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ShannonFriedman comments on Changing Systems is Different than Running Controlled Experiments - Don’t Choose How to Run Your Country That Way! - Less Wrong
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Comments (260)
Agreed that there are many different shades of grey here both in severity and how the cases should be treated. That is a good point.
Generally, if a guy intentionally has sex with a woman who is too intoxicated to stop him, he does not suffer any negative consequence at all. I don't think these sorts of cases are often brought to court - way too much ambiguity to prove anything.
It would be interesting to get more data about the different ways in which this plays out. My guess is that as you imply, there are cases where women intentionally lose their ability to say no. My guess is that also, there are many cases where guys capitalize on this ambiguity with quite a lot of intention.
More plus points in my book toward a cultural shift to where saying yes before sex is the norm. If there are such groups, I'd rather have women who want to be manipulated into sex lose their ability to have this happen than to have someone be forced into a physical act against their will.
This is plausible. According to wikipedia, about 8% of all rape allegation are later deemed false. I did not see any stats on false positives (where an alleged rapist was prosecuted while being innocent). What is obvious from a cursory online search is that the consequences for falsely accused and convicted tend to be as bad as or worse than for real survivers of violent rape.
But this was not my point, I simply asked if what is being discussed as "rape" here is a non-central case.
Okay, thanks for persisting on your point - please let me know if I appropriately address it, I think I understand now but am not entirely certain.
I think that there are many types of rape. Many many ways in which it happens, and differences in motives and premeditation and other such things.
My understanding is that using alcohol or other drugs as an aid to rape a woman is far more common than what you described as your expectation. While I do not place confidence behind these numbers as there is very little actual data, my best guess is maybe something like there is a 10:1 of rapes where alcohol is used with someone the woman knows v.s. a man jumping out and attacking her from behind a bush.
My understanding is that most rapes are from men that the woman knows, often family members and/or family friends, although I am even less sure about the percentages on that and won't bother trying to make a numeric guess.
So, if alcohol with someone the woman knows is actually one of the more frequent scenarios, then I would say that the non-central case does not apply if I understand it correctly?
I would decide on whether a scenario is central or not based on the expected punishment.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that there were no violent cases ever, that all rape cases were of the 90% variety you describe: a victim in a potentially sexually suggestive setting like a bar gets too much to drink, possibly due to some generous verbal coercion by the perpetrator, who is, rather overtly, looking for a sexual encounter. No illicit drugs were slipped in, though the lady probably overestimated her drinking capacity. She was severely impaired, but not drunk unconscious and unmoving, she was not gang-raped with pictures posted online and further bullying or blackmail followed, etc. She was not at a higher risk of pregnancy or an STD compared to if she consented. She would not have consented if she had the capacity to.
Does this describe what you think is the prevalent situation? If so, this would be a central case in that hypothetical case of what would be generally understood as "rape". Would it be punished by hard time and a ruinous life-long sex offender label? Or would an educational campaign of the sort you are describing, "only yes means yes" be a more appropriate way to deal with this case, with significant legal repercussions for the offender, but not nearly as severe as for a premeditated violent physical sexual assault?
What you describe is not what I think the prevalent situation is.
When men answer yes to the question:
"Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?"
Given the way that the question is phrased, my guess is that in the cases of men answering yes to this question, most men answering believe that the woman actually did not want to have sex when he proceeded to penetrate her, and chose to do it anyway. Beyond that, I have little data.
Given so many unknowns, it's hard to tell from this study alone what the spectrum of non-consensual sex was, and so it's hard to draw any useful conclusions. It is quite possible that the blog post author is correct and there is a minority of recidivists who account for the large chunk of non-consensual sex acts. Regardless, the explicit consent approach is certainly an excellent idea, as well as working on changing the cultural norms to make it more acceptable for women to initiate the expression of interest.
I draw the conclusions:
the amount of non-consensual sex attempts and successes reported in the study, which I found surprisingly and disturbingly high, is likely accurate or under-reported - I'm very surprised that so many guys answered yes, and would think that given our culture, its more likely that more thought yes but did not mark it than that they gave false positives.
the offenders are mostly repeat offenders, who are having or attempting to have non-consensual sex with about a half dozen women per guy. That seems meaningful to me! It means that the behavior is indeed intentional among this group.
if you read the whole article, they talk about how they interviewed the guys and some of what they learned from that, and their findings with the interviews were consistent with the check boxes.
