NEWS: In Any Color, Rape is Rape

CULTURE: In Any Color, Rape is Rape

Fabulous Ms. Morgan, whose birthday is this Friday BY THE WAY, AHEM, sent me this link to an "incredibly offensive" article in Cosmo that's got most of the feminist blogs justifiably angry. (More blogposts here.)



Pandagon's Amanda, I think, does the best job of explaining the problem.

But as she says: fuck them. It's part of the way dominance and power work: being weak is despicable and being victimized is shameful. After all, if you're going to believe that power accrues to those who deserve it, you have to buy into the corrolary--that getting fucked, literally or metaphorically, only happens to losers.



But look at the scenarios Cosmo puts forth as "gray rape".

That's rape.

So's that.

No he didn't. He raped her.



And you know, it's really not all that confusing for guys, no matter what Cosmo says.

Yes. Welcome to the grownup world, where women and men are responsible for sex and for respecting their partner's expressed wishes.

Of course he felt taken advantage of: he was raped.

It does if you "felt" she "wasn't sure" and pressured her into that "coy" yes. Again, boys, guess what? If you feel like your partner's not into it, then don't force the issue. See? Easy.

Nope, it's rape. Being invited to someone's room doesn't give you a license to fuck them.



Cosmo goes on to ask, rhetorically, "How do you avoid being a victim without giving up the right to be sexually independent and assertive?" Duh. By being sexually independent and assertive.



Which includes not making excuses for rapists.



Bitch_PhD thinks the best way to prevent rape is to teach boys to take no for an answer.

this is why I don't read Cosmo.

fabulous commentary.

Hahaha. Essentially what that article says is "date rape is acceptably gray." Hahahahahahahaha. Cosmo is written by men, I swear to god. How else do they know 40776475 ways to please them?

Wow. I don't really know how to respond after reading that. Just wow.

But yeah, just read an article on women's magazines in my 'American Women Authors' class and I'm convinced that Men still write those magazines, just like they did in the fifties, the era of the house wife heroine.

Now please don't flame me as a rapist or any of that jazz....but when this scenario comes up

"Anthony Moniello, 24, a radio personality for ESPN, says, "I've had girls tell me 'I don't have sex on the first night.' And I say, 'That's fine, I respect that. Mind if I play with you a little bit?' A girl will say no, she doesn't mind, then she'll get so hot, she'll say, 'Let's do it.' That's the scariest part. Is it then my responsibility to say no?"


Yes. Welcome to the grownup world, where women and men are responsible for sex and for respecting their partner's expressed wishes."


you made the point to emphasize the "and men" part of being responsible for sex by italicizing it. Now....shouldn't you have italicized them both because the woman made two contradictory statemenst? nowhere does he imply any kind of inebriation. The girl said no, then later said yes. I understand that you should respect a girl's wishes with what she first says, but don't bash JUST the guy for that specific scenario. The woman should respect the fact that it's damn confusing when they say two different things without any kind of drug/alcohol involved. If this scenario is gonna be gone, then they've gotta stick to their guns. If no means no...then don't say yes. But i dunno....i'm just trying to get a better understanding here.

Everything else was clear cut rape though....


"Gimme a written notarized contract and we can bump uglies....till then i'm keepin out" - A friend of mine from UConn.....probably offensive, but it was appropriate for this conversation.

amen

Uh, what? If a girl says "let's do it" it's my responsibility to deny her? If a girl says she doesn't want to have sex with me and later changes her mind and wants to have sex with me, it's rape? You're really hard to take seriously.

Really though, what am I thinking. Women are conditioned from birth to do as men say, so anytime I have sex with a woman it's rape--she's only doing it because she was programmed to. The only acceptable non-rape sex is homosexual. Clearly.

Seriously though, rape seems fairly clear cut to me. It's not gray rape if a person says no and another person ignores them and has sex with them, it's regular, vile rape. If one person is wasted drunk and the other is sober, that sounds like rape to me. The fun part is when both people are drunk; I remember a story not too long ago where this girl was drunk and had sex with this guy, who was also drunk, and realized in the morning that she wasn't interested so therefore he "raped" her. Right. Technically they raped each other, since they were both too drunk to give consent, but being drunk isn't an excuse for breaking the law. Sounds like a wash to me.

