This piece is bereft of any kind of scenario analysis or attempt to understand humans. It sounds like are describing a revenge fantasy for men whose prosecutions scandalize you.
Contrary to what you suggest, evidence of ex-post social contact is in fact routinely introduced in criminal defense. But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers, and accommodation is a normal human response pattern. Using the same logic and omissions, you could write an essay saying that battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses should be stigmatized instead of helped.
Battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses definitely should be stigmatized though. This isn't Afghanistan, an adult woman can leave at any time.
I don't think "I had trauma" is necessarily valid as an excuse for misbehavior. If men are being asked to stigmatize rapists, it only seems fair for women to do the same??
But what are you categorizing as “misbehavior”? Reporting an assault? Continuing communication? Or are you assuming something else?
I think Hanania’s disgust reflex is coming from an assumption that an accusation made by someone who was civil with the accused after the alleged act is a false accusation.
Women who stay with abusers may endanger people with whom they have professional, personal, or familial contact by doing so; those most at risk are often children.
A woman who, in dire circumstances, takes the risk of retribution to separate herself from a threat and to make society aware of that threat seems brave to me. Women who do not do so seem, at the very least, not as brave. We do not have to imagine that all those less-brave women are so cowardly as to warrant active stigma in order to imagine that some of them are.
She was never "with" him in a dependent relationship of the sort you allude to. This was a casual social engagement. That she didn't do anything about and continued to have contact with him suggests that she was lying about the degree to which she didn't consent. Regret is not withdrawal of consent.
Id also correct the statement that it was a casual social engagement. My understanding is that she participated in a live stream with him. He was in her professional orbit of influencers, and she continued to associate with him in that capacity for ostensibly professional reasons. That does add a little bit of nuance. It's not like she invited him out for coffee.
Hanania specifically argued that he doesn’t know what happened, but regardless the woman should be stigmatized for continued socialization. So the fact of whether there was consent is not part of his argument.
Anyone who tries to take down someone using their eloquence alone should be stigmatized. Socially awkward young men .. ie most of them .. will be forever hostage to the whims of verbally gifted women .. and they don't even ever had to be in the same room. Bring back statute of limitations and the discarded legal reforms that rose from the Salem Witch Trials.
>But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers
Those women don't sound like they're taking rape very seriously, and can hardly complain if the rest of society treats their rape allegation in the same non-serious way.
There should probably be an exception to stigma if the abuser is a very close family member (like a father or mother).
Or if the person is physically unable to leave (they're disabled).
But if you live in a country where 1) honor killings aren't a thing and 2) women can get jobs and get housing and open bank accounts independently there is no excuse for an adult able-bodied woman not minimizing contact with an alleged abuser as much as possible.
People are often abused by people in their same social circles, and contrary to Hanania, it sometimes does take time for people to admit to themselves that what they experienced was abuse. When you're betrayed by someone you trust it's not unusual to attempt to make excuses for their behavior as a first line psychological defense. This is not controversial.
It's easy to say "if someone does something bad to you, then you should avoid them after". It makes common sense. But human psychology is complicated, and does not operate solely by logic. Emotions contaminate our behaviors and make us do things that don't make sense all the time. That doesn't mean we should be punished for it.
OK, well I think the right answer is still to advocate that a person who experienced possible-abuse should get some distance from the situation and stop hanging out with the possible-abuser for a while if possible, to get some clarity. It's the right move from the perspective of their safety, and also from the perspective of making it easier for society to distinguish real vs fake incidents.
If the person didn't experience any sort of pain or mental trauma, and only "discovers" that this was abuse much later, that seems pretty sus.
I agree to some extent. If someone only feels they were abused decades later it makes it more suspicious. By that point they've gone over the memory so many times I wouldn't trust their judgements to be the truth.
But a matter of months or a year or so, and even in some cases decades later, doesn't totally invalidate it by itself. I have a friend who was groomed by an older man as a child and entered into a relationship with him when she was 18. She only realized what had happened after some time. There wasn't anything illegal about it as far as I know, so it's not totally analogous, but I'm just saying it's perfectly natural for a teen to not fully understand the situation they are in. The fact that it took her a while to realize the situation for what it was isn't disqualifying in and of itself.
"Abuse" isn't a crime unless you define it better. If you mean assault (or assault and battery if that's what your jurisdiction calls it) by a boyfriend/husband that the woman is dependent on to some degree for her sustenance, then yes we can understand why a woman would decide to grin and bear it rather than leave with her children, and we'd be inclined to believe her when she does eventually go to the police. The defence would be unlikely to claim that her previous silence meant she consented to being beaten. (And it's not clear to me that a person can indeed consent to being assaulted and deliberately injured.) But here we are talking an alleged rape by a man she wasn't in a dependent relationship with. In rape, consent is everything, because, unlike being given a black eye and broken ribs, sexual intercourse can be desired and pleasurable, and usually is, if consensual. In domestic assault, the injuries are documented and are evidence all by themselves. We don't need to agonize over whether we should believe the wife's complaint. In rape, the fact of the sexual intercourse is not usually at issue, nor is the identity of the alleged perpetrator. (If there is doubt about either of those, forensic evidence can make the case.) What we have to decide is whether to believe the woman's claim that she didn't consent to the sex that we all agree occurred and with a man we all agree did it. What the defence is trying to undermine and cast reasonable doubt on is the prosecution's claim that she didn't consent. In that situation, continued contact with a social acquaintance does cause us to suspect that she did really consent ahead of time, and in rape the establishment that consent was given must result in acquittal. So the credibility of the complainant's claim to have been taken against her will is everything.
Even if women have a variety of legitimate ways to process trauma, if all we have to go on is the credibility of her claim that she didn't consent when the common sense interpretation of what she did before and after is that she went along with it, even if not enthusiastically -- "you'll do, I guess, and it may help my career" is still consent -- the accused must go free. What Richard says is true, that what happened after the event doesn't change the event. Nonetheless, what the woman *chooses to do* after the event has common-sense impact on what we think really did happen in the event.
And his larger point is also valid: even if it really was rape, that she really didn't consent and we believe her that she didn't, she is still behaving disreputably in hobnobbing with her rapist for a voluntary business proposition.....because it tends to neuter the efforts of the justice system to punish men who really do rape women and seriously hurt them.
The Epstein case is replete with adult women later claiming to have been "abused" or "raped" by Epstein coincidentally when hundreds of millions of dollars were up for grabs for anyone claiming to have been "sexually abused" by Epstein.
The most recent example is Julia Molchanova who had a puff piece written by the WSJ. She was 22 years old when she met Epstein and worked for her "abuser" for 8 full years. As lead plaintiff, she recently sued Bank of America who settled for over $70 million. Bank of America's great crime?Failing to report suspicious transactions and cash withdrawals that theoretically could have been used by Epstein to "traffick" adults by paying them for a massage.
Another example is Juliette Bryant who filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2019 claiming that her abuse caused her to cry herself to sleep every night. The Epstein files released in January show that Bryant was emailing Epstein in 2015, a full decade after the beginning of her alleged abuse:
"I'm in New York until Sunday, would be great see you if you're here?
Let me know if you're around, I could pop in anytime to say hi quickly - it's been so long since I saw you!
Lots of love"
Those who deny women agency will tell you with a straight face that the "victims" must have had Stockholm Syndrome, which is not even a real thing.
Where else is this standard that victim must not have any further contact with perpetrator enforced? In an elder abuse case, would we dismiss a claim that an elderly person was abused if they maintained contact with the abuser after the initial event? This standard seems especially odd in cases of rape involving abuse within a family or human trafficking cases. If a step daughter stays in a house after her step father rapes her, this counts against her claim? Why? When that doctor for the womens olympic gymnastic team was repeatedly abusing the girls, why should it count against their credibility that they didn't immediately focus on bringing charges against him instead of continuing to train at the olympics?
I'm not really seeing what would be more believable about contact stopping after the initial sexual occurrence either. People have consenting one night stands. People have ongoing abusive relationships. What makes a rape allegation more credible when a woman or girl stops associating with a rapist after sex given that women can just as well suddenly stop associating with a man they chose to have sex with?
