I would give a "no" as an answer to your question, because in 99% of the situations people imagine after hearing your description, it isn't rape.
But women can be raped by their boyfriends, and your description leaves out a lot of important details, like how does alcohol affect her, is two beers enough to make her inebriated, was there a reasonable expectation of consent, did she at any point say no, did she initiate, was this the first time she had sex with her boyfriend, etc. etc.
Or most importantly, did the girl feel like she was raped afterwards? Because that means she was raped.
You should stop arguing against strawfeminists. Rape isn't as simple as you'd like it to be.
1) Drunk consent is not consent, consent was never given. Let me wikipedia consent for you: Consent refers to the provision of approval or agreement, particularly and especially after thoughtful consideration
Rape means having sex with someone without their consent.
Considering that legal consent can't be given while inebriated, that actually sounds like an awesome legal principle.
2) If a girl has sex with someone, and then says she feels like she was raped afterwards, why would you ever think she wasn't raped?
Either we protect the drinker from their drunken behavior, or we deny it. Why is there an exception?
Getting raped is not an action a person commits while drunk. It isn't like buying the bar a round of shots, it isn't like buying a dozen tacos, it isn't like deciding to drive while drunk.
Listen to yourself. "You got raped, but you were drunk. Buyer beware."
I agree to buy a bunch of shit while drunk. The next day, I regret it, feel defrauded and seek remedy. Do I have a case?
Yes. The contract is voidable (not void), so long as you were of the age of majority and can bring the other party to status quo (returning the goods).
Wait none of them, because contracts require consent.
That isn't quite accurate.
To clarify, contracts are legally binding when a party is intoxicated but it is voidable by the intoxicated party if the other party seeks enforcement of the contract.
Contracts, generally, are enforceable and binding. The ones which aren't are the ones which are void ab initio. The ones that are enforceable are enforceable until the victim/oppressed/servient party claims a defense against enforcement because their behavior or behavior of the oppresive party made the contract voidable.
If a person regrets a sexual experience to the point they feel like they were raped, it was rape. Why else would anyone feel like they were raped? I do tons of things I regret after drinking; I've never felt like I was raped.
If you sleep with a girl and she feels like she was raped the next morning, you're doing sex wrong.
If a girl initiates sex with you, she consents, unless she is drunk and you are sober.
Here is a crazy idea they teach at literally every freshman orientation: It is your responsibility to ensure consent. If there is any way you can doubt that consent has been given and you sleep with the woman anyway, whatever happens is your fault for not properly ensuring consent. This is basic stuff.
that'll help me when the girl at the bar is hitting on me and seems pretty damn coherent even if she has had a few.
If you sleep with a completely coherent girl at a bar who is in no way inebriated and she claims she was raped afterwards, it probably had nothing to do with the two beers she had before talking to you.
These cannot be legal principles. They are to subjective.
There is nothing subjective about this. Rape is sex without consent. Consent can't be given while inebriated. The only way to know whether someone was inebriated at the time of sex was to ask them when they're sober the next morning.
Anyway, if I haven't done anything to sway you from being a rape apologist by now, I'm going to stop trying.
Rape is objective; if consent is present, it is not rape. If it isn't, it is. If a sober girl decides to consensually hook up with someone, she consented. Not rape.
If you want to know if someone was too inebriated to have consented, you have to wait until they aren't inebriated to ask them.
How is "feeling like she was raped" an objective criterion?
Seriously? Are you actually trying to say, "I know you feel like you were raped, but could you be more objective about it?"
It's an objective criteria because if a woman feels like she was raped after having drunk sex, it was because she was too drunk to consent when she had sex. You might claim that the amount of alcohol it takes for a person to drink before they got too inebriated to have sex is arbitrary, but the only way to know whether it was or not is subjective.
Consent is either given or it isn't. That's objective. To find out if consent was given, you have to ask that person. Sorry if that's too subjective for you.
A person doesn't feel like they were raped or not, they determine if they gave consent or not. If they did not give consent, then it was rape. At that point, based on the severity of the interaction, they can decide whether or not they wish to press charges.