I take no for an answer just fine thanks.

I find this a bit shady. Being that they can retrieve information off formatted hard drives, why would it be so hard to retrieve closed out instant message windows, i am sure there is some tiny bit of memory somewhere that could be retrieved to give them information.

Being sober, 99% of the time i DD. I have taken drunk girls home and put them to bed with nothing more happening. I'd rather wake up in the morning knowing i did the right thing, than have her wake up regretting what she did. I almost always get a thank you for that. I prefer my friends feel safe around me.

It's really not that hard of a decision to make.

fuckin' cosmo...bullshit gossip masquerading as legitimate commentary and advice...stick to fashion tips and celebrity interviews. I also find it pretty sad that the article is written by a Pulitzer prize winning reporter who can't even manage to reference further reading, thus making it the reader's responsibility to put it in context that, forgive my presumption, Cosmo readers are not inclined to seek.

I've kind of got to agree with TommyJohn and Vestril on this one. That one scenario doesn't quite jive with the others.

No, it's really not. Sorry, I was with you until you got here, but this is the grownup world, where people are responsible for their own actions. If you don't want to have sex on the first date, you're responsible to not have sex on the first date. If you decide, uncoerced, to fool around, you need to accept the risk that you may change your mind about how far you're willing to go. Sure, it's the stand-up thing to do, to help people uphold their convictions, but it's not your responsibility to have more self-control about it than they do.

Gender doesn't really enter into this example because it's just as applicable no matter whether the mind-changer is a man, woman, or if both folks are the same gender. If you feel strongly that you don't want to do something, don't put yourself in situations where your judgement will become blurred. I feel strongly that I don't want to crash my car, so I don't drink before I drive it, because that would make crashing it harder to resist. If I feel strongly that I shouldn't have sex on a first date, maybe I shouldn't fool around, if that's going to make it harder to resist.

I don't know, we ingrain it pretty hard into people not to kill, rob, or hurt other people, and it still happens with sickening frequency as well. There is no way to prevent rape other than keeping humans away from one another. We are a fucked up species as a whole.

What we DO need some serious work on is the mentality that women have that we somehow deserved the assault. It is fucked that so many women secretly blame themselves and do not report rape because of the stigma attached to it. If I had the knowledge many years ago that I have now, and the guts to have reported an assault, I might have prevented it from happening to another girl (which it did) and THAT guilt will stay with me forever.

That being said, I don't care if I am letting my husband that I have been together with for 8 years go balls deep in my ass, if I even say the word no mid thrust, he needs to stop, or it is rape. Period, end of discussion.

Indeed.

There was nothing about the first indication of generalised non-consent that said that exceptions could never be made. Which one of our partner's wishes are we meant to be respecting? The original wishes or the apparently revised wishes?

By my estimation, based on the information given, we simply cannot say that. There is no basis to claim that he said no and his "no" was ignored. There's no basis on which to assume he didn't participate enthusiastically at the time. He's woken with a lack of memory and no way of knowing what his own actions were at the time.

I'm not saying he wasn't raped. I'm pointing out that on the information available, we cannot determine that he was.

Yeah... it would be different if just as things were getting going (or really at any point after the "let's do it") she changed her mind and said "wait stop." If he continued at that point, then, yes, absolutely, rape. But according to the text that isn't the case.

Now, that guy might be a bit of a jerk for getting her all worked up, and she might feel manipulated because apparently his finger-fu (or tongue-fu) was just that good that it "made" her change her mind, but i don't feel that such a situation can be called rape, because she consented and in fact kinda told him to do it. She decided to not go by her own rules.

Anyway, (and again this is based strictly on what i'm reading here) this one in particular is not a situation that i would call rape, but only because she changed her mind and decided she wanted to get busy, and didn't change it back.

