Minesweeper
Irradiated by LabRat
Post so titled because I’m acutely aware I’m stepping into a big old minefield, and not at all certain I’m not going to blow something or myself up before completion.
Peter posts today about rape, rights, and responsibility, and I encourage you to go over there and read it in full either before you read this or before you react to it, since I don’t want to take any chance whatsoever on misrepresenting what he said and the position from which he said it. (See, there’s that caution again- I like Peter a lot and what he wrote didn’t even remotely offend me, but again, minefield.) The upshot of his post is a reaction against a strongly stated position- a woman’s right to control over her own body remains in place at all times, up to and including after she agrees to go to her home or his with a guy, after she’s had a drink or twenty, after she’s agreed to sex with one guy but not necessarily the rest of his rugby team too, and so forth. Peter points out- and his point is valid- is that in the real world there are a lot of people who will not respect your rights and you should at all times remember this fact before taking any action whatsoever.
I’m going to attempt to dispense with a large wall of text carefully trying to sort out the issue because I think the heart of the matter is that both points of view are absolutely true. Peter’s right in that there are a lot of wicked people out there just looking to take advantage and if you are not careful you are likely to become their prey; the point of view he’s responding to that a woman does have the right to autonomy over her own body under all circumstances is correct. I think the latter needs to be said because there’s a disturbing amount of sentiment out there that consent is, rather than being what I’d recognize as consent, a sort of game with conditions to be met that result in consent whether the person whose consent is assumed and whose further opinion is rendered invalid knows it or not; a more extreme example of this attitude would be the one I’ve encountered that there is no such thing as marital rape because marriage itself is open sexual consent.
More common examples seem to be that if you agree to have more than one drink with someone, that’s open consent, if you agree to go home with them, that’s open consent, if you wear something that could be construed to be a sexual invitation (to whom? anyone turned on, apparently) that’s open consent, and so forth. All of them carry an undercurrent of the attitude that women are the sexual property of men and any individual one just needs to meet the proper conditions to claim it, and while Peter is correct in noting that a disturbing number of men do indeed have this exact attitude and one must always be prepared to encounter them, it’s also correct to point out that this is a fucking disturbing attitude and one whose existence as a default is something we would be better off not accepting so blithely as we so often tend to.
We tend to maintain a pretty healthy balance of attitude when it comes to other common crimes that consist of a violation of someone else’s bodily autonomy; when considering assault, we all agree that it’s not a good idea to associate with certain people and not a good idea to deliberately provoke them and that we should be aware of ways in which we might do so inadvertently, but when assault happens we generally take it as given that the burden of blame is on the person who decided to take their fists or weapon and start inflicting grievous bodily harm on the other. Legally speaking, we also have no problem entering a he-said-she-said (or he-said-he-said, or whatever) situation and taking one side or another; it’s not treated as a delicate and fraught thing, if one dude claims the other beat the shit out of him and the other dude says he was defending himself from the first dude’s face, we don’t have a terribly difficult time taking Dude A’s side of things legally even if we think he might be kind of a scumbag himself. The degree to which he may have somehow earned a beating from the universe in general just isn’t relevant to the prosecution or defense unless the defense really thinks it can make a case that he goes around attacking people with his face.
Likewise, we accept that stumbling down the back alleys drunk at three in the morning with lots of cash on you is a dumb thing to do, but we don’t doubt that it was a mugging, take reasonable doubt that the mugger might have thought Drunky McStumbler was offering the money as a gift, or excuse Mugger McBlackjack as anything less than a criminal with as low a legal and moral status as any other criminal. We think Drunky was dangerously naive or careless, but we don’t regard Mugger’s actions as just what anyone under the same circumstances would do and therefore deserving of lesser blame or perhaps a pass entirely.
The thing is, unlike Mugger McBlackjack and his cohort, who have the sort of backwards courtesy to identify themselves clearly as predators in the act of committing a crime, rape- especially date rape or rape at a party, which is usually the situation where the argument comes into things- does not have such conveniently drawn lines. Everybody knows as a matter of basic “duh” level social training that there is no such thing as implied or assumed consent to help yourself to the contents of someone’s wallet or beat the shit out of them or walk off with their property, but romantic interactions and sex are, even when completely innocent, often tied up in a sort of social game of unsaids, implications, invitations, and deliberately lowered inhibitions.
