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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   24759 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 16, 2023

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Is this a full blown victim blaming in the most influential printed medium by decorated feminist? Or am I overreacting?

New York Times: There’s a sentence in the new book that I was curious about, and this goes back to the questions about the trickiness of generalizing and of using a certain kind of rhetorical style: You’re discussing the rarity of false accusations of date rape, and you write, I’m paraphrasing, that there are mentally ill or damaged women who will make those kinds of accusations, and the only thing a young guy can do is not have sex with damaged or mentally ill women. That’s a bit of a flip way of addressing that problem, isn’t it?

Caitlin Moran: That’s possibly my most overt piece of feminism. Obviously #NotAllMen, but I have experienced enough men where the thing at a party is that you’re hunting for the girl on the edge of the pack who’s a bit drunk, bit needy. I can remember dads telling their sons in pubs where I come from, “Crazy bitches are always the best [expletive].” It’s just saying to men as a kind and loving mother with some wisdom that if there’s a woman who is mentally ill, disturbed or needy or unhappy or really drunk at a party, leave her alone. The last thing she needs is a penis. If she’s an upset, needy person and you [expletive] her and then the rumor starts going around school, she might need to, for the defense of her reputation, say, “He raped me.” You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing.

nytimes.com: https://archive.ph/tZn3B#selection-457.82-457.95

How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?

How is this different from "You’ve put yourself in a dangerous situation because you’ve done a foolish thing by flirting with that guy wearing that dress"?

Who/whom.

You also, as walterodim points out below, have a situation where there’s no language to describe sexual bad behavior other than ‘unconsensual’. I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her, but it’s not rape. And feminism simply doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘it’s a scummy thing that everyone involved has consented to’, nor does it have any ability to conceptualize the need for that vocabulary.

I think everyone acknowledges that making a move on a vulnerable woman when she’s a bit drunk is taking advantage of her

I don’t acknowledge that. She probably got drunk partly to get laid. Declining her invitation to jump in the sack because she’s drunk is a grave & insulting violation of her autonomy as an adult, her wishes, and her well-being.

How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not? Surely you agree that not every drunk girl at a party is trying to get laid and that there is some level of drunkenness where someone's failure to dissent (or even positive consent) should not be taken very seriously (e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).

(e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).

Yes, but jumping off a bridge into shallow water is an objectively bad idea, whereas having sex is not.

If my friend wanted to jump off a bridge while sober, I also wouldn't help him with it.

Though, as XKCD notes.

Imagine reading this on CNN: "Many fled their vehicles and jumped from the bridge. Those who stayed behind..." Is something good about to happen to those people?

How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not?

Questions of false accusations and such aside, I will say that I think I can probably identify the difference here with pretty high accuracy. The party girl that knows how to drink aggressively but still be mostly doing what she wants behaves differently from the girl that accidentally had too many and is out of it. I might not be able to tell the difference if I'm only encountering them at the end point of drunkenness, but if we were hanging out and drinking together, I think I know the difference.

Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you can perfectly tell the difference. Even so, many other young men probably cannot and for these young men, Moran's advice is probably useful.

Also, it's sort of funny that you are confident you can always tell the difference and fuckduck9000 thinks it is impossible (though in a slightly different context).

To be clear, I'm one of the people that thinks Moran's advice is good advice. I also know that I've hooked up with drunk girls, received no complaints, and married one. I'm not saying my judgment is literally perfect, but I also don't think this is anywhere near impossible.

I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.

Okay, thanks for the clarification. I agree that it's certainly possible to make an accurate guess in many situations but I also don't think everyone possesses this skill.

I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.

He said "How would you know/foresee this?" in response to my comment "I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight" which was in the context of potential problems with having sex with drunk people. It's not quite the same as saying it's impossible to know when a drunk person really planned to get drunk in order to have sex and when they didn't, but it's not so different.

How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not?

You could ask them if they want to get drunk & laid, or just drunk?

I was assuming we were in the context where the girl is already drunk and perhaps so intoxicated that she may not be making decisions she would agree with when sober. In this context, I think it may be hard to determine if part of her reason for getting drunk was to make it easier to get laid (and I wouldn't necessarily trust the accuracy of an extremely drunk person's response to such a question).

the girl is already drunk and perhaps so intoxicated that she may not be making decisions she would agree with when sober

So you want the man to make the decisions for her? Sounds kind of... patriarchal.

