I’m seeing people here and there try to tell me that the Steubenville rapists and their enabling friends didn’t know that what they were doing was wrong. I’m seeing people who should know better, or at least know to ask an expert, saying this.

Let’s get this perfectly clear: They knew what they were doing was wrong.

If they hadn’t known, they would have done it while she was conscious. If they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have talked about their being anything for their coach to take care of. If they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have spent so much time dehumanizing their victim telling each other and the world why she “deserved” it. If they hadn’t known, they wouldn’t have talked about rape.

They knew what they did was wrong. They simply felt entitled to do it anyway.

This is why they were cool with having the coach cover things up. This is why they expected their friends to laugh at the pictures and video. This is why the victim’s “crime” wasn’t being at the party but reporting–and being successful in the prosecution.

They felt entitled to do something they knew was wrong and get away with it. They thought they were the special people.

They weren’t. They aren’t. They’re just a bunch of kids.

They are not, however, mentally incompetent or criminally “insane”. Those are what we label those situations in which people really don’t understand that what they’re doing is wrong. Kids with good grades, lots of friends, and no psychotic break? Yeah, they’re not those people.

The rapists and their friends knew that what they were doing was wrong. They just felt entitled to go ahead and do it anyway.

Today, I spend a bunch of time that could be productive on my harassers and on making the people who don’t want to spend time looking at harassment see what my last several months have looked like. Maybe you’ll see it. Maybe you won’t have to. I don’t know. I’m tired. I’m not entirely in a position to make a smart decision on that right now.

Either way, this comment is what’s keeping me functioning right now.

I know a girl who did just about everything wrong according to those people. She’d been kicked out of the house and went home with a nice guy she’d only known for a week. The guy offered her Marvel vs Capcom to cheer her up and vodka mixed with cran-rasberry to drown her sorrows. Her drink was mixed a lot stronger than his because he hated the taste of alcohol and besides, drunk girls are fun. They fool around for a while and the guy asks if she wants to go to bed, she says not yet. So they watch a movie and the guy mixes more drinks and they fool around more. Now when he asks, she say ok but the guy isn’t sure she’s all there since she can’t even stand without support. So the guy carries her into the bedroom and she’s too drunk to even take off her shoes so the guy has to do it for her.
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Then a memory stirs in the guy’s head and it occurs to him that he’s about to do something awful. So he stops undressing her and climbs into bed fully dressed and she almost instantly falls asleep in his arms.
The guy hadn’t thought a lot about feminism or what rape was, but he did have a lot of spare time at work to read blogs and something had managed to work through the drunken haze and replace “drunk girls are fun” with “consent is important”. The guy still feels like an asshole, but being an asshole is a lot better than being a rapist.
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Thank you Stephanie, for being part of the reason why I’m just an asshole.

One of these days, I might even have enough energy left over after this sort of thing is dealt with to be proud of that.

This one involves MRAs, Wooly Bumblebee, and the details of sexual assault. It’s not pretty.

Earlier this month, I wrote about being very cautious about alcohol after being sexually assaulted by someone who had used alcohol to incapacitate me. I’ve written about the assault before. I usually link the story when I talk about it. I didn’t this time because I knew what was coming and didn’t feel like having the details hauled out and mocked.

That choice has resulted in some…interesting criticisms. We have Reap Paden trying to tell me that I was writing about being an alcoholic. (Uh, no.) And then there’s Wooly Bumblebee: Continue reading “Rape Goggles” →

Last night, I posted a piece that relied on my experience as a victim of sexual assault. I mentioned in that post that it was the sort of thing I didn’t want to write about all the time, that I chose my moments.

It isn’t the writing I want to manage. I can do that by this point without going there again. It’s the responses. This is what I woke up to this morning.
Continue reading “Your Morning Victim Shaming” →

Since Rebecca tweeted about drunkeness and rape, I’ve been seeing a response from generally well-meaning guys. (Yes, I do mean guys.) These are guys who “support” anti-rape efforts in that they are happy to stand up and tell anyone who will listen that rape is bad.

They don’t exactly support the idea that we need to be making the same strong statements about rape and intoxication, though. They’re not quite fighting it either, but they’re…fidgeting. In comment sections, on Twitter and Facebook, they’re trying to figure out what they want to say without saying anything “bad”.

A few of them, here and there, are even talking. They’re saying they’re uncomfortable. One or two will even tell you they’re scared. “She could just say she was drunk, and then I’d be facing rape charges. Do you know how scary that is?”
Continue reading “Do You Know How Scary This Is?” →

A repost for today, in “honor” of all the people who jump up to claim to be rapists when the subject of alcohol and rape is brought up. Pro tip: “That can’t be true because it would make me a rapist” is never a convincing argument. Don’t miss Benny’s comments in particular on that post, or the comments where this was originally posted.

There’s some interesting conversation going on in the comments on my post, “An MRA Speaks on Rape.” It’s interesting not for how it starts–which is the typical fretting about potential edge cases in consent–but because of where it goes from there.

It started with the standard misdirection:

Wel I have some reservations against calling “having sex with an intoxicated person” rape. Does that mean that if both persons were intoxicated they raped each other?

I pointed out that that wasn’t what was being discussed. It is, after all, a very different thing to say that one may be too intoxicated to effectively give or withhold consent (as federal definitions of rape do) and that no one who is intoxicated can consent to sex. Someone else wasn’t keen on me keeping the thread on topic, however:

Given the numbers of people who go home together after meeting at bars or clubs or parties or other places serving alcohol–given the number of people who go out to such places in order to meet someone–and the countless stages of intoxication, and of comparative intoxication, of visible intoxication, questions of who’s buying the drinks, what each person’s goals are–of all the conversations to cut short with simplistic and sometimes unkind responses, this is not one.

I think that there are questions in there to be fleshed out. Because that’s the kind of statement that sounds good and solid, and can block a further conversation if it’s not deconstructed. I’d have looked into it.

Declaring an area crystal clear does not in fact, get rid of that obnoxious blurriness.

A number of commenters made excellent points, and they’re all well worth reading, but I just want to say this up front: If you find the topic of consent to be difficult to sort out, you’re going at sex wrong. Continue reading “"Consent Is Hard"” →