We look at a situation in which someone was raped after drinking with (or getting drunk with) a man or men she didn’t absolutely trust, but at the same time having a drink or more at a party or on a date is an established social convention to the point where you are generally supposed to provide some sort of reason for refusing a drink that isn’t “I reject you and your company now”; you provide a religious reason, or say your father was an alcoholic, or that you’re driving, but it’s enough of a departure from the norm that some sort of reason you wouldn’t accept a drink in a social situation is expected*. Likewise, for a relaxed social setting in which the mood is “let’s all have fun together”, part of expected social behavior for a woman is that she herself be relaxed, smiley, and a little flirty; to keep smiles to the cool and polite minimum is viewed as rejection in the personal (and most people do take rejection personally) and ice-queen, standoffish behavior in the general. The problem for her is that she has no idea if the individual guy she is talking to and smiling at and being slightly flirty with is thinking:
a) “Cool, this is fun, we’ll have a nice conversation and maybe I’ll talk to this other chick next and maybe we’ll all play Parcheesi, maybe I’ll find someone to go home with and maybe we’ll just all have fun.”
b) “She smiled at me, she probably won’t reject me in the next thirty seconds.”
c) “She smiled at me and that blouse is sexy as hell. Maybe I’ll get lucky.”
d) “She’s smiling at me and wearing a totally slutty outfit. She’s clearly dying for it. Let’s see how many drinks it takes to get her to admit it.”
e) “Welp, found my bitch for the night.”
Or to put it more broadly, any given woman in a mixed-sex social setting that isn’t strictly business is required to have two simultaneous views of every man in the room that she isn’t deeply familiar with:
a) A potential predator who may take any excuse to separate me from the group and brutally assault me.
and
b) A friendly human like myself who might be a good friend or even potential partner, whether for the night or more.
It is, to put it mildly, difficult to hold both views of a group of people you don’t know very well at the same time. Leaning toward option A means you miss out on a lot of social opportunities, even so low-level as basically just having some fun in a group, and leaning toward B means you’re metaphorically hanging a “COME AND GET IT” sign around your neck to whichever equally-non-threatening-looking dude in the group holds the “women as sexual property” view. It’s also the one most people lean to, because we don’t normally require people to pass extensive tests in order to consider them basically unthreatening and to view sudden assault and violation as unlikely. We get offended when people assume us likely to commit what we view as serious crimes (murder, assault- rape) just because we’re a member of a certain group or social class and that class isn’t “the Crime Is Fun And Awesome club”.
Making it all much murkier is the fact that it really IS almost impossible to tell from the outside what constitutes rape and what constitutes a sexual encounter one partner regrets and what constitutes a case of one or both participants being too fucked up to remember which one it was later- which makes it all the more tempting, from the outside, to decide which one it was based on a combination of experience and prejudice. There really is no other crime like rape, both in terms of the importance of consent, the ramifications of any kind of judgment impairment liked with the social commonness of lowering inhibitions a bit, or the sheer situation it represents of being able to go so instantly from “everybody is being fun and having fun in an acceptable social setting of fun” to “someone is being horribly violated, and everyone else thinks that’s fun or can’t tell that it’s not.”
So yes, I am all for stressing that your own safety is your responsibility to look out for, first and foremost. I am also for stressing and extending the attitude that everyone has the right to bodily autonomy and there is no exception to that rule. What I’m not for is pretending that avoiding rape is exactly as obvious and easy as avoiding being drunk in dark alleys with a wad of cash in your wallet.
*Which is not saying “it’s a social obligation to get drunk at a party”, but rather “the line between being socially normal and being stupid is pretty fuzzy and often only visible in hindsight”, especially given how much tolerance can vary for even the same individual. Depending on altitude, time of day, my blood sugar level, and hydration level, I either have a hollow leg or am a two-drink cheap date, for example.
October 25th, 2010 at 8:25 pm
Bravo!
Thank you for writing that there is no pass on the responsibility of the person pressing the suit forward.
Socializing and dating is saturated with unwritten rules and undercurrents that navigating that getting-to-know-you dance is hard and can have potentially negative outcomes to females. Yes, there are those situations where it is wise to take many steps back but the responsibility and obligation exists for the person/people/goats to back off if the other person does not want to.
I think that in altered consciousness scenarios that the obligation factor still exists for one person to stop if the other declines. If the generic you gets that screwed up that you don’t recognize the person’s right to say no, it is your responsibility to learn to listen through the haze. Not the other person’s responsibility to figure out how to get out, but yours to stop.
