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Raemon comments on A Rationalist's Account of Objectification? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The comment Skatche just made above I think does a pretty good job of explaining what feminists consider rape, and I think it's easy to infer why non-feminists who only hear the cursory explanation get confused and feel that feminists are "exaggerating" it.
I'm actually aware of the concept of enthusiastic consent, and even considered including an explanation of it in my comment. It's not obvious to me how that could look even remotely close to 'any sex you regret the next morning' - the principle of enthusiastic consent leads to a definition that doesn't even particularly correlate with that unless you add a qualification that one of the partners must consider it rape in order for it to be rape.
Considering that some feminists have argued that all heterosexual sex is rape, he's not exaggerating that much. The ones who make the studies he was referencing do things like making questionnaires that ask questions like "Have you ever pushed a girl into bed to make her have sex with you?" and counting that as rape to inflate the statistics, because more rapes = more money for the rape services they work for.
If I came to believe that I'd made someone have sex with me by applying force, and we hadn't previously negotiated the terms of that scene, I would consider that an instance of rape and I would feel pretty awful about it.
So I don't reject the results of that survey on those grounds.
I understand that you do reject it, and presumably you would similarly disagree about that hypothetical case. A lot of people would. I understand why, and I don't want to get into a discussion of which of us is correct because I don't expect it to lead anywhere useful.
But you should at least be aware that your position isn't universally held, even among men who believe in the existence of consensual heterosexual sex.
Well, obviously there's a difference between violently throwing someone into a bed, and joking around and playfully pushing them on the shoulder to signal them to get into the bed, but my point is that the studies conflate the two and everything in between them and classify them all as rape. Just check "yes" in the box, and voila, you're a rapist.
I agree that there's a difference between those two things. I agree with you that conflating the difference between those two things is problematic.
I disagree with you that the example you give conflates that difference.
If I had pushed someone onto a bed to signal to them that I wanted to have sex with them (I've undoubtedly done this many times, though I can't currently remember specific examples) I would not say "yes" if asked whether I'd ever pushed someone onto a bed to make them have sex with me.
The key word for me is "make."
If I make you have sex with me, that's different from playfully encouraging you to have sex with me.
Exactly so.
I do think that wording the question that way is a bit questionable, though, since it can easily be misread.
(nods) Surveys are problematic that way, in general. The only way I know of to get around it is to phrase every question several different ways and look for variation among the answers based on the phrasing.
The safest move is probably to simply discard any question where the answer depends too much on the phrasing, although in practice that probably means discarding all survey results ever.
Mostly, survey results are good for comparing results on the same survey over time.
Upvoted for actually bothering to listen to what feminists are saying. That model has long since fallen out of favour, though, for obvious reasons: see e.g. Rethinking Rape by Ann J. Cahill. The "enthusiastic consent" model is currently one of the most popular, and I think it captures pretty accurately what we should consider a healthy, versus an unhealthy or coercive, sexual encounter.
That ... sounds like it would predictably overestimate the amount of rapes. Unhelpful though this may be, not everyone has adopted "enthusiastic consent" in their day-to-day lives.
I, for example, occasionally merely agree amicably to have sex, without any enthusiasm. (For example if it the third time that day.) I think I've even agreed reluctantly at some point. Yet I haven't been raped and anyone who tried to tell me I had been raped because I did not give "enthusiastic consent" is both wrong and grossly disrespectful of me and my right to make choices about what I do with my own body.
In fairness, they would probably just add you to rape statistics without telling you. Much less offensive.