I honestly don't care if it sounds patriarchal or not. I'm not a modern progessive (though I'm not exactly conservative or traditional either) and the things I care about are not based on what sounds patriarchal or not. Consent is not the only moral value that matters in sex and sometimes you do have a responsibility to not enable people to make bad decisions, and especially not to take advantage of their propensity to make bad decisions for your own benefit. That's true when a man does it to a woman, when a woman does it to a man or any other combination of genders.

But what makes 'having sex while drunk' a bad decision, per se? Me and one other person in this thread met our wives this way -- it happens a lot. My experience with alcohol is not so much that people do things that they don't want to do when sober as that they do things that they'd like to, but are too inhibited for whatever reasons. Sure sometimes these inhibitions are in some way 'correct', but there's not really a bright line there that I can see. (other than of course if somebody is actually passed out or otherwise physically incapable of articulating consent or lack thereof -- which most people are comfortable just calling 'rape' without any beating about the bush around 'bad decisions' or 'impaired judgement'.

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How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not?

I don't. If you consent to sex, whatever your motives, drunk or not, it's done. It's just sex. It's not like jumping off a bridge. No necks get broken. Nothing morally relevant is happening.

Well yes, you’ve established that it isn’t rape. But it’s still a scummy thing to do to sleep with someone who will foreseeably suffer emotional harm from it.

But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."

I honestly find this a very strange attitude. First, sex can and often does have nontrivial physical consequences, ranging from mild soreness the next day to pregnancy or STDs. Second, many people obviously have a very strong emotional reaction to sex. I certainly think emotional consequences are different from physical consequences but I don't think they don't matter at all. For example, suppose you had a child and told them they are stupid and unlovable. No necks have been broken and yet it's clear that your actions are morally relevant (I'm not trying to equate this example to drunk sex, just trying to point out that physical harm is not a prerequisite for moral relevance). I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight. Obviously a lot depends on the situation, often both parties are partly responsible and just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean it should necessarily be illegal. But I think it's wrong to discount it completely.

I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight.

and @hydroacetylene

But it’s still a scummy thing to do to sleep with someone who will foreseeably suffer emotional harm from it.

How would you know/foresee this? I guess if you are positive you are an absolutely terrible lay in every circumstance, you could theoretically have a duty to protect the opposite sex from your depradations... but no, it's their business. You don't have a crystal ball, and it's up to them to carry the consequences of their decisions, whether it's drinking, having sex, driving drunk, having sex while driving drunk etc. Who's responsible if she's drunk and runs some kid over in her car while you're having sex with her? You see my point? Being drunk makes women less responsible for the consequences of their actions when they choose to have sex, but ordinary humans more responsible when they choose to drive.

Both parties share some responsibility; how much depends on the details of the situation. As an analogy, imagine your drunk friend asked you where his keys were because he wanted to drive. If you help him find his keys and then he drives drunk and gets into an accident then he certainly is responsible, but so are you. If you have sex with someone intoxicated and know that they will likely regret it then in my opinion you are partly responsible.

Edit: "How would you know/foresee this?" The same way you try to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation. Of course sometimes it is possible to make an honest mistake. For example, suppose that someone wants to have sex with you and tells you over and over that they just want to hook up but later you find out that they really wanted a relationship. In most such situations, I think your position would be quite defensible and the person who wanted to have sex with you should bear most or all of the responsibility for their decision. But I think anyone who's been an adult long enough has seen some situations where a man was knowingly using a woman's emotional neediness for sex and I don't think that's a good thing (and even less so if intoxication is involved). By the way, I think you could read Moran's advice to young men from the OP's post as, in part, advice for "how to know/foresee this."

The same way you try to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation. Of course sometimes it is possible to make an honest mistake.

It’s bizarre. Why does the man have the responsibility to look into the future and use his good judgment, when the woman couldn’t be bothered/failed to do so? She could have used “the way to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation “ to simply say no in the first place, instead of relying on his predictions, his self-control, to say no for her against her expressed wish. Let’s just consider her acquiescence the ‘honest mistake’ that is nobody else’s problem, problem solved. Do better next time.

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