What I find confusing is how it appears to be acceptable to act in a reprehensible manner in certain cultures or streets or groups. How is it ever acceptable to rape someone? Why do we pass it off as ‘that’s how the culture/group is’ which has a kernel of ‘you should have known to stay away’?
That’s not to say that prudence shouldn’t be followed on either side. There are a number of ways you should use to minimize the risk. Which has now got me thinking about insurance and if the specialty insurance market could offer rape insurance and mandatory offender insurance and how a rate would be developed.
October 25th, 2010 at 10:35 pm
Drivers of cars are required to not run over pedestrians in crosswalks, but you are a fool if you don’t look sharp when about to cross the street. If you get run over, it’s the driver’s fault legally, but you should keep yer wits about you, knowing that even if you do nothing wrong you can get hurt. Just be prudent. I’m trying to make an analogy here.
October 25th, 2010 at 10:57 pm
A sound biochemical reason to refuse a drink, if yer a wummun: It hits you harder than it would a man. You are generally smaller than a man, and even if you weigh the same, your blood volume is smaller in which to dilute the alcohol.
October 25th, 2010 at 11:20 pm
I have occasionally been more or less dragooned into attending some of these “parties” of which you speak, but tried to find quiet back rooms in which to avoid the human monkeys. Neurotypical extraverts are a curse on us few sensible folks.
October 26th, 2010 at 4:22 am
Rape is also bad because of the disproportionate power and risk once you get the legal system involved. It’s very easy for “Buyer’s Remorse” to result in the man being labeled a sex offender and become ostracized from society and unable to hold a good job. Even if acquitted by anything other than concrete proof that the accused wasn’t there at the time, he’s still going to be known as The Rapist. Odds are, the woman won’t be thought of as a someone willing to sacrifice the freedom of another for the sake of her own reputation.
It also means that, having heard enough situations where a man is convicted based on a lie, a lot of people are far more skeptical than perhaps we ought to be.
October 26th, 2010 at 7:30 am
Why do you object to the notion that you’re obligated to have sex with someone while accepting the obligation to get totally pissed at a party?
Both notions are objectionable on exactly the same grounds, that you aren’t owned by other people, and their expectations have no right to your reality.
If you’re going to defend the right to get pissed, defend the right to get pissed. Phrasing it as some kind of societal obligation contradicts the very autonomy you should be defending. (Not to mention the really weird relationship this has with the post you’re responding to, which comments on the idea that men might be too drunk to be able to recognize consent versus a lack thereof.)
October 26th, 2010 at 7:42 am
The point that rape is like no other crime is an excellent one. I really think we as a culture or even species have not quite gotten our minds around the subject legally. The grey area between rape and sex you regret but were cool with at the time doesn’t seem like it should be so grey and fuzzy, but in practice it really seems to be. I knew a few guys in college who had the tendency to drink and hook up with girls who they never would if sober. No one was inclined to call it rape, but then the guy culture wasn’t really receptive to that. In a few cases it was almost certainly a case of the guy being too drunk to say no, though.
Which was a large factor in why I hardly ever drank in college. It didn’t take to much imagination to see that going terrible places for said guys after the fact.
October 26th, 2010 at 7:51 am
Eric Hammer brings up a very good point. At least twice in law school I saw stone-sober girls go home with absolutely wasted guys. If consent is the crux of the crime of rape, and a drunk person is often incapacitated to the point where that person can’t give consent, were these guys raped?
October 26th, 2010 at 8:50 am
This topic is a minefield to talk about because it is a minefield in real life. Your description of the horrible ambiguity of social situations is excellent. The nature of the situation and social assumptions is such that rule of law, the foundation of any society, is very hard to enforce.
I think that our society would be much better off if we had the following clear legal rule:
“If the woman did not sign a written contract giving explicit permission for sex, then the man is guilty of rape. No exceptions.”
The nature of the contract could be anything from “I pay you $X for sex act Y tonight.” to “We are entering a long-term relationship where sexual consent is assumed indefinitely unless either party says ‘no’.”
This may seem draconian, but it would eliminate the fear, uncertainty, and doubt and make things much better for everyone except the actual criminals. Women would not have to worry nearly as much, because the legal system will always enforce their rights. Men who are not looking for sex will not have their intentions misinterpreted. Men who seduce women honestly will have written proof of permission.
