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Whenever the subject of feminist narratives comes up on this forum, one of the recurring arguments is that feminist messaging is ineffective, self-defeating even, the usual reason being given that it doesn’t reach the men it’s supposed to reach, and only reaches men who don’t need feminist messages in the first place because they’re pretty much acculturated in a feminist milieu anyway. (I know all this doesn’t necessarily sound fair or unbiased, but let’s ignore that for a moment.)
The most fitting example of this that is usually mentioned is the message that “we need to teach men not to rape”, which is supposedly a favorite of feminist activists on college campuses, corporate HR boards and elsewhere. Apparently they promote essentially the same idea as a great tool to combat sexual assault and harassment.
I don’t think I need to explain in detail why this argument sounds so dumb to the average man. Even when I come up with the most benevolent interpretation of this tactic that I can think of, it still seems misguided and, well, dumb. But then it occurred to me: the message makes 100% sense if we start from the assumption that modern feminists, eager to right cultural wrongs of the past that they perceive, really want to make sure their messaging never ever entails even a hint of the notion that women need to exercise any level of agency in order to avoid rape, assault or harassment of any type i.e. avoid bad men, because in all cases that would be “victim blaming” and horrific etc.
From that perspective, it all makes sense, sort of. Am I correct, or is there something else going on as well?
You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.
There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.
You're probably right. But I dislike this behavior of expanding the definition of rape. At least 15 years ago, rape was a violent brutal crime, one where someone was trying to dominate someone else. Not something someone could do by accident. Mens rea was almost definitely necessary for a rape to occur.
Expanding this definition makes it so that people who probably haven't done anything that terrible or didn't intend to do anything that terrible, and maybe made a bad decision now are lumped in with violent psychopaths. It also takes away nuance from language. It may have also had the effect that you're positing, too, of making people less likely to hook up with drunk girls.
This definition changed more like 150 years ago than 15. Webster's dictionary lists rape as "In law, the carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will" in 1828, but as "Sexual connection with a woman without her consent." in 1913.
I do think it's a better policy in general to make up a new word when you need one, rather than overloading an old one... but more than a century?! At some point thou movest on.
Whether or not the 1913 definition means what you're implying it to mean probably depends on exactly how you define consent, and how you define the boundaries of consent. Suffice it to say, based on what I was exposed to growing up in the late 20th century, it was my impression that rape referred to a violent brutal crime, and I'm sure that most others of my generation and geographic location would agree with me. Ymmv, perhaps
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It is common to focus on the most extreme and most rare version of a problem as a rhetorical tactic to avoid addressing the most commons forms of the problem that actually affect the most people.
15 years ago no one though Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein were committing 'real' rape, so why bother raising a fuss over it? And AFAIK (IANAL), what we now call marital rape was legal across the country until the 1970s.
The expanding definition is a necessary step in actually confronting and preventing bad behavior.
I am also a high-decoupler (ie autist) who likes words to have crisp, unambiguous, and unchanging definitions. But I also acknowledge that words are actually just tools that we invent to help us get things we want, and these type of shifting and ambiguous definitions are very often a result of someone tuning the language to accomplish something important and valuable.
This might be the best summary I've ever seen of a particular engagement style, thank you. I have a long post in the works about how to handle an ongoing discussion where people are using different and mutually contradictory forms of engagement, and was struggling to find a phrase to explain this particular one.
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Sneaking in new definitions while still maintaining the previous emotional attachments of those definitions is necessary? In rationalist communities, I think we have words for things like this, such as motte and bailey. And I think that most of us are in agreement that such tactics are sneaky and underhanded, and make it unnecessary difficult to argue against, and very easy to turn into mob mentality and moral panics.
Yup, those are absolutely some of the very strong and important reasons for not doing that.
In this case, one of the countervailing reasons for doing it is, in theory, preventing or getting justice for very very large numbers of sexual assaults.
That's the tough reality of being a consequentialist, you can't just give one persuasive reason why something is bad and therefore decide not to do it, you have to actually ask what the full positive and negative consequences are and try to make a balanced judgement.
