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[Warren DeMontague]

7. unfortunately, this conversation gets a lot of absolutism on people having sex after drinking

excuse the pun.

For instance, you will have people here strenuously go off at length that no one should ever have sex, ever, period, if they've been drinking any alcohol. Doesn't matter if you're a married couple and you each had a glass of wine with dinner and this is the first time in 3 years the kids are off watching some elmo bullshit with the babysitter.... NO SEX, YOU TWO! I've seen that argument made, here. Really.

Yeah, that's realistic. Honestly, I suspect we're not allowed to have sex if we've taken a couple advils or binged watched netflix without getting 8 hours of sleep the night before. The rules some people have invented that other folks are supposed to follow, are pretty strict, you know


but "incapacitated"- that seems to me to be the real point, here. Incapacitated enough to not be capable of giving consent? Of communicating consent? Or even to where people don't really know what they're doing?

"incapacitated" means lacking capacity, and if someone is lacking the capacity to meaningfully consent, then that means exactly what it means, legal implications included. And even if "both parties" are incapacitated; well, it's incumbent upon anyone who inebriates themselves to the point of incapacitation, to still behave responsibly. If you get blackout drunk but get behind the wheel of your car and kill someone, you're still responsible, even if you were 'incapacitated'.


In such a situation the sex isn't going to be very good anyway, so probably both would be better drinking a bunch of water, taking some vitamin B, and sleeping it off. I'd think the advice to a son- or daughter- in that situation is, if you are so drunk you or your partner don't really know what you're doing, or you're not totally sure either of you knows what you're doing- well, to put it mildly, maybe it's not the time for romance.

I also don't think there's some epidemic of women hooking up with guys, regretting it the next day, and suddenly deciding to call it rape.

But the idea that no one - particularly when they're in college - is ever going to have sex while under the influence of any alcohol, strikes me as ludicrously out of touch with how actual humans behave in reality.