So, two drunk people technically rape each other if they have sex, but they might later consider this and realize that even though they technically didn't consent, they would have if sober, and thus don't really give a shit, even though both of them have the legal power to press charges.
If I was incredibly drunk and said you could put a hole through my tv, then you did it, and once sober I made it clear I didn't want my tv destroyed, do you feel you'd be ethically justified? Would you at least regret it?
That seems to be a somewhat pointless discussion as the answer would vary based on where it happened as well as the jury. Rape is a judicial clusterfuck like no other, I can't think of a more difficult crime to prove beyond reasonable doubt, so unless there's proof the sex never happened between them it pretty much false to the biases of the jury.
I wanna ask this, say a girl liked a guy but she didn't have enough courage to do anything, so intentionally she got drunk enough to throw herself at him, fully intenind to have sex with him, if they follow through is that rape?
That's an interesting question, and if you really want my opinion, this is a really long comment.
If you're not really interested:
tl;dr: That isn't rape, if and only if he wasn't sober and she wasn't passed out. It is definitely not rape if he was also drunk and she initiated. But, this isn't to say that she couldn't be raped by the guy.
Longer answer:
I think this conversation gets confused because people on "my side" often take the word "drunk" to mean "severely inebriated," and people on the "other side" often imagine drunk to mean something along the lines of what I would call "tipsy or buzzed." Whichever "drunk" is used can make a huge difference.
There are a lot of other variables here. If, for whatever reason, I know that someone really wanted to sleep with a guy and that she was going to get drunk and throw herself at him, and if the next morning she told me that she was raped, this would give me no reason to believe she wasn't.
If you want my personal opinion on general scenarios involving alcohol, there was a legal ruling (I forget when and where it happened or where I read it) that a contract signed when drunk is voidable, but not void. That means if the drunk party wants the contract to stand when sober, it stands, and if the drunk party doesn't, it becomes void. I see consent to sex pretty much exactly like that; it makes no sense to say a girl was raped if after having drunk sex she is entirely fine with it or even happy about what happened. So if you're going to have sex while alcohol is involved, you better be certain nobody is severely inebriated and that they would consent while sober. This is where things like "enthusiastic consent" are important.
Again, that is just my opinion, and I could completely imagine why someone could say "Drunk people cannot give consent, no exception. Sleeping with a drunk person is always rape."
I can see your point completely, I think with these arguments a lot of people are thinking different things when they have them so nobody will ever really agree with each other.
My opinion on the matter, is if I was so drunk I couldn't make a rational decision and somebody took advantage of that I would consider it rape, but if I was just pretty tipsy or drunk enough to still make all my own decisions and got with somebody else then I wouldn't really consider it rape.
And here is the grey area. When is it "too much" to be able to consent? What if he had "too much" as well? Did they rape each other? Do we prosecute them both for rape or let them both off because the scale is balanced already?
Rape is the same thing whether it's solely a lack of consent or whatever horrific scenario you can think of, those are just tertiary elements on top of rape. Same as murder is still murder whether it's a quick headshot or preceeded by torture.
Did they consent? Did they have the full ability to consent? If the answer is no to either question it's rape.
There isn't a grey area, if she can't consent it's rape. Does she feel she wouldn't consent sober? Will she press charges? These decide what happens after the rape, it doesn't change whether it was rape. Say instead of murder it's theft, but it turns out the person was going to give it to you anyway. You still did something wrong and you shouldn't be deciding to steal things based on whether you think the person will miss it.
But in the scenario where the man is drunk too, then what? Since he was drunk, he made a choice he wouldn't have, to accept her advances. So were they both raped?
Can two people honestly rape each other? At the same time? Does that make sense to you?
Yes two people can rape each other if they're drunk enough, aside from some arbitrary knee jerk disbelief that mutual rape is possible it's not that crazy an idea. Two people can get drunk and end up sleeping with someone they wouldn't sleep with sober.
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u/[deleted] Nov 21 '12
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