October 26th, 2010 at 10:55 am
Alleged -
We had that a long time ago. It was called marriage. Then somebody decided that if a husband has sex with a wife against her will that’s rape. It has two effects:
One, non-contracted consensual sex becomes a crime.
And two, contracted non-consensual sex ceases to be a crime. (By fact rather than law; the contract undermines any claim of rape.)
October 26th, 2010 at 11:47 am
Why do you object to the notion that you’re obligated to have sex with someone while accepting the obligation to get totally pissed at a party?
I’m not “accepting the obligation”, I’m pointing out that it is sufficiently a social norm to have a drink that you are expected to provide a reason you don’t want one. Getting drunk at parties is not in fact a social norm- we disapprove of people who embarrass themselves by not being able to hold their liqour- but it’s likewise also something that’s not too difficult to do in the process defined as “having socially acceptable fun”.
There is no comparable social norm encouraging wandering around in dangerous neighborhoods, provoking scowling men in menacing outfits in bars, or any other condition we point at later as having led to being the victim of a crime, which was my point.
Not to mention the really weird relationship this has with the post you’re responding to, which comments on the idea that men might be too drunk to be able to recognize consent versus a lack thereof.
The fact that you’ve spun that recognition into my “defending a right to get drunk at parties” is a really fucking weird relationship to the original post, as is your apparent apprehension that the possibility for men to be too drunk to consent is the point of Peter’s post. I did not comment on that issue because I thought Peter had made the point fine and had no disagreement with it.
I actually do think our weird gender roles and definitions of sexual consent put us in a place where we’ve effectively culturally defined rape of vulnerable men out of existence unless it’s by another man, and I also think that this is fucked up, I just also think it’s not the subject of my post.
We had that a long time ago. It was called marriage. Then somebody decided that if a husband has sex with a wife against her will that’s rape.
We had that a long time ago. It defined marriage as contractual sexual ownership of women by men rather than the de facto cultural attitude I’m objecting to. What changed was we merely extended the accepted definition of rape- sex against someone’s will- to include married women, as we decided they were not actually property.
You sound as though you believe this was a bad thing. Please disabuse me of this notion if this is an inaccurate assessment.
October 26th, 2010 at 12:06 pm
Wolfwood- That does cut both ways, though. In my experience there’s also a pretty good chance that The Social Circle will decide, based on equally scanty evidence, that the woman making the claim is obviously lying to cause drama and ruin his life- and it’s always a given his defense attorney will do so. The very ambiguity from the outside can be used as a weapon from either direction. The worst part of it is it seems to be decided by who is liked more.
Also, yeah, I would define a woman taking advantage of a man too fucked up to say no as rape, but oh my god have I seen some shitstorms when this is brought up- predominantly from men. Apparently the idea is hugely emasculating.
October 26th, 2010 at 1:17 pm
I’m pointing out that it is sufficiently a social norm to have a drink that you are expected to provide a reason you don’t want one
- If you have to excuse yourself from an action in order to get out of it, you have an obligation; calling it a social norm doesn’t change anything but the name.
The fact that you’ve spun that recognition into my “defending a right to get drunk at parties” is a really fucking weird relationship to the original post
- No. Defending the right to get drunk at parties is what you -haven’t- done here, and should have. Instead of debating the idea that drinking at a party creates responsibility for a rape, you instead suggest women are required to drink at parties, and thereby attempt to diffuse the responsibility.
What you have failed to do more broadly, as Peter did, is distinguish between the responsibility to use common sense and responsibility for a rape; your post doesn’t challenge the assertion that a mistake can lead to a rape and therefore making the mistake creates responsibility for the rape, instead it challenges that the mistake was in fact a mistake.
Drinking too much at a party is irresponsible behavior. Period. Which we have the right to do - freedom means nothing without the freedom to make poor decisions for ourselves and not be physically assaulted for them, whether it’s the government locking someone up for not saving enough for retirement/saying the wrong thing to the wrong person/using cocaine or if it’s a rapist taking advantage of a person who engaged in irresponsible behavior.
Irresponsible behavior is not a crime. It’s irresponsible. That’s it.
What you have done here is to suggest that such behavior -isn’t- irresponsible on the part of the woman because women are expected to drink. This is ridiculous and entirely the wrong argument.
You sound as though you believe this was a bad thing. Please disabuse me of this notion if this is an inaccurate assessment.