I guess all those times I said "i'm not having sex tonight" and ended up having sex because I was "all hot and bothered" despite me saying I'm not going to, I was raped?

what?



listen, if a lady or guy says earlier to their date or whatever that they don't want to have sex, but then later in the evening says "hey you know what, let's just do it", that is not in any way rape....people change their mind...all the time. You can't honestly think that's rape and if you do...well....you're wrong.

Now, in all fairness, if the person changes their mind and says "hey, we should stop" and the person who they're doing whatever with says "uhh...no" and continues...then yes, by all means that's rape.

It basically made me think the same thing. That he is a douchebag more than anything else.

It sounds like he is using his ESPN Fame (what little he has) to use women for his own pleasure and discard of them just as fast.

Did he Rape? Tough Call. Is he a douchebag? undoubtedly

Yep. I wouldn't have thought that rape was ever particularly gray - consent is consent. Nonconsent is nonconsent. But apparently not everyone has gotten that. (Including, apparently, Bitch_PhD, or she wouldn't have included the example that's got everyone upset.)

"It does if you "felt" she "wasn't sure" and pressured her into that "coy" yes."

This is another big example, along with the already cited passage regarding Anthony Moniello, in which the irrational sentiments of the writer overwhelm the overarchingly good points in the post.

Pressured her into that coy yes? By asking? So, if I was to ask my next door neighbor to give me his car repeatedly and he 'coyly' said yes one day, that would mean that I stole it? No, I don't think so, because my next door neighbor is a responsible adult, responsible in every way, for his words and actions.

The fact of the matter is that the cosmo article was a poorly written article about a very relevant issue - we do live in a day and an age in which sexual interactions are much more ill-defined than a few decades ago. As a single heterosexual man in San Francisco, I sometimes feel like I can't even smile at another woman without her wanting to blow the rape whistle at me. And yet, if I don't make the first move with a woman and am not very aggressive, I am classified as something less than a man. Furthermore, I am friends with many many more females than males who date people who treat them as less than an autonomous adult with their own decision-making capabilities.

And, by the way, you can shove it bitch phd, if you honestly don't think its hard being a man who tries to treat women with respect, which your article intimates subliminally in every which way.

the dichotomy that really needs to be broken ( to keep the positive momentum moving forward, no matter how little momentum there is) is the men vs. women issue. It's really not a matter of man vs. woman. It's a matter of mutual respect and communication.

If we take it out of the context of sex for just a moment, and turn "no" into a more generalized statement of "please don't do that to me", one can imagine all sorts of things that another person does not want you to do to/with them. Easy enough to respect.

As far as men go, the ones who continue to rape really fuck it up for the rest of us. So, it's not a matter of women vs. men. It's a matter of all of us respectful humans against rapists.

Thank you. I don't know why this doesn't seem straightforward.

Regretting your decision later on does not mean you didn't make a decision in the first fucking place.

I think this is a good strategy, but it seems your tactics in implementing that strategy need work. Making boys feel defensive and alienated is not the way to teach them anything. And if you don't think you're making boys feel alienated and defensive, read the responses to your articles sometime.

That said, that article is the most fucked up thing I've read in as long as I can remember. When a woman says but does not scream 'no' it falls somewhere between consent and rape? What the fuck?

Does anyone know what the legal situation is when both parties are to drunk to legally consent?

Not according to Susan Brownmiller.

+ 1

Women need to take responsibility for themselves, too; it's not just about men. A woman who says no, then later says 'let's do it baby,' deserves a very clear ARE YOU SURE ABOUT THIS and no more.

The cases of rape in the quoted article are obvious. If someone is passed out: duh - it's rape.

But if someone gets ripped and wants to get it on....Jeezus, that goes on every day of the year! I like to get ripped and fuck! I'd say it's her responsibility to take care with whom she gets naked AND ripped, just as much as it's a guys responsibility to know if he is having sex or committing a violent act.

Why is personal responsibility such an ill thought of phrase? I bet if it was not, rape cases would be a lot easier to prosecute.

Ya ya ya. Let this shit come forth. I am a very sexually healthy victim-in-the-past of childhood sexual abuse.

When a woman says NO: It is rape.

When a woman says no and then begs you to fuck her? Well......I just might.