I wonder if there are any statistics on how many men (or people, since women can commit rape as well) are rapists. That could be an interesting way to flip the usual messages we get and emphasize that so many women get raped because someone is doing the raping.

Damn you bmortimer!

I think one could start with replacing "no means no" with the Yes Means Yes blog's spin on it, which is something like "consent is not the absence of no, but an enthusiastic yes."

By teaching respect for boundaries, that pressuring someone to have sex is not okay, that yes means yes, teaching that sexuality is NOT shameful, that women are not the gatekeepers of sexuality, that it takes two to tango, that you should talk with a potential partner about having sex, etc etc and so on.

I think it is pretty obvious to both perpetrator and victim when murder has taken place. Yet there are still many perpetrators who don't see their actions as rape even when they may seem obvious to others. The education of where to draw the line between consent and coercion starts not with the victim but with the perpetrator. And it would be nice if the education about rape taught men that they should be searching out consent, not simply trying to decide how coercive they can be before they have to stop.

Well, first of all we need to teach men that women's bodies are not their property to use however they'd like. Next we have to educate men as to what rape really is, even by law, because a lot of people don't seem to really know. There is a start.

He felt like it didn't look like a good situation (she looked obviously intoxicated while the guy didnt). When I can tell someone is drunk then that's already the line so I think the guy exercised good judgment. People can drink moderate amounts and still appear pretty aware of all their surroundings.

"if a woman is able to walk upstairs, she's able to make that choice."

Hm. Staggering, swaying, offbalance are all ways one can walk up the stairs. I've seen people really drunk able to go to the bathroom by themselves and puke - they can walk by themselves so I guess they are able to consent to sex?

"Men aren't considered the victims for having sex while drunk, why are women?"

Where did you get this idea? Men are still considered victims when someone rapes them. The fact is many sexual assaults happen this way and if the woman really did want to have sex with this guy then she would have waited 'till he got back and (yes I am assuming) not be relieved when her friends found her.

"bad choice and an assault or rape?"

Why would you call it a bad choice in the first place if it is consensual?

I know bystander intervention can't predict with 100% accuracy if a rape is going to occur or not, but if a situation appears "off" to someone then I think they should do something to intervene.

Personally I'm not against drunk women (or men) having consensual sex (I think it can happen) but I think most people here are against rapists raping, which can include drunk victims. The instance of alcohol intoxication in rapes is pretty high so I think it is good to be aware and intervene if something doesn't look right - especially if someone appears drunker than the other in a hookup.

Did you not see the point about how a lot of rapists have been drinking? That is to say, this ironclad mindset you claim they're locked in to is in fact a sign they're not thinking straight?

And that ignores circumstances where a guy is being aggressive because he thinks that's what he's supposed to do, doesn't get a no, and essentially commits rape because he's ignorant of the fact rape is not just forced sex in an obvious "get the fuck off me asshole" type of situation. I don't claim those occasions make up a large percentage of rapes, but it does happen and is precisely what can be avoided through better education.

No Floyd, you just don't get it. Rapists are not yellow, they don't have "RAPIST" painted on their foreheads, they don't all lurk in parks waiting to jump on intoxicated women.

They're "nice" guys. They're doctors, lawyers, accountants, artists. They love their kids, they treat their wives well.

Have a look through the Feministing archives - find how many rapes, even with a confession from the perpetrator, are taken seriously.

You can't tell me it has nothing to do with societal attitudes that male on female rape is so common when even self-confessed violent rapists get a pass.

Basically the attitude is "rape is horrible, but nothing counts as rape". If I know the guy, if the woman was drunk, if the woman was not a virgin, if the woman was not good looking enough, there is always an excuse.

If sex was not viewed as a commodity taken by men from women, fair enough to focus on self-defence (not that we don't already), but it IS and that needs to change.