- No. I don’t believe it was a bad thing. I don’t think the dissolution of marriage went far enough; women are to a lesser extent the property of marriage, men generally slightly more so now, but marriage is still fundamentally a government-sanctioned abridgment of the single most necessary right to a social species, the right to leave.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:36 pm
Great post, LabRat.
You want to talk about rape minefields? Check out this chick’s definition of “Coercive Rape.” Holy. Crap.
She expands on how rape is a minefield here.
It’s gotten so that we can’t even discuss the issue, without fear of being called names and shouted down. You and your estimable mate, along with most of your motley friends, get big points for being able to hold discussions on upsetting topics without resorting to childish, thoughtless retorts.
October 26th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
“If you have to excuse yourself from an action in order to get out of it, you have an obligation; calling it a social norm doesn’t change anything but the name.”
They are two separate concepts. Insisting that obligation and general expectation are the same thing does not actually make them them so.
“Instead of debating the idea that drinking at a party creates responsibility for a rape, you instead suggest women are required to drink at parties, and thereby attempt to diffuse the responsibility.”
I am pointing out the lack of a clear line between what we describe as adapting to the social norm and what we then define in hindsight as irresponsible behavior. No other crimes have this sort of “risk factor” in which the same risk factor is regarded as a socially positive thing depending on the outcome.
“What you have done here is to suggest that such behavior -isn’t- irresponsible on the part of the woman because women are expected to drink. This is ridiculous and entirely the wrong argument.”
So far as I’m concerned I’ve suggested that such behavior isn’t not irresonsible, it’s just very easy given it’s something people in general- not merely women- are actively encouraged to do, with “too excess” being a fuzzily defined thing that changes based on a number of variables that often aren’t clear to the people involved in the situation. Due to drinking at parties being itself a socially normal behavior, it’s also a very easy thing for a deliberately intentioned predator to exploit, a point that I did not explicitly make but remains true.
Muggers aren’t able to make a socially innocuous suggestion that someone go spend some time away from other eyes with all their cash in their pockets. Rapists are able to make a socially innocuous suggestion that their target compromise their faculties.
I actually do agree with your overall point that there exists a right to be irresponsible without that necessarily putting the responsibility for a violation onto your shoulders rather than the violator’s. My actual point was not that, but rape’s uniqueness in which socially acceptable and encouraged behavior becomes dangerous irresponsibility with few or no clear boundaries.
If you want to make your point the way you think it should be made, write your own blog, which I gather you have done in any event.
“marriage is still fundamentally a government-sanctioned abridgment of the single most necessary right to a social species, the right to leave.”
Curious, given that there is (no longer) a legal obstacle to divorce or in fact any sort of obstacle to leaving without that formality. It’s DIFFICULT, yes, because dissolving what is fundamentally an economic and practical union of lives is logistically difficult, but something being difficult does not mean someone’s rights have been violated.
October 26th, 2010 at 6:27 pm
It is a minefield, and it is difficult to comment on.
It bothers me that if an individual drinks and drives, that individual has committed an offense. But if a woman drinks and then does something foolish sexually, the partner has committed an offense. Of course, scummy people do get other people drunk and take advantage of them. Or spike their drinks, which is just bloody wrong.
A person (man or woman) has the right to say no at any time. Yes, getting a man drunk and taking advantage of him is rape as it is if the genders were reversed. Overall one should not treat people as a means to an end-no pun intended, other people are not toys for your sexual gratification, even if you are married to them.
In my college experience, though, people were very strange about sex. I perceived that a great many (not all) women (and some men, but it was mostly women) used the disinhibiting power of ethanol as an excuse. That is, they wished to be sexually active, but didn’t want to appear “easy” or “slutty” or what have you, so they would get drunk as an excuse. They they had permission to go out and indulge themselves, because they weren’t responsible at the time so that was OK.
Again, in my perception, for a woman to deliberately choose to be sexually active she required some sort of permission, either due to being in a relationship or being intoxicated. It was against the “rules” (and I never knew whose rules) to go out and be sexual for pleasure’s sake alone.
I always thought that if you had to be drunk to be sexual, because you felt guilty about being sexual, one should either deal with the guilt or not get drunk. I refuse to have sexual relations with drunk people, because I wish to be remembered in the morning. But this may be just me, and perhaps it is part of American society’s ambivalence about sex.