All of this situations involve a reason to stay in contact bc there was a pre-existing relationship or the person lived in the same residence of in the case of most elder abuse victims, their mind doesn't work well enough to even know what's going on. In this case they did not even live in the same area and had no relationship or other reason for ongoing contact unless she went out of her way to keep it going. In any event, all of these things would be presented as evidence in any case, and a jury or judge is going to weigh the evidence (or lack of evidence, or exculpatory evidence) before them. I agree with Richard there should be norms/standards that are clearly communicated to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault and distinguish. With the current norms it is almost impossible and you do need actual evidence to prove a felony ... Just he said she said is almost never going to be good enough to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think of this lecture as required viewing on this topic and how thorny it can be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s Tavris talks about the commonality of situations where they women is too drunk to say no and the man is too drunk to hear it.
This discourse is kind of frustrating. It started with women saying "I was drunk and I made a decision I regret, ergo the man is bad". Men responded: "Well I was drunk too, gender equality right? Why is it my responsibility more than yours?" Then women responded: "OK fine. But at least if you're sober and I'm drunk, you're creepy and you exploited me." So now a man has to get drunk in order to protect himself from the exploitation accusation. But being intoxicated also leads to poor decision-making. Brock Turner was drunk out of his mind.
Everyone is just responding with their id. No one is trying to think about what a coherent set of rules would be.
I dream of a world where every fuckboy has a breathalyzer that digitally registers the DNA and blood alcohol level of the person measured. He keeps it in his room and saves the reading when he brings a lady friend over. We can prosecute based on the BAC of the lady friend. The device has very bright LEDs which read either "HAVE CONSENSUAL FUN FOLX" or "STOP--NO SEX" depending on whether the BAC threshold is above or below the legal limit. Super bright and clear, with vivid colors, so you can easily read them while intoxicated. The legal limit for the jurisdiction is inferred automatically on the basis of geolocation. The new focus of feminist discourse can be about lowering the legal sex limit in their particular jurisdiction. That way you can have puritanical jurisdictions and party jurisdictions depending on what the locals want.
You could also add audio recording of consent statements. Call it the CONSENTALYZER. I'm sure this would be a billion-dollar startup.
Or we could just go back to what used to be the standard, where every person is fully responsible for every bad decision they make when drinking, whether that is sleeping with someone embarrassing that they don't even remember later, or getting behind the wheel of a car and they don't remember later. Much easier that way.
In one movie I was skimming on Tubi recently, I saw a young male character documenting consent by having the girl say so into his phone while he videotaped her. The female character didn't think there was anything odd about this, kind of, "Well,...yeah!" Of course unless he videotaped the whole act, he hasn't protected himself from her claiming that she changed her mind while he was putting the head in.
Assuming neither party is drunk or stoned, I wonder if the guy is protected by asking the girl to mount him when she's ready. That at least covers the "E" for "Enthusiastic" in L-FRIES consent.
Why is the ongoing or lack of ongoing relationship a relevant criteria in terms of definitive evidence for or against a sexual assault charge? E Jean Carroll never saw or spoke to trump again after she alleges he assaulted her. How is this evidence in her favor? What if he had stated his intent on coming to the store later and did so? Would we not simply say that her motive for being at the store was keeping her job?
It isn't *definitive* evidence, it's evidence. For the obvious reason that it implies she was not upset by what occurred and sought out ongoing relations. All evidence regarding motive, opportunity, physical evidence etc is relevant and has to be judged together.
Good points but there seems to me a clear difference between abuse between people with long term and close relationships and a literal stranger that you don't have any history or complicated relationship with. If you, like mattress girl, are texting love notes to your rapist, that has to count as evidence against the rape. We can't set up a situation where the accused can't adduce any evidence at all on their behalf. Clavicular is a douchebag and for all I know totally did this, but we can't have a system where the accused is just defacto guilty because of an accusation and nothing else.
Technically sending love notes does not add evidence that a past sexual interaction was consentual. What it really does is show that the allegedly wronged party was fully willing to forgive the perpetrator and continue a relationship with them. In all likelihood, if mattress man had fallen in love with Emma and had a relationship with her for the duration she wanted it, there would be no mattress performance. What made her angry was not the rape, even if it did happen, but that it happened in conjunction with a lack of eventual commitment and other such things, which then made her motivated to forever tar this man as a rapist. The question of legal guilt cannot hinge entirely on the victim's reaction to it, although in practice that has a lot to do with being able to gather evidence for the crime.
I recall back in 2020, there was a social media movement telling white people not to call the cops on black people who they saw committing a crime, even against themselves, because the cops might overreact against the black perpetrator. But a white person not calling the cops for this kind of reason does not count definitively against the likelihood that a crime occurred because a victim's reaction is not objective fact regarding whether or not a crime occurred.
Yes but if a woman is so unaggrieved by sex that she is willing to forgive or wants a relationship with the perpetrator, then it is very hard to see why society should devote literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to catching, prosecuting, and imprisoning the person!!! I don't disagree with what you say likely happened there, but this would undermine the entire basis for society taking this seriously as a crime...which societies have not throughout most of history. I do think what happened is what you say, but that is precisely why most people don't think she was raped. Never heard of someone who's been burglarized who then seeks out the burglar to be their roommate!! If people set a norm that it's fine to just not only forgive but seek out a relationship or even throw yourself at your rapist, the only result is that everyone will just stop giving a crap about rape as a crime or disbelieve it ever happens, which I think is Richard's point.
I don't know much about how rape is actually prosecuted, but it seems like your first statement proves far too much. Consent isn't an easily observed objective fact. It has to do with the mental state of the person who could give consent, and we have to infer what that was on the basis of that person's actions. If the accuser's willingness to do things with the accused other than the act in question can't be evidence of the accused's innocence, how can it be evidence of their guilt? For example, it seems by your logic that iif we could prove that Peters forcibly dragged Mendoza to his home where the rape occurred, that would not be evidence of guilt, since she could technically have not given consent to the abduction but then given consent to the subsequent sexual encounter. It's logically a coherent to hold that position as an evidentiary matter, but I think we can all agree that common sense says that if an abduction occurred, that makes a rape more likely.
But a "victim"'s reaction is evidence about whether she consented to the act, not whether the act happened. The man will usually admit that he did have sex with her (if he did.) In rape, it's the lack of consent that makes the same act a crime that would not be a crime if there was consent. Rape is really a crime like no other. The examples you are citing are when criminal acts occur but for whatever reason we decide not to report them. In a mugging there is no subjective, in-the-victim's-mind, opinion about consent that would bear on whether a jury would convict.
So what evidence can the accused adduce on their behalf in a he said/she said situation that left no evidence? Again to be clear, I dont think false accusations are common like some commenters on this topis seem to. I do think mutually conflicting honest accounts are more common.
Our legal system is already on the accused side in cases of date rape. It’s the prosecution that has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he did it and that is hard to prove even if the woman had no further contact with him if she went on a date with him and then voluntarily accompanied him to private quarters. I would think that there usually isn’t enough evidence to even bring charges forth in cases of date rape when women report it to police departments.
Prosecutors are free to bring forward potentially exculpatory evidence that the accuser continued to have friendly contact with the accused. The accused is able to explain either under their own testimony or cross-examination what the context was and the reason, and the jury makes a decision whether to convict. A good example of a case where a man was not convicted in part because of ongoing warm communication between the accuser and the accused was the P Diddy trial.
Unlike Richard Hanania, I don’t think that continued communication after the act should be cause for public condemnation.
I agree with your conclusion in the legal sense. Even if Hanania persuaded victims to behave like this, bad actors would just abuse the pattern. Rapists could try to coerce their victims into prolonged contact, and false accusers could cut contact to boost their credibility. It’s like a Goodheart’s Law for rape.
However, in an informal sense, all of your examples do make gut sense to me. If there are two elder abuse cases, one of which is false, where one elder remained in contact and one managed to escape the situation, I would a priori assign marginally higher probability to the truth of the second elder case.
Issue with "if you go to his bedroom and get drunk, that is assuming sex is on the table" is that something being on the table doesn't mean it's certain! Theoretically you could decide to have sex or not even if you were in that room and if you wnd up in a situation where the lady can't reasonably say no, the choice she had to back out is off the table, you should probably not go ahead with the sex. Someone shoild be able to of course still say no to sex after following you to a room and even makihg out with yiu a bit and deciding otherwise
While I get Richard's point, I think that was a terrible sentence. Imagine a 17 year old boy went to an adults room drunk and got raped by a guy - I don't think we would say that "sex was on the table".