Thanks for expressing agreement on the explicit consent. Its the thing that makes the most sense to me as to something that is likely to improve the situation at this point in time, when we still know so little and have such a hard time dialoging about this in an open manner as a society.
Now, I am currently reviewing reflexes like this to see if they are actually good, so I'm not going to endorse this statement as true or useful or even relevant. But this was my immediate reaction to your statement:
Humans are uniquely good at concluding the Bad Guys are evil mutants. We demonize, exaggerate, caricature. In almost every instance - possibly every instance that does not concern a specific individual with an identifiable neurological difference - it is factually wrong. This instinctive reaction serves not as an epistemic tool - "He's a pedophile/nazi/liberal/fundie, now we know he's a demon in a fleshuit! Fire at will." - bt as a political rallying cry. In short, this is something a rationalist should probably never say. If you find yourself claiming your enemies are innately evil, you have gone wrong. Retrace your footsteps and try to find where.
Normally this would be a tad more diplomatic and probabilistic, but that stage in my thought process has been replace with noticing the reflex, so...
Note that I did not use the words good or bad. I used the word intentional.
What caused you to think I was needing this advice?
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Okay, I see that you say the statement might not be relevant, and that it is your reflex.
On my end, I am trying very hard to avoid making the mistake you are describing, despite that this is a very emotionally salient topic for me.
Because this topic is so emotionally salient for so many people, it is almost never discussed in an even manner. I have been very pleased with the comments on this post for so many people making nuanced points on a topic that would normally get shut down very quickly in a manner similar to what you describe in a context such as this where there is not a more uniform perspective among the discussion participants.
Re: appropriate thing to do as punishment/response - I would really like to have a lot more data before having to come up with an answer to that which would actually be implemented.
I am a proponent of a healthy and prospering society, and do not value making people feel bad for bad things they have done. So ideally I would want a solution that would heal all parties involved. The possibility space in terms of social context is too large to give a meaningful answer regarding what to do in a situation where I was given the choice.
What do you mean by "using alcohol or other drugs as an aid to rape"? Do you mean the woman is tricked and/or forced to take the drug against her will, or that the woman voluntarily takes the drug and then does something she wouldn't if she were sober? Because these are are very different situations and I would argue only the first constitutes rape.
Your logic implies that if a woman chooses to drink, she is volunteering to have sex with any man present and should not complain if a man chooses to take her up on this offer. Is this what you believe?
No, what I'm saying is that if a woman chooses to drink she is responsible for her actions while drunk as she would be while sober. This is the same standard society applies to drunk drivers and the same standard you seek to apply to men who get drunk.
Okay, I can see where the confusion came in since the context I was assuming is pretty far back in the thread. Here it is again. Men answering yes to the question:
"Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?"
If a woman and a man have sex in this situation, where the man believes that she doesn't want to but proceeds, and the woman is unable to stop him for the reason of being intoxicated despite that it is apparent to the man that she does not wish to proceed, what are your thoughts on this situation?
Do you mean believes she doesn't want to at the moment, or believes she wouldn't want to if she were sober?
To reflect the way in which the question is asked, the assumption I would like to make is that the man believes that the woman does not want to have sex with him at the point in time when he has sexual intercourse with her.
Do you have a link to the exact survey? If another survey question was "have you ever raped a woman?" I could imagine my interpretation seeming like the obvious one.
But still, if I take your wallet when you're too drunk to even notice, I've still stolen it, rather than being given it as a present. Given the wording of the question in that survey, I guess the respondents were thinking of a situation more analogous to the former than to the latter.
OTOH, there are certain people who argue for the analogous of arguing that accepting a present from you would constitute theft if you were drunk, which unfortunately can lead to confusion as to what a particular person mean when talking about such stuff.
I agree with that, but see my other reply downthread. Being penetrated while passed out or nearly so hardly counts as “doing something”, IMO.
What you are pointing to is an important problem and an element in why this is so damn complex. I do think that cases that are not extremely horrendous happen. Unfortunately, the actual horrendous ones easily get dismissed because of this.
Also, it is very traumatic for most people to have someone stick something inside of you against your will. So even if we suppose it was fairly innocent on the guy's side of the fence, that can have severe emotional consequences. Often the most traumatic thing for a lot of people who are violated is just to have their experience be completely invalidated by their friends and family.
Social ignorance propagates this particular cycle. The difficulty of and lack of interest in discussing these topics by a lot of the population propagates it.
False accusations would probably get debunked more as well as true ones being brought to justice with far fewer incidents of occurrence if as a society people really tried to find out what was true with this difficult and complex issue.