NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #27/NN_1992_27.iso/spool/soc/feminism/2583

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From: uunet!infmx![e-mail] (Robert Coleman)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: My Young Friend Was "Date Raped"...
Date: 21 Nov 1992 00:00:59 GMT
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uunet!infmx![e-mail] (Robert Hartman) writes:

>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Humberto Humbertoldi) writes:
>>In article <[e-mail]> uunet!infmx![e-mail] (Robert Hartman) writes:
>>.....[stuff deleted].......
>>
>>......[more stuff about "playing dead" to survive bear mauling deleted].....
>>>
>>>Depending on a woman's history, she may lapse into a mode of playing
>>>dead because she's had a previous bad experience.  Even if I mean her
>>>no harm at the time, if she's in the middle of reliving a previous
>>>trauma, she's traumatized right then, and therefore in no position to give
>>>or withhold consent.  And so, if I then take her lack of vigorous protest
>>>as tacit assent, I may well have crossed the line without knowing it.
>>                  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>Not only without knowing it, but without it being "knowable by a
>>reasonable person" as the legalistic phrase about legal responsibility
>>in a wide variety of situations goes!

>Not so.  Insofar as I, a reasonable person, was just able to articulate
>the circumstances in which such a thing might occur, a reasonable
>person, upon hearing about such circumstances, will take them into
>consideration.

    Hmmm.  I, too am a reasonable person.  I can easily see a circumstance
where the traumatized woman will not only play dead, but actually agree to
have sex, in fear of the repercussions she had experienced before when, at
the very first sign of unwillingness, she had been beaten and raped.
    In other words, even if she said yes, convincingly, you may have
crossed the line without knowing it.  This isn't even a hypothetical; it may
have happened in this way in your actual life.
    To take it a step further, a person may, for various reasons, insist on
having sex even when it is destructive to themselves.  One of the possible
reactions to rape is hyper-sexuality, sometimes followed the next morning
by self-hatred.  You may very well be repeating the damage of a previous rape
even if your partner appears not only to be willing, but eager.  I imagine
that if you were to wake up the next morning to find your partner in this
condition, you'd feel as badly about it as you've implied you felt about the
time that you unknowingly took advantage of someone.

    I don't see where this leaves you any alternative but to avoid making
love altogether, given your intense desire to take the entire responsibility
for the situation (barring, of course, a note from her psychiatrist).

>Since I (and now you) have been made aware of this possibility, I
>(and now you) as a reasonable person, must take into consideration
>the possibility that any lack of active, unprompted assent initiated
>by one's partner can imply a diminished capacity to give consent, a
>reasonable person therefore cannot construe a lack of "vigorous"
>or even "explicit" protest as consent.

Since I (and now you) have been made aware of this possibility, I
(and now you) as a reasonable person, must take into consideration
the possibility that there is no way to determine, from someone's actions,
whether they have a diminished capacity to give consent, a reasonable person
therefore cannot construe even vigorous or explicit consent as consent.

    Or do you believe that "yes" resolves you of all ethical
responsibility?

>> ... It just becomes absurd to talk
>>about rape (or any other crime or injustice) taking place without it
>>being possible for a reasonable person to know their actions
>>constitute such.  It reminds me of a move back to a kind of
>>"Caininite" theology, in which guilt is a property of what on IS, not
>>of what one DOES.

>Nice try.  When one person takes advantage of another's vulnerability,
>however "unwittingly," call it what you like, it's wrong.  When I
>did it, I was wrong.  I hope you never have to feel the way I felt
>about myself after I recognzied what I'd done.

    You are talking, to some degree, at cross-purposes with each other.
Humberto is talking about whether you should be legally responsible, and
you are talking about whether you should be ethically responsible.  Do
you in fact believe that if person 1 makes love to person 2 in a
non-threatening manner, but fails to gain positive assent, that person 1
should spend heavy jail-time if person 2 decides they should?

