We’ve come to this weird place in our history where women become babies instead of have them. It’s all about choices – but not about consequences. Rights, but not responsibilities. When a woman becomes pregnant, she can choose to kill the baby (or if you’re squeamish, terminate the pregnancy.) Repeatedly, in one case. Or she can choose to claim a goodly percentage of the man’s income for the next 18 years. Women have reproductive choices, men have obligations.
But she’s isn’t just free to have a baby or not have one. She can effectively become one. By choosing to drink excessively, she reverts back into a state of vulnerability where responsible people must care for her as they would a child. Once a woman has achieved this euphoric, unaccountable, childish condition, she’s powerfully protected by powerlessness. She can shed her inhibitions and indulge in any sexual fantasy she chooses without consequences. She can proclaim her powerlessness later and cry “Rape! Victim! Not responsible for my actions!” and victimize the faux-assailants who thought they lucked into one of those Penthouse letters. “I never thought this would happen to me, but…[insert sexual fantasy].” Now queue the Sam Kinison scream outro - “And then I was arrested for rape and won’t get out for another 16 years.”
Is it compassionate to protect these women after they’ve falsely accused someone? I suggest it’s more compassionate to make her take her lumps as publicly as the men have. That’s treating her like an adult, not a hothouse flower. Emily Bazelon says of the Hofstra fake-rape accuser “She’s only 18,“ and offers a shred of compassion by failing to name her. Eighteen is old enough to sign a contract, vote, join the military, marry, and go to prison, not juvie, if one commits a crime. Had she stuck to her charges and one of her “assailants” been 17, he would have been charged as an adult.
If a young woman is less lucky, in her drunken-victim condition she may encounter someone who will deliberately harm and possibly kill her. Here is a victim who was ‘guilty’ – ‘of being 24′. Now her family and friends are left to defend her with this weak tea: “the world has got to know that 24-year-olds drink. Sometimes a lot. But no one deserves to be murdered.” Well, that’s true, no one deserves to be murdered. It’s a awful story and I’m saddened by it. But will declaring that the world has got to know that drunk people don’t deserve to be murdered do anything to keep them safe? It’s an invitation. If I were a criminal, I’d be looking for you, drunk co-ed.
We need to stop infantilizing these women. We need to stop pretending there’s no connection between their behavior and any crimes committed against them, or by them. “It’s not your fault!” we reassure. And to some extent we’re telling the truth because fault does belong to the criminal when a crime has been committed. But it’s not the whole truth, and it endorses circumstances where women will be victimized. It doesn’t “empower” anyone to declare our right to be publicly intoxicated to the point of helpless dependence. No one deserves to be murdered or raped. But that fact does not overcome the reality that people are murdered and raped every day, and that criminals normally choose victims who are easy marks. It is unkind to tell that to a crime victim after the fact. But it is cruel not to teach it to young women before the fact.
How about this declaration? Young women have got to know that when you get fall down drunk, you may make stupid choices for which you should still be held responsible, just as a drunk driver would rightly be held responsible for events occurring after he chose to get drunk and do stupid, dangerous things.
You want freedom, choice, and rights? Then earn it by taking responsibility for yourselves.
Updated Hofstra link, thanks Drew!
REPLY TO HAREBELL:
Why are the statistics for false rape accusations compared to nonreported rapes relevant? Are you under the impression that one cancels out the other? Do you think we should accept false accusations – with the accompanying nightmare scenario for an innocent man – as a fair tradeoff for making women comfortable reporting an actual rape?
You write, “A drunk driver is being held responsible for the (statistically high) harm they may cause others and property. The drunk woman has posed no such threat to others or their property and has every right to be where she is doing what she is doing. You’re equating a legal act by a woman with a criminal act by a man.”
Falsely accusing people of a crime is in many cases a crime – and where it’s not, it should be. As to women stupid enough to get fall-down drunk and make themselves vulnerable to predators and their own impaired decision making, well, it’s not a crime to be an idiot. But there’s no need for sane people to endorse that behavior. You want to play the burka card – well, go to it, if that’s the best card you’ve got, but it’s not honest. I didn’t endorse or excuse criminal activity and I was exceedingly clear about that. Perhaps you just skimmed my post the first time and somehow missed those sentences, so I’ve highlighted those lines in red to help you find them.