How can rape exist if people, deep down, see sex as something a man has to take from a woman and her pleasure as secondary at best? (All other pairings don't exist of course - a whole other problem. :/)

"These people who commit these crimes don't see what they are doing is wrong, and they never will"

As Jessica commented upthread, the difference with rape when compared to other crimes is that many times the people raping don't even think it is rape.

Why is there that narrative of "accidentally" raping someone? Why is it that when these topics of consent rise up, some men get all nervous and then proclaim "It's not fair! I could rape her and not know it!" There are men who DON'T WANT TO RAPE but are afraid they might do it, because the way sexual interactions have been constructed in the media and in our everday life has conceived the absence of a "no" as a "yes." And even then! "No"s are "coyingly saying try harder"

And when there was a presentation on masculinity for athletes at my school, when the speaker asked if it was okay to keep going with having sex even when his partner said no during it and an athlete seriously answered "Yes, because he can't stop now."

There does need to be a continuing conversation on these issues of consent and sexual assault and rape.

Floyd, you're creating a false dichotomy. There are options other than "educate rapists" and "women should change their behavior."

The third option is that men need to change the culture in which rapists operate.

I've written somewhat extensively on this subject. From Meet The Predators:

First, the stranger-force rape is a small proportion of rapes, and is all but absent from the samples of self-reporters. Other research** shows that lack of prior acquaintance and use of the weapon are the only significant factors that increase the likelihood that a victim will report the offense. Attacking strangers with force or weapons is the only pattern of victimization at all likely to lead to incarceration of the rapist, let’s face it — so those who commit rape in the way that follows the script may be already in jail, not in college or the Navy filling out surveys. The rapists who are out there are mostly using intoxication, and mostly attacking victims they know.

Second, the sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. (See Amanda Hess’s excellent takedown here.) The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again. That just doesn’t square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data. Most of the raping is done by guys who like to rape, and to abuse, assault and violate. If we could get the one-in-twelve or one-in-25 repeat rapists out of the population (that is a lot of men — perhaps six or twelve million men in the U.S. alone) or find a way to stop them from hurting others, most sexual assault, and a lot of intimate partner violence and child abuse, would go away. Really.

Recommendation

I’m directing this to men who inhabit het-identified social spaces, and I’m not really limiting it more than that. Women are already doing what they can to prevent rape; brokering a peace with the fear is part of their lives that we can never fully understand. We’re the ones who are not doing our jobs.

Here’s what we need to do. We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.

Listen. The women you know will tell you when the men they thought they could trust assaulted them; if and only if they know you won’t stonewall, deny, blame or judge. Let them tell you that they got drunk, and woke up with your buddy on top of them. Listen. Don’t defend that guy. That guy is more likely than not a recidivist. He has probably done it before. He will probably do it again.

Change the culture. To rape again and again, these men need silence. They need to know that the right combination of factors — alcohol and sex shame, mostly — will keep their victims quiet. Otherwise, they would be identified earlier and have a harder time finding victims. The women in your life need to be able to talk frankly about sexual assault. They need to be able to tell you, and they need to know that they can tell you, and not be stonewalled, denied, blamed or judged.

Listen. The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over — to believe that what happens to our friends — what our friends do to our friends — is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape”.

Change the culture. We are not going to pull six or ten or twelve million men out of the U.S. population over any short period, so if we are going to put a dent in the prevalence of rape, we need to change the environment that the rapist operates in. Choose not to be part of a rape-supportive environment. Rape jokes are not jokes. Woman-hating jokes are not jokes. These guys are telling you what they think. When you laugh along to get their approval, you give them yours. You tell them that the social license to operate is in force; that you’ll go along with the pact to turn your eyes away from the evidence; to make excuses for them; to assume it’s a mistake, of the first time, or a confusing situation. You’re telling them that they’re at low risk.