I think it is probably clarifying for men in particular to imagine the facts of all these scenarios but with two men, with the victim not being gay. If they just imagine it with reversed sexes, it won't work, but I think the offense may sometimes be more clear if you remove any such sex distinctions and imagine it as two men. As it happens, I know several men who were sexually assaulted by bosses or coaches or church leaders when they were teenagers. All the same problems with evidence, profound shame, etc are there too. When it becomes men vs women it seems part of people's brain turns off.
Hmm, I am not sure that is a good analogy in the real world since we have some pretty good data that gay male culture is just not the same as heterosexual culture. Did you ever watch the HBO show I May Destroy You - there is a scenario similar to what you describe and it is pretty uncomfortable to watch and struck me as rape.
Gay men behave differently because they deal with other men and don't have to compromise with the opposite sex. They have far more orgies, anonymous casual sex, far more sexual partners, and have the same preferences as straight men for youth and beauty, etc.
I don't know the show, but I don't consider rape gray or murky. My definition of rape is really strict because I think that's most optimal for the court room and legal standards. If there is ambiguity, I would use a different word, like a misunderstanding. Rape is physically forced sex. Sex between men is umcomfortable to watch, I am sure. Sex in general is uncomfortable to watch since, in our evolutionary history, we tried to keep it secret to minimize negative gossip about us, and we succeeded. There were no cameras or porn, or voyeurs. Watching it on screen is an evolutionary mismatch, where we all act as voyeurs.
People like weird things. Seeing it on screen should create a sense of discomfort. Whether it's rape or not should not be based on the viewer's discomfort, but on whether it was physically forced. I am sure gay men do rape each other sometimes, but, when they do, there should be far less ambiguity about what it was than in straight relations, since men and women are different. Men are very clear about what they want, and interactions between two men should be quite unambiguous. If a man physically forced another man to have sex with them without the other man wanting to, then it was rape. If he didn't, then it wasn't. There is some ambiguity in every human interaction, but I think we are deliberately increasing ambiguity today by conflating different things and trying to make our social life free of negative feelings, which is impossible, especially for women, who are more neurotic than men, meaning that at the extremes of neuroticism, women will outnumber men enormously and will experience so many things as negative that it will be impossible to satisfy them without hurting everybody else.
If a woman goes to a man's apartment drunk, she should expect the man to want to have sex with her. If a man goes to another man's apartment drunk, and both think each other are gay, the drunk guy should expect sex to be on the table. Your analogy doesn't work since it leaves ambiguous whether they know they are gay. If one guy is gay and the other isn't and they just meet at work and the guy doesn't have a clue that the other guy is gay and he initiates sex, I am sure the guy will freak out and say what thell are you doing. That's not what gay men do, afaik, precisely because gay men are such a smal minority that they can't just assume another guy will be gay. They have to be sure to minimize freakouts and uncomfortable situations that would occur if one was straight and the othet gay. That's why they use gay bars and other meeting places that only gay men know about, so they can safely assume everybody else is gay.
Also, since gay men can indulge in beauty and youth more than straight men since they don't have to deal with women, there are a lot more age gaps in gay male sex and a lot less emphasis on the age of consent, which in the modern climate is considered highly suspect and immoral. So, I am not surprised you would find much of gay male sex weird and uncomfortable (especially if you are straight like me: I have never even seen a gay male sex scene on screen), because our society finds male heterosexuality uncomfortable, and male homosexuality is like an undiluted version of male heterosexuality. Plus, watching gay men have sex is really disgusting and off-putting for straight men in general, like watching someone eat worms based on one study, so maybe you were discomfited by that as well. Or maybe not if you are such a high uncoupler that you can watch anything without being grossed out.
Sorry for the long rambling post, but basically i think rape should be defined as narrowly as possible beause otherwise we will become too confused due to the complexity of human sexuality.
I also have a personal beef with women who intentionally use their sexuality/relationships with high profile men in entertainment to advance their careers and the cry foul, usually after that career doesn’t elevate like they hoped. It has always made it much harder for other women to succeed in these careers without being harassed by men who are used to this being the norm. They hurt all women with this behavior and put themselves in these situations, which does make their accusations hard to believe.
Your weird obsession with the validity of various sex crimes is gradually corrosive of your intellectual credibility. And has been for long enough now that it's material as the lawyers say.
There are false accusations. And even worse there are mutually honest but conflicting accounts. Now of course I don't think most accusations are false, but you can't just convict people of crimes on an accusation and nothing more. And definitely there is plenty of rape not reported or prosecuted at all, but legally you don't convict some individuals to "make up" for the others. I think of Carol Tavris' talk on this as required viewing on the thorniness of this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s
The thing is...and most people don't seem to realize this, or at least it *never* gets mentioned in reporting....but we ALREADY have special and lower evidentiary standards for sexual assault which don't exist for any other crime. There is all kinds of evidence that defense lawyers cannot ask or submit as evidence, which they could for any other crime, bc we've adopted special protections for sexual assault victims.
There's a certain crowd that seems to want to get rid of all evidentiary rules entirely and say that NOTHING a woman says or does has probative weight. That is not workable. You're dealing with a crime where the act in question involves something that millions of people do happily and voluntarily and with no crime every single day, and one that happens almost always in private with no witnesses. Therefore it's already inherently problematic to prove.
If women get taught they don't have to struggle or put up the slightest fight (which would provide evidence), or even say no necessarily, or do anything else that would lend some probative value towards what happened either during or after...there is just no way to get a conviction, so you might as well forget it.
I cut off all contact after a man I thought was gay and a friend forced himself on me in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a hard decision. I can see circumstances like living with someone and being dependent on him for shelter that are different but a virtual stranger ?
In some you correct that if cutting Contact is evidence of guild, then maintaining Contact is evidence of innocence. However, it doesn’t follow that is actually good evidence. If I confess to a crime that’s good evidence. I am guilty, but if I declare immuno, that’s not actually strong evidence that am innocent. Further, you hardly touch upon the considerable cost of such a social norm, especially in cases where professional obligations or social dynamics would make it costly to Contact, for example, if you wouldn’t consider accusation at that time to be worthwhile, but cutting Contact without explanation would be socially or professionally, costly. It also seems like just a terrible idea when you’re dealing with cases of young victims, who are children or just above the age of consent. I also just disagree about whether getting drunk should necessarily be treated as consent since firstly, people consent to many things under the influence of alcohol which they might not consent to when sober and it’s not always the case that it’s understood by both parties beforehand that drinking is consent to sex. Also, I think you’re suffering from the problem of treating a binary distinction in law as a necessarily binary thing in reality, the law has to draw a sharp line, but that doesn’t mean that in reality, you can’t have a gray zone and while to be fair a good argument can be made that the law would be better of being too narrow rather than two broad in terms of social consequences doing stuff with dubious consent of consent seems questionable on account. For example, the victim being unusually immature, even if technically, just above the age of consent seems at least deserving of a presumption of being very likely potentially bad behaviour, but a rule against cutting Contact in all such cases since definitely way to costly. Sorry for the rough comment, but I’m short of time.