I did endorse the idea that women not get drunk and make themselves easier marks for criminals. I did endorse the idea that women not get so drunk they make decisions they later regret, i.e. accusing men of rapes which did not occur. That’s just common sense and I’m simply amazed anyone is offended by it.
And thanks for including a link to Blue Blue Wave in your post, that’s a great addition to my RSS reader.
Hear hear! Great post!
Absolutely superb! I am going to link this to a men’s rights website and I am sure that it will be popular there. You hit the nail right on the head when you talk about rights and responsibilities. Men have been suffering from this kind of thing for quite some time now. We have absolutely no reproductive rights and often times a women’s rights are exercised at our expense.
You also hit the nail on the head with the false rape accusation made by this woman up in Hofstra. She is an ADULT! A lot of feminists will propose that the root reason she lied about it was this thing called “rape culture” which is a fancy way of saying that society basically conditions men to view women as objects that they are entitled to and tells women that they should be ashamed for wanting to have sex. So here is how this works:
1. The five guys are still jerks for gang banging her because they are “subscribing to the rape culture” and in fact just because they are male because, like all things bad, men created the rape culture.
2. She is not to be blamed for anything because the rape culture made her ashamed of wanting to get freaky with these guys so she was “induced” to lie. Poor dear.
There are a lot of people who actually believe in this nonsense and will tout it till they are blue in the face. Unfortunately they have dominated the public discourse on rape, domestic violence, and reproductive rights for decades now.
I appreciate your thoughts
You know, unfortunately the same mentality (especially by men who believe they have the right to have sex with any woman regardless of her ability to consent) is why so few women actually report being raped while they are intoxicated.
I know. I used to be an alcoholic. And it is exactly why I did not report it when I was raped. Yes, I take responsibility for drinking too much. I was young, dumb and trusted the people I was with. I was under the age of 21 and didn’t even have any business drinking. That didn’t give the guy no right to do what he did to me though. Whether he thought I wanted it or not (which from the way I looked after the encounter, I have a hard time believing he thought it was).
No woman has a right to claim she was raped when she wasn’t, but no one should be having sex with someone who obviously cannot consent. If they are drunk or high, the law says you can’t have sex with them. At least, that is the law here in Kentucky. Thank goodness too as there are some criminals who are more than happy to get you drunk or high without your consent as well. I actually know someone that was saved from being gang raped after she drank only one cup of beer (about half of an actual can of beer). It was spiked with a drug and she doesn’t remember one single bit of it.
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I agree with you, no one should be having sex with someone who obviously cannot consent. And I went out and gotten plastered and made myself vulnerable on many, many, occasions. This was what my friends and I did for recreation, with devastating results. So my goal here is to make the point that much of it is avoidable if women took responsibility for their safety and exercised some common sense. Young women should be told, and told again, until they GET it. We can’t control criminals until after the fact of the crime, and maybe not even then. We CAN minimize the risk to ourselves before the fact, and we should.
Again, I’m not talking about rohypnal criminals or the like – anyone using a date rape drug knows exactly what they’re doing, they are without doubt a criminal, a predator. And we all know that there are men who think nothing of what used to be called “taking advantage” and is now properly called rape. I definitely do not defend that in any way, shape or form.
But the problem is when you’ve often got two – or a group – of drunks who think they’re capable of consent or recognizing consent. At this point, she gets to go back and say, nope, I was incapable of consent. A guy similarly under the influence isn’t going to get far with the defense that he was drunk to the point that he didn’t fully appreciate her level of drunkeness. He’s held to a higher standard than she is. I think that’s wrong. Once you get enough alcohol into the mix, it’s very difficult to separate crimes from misunderstanding. My perspective is – “You can’t control men (or anybody, for that matter), but this is the part you CAN control: your own drinking, so make sure you do so or the consequences may be severe.”
I wholeheartedly agree with both of your posts. However in this particular instance we must acknowledge that she sure as heck wasn’t too drunk to make a false accusation. That was done intentionally and with a deliberate mind.
That’s a good point, Laura. We hold men to a higher standard just because both parties are drunk, and it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Here’s an idea: If you’re going to get drunk and don’t want to have sex, stay away from the opposite sex. Or the converse: If you’re going to hang around the opposite sex and don’t want to have sex, don’t get drunk.
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