I'm not even claiming that the balance trivially obviously falls on the side of distorting the language in this case, I'm just saying an argument that doesn't weigh the intended benefits against the expected costs isn't really saying anything.
That's horribly short sighted from a consequentialist perspective, and not particularly rational to indicate that short term gains are worth degrading the value of truth and language. Just because you can't see the immediate negative consequences, or they're obscured, doesn't mean that they're not there. All of this lowering the sanity waterline is to blame for all the horribly contentious political strife going on, and increasing divide. If there's a civil war that happens, I don't think it's unreasonable to think that this sort of sophistry is not an insignificant factor.
Furthermore, I doubt most of the people who actually are promoting this sophistry would actually be okay with other people doing it as well. Saying "it's okay when we do it" isn't exactly a good look, or anything I think people should be aspiring to do.
So I agree that if we lived in a perfectly rational world where no one ever did linguistic maneuvers like this ever and instead all language was maximally precise and informative, because having perfectly accurate information is what let everyone engage in sophisticated and dispassionate object-level debates about the empirical outcomes of different policy proposals to find the utilitarian optimal approach, then the first person to do something like this would be breaking a sacred trust and destroying a public good and committing a grave sin.
But we very, very, very, very, very... ... very, very, very, very much do not live in a world like that.
So given the fallen world we already live in, it's not clear how much marginal damage the 92,252nd instance of that happening does past the marginal damage done by the 92,251st instance.
It would certainly be better if everyone did it less, and I am actually an active proponent of doing it less in many contexts.
But it's not obviously clear that the utilitarian optimal policy is to be an extremist about never doing it ever, when it's already a standard tactic that everyone uses and not using it puts the other things you value at a severe rhetorical disadvantage, and when the marginal damage of one more case is mitigated by all the other case.
It's certainly not right to be a selective extremist about it, where you notice and call out whenever your opponents do it, but turn a blind eye when your side does it ('abortion is murder' much?).
As for 'the people doing it would object to the other side doing it'.... yeah, obviously. That's exactly what an isolated demand for rigor is, people do it all the time to fight their opponents, that's exactly what this instance of calling it out and objecting to it is. That's kind of my point.
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Hooking up with a girl who's too drunk to say no is, in fact, very bad behavior.
I think everyone agrees with that. But there's a wide spectrum from sex with someone physically unable to say no, i.e. passed out, to a guy who's had a few beers hooking up with a girl who's had a glass of wine. The culture war as it relates to this issue seems to be about what "too drunk to say no" means, from those who say that situations like the latter are fine, and those who say that having any amount of alcohol whatsoever renders a women unable to consent. I imagine it's the possibility of society being at the point where something like the latter situation is viewed as SA/rape that @haroldbkny is referring to when he says that people are just going to be less likely to hook up.
I am entirely OK with a little gender discrimination as the price to pay for this outcome.
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What does "too drunk to say no" actually mean? Obviously the motte you're trying to imply with that phrasing is "passed out or literally too drunk to slur out a 'nooo'," but that's not what happens in 99% of cases. The bailey is "Jake was DRUNK, Josie was DRUNK, Josie could NOT consent!", or the "if you think she's out of your league it's rape" thing lagrangian is pushing below.
Unless you can actually phrase your rule in a sensible way that people will understand how the legal system will interpret a given situation, vague social conservatism is just providing cover for California style "yes means yes except when yes means no, and isn't there someone you forgot to ask?"
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I agree. But it's not rape.
Would it be rape to have sex with someone who was asleep? Comatose? Sedated? I think almost everyone would say yes.
Yes, because they didn't consent.
And if a girl is so drunk that she's drifting in and out of consciousness, how can she consent?
That's certainly an edge case. But I don't think it invalidates my position.
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How often is that the case? How is your rule distinguishing between incapacitation and "might not make the same decision while sober, or uses that as an excuse to dodge shaming afterwards"?
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If she's "too drunk to count to ten" let alone passed out, it strikes me as very similarly morally to rape-at-knifepoint. Not quite as bad, but not "obnoxious liberal word expansion" levels of different.