    Lets take another example.  You collect stamps.  A friend offers
to sell you his collection, a collection you envy, at a greatly discounted
rate.  You agree, and later find out that he's addicted to drugs, and sold
at the discounted rate to get immediate money to get a fix.  In fact, he
acted in reduced capacity to make a decision, caused by a physical addiction.

    Are you, in fact, a thief?  Should you go to jail for the crime?
I would expect you'd feel, ethically, very bad, but has a crime occurred,
and is there both a victim and a criminal?  What is your degree of
responsibility, and, just out of curiousity and away from the point, seeing
as he's spent the money, how would you resolve the situation?  Would you
give the collection back, knowing that he sold it in drug-induced reduced
capacity, even though you can't get your money back?

    This isn't very analogous to the "rape" situation you've described;
it's meant to show that there is a difference between what is ethical and
what should be legal.  Humberto is arguing about how to determine criminality,
and you're arguing ethics; if you want to debate him, you need to switch
gears.  We know how he feels this should be addressed in law; how about you?

>> ...    I don't mean to make light of people's past traumas, but
>>neither do I think that a current "perpetrator" can be held
>>responsible for them -- nor even for assuming they exist.

>No.  But a man can and should hold himself accountable for his own
      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>actions, and even though it might not seem fair that a woman's prior
 ^^^^^^^
>history can interfere with whatever fun he might like to have,
>sometimes that's just the way it is.

    Here is the crux of my disagreement with you.  A *man* should hold
himself responsible for his own actions...  but apparently, a *woman* should
not.  Women apparently are fragile china dolls, dolls who we men *cannot count
on* to communicate their true feelings at the appropriate times without
continuous prompting for verbal assention from the only gender who apparently
*is* innately responsible: men.

    I could go on some time about what I think about what amounts to
paternalistic assumptions, and what this means about "equality".  This
assumption that some large percentage of women are "broken" wrt their
ability to express even their must fundamental needs and desires in the face
of men's desires can easily be extrapolated out of the bedroom and into the
boardroom.  Where does the chauvinism stop?  At what point do we start to
assume that women have any possibility of being equal, that they don't need
ethical men's constant attention and guidance?

Since _everyone_ has a life
>history, and the current figures estimate that 1 woman in n where n is
>your favorite single-digit number has experienced incest, molest or
>rape, a reasonable man must take into account the possibility that
>engaging in similar activities may bring up traumatic recollections
>in any woman he's with, and be prepared to deal appropriately with that
>eventuality.

    I respect your desire not to cause any harm, and I can't argue with
the above paragraph.  If I were to sense anything wrong, I would personally
stop.  However, I cannot accept this statement that lack of continual
affirmative prompting constitutes "something wrong".  I'd be very surprised
if most people's normal intercourse ritual included requiring the woman to
continuously drone her verbal approval through the entire act.  Lack of
continuous affirmation is the norm, not the exception.  (Of course, there *are*
those women who moan "yes, yes, yes!" all the time, but I don't think the
goal is to grant permission. ;-) )

    The following is not a criticism or a personal attack.  I apologize in
advance if you take it that way; it is not intended that way.

    I get the impression that this event you've referred to, where you
unknowingly hurt someone, has scarred you in a very similar fashion to the
way some rape victims are scarred, turning a normally mutually beneficial,
happy event into a scary situation that needs special controls for you to
feel comfortable.  It's very easy to get in a crash at 70 mph, roll the car
a few times, and decide that those highway people were right in the first
place; 55 mph is what people should drive, and what you'll be driving from
now on, and incidentally, everyone else should drive at that speed too.
    And you'd be ethically correct.  If everyone drove at max 55 mph,
the number of traffic fatalities would drop (IMO).  But the fact is that
even with a very significant fatality rate, it's insignificant in comparison
to the population; it is so rare in most people's lives that they are unlikely
to ever have it happen to them.  In situations like this, we, as a society,
prefer to have the freedom to choose a faster speed (as indicated by the
reality, around here at least, of a 65-70 mph average freeway spped) over
the possibility of saving someones life.
    It may not be the right choice, but the alternative isn't livable
either; 15 mph would save almost all the lives, but I don't want to live like
that.  Is your ethical set so strong that you drive at 55 mph?
    Hey, you should do what makes you feel comfortable.  But when you
insist that if we don't follow your guidelines, we're unethical, or even worse,
criminals (not knowing your standing on the legal system implications yet)
then I take issue.  Your guidelines are overzealous and constricting, and
unnecessarily so, and carry implications about assumptions about women's
probable need for guidance that make me very uncomfortable.

