<p>I didn’t say that Emily Yoffe was the Taliban, Hunt. She – and I, too, as I acknowledged – are somewhere on the slippery slope between I’m-Not-Sure-What and The-Evil-Taliban. She’s closer to the tipping point than I am, maybe over it, because she has an explicit agenda of trying to clean up a whole bunch of behaviors she doesn’t like on moral grounds.</p>
<p>Also, what I take mini to be saying is that the situation you, and I, and lots of other men, especially lawyers, get so hung up about – mutual diminished capacity, followed by a rape accusation – doesn’t actually happen much, if at all. What women experience as rape, and report as rape, is serial rapists taking advantage of that idea and, well, raping women, with premeditation and often with a clear head. Of course, sex between drunken teenagers does happen, more than occasionally, and sometimes one or both of them regrets it afterwards, but no one feels raped or accuses the partner of rape. At least not very often.</p>
<p>I tell my son stuff he knows all the time. He’s near 20 years old and I still tell him to put a coat on when it’s cold or to make sure he’s eating healthy or to make sure he’s getting enough sleep. He rolls his eyes and says ‘Yes, mom’.</p>
<p>Not to mention cautioning him about drinking or staying out of any other trouble…</p>
<p>Well, maybe it’s because I’ve read a bunch of stuff by Emily Yoffe before, and because she’s writing in Slate, but I just don’t agree that she’s trying to clean up behaviors she doesn’t like on moral grounds. I don’t see that in this article.</p>
<p>JHS, I don’t think you could restrict your adult daughter from getting impaired drunk if she was inclined to do it, but I can’t imagine how getting impaired drunk is any sort of model of freedom and empowerment. It’s not like saying “don’t have wine with your dinner.” I would be completely fine with “restricting” my kids from driving drunk and I view drunk to impairment in exactly the same light.</p>
<p>“I am suspicious, however, when rape-prevention looks like the knife-edge of a more comprehensive moral cleansing of young people’s behaviors”</p>
<p>Morals have nothing to do with it, from my point of view, and I don’t see that in the Yoffe article either. I’m interested in comprehensive SAFER behaviors for young people. I like condom distribution and seat belt use just as much as I like discouraging getting wasted. Stuff that I see as immoral but not unsafe (like lying to your significant other) is none of my business.</p>
<p>I just don’t agree that there’s no hope of changing binge-drinking behaviors. Sure, they aren’t going away completely, but they vary a lot from campus to campus, even between campuses that draw from the same applicant pool. That’s partly through self-selection, but based on my own observations, freshmen are shaped in large part by the existing culture they find. The same kid makes different and boozier choices if he gets into Dartmouth instead of Columbia. So his choices aren’t an inevitable result of his youthful curiosity/stupidity. There’s a lot of wiggle room that can be determined by what the cool kids teach him.</p>
<p>If she’s passed out–as the young woman at Vandy was–and he has sex with her, yes, it’s rape. Will he ever be prosecuted? No. He won’t. You know that. But would a normal guy want to have sex with a woman who was unconscious? No, I don’t think he would. </p>
<p>What if the young man knows that, although they hadn’t had a fight, the young woman did not want to have sex that night for some reason. He decides to intentionally get her drunk so he can have sex with her? Is that rape? I think it is. </p>
<p>Yes, there are the situations in which both parties are drunk but conscious and they both make bad decisions. But that is NOT the most common pattern. It’s certainly not one in which the young man will be prosecuted. I think it’s very fact-specific as to whether it’s rape. How drunk is he? How drunk is she? Had they had sex before? If not, had they discussed having sex while they both were sober and had the woman indicated she wanted to do so? There are other factors too.</p>
<p>Bottom line: my own parental advice was “Don’t have sex with anyone the first time when one or the other of you is drunk.”</p>
<p>Knowing what I know from having been a college student (and knowing several young women who spoke about being raped or being ‘date raped’) and now being the mother of a college student, I would say that it is true that in those cases that the man will most likely never be prosecuted and that because of that no statistics can be tracked, but I also suspect that there is a strong possibility that it IS the most common pattern. </p>
<p>Very, very few young women are raped by strangers on college campuses - it happens, but is a rarity on any campus. Slightly more are forceably raped by acquaintences and those may or may not be prosecuted. It is still not a large percentage of the population. A few are drugged with a substance like ‘ruffies’, but once again although it happens, it is a rare occurance. But I bet if there was a way to track the number of women that were drunk and admitted to feeling taken advantage of because they made poor decisions under the influence that number would be MUCH higher than the others.</p>
<p>Can we agree that there may be many cases of more-or-less drunken sex in which one or both of the participants experiences some regret the next day, but doesn’t feel that he or she has been raped? These situations may not show up on the statistics we’re looking at.</p>
