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drethelin comments on LW Women Submissions: On Misogyny - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't know, but I'm pretty confident it exists. I'm sure someone CAN drink at a frat party without wanting or anticipating sex, and in fact most people probably don't get laid. But I also think it's not as immoral to go to a frat party expecting and planning on hooking up with a drunk person, as it is to rape someone.
Even if that person intended to have drunk sex, it doesn't mean that they intended to have it with you specifically. And anyway, I doubt that many people who intend to have drunk sex also intend to have it while drunk enough to be in a state of consciousness so much diminished that they are unable to consent.
My impression is that both sides in the argument are using the level of drunkness which supports their point.
The people who don't want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are moderately drunk, who are more likely to say choose sex than they would be sober, and who chose to get that drunk because they want to have sex but otherwise wouldn't.
The people who do want drunk = non-consent imagine people who are very drunk-- unconscious or barely able to mumble and make vague gestures.
Neither side is entirely wrong-headed, though my sympathies are with the second group, since it's pretty common for people to drink to the point of incapacitation.
On the other hand, rules becoming much stricter than necessary happens too.
I've encountered people who want drunkenness to be non-consent who explicitly reject the reasoning in your second example; they want any reduced capacity to make decisions to render consent invalid. (And I've seen some very convoluted logic about passive versus aggressive sexual behavior justifying why it's still rape when the man has also been drinking from a couple of them.)
(The inability to strawman feminism is really bizarre. It's possible to strawman individual feminists, but for the ideology as a whole, no matter how bizarre a position you can think up, there's somebody that actually holds that belief, and more insists it is proper feminist thought, and who probably also insists that anybody who doesn't agree isn't a proper feminist. And the craziest also tend to be the loudest; Jezebel, for instance.)
That sounds like a way too broad category to be useful. Most of the time there will be something or another that negatively affects my mental faculties.
Yes; I also suspect many of them don't even realize it -- simply, the typical example of a drunk person is someone who deliberately drinks in order to lower their inhibitions in the minds of the first group, but in the minds of the second group it's a passed-out person, due to the different experiences of the two groups and generalizing from one example.
(This is an example of a more general pattern, about which I've been thinking of writing a top-level post but kept putting that off.)
I was going to say “is it?”, then I remembered that, according to this article (discussed on OB before BTW), I am from an “integrated” culture and you're from an “ambivalent” one.
The ability to consent varies continuously with intoxication level, hence it could be technically argued that a gray area exists. But the effect seems quite non-linear, with a sharp transition. As a rule of thumb I would say that if somebody is able to walk on their own then they can consent, otherwise they can't.
I suppose there are cases when somebody first consents, or reasonably appears to consent, then they fall unconscious during the act, then they wake up and OMG I WAS RAPED!!!11ONE1!!
This type of "accidental rape" is possible, but I doubt it's common: evidence suggests that the majority of rapes, including those enabled by victim intoxication, are committed by a small proportion of men who are serial rapists and often have other patterns of antisocial behaviors. These people typically understand that their behaviors violate laws and social norms, yet they do it anyway because they don't care and believe (often correctly) that they can get away with it.
How do blackouts figure into this?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_%28alcohol-related_amnesia%29#Consequences
This implies that the ability to walk doesn't imply a reliably good grade of consent.
As I said, there is some gray area. Some people can do things they later regret during alcoholic blackouts, but it doesn't mean that they are completely incapable to exercise judgement in these circumstances. In fact, in most cases they would be still considered legally responsable for their actions.
Yep. Kill somebody, you're still held wholly responsible. Consent to sex, on the other hand, is far too serious a matter.
My general rule of thumb is thus: If you inebriate yourself, you're responsible for everything you do under the influence of alcohol, including consent. Your responsibility for your actions precludes actions intended to deny your own responsibility.
Which is not to say that sex with an unconscious person isn't rape; I limit myself strictly to those cases where the person does in fact give consent.
Who could ever have doubted that?
V_V says:
Yes, my point was that walking on your own has at least one well-known exception, and so of course no one would say that walking is any more than a fallible piece of evidence, a heuristic, a relatively reliable guide, a rule of thumb. You rephrasing it implied skepticism that it was ever fallible, so I brought up the exception (and particularly appropriate, note the mention of sex in the lede of the link).
I think we should start by addressing this problem.