All this talk about rape is making me...

[FightForMichigan]

9. Well.

Short answer: Thanks for thinking about these things.

Long answer to follow....

Rape is rape. Right? And sex with anyone who has not consented is rape. Always. Or is it? My wife and I, in our younger years when we drank more often to excess, had sex on more occasions than I can count when neither of us were in any condition to voluntarily consent. It never occurred to us that we were raping each other. Now, you can say there was implied consent, but if we start recognizing the defense of implied consent, where will that take us? Would it be enough that I thought she consented? If she had called the cops the next morning, would I have been charged?

Far be it from me to guess at how the relationship between you and your wife operates. If the two of you have an ongoing agreement that this is OK, then it is OK - for the two of you. And the OK-ness of it can be withdrawn at any time, such as, for example, one of you is angry at the other for something that day or just isn't feeling well right then or plain old doesn't want to. If neither of you feels like you've been used against your will, I'd say you're OK. But she isn't here to ask. Maybe you should ask her?

Let’s get a little more into left field. What if a man visits a prostitute, and pays her for sex. Unknown to him, she is being forced to trick by her employer, and it is against her will. Is the John guilty of more than solicitation? Has he raped her? Has the pimp raped her?

So you're walking down the street when someone offers to sell you a really nice diamond ring. Sure is pretty. And the price is unbelievable. Who knew you could get such a nice ring for $10. And, being the gullible sort, you take the bargain. Holy cow, imagine your surprise when you get tagged for receiving stolen goods! What's that? You didn't know? How could you not have known? Did you really think you could buy a ring like that for $10? We say you participated in the crime. Yes, the John raped her. Which is one of the reasons I have some serious misgivings about prostitution. It had damned well better go along with a strong program to eliminate human trafficking or you're throwing the doors open to an epic expansion of human misery.

True, we have evolved the ability to reason and have become civilized, but does that completely suppress the physical instinct to have sex with any female we can have sex with? Completely?

Really? Really? You mean mankind, with its oversized brain, it's ability to harness fire, develop language and write books, pass down knowledge from generation to generation, create medicines to cure disease and fly to the moon - to do all these things - somehow a man can't control his own penis? This is nonsense. You can have instincts all you want. It doesn't mean you get to act on them and it's OK.

And, if there is an ongoing battle between our reason and our instinctive urges, what do alcohol and/or drugs do to influence the outcome of that internal conflict? How many of us have done things while drunk that we never would have done sober? Should “I was drunk” be a defense? Should it be taken into consideration at all?

Drinking is a choice, and when you drink, you're not absolved of responsibility. Some good drivers never would take chances with a motor vehicle that they would take when they're drunk. That's no excuse for killing someone. In fact, it's treated much more harshly that someone who has a fatal accident caused by a mechanical failure, for example.

Our society is inundated with violent, forceful, aggressive sex every day, and in every conceivable form. Movies, video games, TV. Watch the Lifetime channel on a Saturday afternoon if you doubt me. How about humor - Headley Lamar: “You said ‘rape’ twice”. Thug: “I like rape”. Headley: “Ooooh. Kinky”. I laughed my ass off at that one, but now I can see an argument that it was promoting rape. I hate to say it, but rape is everywhere these days.

Yeah, that's shitty, isn't it?

Is it any wonder that our 14, 15, 16 and 17 year old children are confused as Hell about where the damn line is? Especially when their bodies have been ravaged by hormones? We all understand the scenario in a post I saw earlier in one of the threads that if "..she takes off her own clothes, helps you take off yours, and then says 'let’s do it now' ”, we have consent. And we all understand that forcing yourself on someone who is resisting in any way is rape.

So, what is resisting?
“No”.

Yep, right there. You got it in one. Why you went on from that, I have no idea.

Guys ARE taught - by peers, media, whatever – that turning a “NO” into a “YES” is the art of seduction. So where does the seduction end and the rape begin? If you persuade her to consent, is that okay? What if you lie to her to get the consent? “I’ll love you to the end of time”? “The doctor says when they turn blue, it can do irreparable damage and I might not be able to have children later”. What if you just wear her down and she gives in out of exhaustion?

Oh baloney. Guys are also taught that no means no. So stop at no. What is so damned hard about this?

Is the line different if you’re the father of the teenage girl versus the father of the teenage boy? Why?

Don't know what this means.

Some women do like to “be taken”. I have known a few, and one of them told me once that it made her feel less guilty about liking the sex. I remember thinking about how messed up that was, but I blamed the double standards of our society, not myself for participating in the “sex game” she openly desired. I suppose if you had been watching us from the closet, you may well have thought I was forcing myself on her. But I didn't rape her. At least I don’t believe I did.

Consensual play is just that: consensual play. She told you what she wanted to do and the two of you did it.

I also understand that some women, as screwed up as it sounds, do have stranger-rape fantasies. Haven’t known any of those. But I guess it takes all kinds.

They're not rare and they're exactly that: Fantasies. Fantasies are something a person has control over. Rape is the utter loss of control and assault from another person. They're completely different things.

Is there a difference, in any way or to any degree, between (a) the stranger who jumps out of an alley or crawls in through a locked window and forces himself on a woman sexually, and (b) the date who accompanies a woman who drinks enough such that she is not sufficiently in possession of her mental faculties and cannot form the requisite intent to voluntarily consent, and then he has sex with her as she remains conscious but doesn't physically resist? Should the punishment be different for those two men? How so? How many different shades of grey exist between those two scenarios? 50, maybe?

They are both rapists. If, however, a rapist inflicts additional harm during the rape, he may be subject to more charges. For example, here in Michigan, we are poised to pass a law that specifies that strangulation (not to the point of death) will soon be considered an attempt to inflict bodily damage less than murder and it will carry a 10-year sentence. So if a rapist tries to cut off someone's breathing before or during a rape in order to subdue them, they risk an additional 10-year prison sentence on top of any sentence for the actual rape. (Or, more realistically, the rapist can plea down to a strangulation charge and serve 10 years.)

Forcing yourself on a woman against her will is rape. Having sex with an unconscious woman is rape. Drugging a woman to exploit her sexually is rape. But biology and the complications of human relationships can make things a little murky beyond those absolutes. I have never done either of those things. But I have begged, cajoled, pleaded, tried reverse psychology, teased, begged some more, acted distant, told jokes, dared, double-dared, even triple-dog-dared (that last one works great for getting a woman to skinny dip) ..… all in the name of changing the NO into a YES. And I am certain that some girls had regrets the next day – and no, not always because I was less than stellar in my performance. That’s a topic for a whole ‘nuther thread.

You're making this so much harder than it has to be and I don't know why. Rape - generally speaking - is commiting sexual acts upon someone against his or her will. It's simple. Legally speaking, each state will have its own definition, but it usually goes something like this: the sexual penetration of a person vaginally, orally or anally without consent. You can beg someone all day long and you might be an annoyance and make an ass of yourself, but begging isn't rape. Because no one has been sexually penetrated against his or her will. If she gets fed up to the point she decides to have sex with you just to make you quit whining, that's still not rape, because she decided too. If you got fed up with all that and held her down and did it anyway, or threatened her to the point she was unable to safely say no, or drugged her to get rid of resistance, then yes -that's rape.

(I'm a lawyer, we have to have our rules)

Oh, well, that explains a lot. And I suspect you know a lot of answers to your own questions. So my question to you is - why are you trying to muddy the waters?