I confess, I never understood this line of reasoning, sure, people have a choice weather to to get drunk or not, but even assuming that they are never mistaken about the intentions of the people around them when they are choosing to get drunk, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to punish being stupid and impulsive with potentially traumatising sex. It’s obvious to me that given that people can often do things under the influence of drink that they would not do otherwise, not to mention the cases where someone is just too drunk to say yes, or no, it’s very likely that sex under these conditions can prove fairly traumatising and given this, it is obvious to me that other people should in fact not have sex with you unless they have good reason to believe you wouldn’t mind. For example, if you have a pre-existing understanding that you will have sex with them. When you’re drunk, the fact people consent to stuff isn’t some kind of get out of jail free card if I tell you to chop off my arm, the correct response is not to do that instead of insisting that I should be responsible for my decisions and in any case, no one was forcing you to go along with me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to chop off my arm but you shouldn’t chop it off either, and I think the same principal applies to sex when one of the parties is drunk. To give another analogy. If you have a reputation for fraud and cheating, and I still go and try to do a transaction with you. Absolutely nobody is going to respond to this situation by saying that I should be responsible for my decisions for choosing to do business with you if I get defrauded since it’s just understood that even though I could have chosen not to come to do business with you, you still can’t try to fraud me. Like come on, if I get an elderly man drunk and convince him to will everything he owns to me. I think people would at least agree that this is kind of questionable behaviour and at least in this example, the person can just change their mind once they are no longer drunk, unlike in the case of sex, where it’s already done thing. No to be clear if you are able to demonstrate that sex while drunk without a pre-existing understanding is actually not likely to prove damaging to you. Then it would be fine, but if it is in fact damaging, I don’t think consent is a terribly good defence after all you, if I actively try to do something stupid or damaging to myself while drunk, it’s generally understood that it’s good to stop me, not assist me in hurting myself.
A lawyer is in a fender bender with another car where right of way was ambiguous. Dark night, no traffic, no witnesses, no dash cams. Neither are injured. Lawyer calls cops, then takes out a flask of whiskey and offers the other driver a drink. The other driver, a bit rattled, drinks it down gratefully. The lawyer screws the cap back on and hides the flask in the trunk. "Aren't you having one?" the other driver asks.
Firstly, consent in contract and consent to sex is not exactly identical as an analogy. If I lie about materially relevant facts to get you to agree to a contract. It is very often going to be a criminal offence, but this is not true in the sexual case, secondly, as I noted my original comment, I do think there is a case for keeping the legal definition of rape, narrow, but socially it does seem bad. For example to get someone drunk out their mind and then get them to sign a contract especially if the contract in question seems likely to be bad for them. Note in actual contracts, it is very rare for you to actually go sign a contract without a pre-existing understanding that you’re planning to do that when people get drunk with their business associates, they generally just hammering out minor details in my experience, it’s fairly rare for someone to decide to sign a contract when they had no intention to do so a few minutes ago, at least if you’re talking about contracts that actually have a serious impact on their finances. Also, as a matter of fact, we do in fact, prevent people from doing things that they would un controversial consent to. If we think the results are going to be predictably bad. That is why for example, you can’t consent to not putting on your seat belts or getting a child with no drivers license to drive you or killing yourself because you’re suffering from a few months of depression so in actuality, we do generally seem to follow the principal that actually it’s still wrong to do things that are predictably very likely to be bad for someone, even if they consent to these things. Also note that the basic principle that severe deficiencies of rationality, vitiate consent is well established. That’s why you can’t sign a contract with a child or someone not in their sound mind also to be clear. I wouldn’t actually have a problem if somebody had sex after a glass of wine. I am more concerned about the case with their blackout drunk or at least significantly. The point where they are very likely to consent to something, even if they might not consent to it when not being under the influence, a single classes isn’t going to affect too much at least unless you have an unprecedentedly low tolerance.
This, more than anything, is behind the drop in young men's pursuit of women .. forever hostage to what some gal will eventually blurt out, when the mood strikes her.
There is something deeply disturbing about arguing that a woman should be stigmatized even if she actually was raped because she remained in contact with the man who allegedly assaulted her.
You can debate whether post-incident behavior is relevant evidence. But advocating social punishment for victims because they didn't behave the way you think a “real” victim should is vile. That isn't concern for justice. It's victim-blaming dressed up as social analysis.
Honestly, I think anyone who can arrive at “she may have been raped, but she deserves to be stigmatized for it” should step away from the keyboard and seriously reconsider whether they need some professional help. Unfollowing because Richard Hanania is absolutely vile.
This commentary misses something important. Most sexual trauma doesn’t look like dark alleys and knives. Going purely by the numbers, the most typical case looks like drinking with someone you trust, getting penetrated by them, and feeling rattled and disturbed afterwards in a way it might take you some time to sort through. (It’s covered in any decent sex ed that the most common date rape drug is alcohol, and most rape is done by trusted acquaintances rather than strangers.)
In confusing, psychologically disorganized, or gray-area situations—which, again, make up most of the surface area of sexual exploitation—the victim may take a while to process the experience and mentally clarify that a line was crossed. IRL perpetrators will rarely signpost themselves or make it easy for either party to evaluate what’s going on; instead, they’re fountainheads of cognitive dissonance and contradictory signals. You could say they accomplish gaslighting (in a lot of cases) just by signaling passively that their own behavior is “normal” and unremarkable, when really it would alarm a reasonable, neutral observer.
So, “confused victim slowly puts the pieces together and much later blows a whistle” is a true-to-life and unsurprising pattern. It’s made of specific elements that can be observed and falsified. Our public standard of scrutiny should understand that pattern and watch for the elements. I do agree there should be norms and behavior pressures (of one kind or another) that help surface better evidence, so we don’t live in a murky lemon market of over-credible liars and under-credible victims.
In tandem, as far as stigma goes, we should hold the accused to a demanding standard: avoiding the appearance of impropriety. Hair-splitting technical questions of what does or doesn’t “count” as rape should only come up in a courtroom setting, because the deployment of State violence needs to follow clear and predictable laws. The general public should focus instead on the bottom-line quality of human outcomes, which we are free to observe in a way the courts aren’t. While drunken bedroom sex isn’t uniformly traumatic or abusive, it’s famously THE primary site of sketchy, gray-area, hard-to-adjudicate cases that leave people genuinely wounded and worse off. Since the legal system can’t adequately deter the harms there (due to problems with both evidence and moral ontology, as Hanania mentioned), culture should step in to provide deterrence. It should be widely seen as gross, bad, and suspicious to steer another person as Clavicular did, based on just the evidence we already have.
Look I'm not defending or weighing in on Clavicular or this case, bc my opinion is that both he and she are likely horrible, narcissistic, warped people who will do anything and everything for money and attention. Also, both of them being underage and legally not allowed to drink causes a lot of problems here...generally I'm of the opinion that everyone is fully responsible for everything they do drunk, whether that is mowing someone down in a car or consenting to sex, and too bad if they're embarrassed the next day or don't remember. Given they were both underage his mother is likely in big trouble.
But I can't go along with your general rule at all. You want all possible instances of the remotest grey area to be fair instead of sex, under this rule. "Drunken bedroom sex" does not just result in trauma, it results in many happy relationships and I'd warrant was the beginning of tens of millions of marriages...maybe even a majority of them...in the 20th century. Nights of drunken bedroom sex have been some of the greatest nights of my life. I hate the terms "sex positive" and "sex negative" because they don't actually mean anything like what they imply, but a rule that anything less than perfect adherence to some ideal where everyone soberly and consideredly articulates enthusiastic pre-informed consent to everyrhing that happens is the most sex negative stance I can think of. A better rule is that people should not get drunk if they can't control themselves while drunk or can't emotionally handle their actions when appraising them sober. Of course this doesn't apply if someone is held down and has liquor poured down their throat or otherwise did not voluntarily and knowingly drink.
On the actions of how "trauma* occurs, I agree with your description of how it goes down and you did a good job describing it. Except that's a very new and not at all universally accepted definition of trauma. And a lot of people will just think that if some event is so subtle or vague that it takes a person months or years of thinking through it to even *realize* it was an offense...time during which most likely others are encouraging that interpretation...that there's not much reason for society to care about the offense. Plenty of other bigger problems to focus on than something that's not even immediately apparent as a bad thing and takes years to figure out.
This piece is bereft of any kind of scenario analysis or attempt to understand humans. It sounds like are describing a revenge fantasy for men whose prosecutions scandalize you.
Contrary to what you suggest, evidence of ex-post social contact is in fact routinely introduced in criminal defense. But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers, and accommodation is a normal human response pattern. Using the same logic and omissions, you could write an essay saying that battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses should be stigmatized instead of helped.
Battered women who do not leave their abusive spouses definitely should be stigmatized though. This isn't Afghanistan, an adult woman can leave at any time.
This reeks of absolutely no understanding of how humans process trauma.
I don't think "I had trauma" is necessarily valid as an excuse for misbehavior. If men are being asked to stigmatize rapists, it only seems fair for women to do the same??