    I don't believe the situation that you've described is very likely,
i.e. someone playing dead and my not noticing it unless I'm looking for
constant verbal assent.  If you want to argue that men should be very sensitive
to verbal and non-verbal clues from their partners, I'm with you, though I'd
extend that idea to women as well.  If you want to argue for understanding
when a partner doesn't want to continue, I'm with you there, too.  If you
want to argue that, in general, we can't trust women to tell us no when they
don't want to do something, unless we responsible types prompt them every
step of the way, then you lose me completely.

>I realize that the standard I propose is tough.  But what is it that
>men want?  Do men want to avoid unwittingly committing what some women
>call "rape?"  Or do men just want to avoid the blame when they're
>careless about a partner's feelings and the sex goes awry as a result?

    I don't know what "men" want.  *I* want to believe that most women
don't need my guidance, and are capable of giving some indication of their
feelings/opinions without my prompting, and having done so with or without
prompting, are capable of telling me if they change their mind.  If I'm
wrong, then I would certainly want most women to have paternal guidance in
their affairs, since they would be incapable of dealing with their lives
themselves.  Since this idea is completely revolting to me, I'll take the
lesser of the two evils.
    And I especially want to avoid the sort of fight I'd get into with
my wife if she ever were to conclude that I was treating her like a child,
holding her hand throughout the process under the assumption that she wasn't
going to be honest with me or herself unless I lead, or somesuch.  She
wouldn't like that a bit, no siree.

>> ... I should be held accountable for
>>my actions based on their own contents, not based on what people are
>>reminded of by them.

>But when you ask someone to participate in something with you, and
>they decline to answer, in any other context that is taken as a "no."
>What's so "unreasonable" about taking a nil response to an invitation
>for sex as an implicit "no?"

    What you're saying simply isn't true.  For instance, if someone's in
my office, I might say "Let's go find a conference room."  If the person
doesn't reply and does follow me into the conference room, I'm supposed to
assume that the person didn't want to go?  Sorry, but my respect for other
individuals makes me think that if the other person didn't want to go, they'd
say so and make an alternate suggestion.
    In real life, people make agreements all the time without saying a
word, and perform complicated acts without probing for approval from the
other party at each step of the way.   People come to spontaneous agreements
to do things without anyone even suggesting the idea, much less agreeing to
do them.
    In particular, if I asked someone to participate in something with
me, and they proceeded to do so, without ever saying a word, I wouldn't be
assuming they didn't want to do it.  Human communication is just too complex
to be reduced to a verbal "yes" or "no"; however, "yes" or "no" should be
taken as absolutes.  "No means No" is reasonable; IMO, a woman leaping onto a
bed and ripping off her clothes while giggling doesn't mean no, and I'm
just being deliberately obtuse if I imagine it does.

    "These boards are in my way."
    "Where do you want to move them to?"
    "Over there."

    (Pan as boards are moved; gasp as you realize that not only has the
second person not agreed to move the boards, and thus been possible enslaved,
but the first person never even asked for the second persons assistance.)

Robert C.
--
----------------------------------------------
Disclaimer: My company has not yet seen fit to
        elect me as spokesperson. Hmmpf.


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