Thursday, November 20, 2008
In which controversy is revived
A long time ago, there was an extensive inter-blog debate about grey rape, and now, Helen Rittelmeyer makes my case better than I did in the current issue of Doublethink.
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4 comments:
Way to reduce complex questions to either "isn't or is" statements. Nothing like serious thinking going on Doublethink. Stay classy, Helen.
I think Helen's article pushes the point she makes in her last paragraph: "Either sex is mundane or it isn’t". She sees this at the forefront of some sort of new wave of feminism or whatever. Meaning "mundane or non-mundane" isn't something to be reduced to a simply binary like that. Thank god life doesn't fit into the little dialectics Helen or Michel (Foucault) think it should. Otherwise shit would be very boring.
The questions of rape are rather simple and rest on the issue of consent. If consent is not present, and yes, drugs or alcohol prohibit consent, then there is rape. Anyone who disagrees is knowingly lying to themselves, or simply refusing to think. The "4th-wavers" aren't coming up with "solutions" to handle date-rape because they have devalued sex or somehow won the feminist conundrum, but likely because, after all, they are very sad people, drunks with no control over their lives. They have devalued sex, but not really. Rape is still something "to get through" and absence of reporting is "a hassle." "I don't want to ruin his life,", etc, etc. These aren't the mark of someone who has transcended sex in all aspects from consensual sex to "gray rape" (whatever you guys think that is) to more violent rape. As for the comment, "I always felt comfortable around my rapist", too much can be said about that. I think one would be hard pressed to find worse role-models for the new fem movement.
As for the drunk men who rape the girls who show up drunk, etc, etc. The distinction is simple, they are the actors. If they showed up at a sorority party drunk and got raped by the women, it would be the same issue in reverse. All this talk is so heavily pushed into the common male rapist female victim model, that a lot is often lost.
Sex means something to society and to people. While some people with certain lifestyles, who have "devalued" sex in some ways, find it easier to cope with "grey rape" because their lives are an endless series of drunken benders and sexual escapades, violent, abusive, rape, certainly wouldn't have them saying rape is just something you "get through". The issue is of control of one's body, and the abuse of it by another without consent. The action is not different, but only of differing violent degree (depending on the awareness of the victim). It is not someone sticking me with a pin or stabbing me with a knife, (both violently). It is something stabbing me with a knife while I scream and shout for my dear life, or while I drunkenly kind consent to it. (The pin stick can be used instead of the knife stab to the same effect.)
Its an incredible embarrassment not only to whatever so-called feminist clique, the society, and all organizations dedicated to treatment, prevention, etc, that this debate is even still around. Consent is not a difficult concept to grasp. Sex means something in society, even if to individual actors is doesn't mean as much to others. (I don't buy for a minute the people OK with grey rape, getting through violent rape in even close to the same way they would deal with violent assault. Show me the feminist who completely takes sex off the table entirely and then you have a new movement.)
Finally, get this out of the colleges purview. This is a police matter, a societal moral issues involving consent and respect of others persons. Colleges are for academics, leave them to do that, its already more than enough for them. Let them push the society and police to be the actors here, this is a societal, legal, and political question, not one for campuses.
And really, finally. Just as the girl who shows up completely smashed to a frat party expect that the pricks there don't beat the shit out of her, no matter what she says, she should expect no guy is going to touch her, rape, her, or do anything to her. Drunk people, people on drugs are not consenting adults, if this society had any real morals it would except that and shit would be avoided. And really finally again, the girl who goes and lies down in her old boyfriend's bed, and starts to give him oral sex and then suddenly realizes she doesn't want to do that, and she tries to push him off and he doesn't respond and goes on to have sex with her is not ambiguous at all, it is rape, plain and simple. Because she wasn't screaming "no" and "stop" and he didn't have to hit her and make her stop pushing doesn't affect a damn thing. Any guy or girl knows immediately, without a doubt, and most definitely in this hyper-sensitive age when someone is trying to stop something. I think there is a societal or media myth that "no" is the end all and be all of rape, and if someone doesn't shout that or something similar, you can do whatever you want. It's sad. Every decent person knows what rape is and what consent means. These discussions are pathetic and incredibly depressing.
"Every decent person knows what rape is and what consent means." Well, since this girl evidently did not know, I suppose we must conclude that she is indecent? Your entire argument here is an assertion that consent is self-evident, so there should be no argument about it. Unfortunately, there obviously are arguments, so I'm guessing your thesis might require some revision.
Perhaps drunkenness precludes consent, but if the men are drunk too, how can they perceive the drunkenness of the women well enough to know if their expressed consent is valid or invalid? Should they breathalyze any woman who appears interested in them before going further? Again, what if the woman isn't sure if she wants to does not want to go farther? What if she does want to then, but decides the next morning she really didn't want to? If you make it a police matter, then you will have, as Heather MacDonald points out, even fewer reports of rape because of the "I don't want to ruin his life" problem. But if it's so clear that he has committed an egregious, violent crime against you, why not ruin his life?
Your knife stabbing analogy suggests all sex is rape, whether or not it is consensual, whether or not the victim is drunk or sober. All death by stabbing is murder, even if it is soberly consented to beforehand.
I think the pin-poking analogy is apt, and the women in the article might agree with it as well -- being poked with a pin is unpleasant and perhaps technically qualifies as assault, but come on; if someone poked you with a pin while you were drunk (particularly if it was a friend), would you want them arrested for it? Would you even stop considering them a friend because of a predilection for poking someone with a pin when they were drunk?
The point is that the pin prick doesn't cause severe harm and the women in the article are saying that the particular rape spoken of did not cause severe harm. Nobody is arguing that it was a good thing or a nice thing, only that it wasn't a horrible, scarring, life-changing thing.
I find this debate fascinating because (as the youngsters say) "back in the day," the term "date rape" did not exist. I don't recall hearing the term used prior to 1990.
I recall having a conversation with a female contemporary about an incident that occurred while she was in college in the 1970s, an occurrence that, today, would be defined as date rape. I asked her, point blank, if she considered herself assaulted or taken advantage of. "No," she replied, "I considered myself stupid for putting myself in that position—drunk and stoned and making out with a guy I barely knew." Like Anonymous 2's scenario, my friend was obviously not happy about the way things transpired, but permanently scarred? I don't think so.
In the 1970s, promiscuity and drug use were so prevalent and so symbiotic that drug and alcohol-induced liaisons that elicited morning-after, cringing reflection and shame were so commonplace that the police would have been occupied with little else had the current criteria been applied.
I dare say that were the current definition of date rape suddenly applied ex post facto, the nation's prisons would be swollen with college-educated, middle-aged white men.
I certainly don't think that the young men of this generation are any more predatory than their progenitors, probably less so. However, such assault charges are significantly more prevalent today. Could it that 20-something men, their mores forged in the crucible of the AIDS epidemic and the Reaganite "just say no" ethos, are to be expected to "know better," to possess internal governors on their libido, and to display an almost omniscient sense of when a partner is impaired and when she is not?
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