See my comment under tendrils below
But what are you categorizing as “misbehavior”? Reporting an assault? Continuing communication? Or are you assuming something else?
I think Hanania’s disgust reflex is coming from an assumption that an accusation made by someone who was civil with the accused after the alleged act is a false accusation.
Women who stay with abusers may endanger people with whom they have professional, personal, or familial contact by doing so; those most at risk are often children.
A woman who, in dire circumstances, takes the risk of retribution to separate herself from a threat and to make society aware of that threat seems brave to me. Women who do not do so seem, at the very least, not as brave. We do not have to imagine that all those less-brave women are so cowardly as to warrant active stigma in order to imagine that some of them are.
She was never "with" him in a dependent relationship of the sort you allude to. This was a casual social engagement. That she didn't do anything about and continued to have contact with him suggests that she was lying about the degree to which she didn't consent. Regret is not withdrawal of consent.
Id also correct the statement that it was a casual social engagement. My understanding is that she participated in a live stream with him. He was in her professional orbit of influencers, and she continued to associate with him in that capacity for ostensibly professional reasons. That does add a little bit of nuance. It's not like she invited him out for coffee.
Hanania specifically argued that he doesn’t know what happened, but regardless the woman should be stigmatized for continued socialization. So the fact of whether there was consent is not part of his argument.
Anyone who tries to take down someone using their eloquence alone should be stigmatized. Socially awkward young men .. ie most of them .. will be forever hostage to the whims of verbally gifted women .. and they don't even ever had to be in the same room. Bring back statute of limitations and the discarded legal reforms that rose from the Salem Witch Trials.
>But in fact, this is never solid evidence of innocence because people have professional, personal, or familial reasons for staying in contact with abusers
Those women don't sound like they're taking rape very seriously, and can hardly complain if the rest of society treats their rape allegation in the same non-serious way.
There should probably be an exception to stigma if the abuser is a very close family member (like a father or mother).
Or if the person is physically unable to leave (they're disabled).
But if you live in a country where 1) honor killings aren't a thing and 2) women can get jobs and get housing and open bank accounts independently there is no excuse for an adult able-bodied woman not minimizing contact with an alleged abuser as much as possible.
People are often abused by people in their same social circles, and contrary to Hanania, it sometimes does take time for people to admit to themselves that what they experienced was abuse. When you're betrayed by someone you trust it's not unusual to attempt to make excuses for their behavior as a first line psychological defense. This is not controversial.
It's easy to say "if someone does something bad to you, then you should avoid them after". It makes common sense. But human psychology is complicated, and does not operate solely by logic. Emotions contaminate our behaviors and make us do things that don't make sense all the time. That doesn't mean we should be punished for it.
OK, well I think the right answer is still to advocate that a person who experienced possible-abuse should get some distance from the situation and stop hanging out with the possible-abuser for a while if possible, to get some clarity. It's the right move from the perspective of their safety, and also from the perspective of making it easier for society to distinguish real vs fake incidents.
If the person didn't experience any sort of pain or mental trauma, and only "discovers" that this was abuse much later, that seems pretty sus.
I agree to some extent. If someone only feels they were abused decades later it makes it more suspicious. By that point they've gone over the memory so many times I wouldn't trust their judgements to be the truth.
But a matter of months or a year or so, and even in some cases decades later, doesn't totally invalidate it by itself. I have a friend who was groomed by an older man as a child and entered into a relationship with him when she was 18. She only realized what had happened after some time. There wasn't anything illegal about it as far as I know, so it's not totally analogous, but I'm just saying it's perfectly natural for a teen to not fully understand the situation they are in. The fact that it took her a while to realize the situation for what it was isn't disqualifying in and of itself.
"Abuse" isn't a crime unless you define it better. If you mean assault (or assault and battery if that's what your jurisdiction calls it) by a boyfriend/husband that the woman is dependent on to some degree for her sustenance, then yes we can understand why a woman would decide to grin and bear it rather than leave with her children, and we'd be inclined to believe her when she does eventually go to the police. The defence would be unlikely to claim that her previous silence meant she consented to being beaten. (And it's not clear to me that a person can indeed consent to being assaulted and deliberately injured.) But here we are talking an alleged rape by a man she wasn't in a dependent relationship with. In rape, consent is everything, because, unlike being given a black eye and broken ribs, sexual intercourse can be desired and pleasurable, and usually is, if consensual. In domestic assault, the injuries are documented and are evidence all by themselves. We don't need to agonize over whether we should believe the wife's complaint. In rape, the fact of the sexual intercourse is not usually at issue, nor is the identity of the alleged perpetrator. (If there is doubt about either of those, forensic evidence can make the case.) What we have to decide is whether to believe the woman's claim that she didn't consent to the sex that we all agree occurred and with a man we all agree did it. What the defence is trying to undermine and cast reasonable doubt on is the prosecution's claim that she didn't consent. In that situation, continued contact with a social acquaintance does cause us to suspect that she did really consent ahead of time, and in rape the establishment that consent was given must result in acquittal. So the credibility of the complainant's claim to have been taken against her will is everything.
Even if women have a variety of legitimate ways to process trauma, if all we have to go on is the credibility of her claim that she didn't consent when the common sense interpretation of what she did before and after is that she went along with it, even if not enthusiastically -- "you'll do, I guess, and it may help my career" is still consent -- the accused must go free. What Richard says is true, that what happened after the event doesn't change the event. Nonetheless, what the woman *chooses to do* after the event has common-sense impact on what we think really did happen in the event.
And his larger point is also valid: even if it really was rape, that she really didn't consent and we believe her that she didn't, she is still behaving disreputably in hobnobbing with her rapist for a voluntary business proposition.....because it tends to neuter the efforts of the justice system to punish men who really do rape women and seriously hurt them.
The Epstein case is replete with adult women later claiming to have been "abused" or "raped" by Epstein coincidentally when hundreds of millions of dollars were up for grabs for anyone claiming to have been "sexually abused" by Epstein.
The most recent example is Julia Molchanova who had a puff piece written by the WSJ. She was 22 years old when she met Epstein and worked for her "abuser" for 8 full years. As lead plaintiff, she recently sued Bank of America who settled for over $70 million. Bank of America's great crime?Failing to report suspicious transactions and cash withdrawals that theoretically could have been used by Epstein to "traffick" adults by paying them for a massage.
Another example is Juliette Bryant who filed a lawsuit against Epstein in 2019 claiming that her abuse caused her to cry herself to sleep every night. The Epstein files released in January show that Bryant was emailing Epstein in 2015, a full decade after the beginning of her alleged abuse:
"I'm in New York until Sunday, would be great see you if you're here?
Let me know if you're around, I could pop in anytime to say hi quickly - it's been so long since I saw you!
Lots of love"
Those who deny women agency will tell you with a straight face that the "victims" must have had Stockholm Syndrome, which is not even a real thing.
Michael Tracey has done a good job documenting how "trafficking" is now just prosecutor fairy dust that turns any and all sex into felonies.
Where else is this standard that victim must not have any further contact with perpetrator enforced? In an elder abuse case, would we dismiss a claim that an elderly person was abused if they maintained contact with the abuser after the initial event? This standard seems especially odd in cases of rape involving abuse within a family or human trafficking cases. If a step daughter stays in a house after her step father rapes her, this counts against her claim? Why? When that doctor for the womens olympic gymnastic team was repeatedly abusing the girls, why should it count against their credibility that they didn't immediately focus on bringing charges against him instead of continuing to train at the olympics?
I'm not really seeing what would be more believable about contact stopping after the initial sexual occurrence either. People have consenting one night stands. People have ongoing abusive relationships. What makes a rape allegation more credible when a woman or girl stops associating with a rapist after sex given that women can just as well suddenly stop associating with a man they chose to have sex with?
All of this situations involve a reason to stay in contact bc there was a pre-existing relationship or the person lived in the same residence of in the case of most elder abuse victims, their mind doesn't work well enough to even know what's going on. In this case they did not even live in the same area and had no relationship or other reason for ongoing contact unless she went out of her way to keep it going. In any event, all of these things would be presented as evidence in any case, and a jury or judge is going to weigh the evidence (or lack of evidence, or exculpatory evidence) before them. I agree with Richard there should be norms/standards that are clearly communicated to make it easier to prosecute sexual assault and distinguish. With the current norms it is almost impossible and you do need actual evidence to prove a felony ... Just he said she said is almost never going to be good enough to prove something beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think of this lecture as required viewing on this topic and how thorny it can be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s Tavris talks about the commonality of situations where they women is too drunk to say no and the man is too drunk to hear it.