October 26th, 2010 at 7:17 pm
William: I made much the same observations in college, and this was in one of the most libertine cities in the nation. I knew a LOT of young women who ostensibly got drunk and accidentally had sex (or, worse, used the term “date rape”) but were transparently GETTING drunk and wandering off with guys just to justify casual sex to themselves. (Perhaps needless to say even these idiots did not report the “rape”.)
Makes a murky area much murkier to be sure.
October 26th, 2010 at 9:19 pm
“I knew a LOT of young women who ostensibly got drunk and accidentally had sex (or, worse, used the term ‘date rape’) but were transparently GETTING drunk and wandering off with guys just to justify casual sex to themselves. (Perhaps needless to say even these idiots did not report the ‘rape’.)”
This is beyond disgusting to hear. I’ve heard dudes made this claim that some girls who said no, especially afterwards, really “wanted it”, but never had heard the claim that they actually did. I shall do my level best to rear daughters that likewise consider this disgusting.
If you want something, but are trying to deny it from yourself, that’s understandable. If you offer something to someone, and then blame them for taking it, you’re a crook.
October 26th, 2010 at 9:46 pm
The context in which I heard the term used was when talking to one another and maintaining social face that way. Using it to guys would have hurt their casual sex prospects. Saying no would have too, they were just “omg soo drunk”.
Still disgusting, but the fiction was used for plausible deniability with other girls/women, not to bludgeon the guys they were with.
October 27th, 2010 at 7:58 am
@William the Coroner - agreed; I’ve never found the terribly inebriated to be attractive at all. I’d like to think of dating as something both parties are happily agreeing to - to poison one party into stupefaction seems like a total subversion.
If you get a potential partner excessively drunk and take advantage, shouldn’t *you* be the one feeling bad in the morning?
(Thank goodness I’m no longer 19, and the company I keep is a bit more self-assured and sensible than it was then.)
October 28th, 2010 at 7:29 pm
“What I’m not for is pretending that avoiding rape is exactly as obvious and easy as avoiding being drunk in dark alleys with a wad of cash in your wallet.”
Thank you, thank you, thank you. You’re right on. The hypothetical woman half naked in a bar and totally drunk is a red herring. Sure, it happens, but the majority of rapes are not like that. Not anything like that. And it’s really insulting when guys use that kind of example to defend their ‘she’s partially at fault’ whining.
It’s human nature to play Monday morning quarterback. If someone gets mugged and tells their coworkers about it the next day, the reflexive response is ‘Yeah, walking down a dark alleyway after getting cash from the ATM probably wasn’t your brightest move’. And the victim laughs, and agrees, and life moves on. It’s no permanent judgment on his character.
Rape is not like that. It’s a deeply personal and violating experience. (Guys, if you doubt me, imagine getting tied up and ass raped and how much shame and anger you’d feel afterwards. Yeah, that’s how girls feel too.) So even if a ‘why was she wearing such a short skirt’ comment is made in the same spirit and with the same lack of malice as the ‘why did you walk down that alleyway’, it comes across as ‘she was dressed like a whore and was totally asking for it’. Every time. No matter how kindly it was stated, because the type of crime is totally different it comes across as blaming the victim. And women everywhere get really, really angry.
I think when feminists are ranting about how women should be able to dance in the streets naked, they’re not literally defending that behavior. (They’d be the first to tell their friends it’s a really stupid idea.) What they’re really protesting is the reflexive ‘well, what was she doing wrong?’ reaction. Because most of the time, she was doing nothing wrong, nothing outside social norms. And harping on situations where the woman put herself at risk sets up a false and very, very harmful idea that women can always avoid rape if they’ll just be careful, and only stupid girls get raped. Unfortunately there have been several comments to that effect in this thread already.
So yeah. If your first response to a rape conversation is to try and find circumstances where the woman may have put herself at risk, kindly go take a long walk off a short pier.
Thanks for the thoughtful article, LabRat. You’re brave to step onto that turf.
November 4th, 2010 at 6:05 am
Took a while, -25 years or about my 40th birthday- but I finally wised up.
If you’re drunk, NO SEX FOR YOU!
I don’t care if you want it soooooo bad.
I don’t care if the other person want’s it soooooo baaaddd.
I don’t care that I happen to have access to a lawyer famous for destroying -politely and sensitively- ‘victims’ in court.
No sex while drunk, not even in a relationship.
It’s just not worth it.
Needless to say, since I made this stance public, I have been propositioned by girls, women, who I’d be very afraid to let them talk, or even breathe, next to any flame.