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Oh, hydro, there are a lot of legal definitions of what exactly is and isn't rape, and judges make comments about it.
I'm now sufficiently burned on "oh wow hey just so happens that at precisely the right moment to help us get rid of this guy we hate, someone comes forward with an accusation of sexual assault that conveniently has no witnesses to support or, for our purposes, prove it never happened, gosh what are the chances, eh?" stories of this kind to be very dubious.
Lack of consent is not in itself rape. Suppose it hadn't been Platner walking in her front door. Would she have fought that guy off, called the cops, tried to get help? Because the story can be interpreted to be "she kinda would have gone along if he'd been sober, but because he wasn't, she just shrugged and let him get some so he'd go away in the morning". There's nothing there about "and I tried fighting him off, and when I got into my bedroom I locked the door but he broke in, and I tried calling for help but he grabbed my phone" etc. in the story.
Could have been rape. Could have been choice she later regretted. Could be "I don't want this guy in office, so here's my story". Could be a lot of things. I don't like Platner, but this isn't enough in the story to say "yep definitely rape rather than dubious consent". A lot of women (and men too, I guess) have sex out of a sense of duty or obligation, that doesn't make it rape.
I mean definitionally it is:
The revised UCR definition of rape is: penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.
That doesn't mean this story is true of course. But having sex with someone without their consent is rape. Whether they fight back or freeze or do nothing.
If she consents to having sex with Platner no matter how grudgingly then it isn't rape of course, you are correct there. But then there is consent. Lack of consent is exactly what turns sex into rape.
I think HereandGone is implying a sort of tacit consent. I don't consent to my cat laying me and clawing at my belly... but I don't do much more than call him an asshole and then scratch his ears. I've personally been on the receiving end of similar sexual behavior, and calling it rape feels like it seriously devalues the concept. I was not "forced against my will", I was "annoyed by a drunk wife until I decided that getting her off was the quickest path to getting back to sleep".
For the cat example, you have technically been assaulted no (assuming we held cats to human standards at least for the analogy to hold)? Someone else who likes cats less could throw your cat across the room in self defense. The fact you don't take it seriously is your prerogative, but in a human to human scenario that would be assault (or battery or whatever). If a man walks up to you and scratches your stomach with sharp fingernails, I assume you are not going to be as sanguine (though, hey what do I know, maybe that would float your boat!)
For the wife example, however grudgingly you did indeed consent. So that's not the same as "lack of consent"
Lack of consent is the literal difference between rape and not rape. If she does indeed grudgingly consent to Platner then it is not rape I agree. If she doesn't consent at all then it doesn't matter what other actions she takes, it is rape.
After 5 years and with presumably no evidence it might not be prosecutable or provable beyond a reasonable doubt of course, either way.
I think this is the line being discussed. HereandGone is interpreting her actions as being closer to "begrudging consent". The problem with
is that, particularly among people who have an existing, ongoing sexual relationship, that line can get blurry.
It can! But the statement wasn't about why he may have assumed he had consent or similar. Her statement was that lack of consent does not make rape. Not that the line was blurry, or that he may have assumed consent, or that it wasn't communicated well or anything of the sort.
The literal difference between rape and not rape is the lack of consent. The line might get blurry as to whether she did consent, I agree. But if she did not it is rape.
If she just meant the line is blurry then her choice of wording was poor indeed.
You're still assuming the situation can be resolved into a binary state. She herself might not have a consistent take on if she begrudgingly tolerated sex with an intermittent partner of known sexual forwardness, or was raped. And even if she did ultimately decide it was easier to just fuck him and kick him out in the morning, that doesn't mean his behavior wasn't shitty and wrong. But if he'd done the same thing a half dozen times before and found her more receptive (perhaps after a token "No, it's late, you shouldn't"), then that would make his behavior (and hers!) more understandable.
It is a binary state though. It might be unknowable to us, but she was either consenting or not. She might rationalize it after one way or the other, thats all true. He might have had prior reason to assume her consent one way or another. Again all true.
But at the point of the act whether she consented or not is the difference between rape or not. And that is binary. In her mind she was either consenting or not.
She might go back and forth afterwards, absolutely. Humans are great at rationalizing all kinds of things.
Her post hoc rationalizations one way or the other cannot change the past.
This is quite the claim about a concept that is known to be rather messy. Multiple entire books have been written by philosophers of ethics trying to explore the nature of consent, because it is, indeed, rather messy. One may desire to collapse all the messiness down to a binary state, but that is a significant enough of a claim that it likely requires yet another one of those books written by a philosopher of ethics to argue for. Probably not something that's going to be settled in a MottePost.
To be clear, I think that for some situations (many situations), there is a clean enough mapping from the complex mental state that was present in that situation to a binary consent state. But that mapping is not always clean. One can hold as an axiom that, in theory, such a mapping must always exist, but that would either be an axiom or a claim. If it's a claim, I think it's hard to look at the existing academic work and believe that it has been conclusively shown.
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