This discourse is kind of frustrating. It started with women saying "I was drunk and I made a decision I regret, ergo the man is bad". Men responded: "Well I was drunk too, gender equality right? Why is it my responsibility more than yours?" Then women responded: "OK fine. But at least if you're sober and I'm drunk, you're creepy and you exploited me." So now a man has to get drunk in order to protect himself from the exploitation accusation. But being intoxicated also leads to poor decision-making. Brock Turner was drunk out of his mind.
Everyone is just responding with their id. No one is trying to think about what a coherent set of rules would be.
I dream of a world where every fuckboy has a breathalyzer that digitally registers the DNA and blood alcohol level of the person measured. He keeps it in his room and saves the reading when he brings a lady friend over. We can prosecute based on the BAC of the lady friend. The device has very bright LEDs which read either "HAVE CONSENSUAL FUN FOLX" or "STOP--NO SEX" depending on whether the BAC threshold is above or below the legal limit. Super bright and clear, with vivid colors, so you can easily read them while intoxicated. The legal limit for the jurisdiction is inferred automatically on the basis of geolocation. The new focus of feminist discourse can be about lowering the legal sex limit in their particular jurisdiction. That way you can have puritanical jurisdictions and party jurisdictions depending on what the locals want.
You could also add audio recording of consent statements. Call it the CONSENTALYZER. I'm sure this would be a billion-dollar startup.
Or we could just go back to what used to be the standard, where every person is fully responsible for every bad decision they make when drinking, whether that is sleeping with someone embarrassing that they don't even remember later, or getting behind the wheel of a car and they don't remember later. Much easier that way.
In one movie I was skimming on Tubi recently, I saw a young male character documenting consent by having the girl say so into his phone while he videotaped her. The female character didn't think there was anything odd about this, kind of, "Well,...yeah!" Of course unless he videotaped the whole act, he hasn't protected himself from her claiming that she changed her mind while he was putting the head in.
Assuming neither party is drunk or stoned, I wonder if the guy is protected by asking the girl to mount him when she's ready. That at least covers the "E" for "Enthusiastic" in L-FRIES consent.
Why is the ongoing or lack of ongoing relationship a relevant criteria in terms of definitive evidence for or against a sexual assault charge? E Jean Carroll never saw or spoke to trump again after she alleges he assaulted her. How is this evidence in her favor? What if he had stated his intent on coming to the store later and did so? Would we not simply say that her motive for being at the store was keeping her job?
It isn't *definitive* evidence, it's evidence. For the obvious reason that it implies she was not upset by what occurred and sought out ongoing relations. All evidence regarding motive, opportunity, physical evidence etc is relevant and has to be judged together.
It probably never happened. That's why her lack of contact with him afterward is irrelevant.
Good points but there seems to me a clear difference between abuse between people with long term and close relationships and a literal stranger that you don't have any history or complicated relationship with. If you, like mattress girl, are texting love notes to your rapist, that has to count as evidence against the rape. We can't set up a situation where the accused can't adduce any evidence at all on their behalf. Clavicular is a douchebag and for all I know totally did this, but we can't have a system where the accused is just defacto guilty because of an accusation and nothing else.
Technically sending love notes does not add evidence that a past sexual interaction was consentual. What it really does is show that the allegedly wronged party was fully willing to forgive the perpetrator and continue a relationship with them. In all likelihood, if mattress man had fallen in love with Emma and had a relationship with her for the duration she wanted it, there would be no mattress performance. What made her angry was not the rape, even if it did happen, but that it happened in conjunction with a lack of eventual commitment and other such things, which then made her motivated to forever tar this man as a rapist. The question of legal guilt cannot hinge entirely on the victim's reaction to it, although in practice that has a lot to do with being able to gather evidence for the crime.
I recall back in 2020, there was a social media movement telling white people not to call the cops on black people who they saw committing a crime, even against themselves, because the cops might overreact against the black perpetrator. But a white person not calling the cops for this kind of reason does not count definitively against the likelihood that a crime occurred because a victim's reaction is not objective fact regarding whether or not a crime occurred.
Yes but if a woman is so unaggrieved by sex that she is willing to forgive or wants a relationship with the perpetrator, then it is very hard to see why society should devote literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to catching, prosecuting, and imprisoning the person!!! I don't disagree with what you say likely happened there, but this would undermine the entire basis for society taking this seriously as a crime...which societies have not throughout most of history. I do think what happened is what you say, but that is precisely why most people don't think she was raped. Never heard of someone who's been burglarized who then seeks out the burglar to be their roommate!! If people set a norm that it's fine to just not only forgive but seek out a relationship or even throw yourself at your rapist, the only result is that everyone will just stop giving a crap about rape as a crime or disbelieve it ever happens, which I think is Richard's point.
I don't know much about how rape is actually prosecuted, but it seems like your first statement proves far too much. Consent isn't an easily observed objective fact. It has to do with the mental state of the person who could give consent, and we have to infer what that was on the basis of that person's actions. If the accuser's willingness to do things with the accused other than the act in question can't be evidence of the accused's innocence, how can it be evidence of their guilt? For example, it seems by your logic that iif we could prove that Peters forcibly dragged Mendoza to his home where the rape occurred, that would not be evidence of guilt, since she could technically have not given consent to the abduction but then given consent to the subsequent sexual encounter. It's logically a coherent to hold that position as an evidentiary matter, but I think we can all agree that common sense says that if an abduction occurred, that makes a rape more likely.
But a "victim"'s reaction is evidence about whether she consented to the act, not whether the act happened. The man will usually admit that he did have sex with her (if he did.) In rape, it's the lack of consent that makes the same act a crime that would not be a crime if there was consent. Rape is really a crime like no other. The examples you are citing are when criminal acts occur but for whatever reason we decide not to report them. In a mugging there is no subjective, in-the-victim's-mind, opinion about consent that would bear on whether a jury would convict.
We don’t have such a system where someone is guilty because of an accusation
So what evidence can the accused adduce on their behalf in a he said/she said situation that left no evidence? Again to be clear, I dont think false accusations are common like some commenters on this topis seem to. I do think mutually conflicting honest accounts are more common.
Our legal system is already on the accused side in cases of date rape. It’s the prosecution that has to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he did it and that is hard to prove even if the woman had no further contact with him if she went on a date with him and then voluntarily accompanied him to private quarters. I would think that there usually isn’t enough evidence to even bring charges forth in cases of date rape when women report it to police departments.
Prosecutors are free to bring forward potentially exculpatory evidence that the accuser continued to have friendly contact with the accused. The accused is able to explain either under their own testimony or cross-examination what the context was and the reason, and the jury makes a decision whether to convict. A good example of a case where a man was not convicted in part because of ongoing warm communication between the accuser and the accused was the P Diddy trial.
Unlike Richard Hanania, I don’t think that continued communication after the act should be cause for public condemnation.
I agree with your conclusion in the legal sense. Even if Hanania persuaded victims to behave like this, bad actors would just abuse the pattern. Rapists could try to coerce their victims into prolonged contact, and false accusers could cut contact to boost their credibility. It’s like a Goodheart’s Law for rape.
However, in an informal sense, all of your examples do make gut sense to me. If there are two elder abuse cases, one of which is false, where one elder remained in contact and one managed to escape the situation, I would a priori assign marginally higher probability to the truth of the second elder case.
All of this would have weight as long as there is a critical component .. that the charges were not made based on words alone.
Issue with "if you go to his bedroom and get drunk, that is assuming sex is on the table" is that something being on the table doesn't mean it's certain! Theoretically you could decide to have sex or not even if you were in that room and if you wnd up in a situation where the lady can't reasonably say no, the choice she had to back out is off the table, you should probably not go ahead with the sex. Someone shoild be able to of course still say no to sex after following you to a room and even makihg out with yiu a bit and deciding otherwise
While I get Richard's point, I think that was a terrible sentence. Imagine a 17 year old boy went to an adults room drunk and got raped by a guy - I don't think we would say that "sex was on the table".