I'm curious, to any older commenters especially: does usage like this of "rape" strike you as euphemism treadmill, or is this just the natural range of the word? I suspect it's the latter, but maybe I'm young(ish). I'd think to use "rape" for the above and knife-point when that detail isn't central, and say "violent rape" when the knife (/threat/etc) is central to the discussion.
Say a man runs through someone else's house with a bulldozer. Everything in it is crushed, the walls collapse, the whole thing is completely destroyed. When people find out, they start calling the man an arsonist, who committed 'cold arson.' After all, destroying someone's home is a terrible thing to do. Does that make it arson?
No, but I don't think the analogy tells us much. They are certainly both destruction of property, even if only one is arson-y; similarly in the rape side of the analogy both are rape, even if only one is violent-y.
(There's a weaker argument I could add that both forms of rape are violent, but that's sufficiently far into repurposing words that I won't stand by it real strongly.)
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So if you drug someone and have sex with them that isn't rape?
Assuming they can consent, no. It's very bad and should wind you in prison for a long time. But it's not rape, because that word means something specific. "Rape" is not a catch all term for "any evil behavior involving sex".
Drugging someone so they can't meaningfully resist has been a central example of rape for as long as I can remember, and I seem to be on the older end of this forum. I definitely agree with the complaint that modern feminism has expanded the definition beyond reasonable limits, as the "social justice" crowd is prone to doing with all sorts of terms, but this is not an example of it. The solution to revisionist history is not revisionist history in the opposite direction.
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The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
I took "too drunk to say no" as "they will say yes to anything because their inhibitions are lowered", not "they're so drunk they can't even respond". The latter case would be rape, but the former isn't.
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This is a special place.
If you can't decouple your sense of moral outrage at bad acts from a discussion over what words mean, you're going to have a real bad time on this forum. My position here isn't even that spicy. We have a guy who literally argues for pedophilia being OK, we have people who think that the Jews are to blame for everything, etc. Saying "I think x act is immoral but it doesn't fall under the definition of y" doesn't even register compare to some of the arguments here.
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...Speak plainly. What's your actual disagreement with the above?
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This is a fully semantic argument, and in a semantic argument there's not a much stronger rebuttal than 'no one else is using the word that way, so if you do you're just failing to communicate.'
Also: if you agree it's bad behavior and that some people might do it without realizing that, do you agree they should be taught not to do that?
If so, you agree with the feminist message of 'teach men not to rape' in substance, and just have a semantic disagreement about one word.
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'Rape' isn't a natural category. It's a term for having sex with a woman who doesn't or shouldn't want it in a way that's sufficiently bad. That's why the term 'statutory rape' exists uncontroversially despite generally not referring to any use of force.
So this is really an argument about whether hooking up with a drunk out of her mind girl is bad enough to be considered rape. Now, I presume that we agree that giving a girl valium to hook up with her is bad enough to be justifiably called rape, just because most people do in our culture- there's a specific word for that kind of it. I presume we agree that if a man bought an eighteen year old woman- so old enough to consent to sex with him, not old enough to drink in the US, and not old enough to be presumed to know her limits with alcohol- alcoholic beverages until she was too drunk to say no, then took her back to his hotel room, we would agree that this qualifies as rape.
So is the difference the idea that getting taken advantage of is a natural consequence of sufficient public drunkenness? Because although there's a sense in which it obviously is, it also seems to be sufficiently horrendous that using the term rape is at least founded, if non-central, and if referring to it that way reduces the incidence thereof(which is entirely possible) then I'm all for it.
I think a key detail here is that alcohol is a helluva drug. It's quite easy, especially as a smaller, younger woman to overestimate your tolerance. Either of you also might not know what's in the punch exactly, or how long you hit the keg.
So, the ethical thing is to look at the person as you're getting to bed and ask "ok, but really, is it OK to have sex here?" I think if she'd never in a million years have sex with you after a moderate amount of alcohol, no. If in the heat of the moment and a bit buzzed, she'd probably have said yes, you're at least in grey territory, potentially fine, depending on the details.
