The Risk of Harm

No one, man or woman, is ever asking for rape, no matter what they do. In my humble opinion if someone is too drunk to consent then that shouldn’t count as consent. I realize this isn’t the stance our justice system takes, due to issues around evidence, but I just can’t understand why anyone would want to have sex with someone who wasn’t into it, or was too out of it to know what was going on. Why not get yourself a sex doll and avoid the possibility of hideously violating someone? If the sexual stimulation is the very fact that the other person is comatose, powerless, unable to communicate, then actually what is turning you on is rape. And that’s not ok.

In my teens I used to know a guy who would quite often use drinking games at parties to get one young woman drunk. He was a tall solid fella, so it took rather a lot for him to lose his faulties to any significant degree, but not so for some of the women around the table. He would further queer the pitch by changing the rules on people, once they were starting to get too drunk to remember how the game was played. Often he would disappear into a bedroom with his target later in the evening. If she was too out of it to consent, or not into it, would his responsibility for raping her somehow be diminished because she had willingly sat down at that table to play?

Let’s put this another way (and I freely admit that this way is heavily inspired and influenced by an excellent Pat Booth column that was in my local paper a while back [sadly offline].) Is there any other crime someone could commit against me where my sobriety (or lack thereof) would diminish their responsibility, and I would share some of the blame? If I have too many wine coolers and someone mugs me on the way to the toilet at the pub is that partly my fault? If I get all tiddly on shandies, ask a friend to help me get from the taxi to my bedroom, and said friend beats me up and leaves me for dead on the hall floor, was I being reckless with my own safety?

Booth’s column put it far more eloquently than I have, writing the cross-examination of a victim of a mugging as if they were a rape victim, and pointing out the way in which we so often blame the person violated, by virtue of making excuses for the rapist based on the actions (or inactions, or “wrong” actions) of the victim. To my mind using “she was drunk” as an argument that a woman has put herself at risk of harm is on this same slippery slope.*

Why the different standard for rape? Why do we consider women who walk alone at night, or are drunk around men, or get separated from their friends while clubbing, or wear short skirts and FM boots, or who go home with a man but don’t want to have sex, or who get in a taxi with a man who they’ve already let feel their boobs, or who change their mind, somehow responsible for a violation they would never choose, drunk or sober?

In my darker moments, when I despair a bit about human nature, I wonder if the victim blaming is an unholy marriage between sexism and denial. If our society was honest about what constitutes rape then many people might have to also deal with the fact that they have raped, or been raped themselves. I have seen this culture of denial first hand when a sexual predator was unmasked in an organization I was involved in – a woman who I suspect had been one of his victims defended the rapist to the hilt and I believe that was because she could only think of what had happened between them as consensual, otherwise her brain would have to deal with the reality of rape. It’s an understandable response, when faced with the enormity of violation, to seek comfort in denial.

I’m a hypocrite of course. I don’t get drunk, I avoid walking alone at night, I get my keys out in the carpark to ward off an imaginary attacker, I offer to walk with my friends to the bus stop after a late night movie. I fear violence in all the stereotypical situations, and from all the stereotypical sources, despite knowing that I am most likely to be attacked in my own home, and by someone I know. My head has yet to overrule my gut in this matter.

If I wasn’t a “good girl” I wouldn’t be asking for rape. I wouldn’t be responsible, in any way, for the sexual response of anyone else. And I’m yet to be convinced that how much alcohol I have consumed makes me culpable, even just a tiny bit, for someone else choosing to attack me, just because that violence is a sexual violation.

*Hence my extreme disappointment not only with the “Lisa” advert ALAC have run recently, but also with their response. I’ve written enough about that specific campaign already recently, all I can really do now is despair and conclude that they just don’t get it, then take a deep breath and write back to them in hope.