I saw economist James Galbraith not long ago — an economist beloved of progressives everywhere. Galbraith said, among other things, “First rule of economics: incentives work.” He was speaking in another context, but this applies to rape. The overwhelming prevalence of acquaintance over stranger rapes and of intoxication over overt force, and the relative rarity of weapon use and physical injuries, is easily explained. Rapists know what works. They like to rape, they want to keep doing it, they want not to be caught. It is in their interest to be very sensitive to which accounts of rape are believed and which are attacked and to know which targets and methods are lowest-risk for them.

What they do is what works. They rape their drunk acquaintances because it works. They rape their drunk acquaintances because we let them.

We need to revoke the rapists’ social license to operate. We need to stop asking, “why do we think he didn’t know she wasn’t consenting,” which is the first question now, really. First as a cultural matter — leaving the legal matter aside — we need to adopt the stance that sexual interaction ought to always be had in a state of affirmative consent by all participants; that anything else is aberrant. If someone says, “I was sexually assaulted,” the first question should be, “why was a person continuing with sexual activity when zir partner did not want to?”

This is what it is: real rape happens when the attacker is drunk and the target is drunker and alone and isolated. That’s rape-rape. If he gets away with it, it will be, on average, rape-rape-rape-rape-rape-rape. If we refuse to listen, he can continue to pretend that the rapist is some guy in the parking lot late at night, when it’s actually him, in our friends’ bedrooms half an hour after last call. If we let that happen, we’re part of the problem.

The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

See also Predator Redux

I dunno, Floyd. What I hear you saying is the same old anti-feminist line that men are sub-human animals with impulse control a four-year-old would be ashamed of, who can't be depended on to keep their willies in their pants. And that short of some fantasy bio-catastrophe even Twisty Faster would balk at there's not a darn thing anyone can do but lock up the women to keep 'em safe?

Screw that pal. 99% of men, like all adult human beings, can control themselves perfectly well, even when they've been drinking. Sure, more people have trouble once they start drinking since one of the first pharmaceutical effects of alcohol is impaired judgment. But humans have this amazing capacity to a) make plans in anticipation and b) to make social arrangements with friends, as for instance, when arranging for a designated driver, for friends to "take away my keys," and so on in order to forestall a bad decision to attempt to drive while drunk.

In fact, even when someone doesn't plan ahead there's still the social effect of #b, above, where even if you haven't made arrangements in advance people now have it pretty ingrained that they don't let friends drive drunk. It's even ingrained enough that most people, even when drunk, will back down when reminded they shouldn't drive.

You don't have to be that old to remember when people said that was impossible. Now? Not so much. Plus, now it's such a faux pas to ignore the advice of friends and even strangers that a transgressor will have difficulty living it down next day.

So, Floyd, what you said about drunk men and rape is exactly, 100% what people said about drunk drivers maybe 20 years ago. Even "these men" who "are incapable of change."

Would a campaign to include the same kinds of pre-agreements and social pressure against drunken sexual assault that we have against drunk driving be 100% effective? No. It hasn't been 100% effective against driving. But a policy doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worth undertaking, and those anti-drunk-driving initiatives have been very effective.

Finally, one reason an initiative doesn't have to be 100% effective to be worth it (besides the obivous one of fewer perpetrators and victims) is that it makes it harder for the 1-6% you, Floyd, and Thomas mentioned to "blend into the background." Just like hard-core drunk drivers are more visible, and confrontable, now that most decent people know to hand over their keys, same with serial date-rapists.

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By the way, if I was to implement, say, a campus-wide drunken hookup policy I'd probably use a "too drunk to drive, too drunk to competently hookup" metric. That doesn't have to mean everybody has to go home alone if they've been drinking, just that at that point it ought to be socially acceptable for friends to, for instance, check in with a couple that's heading up the stairs the way they'd check in if they were headed out to their car. And even a strict policy ought to account for cases where both parties have agreed to hookup before they got hammered. (Yes, I'm aware that drinking is almost universally sanctioned on campuses. I said if I was implementing the policies. And campus policies just mean the initiative would have to be informal rather than official.)

Point being, though, that it's neither as hopeless as you put it, Floyd, nor are we as helpless to do anything about it.

figleaf