In most other situations "I made a bad decision because I had too much to drink" does not carry much legal weight. Assuming the women in your scenarios do in fact consent "in the moment", how can you invalidate this consent without also invalidating (for example) a woman's decision to go driving while in such a state?
ie. 'drunk woman decides to drive and crashes into a pole' --> prosecute her (I think?); but 'drunk woman decides to sleep with some gross nerd' --> prosecute him (?!)
Your framework seems to be denying women significant agency; seems a bit patriarchal to me.
The key difference is that only in the rape story has anything been done to her by someone else.
When driving, the damage is to the pole. Heck, let's say she ("S") kills someone else ("E"). S has violated E's rights, so S should be prosecuted for murder (or property damage to the pole). No one did anything to S, except insomuch as S did it to herself, so no one should be prosecuted (or held morally responsible) for anything that happened to S.
When S is raped, the damage is entirely to S. This was done to her by someone ("R"[apist]), who should be prosecuted. Debateably, S did something to herself too, but undebateably (well, it is themotte, but I feel pretty good about this one), there is the key difference that something was done to S in this one.
Further, in my version of the setup, she really hasn't decided to sleep with the nerd ("can't count to ten"). Past some level of drunk, you're on autopilot, and anyone who steers you transgresses. So yes, I absolutely do deny people agency once they are blackout drunk. I put that agency in the hands of society/morality to protect them. Enormously practical? No, so go be monogamous and sober, but still better than a free-for-all on drunk coeds.
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There's a word for a guy who consistently engages in that sort of reasoning (not just in this particular case, but in general) and that word is "virgin". It's very easy for a certain sort of guy (think Scott Aaronson) to convince himself that any particular woman is out of his league. The kinds of guys who think they're God's gift to women aren't going to engage in that sort of reasoning, and if they did, they'd always answer "it's fine". So all this sort of rule does is ratify turning the self-abasing into volcels.
Plus, of course, the guy in this situation has probably also been drinking.
The hypothetical as I am thinking about it is that the man is knowingly much less drunk. If everyone is very drunk, I think that's less of rape and more of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes" all around.
I think your point stands for a smallish group of those you're describing, "white knight" types, who should yes in fact move in the drunker/less-rigidly-consent-requiring direction.
But, in general, I prefer the word "adult." I found dating got exponentially easier as I started advertising being a ~sober, boring, responsible adult instead of being maximally able to consume booze/etc.
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How am I supposed to know this? What does even mean? She’s at a bar/club/house party - a milieu where everyone is aware that at least some number of people there are interested in meeting prospective sexual partners. She’s unaccompanied by a man, so I have no reason to believe she’s spoken for. She’s talking to me and hasn’t wandered off or thrown a drink in my face or whatever, so clearly she’s at the very least not actively repulsed by me. So why would I assume she would “never in a million years” have sex with me?
If you have to ask, the answer is no. I.e., I think the moral thing is to view the default as "no consent" and require positive evidence to move to "consent." If you can't count to ten, you can't give that evidence. I don't even think that's overdone liberal nonsense, of which there's a lot on this subject.
Concretely, if she's so much drunker than me and hotter than me that I can not picture her feeling less than grossly violated tomorrow, then the sex feels very rapey. If I think we're both buzzed and we might both feel a little gross about it tomorrow, then shrug, she made her choices.
I in practice solve these complex moral dilemmas by being old, boring and sober. It's remarkable how much complex modern feminist 'BUT WHAT IS CONSENT EXACTLY' goes away if you allow the answer to be even as serious as "a thing two people who are multiple dates do while sober".
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This term is, in fact, controversial - at least in the discourse space you and I are participating in. It is, in fact, an extremely tendentious framing, and I do in fact reject it. (The mere fact that the “age of consent” differs so dramatically between different jurisdictions worldwide illustrates that people do in fact disagree substantially about the validity of the framing.)
We absolutely do not agree on this. First off, we would have to ask a number of very important questions which you hand-wave away. Does the man know she’s 18, rather than 21? (If he met her in a bar, the answer is almost certainly “no”.) Does he know that she “doesn’t know her limits”? Why would he assume that a grown adult is unable to exercise basic agency over her own decisionmaking?
