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I agree. But it's not rape.
'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.
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.
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?
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.
This is exactly right. I think that if an adult has consensual sex with a teenager, that's not OK (with various edge cases as we know from statutory rape laws). I think if anyone talks a 9 year old into having sex with them, we should lock them up and throw away the fucking key. But it's important to maintain the meanings of terms, so I think they should be under different laws than rape because they aren't the same.
There's an annoying chilling effect when it comes to the sex crimes where any attempt to differentiate between degrees of wrongness is seen as moral endorsement.
I think, clearly, lying to a woman at the bar that you're a millionaire to get in her pants is bad. Stringing a girlfriend along with vague future prospects of marriage when you have no intention of marrying her is bad. And dragging her into an alleyway and forcibly penetrating her is bad.
All these subvert the woman's free will to have sex with her when she would otherwise refuse. But they're very different crimes. Lumping them all together under one word and treating them all the same is stupid.
Yeah and it's incredibly annoying. I have learned the hard way to expect that sort of bad reasoning from normies, but I didn't expect to encounter it here of all places.
It's like Jonathan Haidt says, people form their moral judgements first based on disgust, then rationalize it post hoc. People will jump through many hoops to preserve their feelings of moral superiority, especially when it comes to protecting women and how women are treated. This, in my opinion is evidence that women are not oppressed. Everyone wants to think everyone else is oppressing women but they are the one of the few good ones.
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