(no subject)

[fandomnumbergenerator]

So, I’ve been thinking about the “affirmative consent” bill in California, and various changes to campus policies around sexual assault.

[This is long and rambling, and really just about my experiences and intuitions and is probably problematic for a lot of reasons.  If I say anything which is totally wrong or upsetting, please let me know. Also, if any of the links don’t work, let me know and I can send you the PDFs]

Part of the issue is that I’m still (twenty years later) trying to wrap my mind around the time I had blacked out sex in college.  It was after a cast party for a friend’s play and I had been drinking Jack out of the bottle trying to impress a bunch of theater school grad students.  But I was drunk enough that I wandered away from the people I knew and into a drum circle in the dorm courtyard.  And everything after that is blurry flashes, of rolling around on the grass making out with two guys in quick succession, of untying the laces on my pants, of throwing up against the wall with someone holding my hair and asking if I was OK.  And then I woke up in my own bed, with all my clothes on.  Hung over, but not unbearably so.  And it took a couple days for me to piece together that I had had loud sex in the courtyard (in view of everyone’s rooms) with a guy I’d never met.

I was horrified that I’d blacked out that severely, and by the mounting rumors (which thankfully very few people definitively connected to me).  And the way I kept running into the guy in question, and how he would give me these looks of horror and embarrassment, or just not meet my eye.  And apparently his girlfriend was SUPER PISSED (though I never actually figured out which mousy blonde she was). And I basically spent the next two months trying to play the whole thing off like it had been on purpose.  That’s me.  Balls-out exhibitionist who Does Not Give A Fuck.

And I should have gone to talk to someone (though I’m not exactly sure who that someone should have been, I hadn’t had the best experiences with student mental health services).  And I should have gone to the doctor and gotten like a million tests and antibiotics and the morning after pill.  But it actually did not occur to me.

But I don’t think it was sexual assault.  I don’t think the guy was a predator.  I think he was a drunken idiot who got caught up in my drama and didn’t have the balls to come talk to me about it later. Since I was really into it for all the parts I can remember, and he didn’t know me, I’m not really sure how he would have known how drunk I was. (Though if there actually was, as one rumor had it, a guy filming the whole thing, that guy can fuck off into the sun. At least YouTube didn’t exist yet.)

And I worry that administrative boards, legislators, pundits, journalists, Hanna Rosin, Emily Yoffe, etc. misunderstand what it means to say that alcohol is involved with 50% of campus sexual assault, and think my blacked out sex is what most (all?) sexual assault looks like on campus.

In this article about college guys admitting to rape and attempted rape (as long as the questionnaire doesn’t actually say the word “rape”), I found the wording of this question in particular really helpful:

Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did no want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances (e.g., removing their clothes)?

[Apparently 4.5% of the respondents answered yes to this question, and of the 62% of them who said they had done it more than once, the average was 8.4 times]

“too intoxicated to resist” just seems really clear to me, in a way that “too intoxicated to consent” doesn’t.

[Compare the wording to the CA bill:

“The complainant was incapacitated due to the influence of drugs, alcohol, or medication, so that the complainant could not understand the fact, nature, or extent of the sexual activity”

or the draft Harvard policy:

“when a person is so impaired or incapacitated as to be incapable of requesting or inviting the conduct, conduct of a sexual nature is deemed unwelcome, provided that the Respondent knew or reasonably should have known of the person’s impairment or incapacity”]

I mean, lots of people have drunk sex, and maybe it means they should examine their alcohol use, but it doesn’t necessarily say anything about consent.  (For example, the first time I hooked up with my now husband we were pretty drunk.  We’d been dancing around each other for months, and it seemed like we needed a little Dutch courage to actually do the deed.)

Also a belief that intoxication prevents any meaningful consent touches on the ability of drug users to consent, and potentially flattens all drunk or drugged sex into undifferentiated sexual assault, with no ability to distinguish between consenting and unconsenting sex.

It also enforces the idea that campus sexual assault is primary about an accident or misunderstanding.  And ignores all the data about predators and repeat offenders and men targeting drunk women, and therefore creates the wrong policies.

As the 2002 Lisak paper says,

the data presented here carry implications for the investigation and criminal justice response to those rapes that are reported and that fall into the category of “difficult to prosecute,” cases in which there are no physical injuries, and where the accused can claim that the victim consented to the sexual encounter. Given the statistical likelihood that a rapist has committed previous rapes and other acts of violence, a thorough investigation of the accused’s social networks might well uncover additional crimes. By questioning acquaintances of the accused who frequent the same bars, parties, fraternities, and other social venues, investigators may uncover previous victims of the accused.

References:

http://www.middlebury.edu/media/view/240951/original/

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/acer.12356/abstract

http://www.davidlisak.com/wp-content/uploads/pdf/RepeatRapeinUndetectedRapists.pdf

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201320140SB967

http://diversity.harvard.edu/files/diversity/files/harvard_sexual_harassment_policy.pdf

also the #consent tag on clarawebbwillcutoffyourhead’s tumblr