Your scenario doesn’t mention anything about misdirection, subterfuge, etc. (i.e. spiking a drink without her knowledge) He’s just offering her drinks, and she’s willingly accepting those drinks.
And once she’s finished all of those drinks, how “visibly drunk” is she, actually? Surely you are aware that there is a wide spectrum of intoxication; someone can be buzzed or tipsy without being genuinely unable to exercise basic control over his or her faculties. Someone can be drunk enough to make decisions which one would not make if stone-cold sober, and in some cases that’s the whole point of drinking in the first place. (“Liquid courage” is a term for a reason.)
And an observer cannot always reliably detect, based on observing outwardly-obvious behavior, a person’s internal level of confusion/inebriation. Nor can simply knowing how many drinks she has had reliably tell you the extent to which she has lost control of her faculties. I know plenty of people who can down five shots of tequila and still maintain quite a bit of mental acuity and functionality; I also know plenty of people who will have one mixed drink and then be a stumbling mess.
You are requiring this man to be able to accurately gauge everything about this situation, at penalty of going to prison for a substantial chunk of his life, and having a permanent felony record, if he misjudges any of it. I thought I was one of the more authoritarian and pro-law-and-order posters here, but apparently you put me to shame.
All of this would, of course, be quite different if we lived in a culture in which it was widely understood to be extremely aberrant behavior for a woman to consume alcohol and then have sex with a man she just met, or barely knows. If we lived in a culture where the vast majority of women were chaste, monogamous, and averse to the mere thought of having casual hook-ups, then in the rare scenarios when a woman does do that, we could at least assume that foul play and predatory behavior on the man’s part may be involved.
However, in the culture we do live in, women do in fact willingly and enthusiastically consent to hookups all the time - very often after consuming some amount of alcohol! In such a milieu, any man who capitalizes on this opportunity now has to accurately - usually while intoxicated to at least some degree himself - whether this particular woman is hooking up with him because she is so plastered she’s lost all control of her mind and body, OR because that’s just a normal thing that tons of women do willingly all the time these days.
I am strongly in favor of a sea change in cultural morality toward a far more sexually-conservative set of cultural norms. However, that whole suite of norms would have to develop basically simultaneously, with all parties involved holding up their respective ends of the bargain. In the meantime, you’re asking far too much agency from men and none at all from women, with predictably disastrous consequences.
In Bahrain, a man who violently rapes a woman can escape all legal culpability if he agrees to marry her. The fact that Bahrainis "disagree substantially about the validity of the framing" (namely, that rape is a heinous and despicable crime, and not just because it may be harder for the victim to find a husband) does not give me cause to update my views on rape or reject the conventional western framing.
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I don't think the moral importance of age of consent in general is controversial even on here. Don't get me wrong, I'd welcome any interesting discussion you'd like to have here.
But, I think the fact on the ground is that while posters would disagree on exact ages, allowances across cultures, etc, most people think there should be some age and/or age-gap that makes it definitionally impossible to consent.
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But women do have massively less agency than men. They're called the meme gender for a reason and that goes both ways. There is a reason that for all 5,000 years of recorded history men have led and women, with very rare exceptions, followed- that's just the way it shakes out. Again, that goes both ways- insisting on women's empowerment is usually dumb, but so is counting on women's agency to get anything done.
Making plans on the basis of 'women will have agency to change cultural morality' is a bad plan. Particularly around sexual norms; do you think women are initiating these encounters at a rate that even cracks the high single digits?
That's even ignoring that open and liberal sexual norms aren't particularly what women want anyways. They're something that's mostly desired by men, for biological reasons.
This is an inherently hazardous activity and my sympathy for such men is limited. If they get it wrong they deserve to pay the price because there's a high chance of getting it wrong and that seems generally foreseeable and known.
