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Dahlen comments on Open thread, Sep. 14 - Sep. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'd rather people actually said "Do you want to come back to my room for sex?" rather than "Do you want to come back to my room for coffee?" where coffee is a euphemism for sex, because some people will take coffee at face value, which can lead to either uncomfortable situations, including fear of assault, or lead to people missing opportunities because they are bad at reading between the lines.
Or if you do want to invite someone for a drink, go somewhere public.
Edit: I'm not saying that people should go round propositioning people for sex without getting to know them first. I'm saying that drinks in public are good, and that I, personally, prefer to think that adults should be able to say what they mean without euphemisms. I'm not saying that I get to ignore societies' rules. And I realise that people find what I have been saying creepy, but personally, I think if I was a girl I would find it very creepy that there could be situations where I'm in a private room with no witnesses and I want to drink coffee and the guy expects sex.
Plausible deniability, dude. It's much easier to dispel the awkwardness of rejection if you can reasonably fall back on the claim that, hey, maybe coffee was all you wanted anyway. Successful courtship depends on making the other person feel comfortable around you; it's a human relationship, not resource extraction, and it has to be framed in appropriate terms. (Edit: oh, sorry, I thought I was replying to advancedatheist; removed a sentence that assumed this.)
In table format. The second strategy is much more likely to lead to (2,1) than to (2,2).
I get that it's not resource extraction, but its not espionage either, and I personally don't see the need for 'I can neither confirm nor deny that I want sex'.
I also get that its about making people feel comfortable. I'm more comfortable if people are fairly upfront about what they want, but I get that it's just me who feels this way. I'm really bad at picking up on subtext, I have conversations like this:
Other person: "We're spending a lot of time together, its almost like we're being a couple."
Me: "Yeah, we have been hanging out a lot."
several months later...
Oh. I get it now. Why couldn't he just say he wanted a relationship?
And things can get even worse if one person thinks coffee means sex and one thinks it means coffee. I know a girl who has been accidentally raped because of drunken misunderstandings.
BTW I'm impressed that you went to the fuss of making a table :)
The usual term is flirting.
A lot of the time people are not sure about what they want (or whether the cost-benefit is favorable). Socially acceptable delaying tactics are important.
A girl saying yes to coffee isn't an excuse to not look for consent when having sex. Saying yes to coffee just means consent to move to a different location.
This is true, but its not that simple. When you're in private, its a far more dangerous situation, and, for instance, some girls will be scared to say no because of the possibility of violence.
She will be even more afraid to say "no" while in private if she beforehand explicitely said "yes" to sex instead of having said "yes" to coffee.
If you ask: "Do you want to come to my room with me to have sex" and she says "Yes", that can be interpreted as a promise to have sex if the girl comes to the room. Asking for "coming to the room to drink coffee" doesn't do that to the same extend.
But that presumes that the girl changes her mind about the sex when she reaches his room, which seems strange.
I suppose the room could be a sex dungeon, but in that case he should have asked "Wanna come home with me for kinky sex?"
(Obviously, people have the right to withdraw consent at any time for any reason, it just seems unlikely that it would be necessary)
In the example the girl usually don't just want sex but she wants sex while she's turned on and that brings her pleasure. Even in the case of asking directly for sex a girl would assume that the guy will engage in foreplay that puts her then in an emotional state where she will have pleasurable sex.
When a guy asks: "Do you want to come to my room for coffee" a girl might think "That's exciting and hopefully the night will end with great sex" but depending on how the interaction in the room goes it might or might not end up in sex.
I am assuming that the people involved have probably been out drinking and having fun and getting into an exciting emotional state beforehand.
That's such BS. Rapists know what they're doing, even when they pretend otherwise; rape is predatory behavior. The only way you could accidentally rape someone is in the "whoops, found the wrong hole!" sense.
That depends on how one defines the word "rape". The fact that there is currently an attempt by certain groups to massively expand the definition of that word (while keeping the connotations of the original meaning) isn't helping.
The issue in this case seems to be that the man thought that the fact that the woman said "yes" to having coffee means that she expressed consent while the woman thought it didn't.
Why do you think that in every case both people have the same idea whether there's consent? Or do you think that rape means something different than having sex without consent?
The data show otherwise. As it turns out, an overwhelming portion of rapes is due to a minority of repeat offenders who never get caught, due in no small part to prevailing social attitudes which all-too-readily construe rapes as nothing more than one-off "misunderstandings" which can be "forgiven". But again, that's just wrong. Rape is not something that just happens once - they do it again and again.
Would this be the same "data" that claims that 1 in 4 college women are "raped"?
Someone who thinks that a woman saying "Yes" to coffee means that she expresses consent to sex is likely going to repeat the error multiple times.
Believes such as: 'Her mouth that "no" but her eyes said "yes"' can also repeat to repeated offending without the rapist thinking he's a rapist.
Understanding how to determine consent is vital and not all problems are due to bad intent.
I note that people who misunderstand something once seem above-averagely likely to misunderstand similar things in future, especially (but not exclusively) if they don't receive correction.
Maybe you're right about the vast majority of cases. In the specific anecdote I mentioned, the victim told me that it was a misunderstanding - they were friends, she thought she was going home with him to sleep, he thought they were going to have sex, they were both very, very, drunk and he didn't understand that she wasn't consenting. She has forgiven it and they are still friends, although perhaps less close.
I'm not endorsing anyone's actions here. Perhaps this guy is a threat, and she should not have forgiven him. But I think my original point stands, which is that it is safer for people to get to know each other over drinks in public and only go home if they both sure whether or not they want sex.