<p>mini and I disagree about more things than we agree about. </p>
<p>The thing we do agree about though is that MOST rapes on college campuses are committed by serial rapists who use booze as a weapon. </p>
<p>There is a reason why the vast majority of rapes on college campuses happen to first year female students during the first 6 weeks of school. If most rapes were of the “failure to communicate while both are drunk” variety, they would be spread out more equally over the academic year.</p>
<p>“mini, just to make sure I understand your position on this, are you saying that every situation in which a man and a woman have sex, and the woman is too drunk to form consent, the man has raped the woman? I understand that this is the law in some jurisdictions–are you saying that this should be the law?”</p>
<p>If there is not consent, and there is forcible or coerced sex, it’s rape.</p>
<p>But again, I don’t know why you are all focusing on “too drunk”. There’s evidence that most rapes occur after a woman has had a drink, but not any for the idea that they occur when she is drunk, or “too drunk to form consent.”</p>
This is kind of a non-answer, unless you want to define “forcible sex.” I hate to be crude, but are you saying if the guy is lying on his back, it’s not rape?</p>
<p>I actually think that the more extreme voices in the rape/rape culture awareness campaigns have contributed to the misconception that a significant portion of campus rapes are grey area situations.</p>
<p>When conversations on rape feature the notions that
a. two drunk people having sex is automatically rape (of the woman), even if the woman initiated and enthusiastically participated in sex
b. persuading (not coercing or threatening) someone to have sex is rape, including when this happens within the context of a marriage or other preexisting sexual relationship
c. “No means no” should be replaced with “active consent.” This means that if a man and woman are in an intimate situation, the man must ask for verbal consent for every move he makes. If he doesn’t, and goes one iota beyond what she feels comfortable with, he has raped her, even if she never tells him to stop or does anything else to register that things are going too far/too fast for her</p>
<p>some people are going to come to the unsupported conclusion that a significant number of “date rape” cases consist of just such situations, which many people will not view as rape (nor, I think, should they). It is the same with sexual harassment - when we include things like “telling a colleague you like her skirt” under the rubric, it contributes to the minimization of what is actually a very real problem.</p>
<p>The criminal courts and prosecutors decide just like they always have or it could end up as a civil case I supposed depending on how far either party wants to take the situation. This is a good thing. It sorts out remorseful behavior from criminal behavior. The statute of limitations is either many years to no limitation depending on the state. Lots of time to decide…although it’s always best for a woman to call the police ASAP if she has been assaulted.</p>
<p>The first statement is untrue unless (a) you limit force to the use of a gun or a knife, b) think several multiples of a number is “slightly more” and c) you don’t include the use of Ecstasy, Molly, etc. </p>
<p>Here are some FACTS about rape…including the fact that 45% of the women raped on college campuses were NOT using drugs or alcohol when they were attacked. However, 75% of the rapists were. Not drinking gives women a LOT less protection against being raped than some posters in this thread think. Yes, the MAJORITY of women who are raped on college campuses WERE using drugs or alcohol, but it’s 55%, not just about all of them. And many of those women were NOT drunk. </p>
<p>zoosermom, I agree completely. That’s why, I think, the result was a comparative slap on the wrist, which the victim (if not her many champions) found satisfactory. But in that case, at least in the victim’s version, there was a big difference in the degree of mutual incapacity, and it wasn’t something they had engaged in together.</p>
<p>I’ll make a horrible confession. I agree completely with jonri’s advice in #106 above, but between my first real girlfriend at 15 and my last one (the one I married), I don’t think I ever had sex for the first time with anyone when neither of us had been drinking. Part of it was not believing that anyone would want to have sex with me if she hadn’t been drinking or something like it, and part of it was quieting my own inhibitions, both about whether it was a good idea for me to have sex with her, did I like her enough, and about whether I could risk being rejected. All of that was terribly immature, but that’s what a lot of collegiate sex is: terribly immature.</p>
<p>Do scientifically valid studies actually find that 20% of college women are raped by serial rapists that they know? And that in most cases,do they find that some alcohol was involved but not enough to render the woman incapacitated? </p>
<p>That seems like a very high percentage to me, having been a college student, a graduate student, having many friends who were once college student, and now a mom of 2 college students and good friends with moms of many college students. Obviously, my experience does not substitute for research. During previous discussions on this board I tried to find some quality studies on rape incident and just did not find any that substantiated such a claim.</p>