those early influences left me!?!?! What else has been done to me? What else have I let happen? What else have I done in all earnestness? What impact have I had on others?

It's been bugging me a lot. Sort of a hard, fast replay of the old Will Rogers line, which I cite frequently, that "it's not what you don't know that'll hurt you, it's what you know that just ain't so."

Anyway, while I could launch into how my latest runaway train of thought about consent and assumptions has been accelerated by Clarisse Thorn's controversial but excellent exploration of forgiveness vs. accountability in On Change and Accountability, or how it was set rolling by Rachel Hills' Best of 2010: “But women don’t rape!”: sexual pressure, rejection and the male sex drive discourse, and how at the moment I'm feeling a bit like the only people one should really trust in sexual situations are the meticulous negotiation fetishists in the kink community (for instance see item #4 in Andrea Zanin's Expectations of Dominance: Picking Through the Tangle.) But I'm still not feeling completely collected about it, and besides, at the moment I'm feeling all Maslow's hammer about unstated assumptions that can interfere unspoken and even verbal consent... and so at this point any conclusions I draw are likely to be, um, over the top.

So instead I'd like to point out this cute little 2004 video short Jason Reitman and his then-partner Michele Lee called "Consent." It's not perfect (the text "romance deserves better than this" at the end of the credits is a little ambiguous) but it nicely captures how little we're able to communicate with simple yeses, nos, and you-want-tos.

YouTube link via Caitlin.

Photo outside co-ed wing of Avent Hall by Flickr user Desales University.
Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reflecting on reactions to news about college students and sex Matthew Yglesias wonders what all the fuss would be about.

As John Garvey explains, “Students in co-ed housing are more likely (55.7%) than students in single-sex dorms (36.8%) to have had a sexual partner in the last year—and more than twice as likely to have had three or more.”

Except strangely Garvey presents this as part of an argument against co-ed dorms. Which is silly. College students are adults. It’s of course true that, thanks to technological change, it’s now important for a large share of young adults to dedicate themselves to additional schooling at an age when traditionally they would have been engaged in full-time back-breaking agricultural labor. But that doesn’t change the fact that a college student is a person fully equipped to enjoy having sex — a fun, affordable, and ecologically sustainable pastime.

Source: Matthew Yglesias

Recalling my own early non-college days and then later college days I'm going to accept the figures at face value but add the very strong caveat that at least as long as there's a choice different kinds of people choose different kinds of housing.  I'd go a step further and suggest that even in schools where only single-sex or only co-ed housing is offered different kinds of people choose different kinds of schools as well.  And finally I'd add that at schools that still have a tradition of in loco parentis younger students (freshmen at least and often sophomores) are probably more closely supervised and more likely to be assigned to single-sex dorms even when both types are available.  And of course contrary to popular belief roughly 50% of college sophomores have not yet had sex (or at least not intercourse) and so unless you're completely wild-eyed and squeamish about sex your studies should control for all of the above.

And finally, whereas there's some small number of students who enter college before age 18 there are scarcely any at all who are still 17 or younger by their Junior years.

I'd like to assume Garvey's sources controlled for obvious stuff like that (I can't tell because his op-ed is behind a Murdoch paywall), but like Yglesias I get the distinct impression that in keeping with Murdoch-publication tendencies Garvey himself sounds too panic stricken about the possibility of adults having

That said, Yglesias is of course 100% correct: the kind of college student most likely to live in mixed housing is an adult, is almost certainly better-socialized to both genders (regardless of his or her individual orientation), and is generally very well equipped to safely and conscientiously decide to have consensual sex with his or her partner(s) of choice when presented with an opportunity. And to both expect to have their decisions to be honored and to honor the decisions of others.

If I can just go one step further out on a limb about co-ed living situations, they tend to present more opportunities for between-sex contact while everyone's completely sober and while people are not likely to be in party/"hookup" mode. With the result that, all else being equal, students in co-ed situations are more likely that segregated ones to form... interesting but not necessarily well-informed opinions about the opposite sex. At least that was my general experience under three circumstances: while living in co-ed apartments with other starving hippies, when working in bars in a big-10 university district when the legal drinking age was still 18 and most students and the single-sex to co-ed housing ratio was around three to one, and much later when I went to college myself and lived in co-ed student housing.

And finally, particularly based on my experience of big-10 single-sex housing students vs later mainly co-ed housing college, there were still instances of sexually abusive situations (by men and women) in co-ed housing they tended to be waaay lower-frequency than with single-sex housing. Even considering factors such as big southern university vs. small northwest college and greater awareness of personal autonomy. The main determinant, in my opinion, was that in housing people of both sexes were in a position to monitor goings on and apply peer pressure and, if necessary, peer intervention when situations began to develop.

Photo by Flickr user robotclaw. Used under a Creative Commons license.

A reader with the pen name Slap Unhappy asked Em & Lo for advice with the following situation.

My wife and I have been together just over five years. The other night while having sex, she asked me to slap her in the face. Repeatedly. I was raised not to lay a hand down on a woman, and now I am being asked to. We are pretty active and broad in our sexual tastes, but this one is kind of weird to me. Thoughts, ideas?

– Slap Unhappy

Source: Em & Lo

First of all, I recommend reading E&L's response, which is both informative and thoughtful.  But the question brings up another dimension that I don't think is explored often enough.

Back in the late 1970s or early 1980s I ended up breaking up with someone early in a relationship because she wanted me to slap her. It just totally freaked me out. A few years later I was really freaked out when a partner told me she was terribly turned on by spanking.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know about BDSM. In fact I’d done a fair amount of bondage and coercion role-playing. But neither of those partners had seemed the least bit interested — they’d just had previous partners who’d done it to them and they’d discovered they liked it.

My loss in retrospect, and of course theirs too.

What I didn’t understand at the time, and it’s really important for Slap Unhappy too, is that boundaries and respect for boundaries are really important not just to protect the sub, and in more gendered terms they’re not there just to protect the woman.

You’re absolutely right that, especially when we’re turned on, people can withstand far more “impact” than their partners may be psychologically or even physically comfortable giving. (Psychologically as in Unhappy’s and my case where hitting someone went against ingrained upbringing. And physically it often hurts one’s hand more to spank someone than it hurts the spankee’s bottom.)

So anyway, while it might be Unhappy’s partner’s wildest turn on to be slapped, if it’s a turn-off for him then she needs to a) recognize that it’s a boundary issue for him, b) negotiate to see if there’s a way to make him comfortable enough to consent, and if not then c) respect his boundary and his decision not to participate.

Oh, and possibly if he goes ahead anyway then she may also need to d) help work with him through what I’m going to call potential “top drop” afterwards. Because what he might agree to try he might still be bummed about after.

Bottom line: We don’t usually think of boundaries and consent as moving in the direction of the top, or in heterosexual relationships as working towards the man. But boundaries are boundaries and consent is consent and when they’re confronted it’s important that they be respected regardless of who’s boundaries they are or who’s consent is required.

It’s always ok to say no.