I think it is probably clarifying for men in particular to imagine the facts of all these scenarios but with two men, with the victim not being gay. If they just imagine it with reversed sexes, it won't work, but I think the offense may sometimes be more clear if you remove any such sex distinctions and imagine it as two men. As it happens, I know several men who were sexually assaulted by bosses or coaches or church leaders when they were teenagers. All the same problems with evidence, profound shame, etc are there too. When it becomes men vs women it seems part of people's brain turns off.
If the guy knew he was gay and the man thought he was gay and met him in a gay bar, he should have.
Hmm, I am not sure that is a good analogy in the real world since we have some pretty good data that gay male culture is just not the same as heterosexual culture. Did you ever watch the HBO show I May Destroy You - there is a scenario similar to what you describe and it is pretty uncomfortable to watch and struck me as rape.
Gay men behave differently because they deal with other men and don't have to compromise with the opposite sex. They have far more orgies, anonymous casual sex, far more sexual partners, and have the same preferences as straight men for youth and beauty, etc.
I don't know the show, but I don't consider rape gray or murky. My definition of rape is really strict because I think that's most optimal for the court room and legal standards. If there is ambiguity, I would use a different word, like a misunderstanding. Rape is physically forced sex. Sex between men is umcomfortable to watch, I am sure. Sex in general is uncomfortable to watch since, in our evolutionary history, we tried to keep it secret to minimize negative gossip about us, and we succeeded. There were no cameras or porn, or voyeurs. Watching it on screen is an evolutionary mismatch, where we all act as voyeurs.
People like weird things. Seeing it on screen should create a sense of discomfort. Whether it's rape or not should not be based on the viewer's discomfort, but on whether it was physically forced. I am sure gay men do rape each other sometimes, but, when they do, there should be far less ambiguity about what it was than in straight relations, since men and women are different. Men are very clear about what they want, and interactions between two men should be quite unambiguous. If a man physically forced another man to have sex with them without the other man wanting to, then it was rape. If he didn't, then it wasn't. There is some ambiguity in every human interaction, but I think we are deliberately increasing ambiguity today by conflating different things and trying to make our social life free of negative feelings, which is impossible, especially for women, who are more neurotic than men, meaning that at the extremes of neuroticism, women will outnumber men enormously and will experience so many things as negative that it will be impossible to satisfy them without hurting everybody else.
If a woman goes to a man's apartment drunk, she should expect the man to want to have sex with her. If a man goes to another man's apartment drunk, and both think each other are gay, the drunk guy should expect sex to be on the table. Your analogy doesn't work since it leaves ambiguous whether they know they are gay. If one guy is gay and the other isn't and they just meet at work and the guy doesn't have a clue that the other guy is gay and he initiates sex, I am sure the guy will freak out and say what thell are you doing. That's not what gay men do, afaik, precisely because gay men are such a smal minority that they can't just assume another guy will be gay. They have to be sure to minimize freakouts and uncomfortable situations that would occur if one was straight and the othet gay. That's why they use gay bars and other meeting places that only gay men know about, so they can safely assume everybody else is gay.
Also, since gay men can indulge in beauty and youth more than straight men since they don't have to deal with women, there are a lot more age gaps in gay male sex and a lot less emphasis on the age of consent, which in the modern climate is considered highly suspect and immoral. So, I am not surprised you would find much of gay male sex weird and uncomfortable (especially if you are straight like me: I have never even seen a gay male sex scene on screen), because our society finds male heterosexuality uncomfortable, and male homosexuality is like an undiluted version of male heterosexuality. Plus, watching gay men have sex is really disgusting and off-putting for straight men in general, like watching someone eat worms based on one study, so maybe you were discomfited by that as well. Or maybe not if you are such a high uncoupler that you can watch anything without being grossed out.
Sorry for the long rambling post, but basically i think rape should be defined as narrowly as possible beause otherwise we will become too confused due to the complexity of human sexuality.
I also have a personal beef with women who intentionally use their sexuality/relationships with high profile men in entertainment to advance their careers and the cry foul, usually after that career doesn’t elevate like they hoped. It has always made it much harder for other women to succeed in these careers without being harassed by men who are used to this being the norm. They hurt all women with this behavior and put themselves in these situations, which does make their accusations hard to believe.
This is total BS.
As a liberal woman who finds most Hanania’s takes on women creepy… reluctantly co-sign.
Your weird obsession with the validity of various sex crimes is gradually corrosive of your intellectual credibility. And has been for long enough now that it's material as the lawyers say.
>Your weird obsession with
When someone opens with this you know they won't be providing an actual argument.
There are false accusations. And even worse there are mutually honest but conflicting accounts. Now of course I don't think most accusations are false, but you can't just convict people of crimes on an accusation and nothing more. And definitely there is plenty of rape not reported or prosecuted at all, but legally you don't convict some individuals to "make up" for the others. I think of Carol Tavris' talk on this as required viewing on the thorniness of this issue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo&t=58s
The thing is...and most people don't seem to realize this, or at least it *never* gets mentioned in reporting....but we ALREADY have special and lower evidentiary standards for sexual assault which don't exist for any other crime. There is all kinds of evidence that defense lawyers cannot ask or submit as evidence, which they could for any other crime, bc we've adopted special protections for sexual assault victims.
There's a certain crowd that seems to want to get rid of all evidentiary rules entirely and say that NOTHING a woman says or does has probative weight. That is not workable. You're dealing with a crime where the act in question involves something that millions of people do happily and voluntarily and with no crime every single day, and one that happens almost always in private with no witnesses. Therefore it's already inherently problematic to prove.
If women get taught they don't have to struggle or put up the slightest fight (which would provide evidence), or even say no necessarily, or do anything else that would lend some probative value towards what happened either during or after...there is just no way to get a conviction, so you might as well forget it.
This piece is ridiculous. And so are your opinions. Unsubscribing.
yes, thanks for courageously taking on this third rail...
I cut off all contact after a man I thought was gay and a friend forced himself on me in the middle of the night. It wasn’t a hard decision. I can see circumstances like living with someone and being dependent on him for shelter that are different but a virtual stranger ?
In some you correct that if cutting Contact is evidence of guild, then maintaining Contact is evidence of innocence. However, it doesn’t follow that is actually good evidence. If I confess to a crime that’s good evidence. I am guilty, but if I declare immuno, that’s not actually strong evidence that am innocent. Further, you hardly touch upon the considerable cost of such a social norm, especially in cases where professional obligations or social dynamics would make it costly to Contact, for example, if you wouldn’t consider accusation at that time to be worthwhile, but cutting Contact without explanation would be socially or professionally, costly. It also seems like just a terrible idea when you’re dealing with cases of young victims, who are children or just above the age of consent. I also just disagree about whether getting drunk should necessarily be treated as consent since firstly, people consent to many things under the influence of alcohol which they might not consent to when sober and it’s not always the case that it’s understood by both parties beforehand that drinking is consent to sex. Also, I think you’re suffering from the problem of treating a binary distinction in law as a necessarily binary thing in reality, the law has to draw a sharp line, but that doesn’t mean that in reality, you can’t have a gray zone and while to be fair a good argument can be made that the law would be better of being too narrow rather than two broad in terms of social consequences doing stuff with dubious consent of consent seems questionable on account. For example, the victim being unusually immature, even if technically, just above the age of consent seems at least deserving of a presumption of being very likely potentially bad behaviour, but a rule against cutting Contact in all such cases since definitely way to costly. Sorry for the rough comment, but I’m short of time.
Drinking is not consent to sex. But consent *is* consent, even if given while drunk.
People have to be held responsible for their own decisions. Even poor ones.