And
One can recognize the need for some sort of line to draw without thinking that every particular line is obvious rather than arbitrary. Almost nobody thinks that an adult should be allowed to have sex with a 13 year old. On the other hand, having sex with a 17 year old doesn’t seem any different from having sex with an 18 year old. But having sex with a 16 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 17 year old and having sex with a 15 year old doesn’t seem different from having sex with a 16 year old and having sex with a 14 year old…
At some point ‘if a=b and b=c then a=c’ breaks down. This point is necessarily arbitrary, but it does exist, so the important thing is to find a common point to draw the line.
I don't know if men in our society would have a problem with having more responsibility than women, provided that women admitted this. If the messaging was "men need to protect women because men are stronger and have more agency", that might be acceptable. It was acceptable for almost all of recorded history. That's the tradcon way.
The problem is that feminist messaging refuses to say this. Instead they say that women are just as capable as men, except for the fact that men are holding them down, and therefore it's men's responsibility to help women, in order to apologize and make women more powerful. It villainizes all men, most of whom have never wanted to hurt women and have always wanted to protect them.
FWIW, I'm not a tradcon, I probably think something in the middle. But mostly, I think women are strong, and need to embrace this and take responsibility, and actually act as such, and stop blaming men for their problems. How does that look for rape situations? Dunno, maybe they should start carrying around guns so if they find themselves in compromising situations, they have the actual firepower to overcome the man's brute strength. But that's for more of the violent rape situation. For the "I'm too drunk for my decisions to matter", I think the solution is for women to actually take responsibility. And I think that feminism's focus on victim-based empowerment isn't helping them.
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Okay fine, again, I’d be very happy with a return to traditional sexual morality, in which a man is guilty of criminal seduction if he has sex with a woman before getting to know her family and asking her father for permission to marry her. However, that world is very far away from the world we live in now. You are, for practical purposes, proposing a world in which women have exactly the same degree of recognized agency as they do right now in every single aspect of life except for sex. (If not, how do we get from here to a world in which women lose all of this agency they’ve accrued?) This is obviously insane and unsustainable, and I hope you would understand why so many men would vociferously object.
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This is very simple. If you consent (no matter how ill founded the consent is), then it's not rape. I similarly think that statutory rape is very much not rape, and that the only reason it's called such is because people torture the meaning of words to try to give something moral weight.
One of the problems of American culture (or perhaps even human culture in general) is that people try to make everything maximally bad as a rhetorical tactic. They aren't willing to say "this is bad but not (really bad thing)". Well I'm willing to bite that bullet. If you have sex with someone too drunk to effectively say no, even if you were feeding them drinks to achieve that, it's not rape as long as they consented. We can, and should, frown on and punish that behavior. But it's not rape.
Bob puts a gun to the head of Alice and says you either consent to sex with me right now or I shoot. Alice, who wants to live, makes a rational decision and says yes and then Bob has sex with her. According to your definition what just happened wasn't rape. However most people would absolutely say that it was.
It's an interesting point, but I don't think that edge cases existing mean that the definition is wrong. Sure, if we wanted to we could spend probably hours to hammer out a definition which solves all the edge cases. But that's true of any definition.
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To be clear, are you espousing the belief that an adult (e.g. a 30 year old man) is in no way morally transgressing to have sex with an enthusiastic twelve year old? Nine year old? Toddler?
No, of course not. I frankly am surprised you think I said that, because I was very clear that we should punish someone who gets a girl drunk just to have sex with her. Just because something isn't rape doesn't mean it's morally permissible.
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Reading him as charitably as I can I'd say he's advocating something like what the French had before they brought in age of consent laws a few years ago. You still got sent to prison for having sex with a minor but it wasn't called rape, and you got sent to prison for much longer if your case satisfied the coercive bar needed for a rape conviction.
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The point of the comment is that not all immoral sexual acts should be called "rape". I can imagine a framework where the 30-year-old has sex with a "consenting" 9-year-old, and then is prosecuted, not for "statutory rape", but for fraud—because he falsely stated or implied that there was little or no chance that the sex would result in physical harm to the 9-year-old, and the 9-year-old was too ignorant to know otherwise.
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Jesus dude...
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