I confess, I never understood this line of reasoning, sure, people have a choice weather to to get drunk or not, but even assuming that they are never mistaken about the intentions of the people around them when they are choosing to get drunk, it just doesn’t seem reasonable to punish being stupid and impulsive with potentially traumatising sex. It’s obvious to me that given that people can often do things under the influence of drink that they would not do otherwise, not to mention the cases where someone is just too drunk to say yes, or no, it’s very likely that sex under these conditions can prove fairly traumatising and given this, it is obvious to me that other people should in fact not have sex with you unless they have good reason to believe you wouldn’t mind. For example, if you have a pre-existing understanding that you will have sex with them. When you’re drunk, the fact people consent to stuff isn’t some kind of get out of jail free card if I tell you to chop off my arm, the correct response is not to do that instead of insisting that I should be responsible for my decisions and in any case, no one was forcing you to go along with me. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to chop off my arm but you shouldn’t chop it off either, and I think the same principal applies to sex when one of the parties is drunk. To give another analogy. If you have a reputation for fraud and cheating, and I still go and try to do a transaction with you. Absolutely nobody is going to respond to this situation by saying that I should be responsible for my decisions for choosing to do business with you if I get defrauded since it’s just understood that even though I could have chosen not to come to do business with you, you still can’t try to fraud me. Like come on, if I get an elderly man drunk and convince him to will everything he owns to me. I think people would at least agree that this is kind of questionable behaviour and at least in this example, the person can just change their mind once they are no longer drunk, unlike in the case of sex, where it’s already done thing. No to be clear if you are able to demonstrate that sex while drunk without a pre-existing understanding is actually not likely to prove damaging to you. Then it would be fine, but if it is in fact damaging, I don’t think consent is a terribly good defence after all you, if I actively try to do something stupid or damaging to myself while drunk, it’s generally understood that it’s good to stop me, not assist me in hurting myself.
So next time I sign a contract, I sneak out, take a shot of whiskey, then come back and sign.
Now my signature means nothing and contract is null and void?
We either treat people as responsible for their own decisions or we don't.
Lawyer joke:
A lawyer is in a fender bender with another car where right of way was ambiguous. Dark night, no traffic, no witnesses, no dash cams. Neither are injured. Lawyer calls cops, then takes out a flask of whiskey and offers the other driver a drink. The other driver, a bit rattled, drinks it down gratefully. The lawyer screws the cap back on and hides the flask in the trunk. "Aren't you having one?" the other driver asks.
"Oh, sure, I will. *After* the police arrive."
Firstly, consent in contract and consent to sex is not exactly identical as an analogy. If I lie about materially relevant facts to get you to agree to a contract. It is very often going to be a criminal offence, but this is not true in the sexual case, secondly, as I noted my original comment, I do think there is a case for keeping the legal definition of rape, narrow, but socially it does seem bad. For example to get someone drunk out their mind and then get them to sign a contract especially if the contract in question seems likely to be bad for them. Note in actual contracts, it is very rare for you to actually go sign a contract without a pre-existing understanding that you’re planning to do that when people get drunk with their business associates, they generally just hammering out minor details in my experience, it’s fairly rare for someone to decide to sign a contract when they had no intention to do so a few minutes ago, at least if you’re talking about contracts that actually have a serious impact on their finances. Also, as a matter of fact, we do in fact, prevent people from doing things that they would un controversial consent to. If we think the results are going to be predictably bad. That is why for example, you can’t consent to not putting on your seat belts or getting a child with no drivers license to drive you or killing yourself because you’re suffering from a few months of depression so in actuality, we do generally seem to follow the principal that actually it’s still wrong to do things that are predictably very likely to be bad for someone, even if they consent to these things. Also note that the basic principle that severe deficiencies of rationality, vitiate consent is well established. That’s why you can’t sign a contract with a child or someone not in their sound mind also to be clear. I wouldn’t actually have a problem if somebody had sex after a glass of wine. I am more concerned about the case with their blackout drunk or at least significantly. The point where they are very likely to consent to something, even if they might not consent to it when not being under the influence, a single classes isn’t going to affect too much at least unless you have an unprecedentedly low tolerance.
With respect to the alcohol isn't Clavicular (20) himself a minor?
This, more than anything, is behind the drop in young men's pursuit of women .. forever hostage to what some gal will eventually blurt out, when the mood strikes her.
There is something deeply disturbing about arguing that a woman should be stigmatized even if she actually was raped because she remained in contact with the man who allegedly assaulted her.
You can debate whether post-incident behavior is relevant evidence. But advocating social punishment for victims because they didn't behave the way you think a “real” victim should is vile. That isn't concern for justice. It's victim-blaming dressed up as social analysis.
Honestly, I think anyone who can arrive at “she may have been raped, but she deserves to be stigmatized for it” should step away from the keyboard and seriously reconsider whether they need some professional help. Unfollowing because Richard Hanania is absolutely vile.
This commentary misses something important. Most sexual trauma doesn’t look like dark alleys and knives. Going purely by the numbers, the most typical case looks like drinking with someone you trust, getting penetrated by them, and feeling rattled and disturbed afterwards in a way it might take you some time to sort through. (It’s covered in any decent sex ed that the most common date rape drug is alcohol, and most rape is done by trusted acquaintances rather than strangers.)
In confusing, psychologically disorganized, or gray-area situations—which, again, make up most of the surface area of sexual exploitation—the victim may take a while to process the experience and mentally clarify that a line was crossed. IRL perpetrators will rarely signpost themselves or make it easy for either party to evaluate what’s going on; instead, they’re fountainheads of cognitive dissonance and contradictory signals. You could say they accomplish gaslighting (in a lot of cases) just by signaling passively that their own behavior is “normal” and unremarkable, when really it would alarm a reasonable, neutral observer.
So, “confused victim slowly puts the pieces together and much later blows a whistle” is a true-to-life and unsurprising pattern. It’s made of specific elements that can be observed and falsified. Our public standard of scrutiny should understand that pattern and watch for the elements. I do agree there should be norms and behavior pressures (of one kind or another) that help surface better evidence, so we don’t live in a murky lemon market of over-credible liars and under-credible victims.
In tandem, as far as stigma goes, we should hold the accused to a demanding standard: avoiding the appearance of impropriety. Hair-splitting technical questions of what does or doesn’t “count” as rape should only come up in a courtroom setting, because the deployment of State violence needs to follow clear and predictable laws. The general public should focus instead on the bottom-line quality of human outcomes, which we are free to observe in a way the courts aren’t. While drunken bedroom sex isn’t uniformly traumatic or abusive, it’s famously THE primary site of sketchy, gray-area, hard-to-adjudicate cases that leave people genuinely wounded and worse off. Since the legal system can’t adequately deter the harms there (due to problems with both evidence and moral ontology, as Hanania mentioned), culture should step in to provide deterrence. It should be widely seen as gross, bad, and suspicious to steer another person as Clavicular did, based on just the evidence we already have.
Look I'm not defending or weighing in on Clavicular or this case, bc my opinion is that both he and she are likely horrible, narcissistic, warped people who will do anything and everything for money and attention. Also, both of them being underage and legally not allowed to drink causes a lot of problems here...generally I'm of the opinion that everyone is fully responsible for everything they do drunk, whether that is mowing someone down in a car or consenting to sex, and too bad if they're embarrassed the next day or don't remember. Given they were both underage his mother is likely in big trouble.
But I can't go along with your general rule at all. You want all possible instances of the remotest grey area to be fair instead of sex, under this rule. "Drunken bedroom sex" does not just result in trauma, it results in many happy relationships and I'd warrant was the beginning of tens of millions of marriages...maybe even a majority of them...in the 20th century. Nights of drunken bedroom sex have been some of the greatest nights of my life. I hate the terms "sex positive" and "sex negative" because they don't actually mean anything like what they imply, but a rule that anything less than perfect adherence to some ideal where everyone soberly and consideredly articulates enthusiastic pre-informed consent to everyrhing that happens is the most sex negative stance I can think of. A better rule is that people should not get drunk if they can't control themselves while drunk or can't emotionally handle their actions when appraising them sober. Of course this doesn't apply if someone is held down and has liquor poured down their throat or otherwise did not voluntarily and knowingly drink.
On the actions of how "trauma* occurs, I agree with your description of how it goes down and you did a good job describing it. Except that's a very new and not at all universally accepted definition of trauma. And a lot of people will just think that if some event is so subtle or vague that it takes a person months or years of thinking through it to even *realize* it was an offense...time during which most likely others are encouraging that interpretation...that there's not much reason for society to care about the offense. Plenty of other bigger problems to focus on than something that's not even immediately apparent as a bad thing and takes years to figure out.
*rape instead of sex, that should say