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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28480 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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It’s a man’s right to have consensual sex with mentally unwell and “damaged” women

This is the point at which I stop going along. Haven't you heard the good old "don't stick your dick in crazy"? And nobody, man woman or other, has the "right" to have sex with anyone.

I think Brand's in a grey area; he did like to get involved in some tacky shit in order to keep the edgy image going. He probably did sleep with women who were flaky, crazy, or unstable. And those women probably were in some sense vulnerable, thought that pulling a big name famous guy would result in more than it did, might even have hoped for a relationship. Years later, they've imbibed the notion that they weren't able to consent or that he coerced them into sex.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

Consider it karma for the shit he pulled back when he was being an edgelord: the Andrew Sachs prank phone call. Andrew Sachs was an actor, a genuinely nice guy, and best known for his role as Manuel in "Fawlty Towers". He was also of Jewish ancestry and his family had settled in Britain after fleeing the Nazis:

Sachs was born in Berlin, Germany, the son of Katharina (née Schrott-Fiecht), a librarian, and Hans Emil Sachs, an insurance broker. His father was Jewish and his mother was Lutheran, with Austrian ancestry. The family moved to Britain in 1938 to escape the Nazis.

In 2008, when Sachs was 78 years of age and Russell Brand was 33 and his co-presenter Jonathan Ross was 48 years of age, they were going to do a pre-recorded section for Brand's radio show. That didn't go as planned, because the two shitheads Brand and Ross (and I've always thought Jonathan Ross was a dickhead) thought they could be so funny by being loons:

On Thursday 16 October 2008, Sachs, who portrayed Manuel in the 1970s BBC television sitcom Fawlty Towers, was scheduled to be a phone-in guest on Brand's evening radio show. The show was pre-recorded due to Brand's work commitments. Brand had briefly been in a relationship with Sachs' granddaughter Georgina Baillie.

After being unable to reach Sachs on his home telephone, Brand and his co-host of the week, fellow Radio 2 DJ Jonathan Ross, left Sachs four voice messages on his answering machine. In the first message, Brand joked about Fawlty Towers and the fact that both he and Sachs had appeared in The Bill, but was interrupted by Ross shouting out "he fucked your granddaughter". The rest of the message and the following three messages were all characterised by Brand and Ross attempting to apologise for Ross' outburst, but each quickly descended into farce; for example, Brand sang to Sachs: "It was consensual and she wasn't menstrual", and Ross asked to marry him. Brand later said that listening to the calls was like hearing "two idiots dancing towards a canyon"

On 25 October, Brand presented his last edition of his radio show with co-host Simon Amstell, which they performed live. Shortly before going on air, Brand was informed that The Mail on Sunday would be running a story about the phone calls. During the show, Brand apologised to Sachs, but also devoted much of the show to deriding the Daily Mail for its support of Nazism in the lead-up to World War II. In his apology to Sachs, Brand said: "What's worse – leaving a swearword on Andrew Sachs' answerphone or tacitly supporting Adolf Hitler when he took charge of the Third Reich?"

Sachs later stated he had not given permission for the messages to be broadcast. The BBC originally stated that they were "not aware of any complaint by Mr Sachs", but later confirmed a complaint had been received, and apologised. Brand issued an apology for making the calls but stated it was "funny" during his last radio show, before the Mail had printed the story.

So broadcasting to the public stupid messages where you yell at an elderly man about fucking his grand-daughter, then 'apologise' by invoking Hitler to that same man whose family had to flee the Nazis is so thigh-slappingly funny. I hope Russell is laughing as heartily now with these accusations, it's all only a bit of lewd fun isn't it!

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

What a questionable assertion to make.

Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?

A mild case of OCD? BPD like the women Brand was probably fucking?

In medicine and law, it's not just a matter of having "a" mental illness, unless the person is a ward of the state or their family, then it's incredibly dumb to refer to them as incapable of extending sufficient consent for sex, an incredibly common and fundamental activity, when they're not disbarred from doing a great deal more they can't weasel out of on grounds of mental incompetence.

Not that I think that even the grossly retarded, like a person with Downs, should be stopped from having sex, but even broader society doesn't hold the insane assertion you make as true, de facto or de jure.

Let's bite the bullet here. We've both got significant experience in the medical field, you more than me. But we both know that even the best psychiatrists aren't perfect. We also know that college age is prime time for development of psychotic disorders and bipolar disorder. So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

Hell, it is possible (although unlikely) that someone that is a ward of the state (or otherwise in State custody/guardianship) manages to bust out of their group home or whatever, get to Brand, and seem like a more or less sane and put together person. Maybe 99 percent of the time or even 99.9 percent of the time wards of the state don't look competent, but 0.1 percent of the time on any given day they do, and occasionally they break loose or run away from their group homes to live on Christmas tree farms or follow rockstars or something. Intelligent schizophrenics can cook up at least superficially plausible bullshit from time to time...it is a matter of slinging enough bull feces at enough walls and ultimately something sticks.

So what's the odds, given that, that a woman that is mostly OK but maybe a little manic, maybe just an energetic person that can totally consent...when she has sex with Brand becomes floridly psychotic three days later, winds up in a psych ward, and then truly doesn't recall whether the sex happened before or after she was manic or psychotic?

A) Brand is screwing hundreds of women, maybe thousands, over his career.

B) Such groupies are significantly more likely to be BPD, manic, or just a little off kilter in a million ways. The kind of people who are jumping at opportunity to do blow and blow rockstars aren't quite the average women, even if I wouldn't pathologize them outright.

Then now, does it strike you as particularly unlikely that over a career of several decades, one of them would experience such an episode?

The odds per any given groupie might be miniscule, but when you consider the massive number of them he's fucked over the years..

If someone has slept with hundreds of women, then you shouldn't be particularly surprised if one documented incident overlapped temporally with something concerning. It's just not nearly as damning as for a dude who's getting poon every 6 months in college.

This is kind of my point. Joe Average has like ten partners in a lifetime. If he's more or less prudent he has let's say a 99.9 percent chance of not sticking it in someone that might not be able to consent. That's probably going to keep him out of trouble. Not so for Brant.

Do you want to take that line of thought to the conclusion that if a married woman develops, say, a bout of mild depression, it's the job of the police and her psychiatrist to stick on a chastity belt against the wishes of her and her husband?

Hello, hello, guess why the offence of marital rape was created in law?

A depressed woman may not feel like having sex with her husband. If her husband goes ahead and insists on his "marital rights", maybe even forcefully, then whaddya know - it's rape!

You're being obtuse here, intentionally or not.

You claimed that any kind of mental illness (without bothering to specify degree or type) makes a woman unable to consent, presumably above and beyond plain old saying "nah dawg, not feeling it tonight" and turning over.

So the relevant comparison is where a woman with depression voluntarily has sex with her husband, not where she denies it. It might be begrudgingly, but couples regularly do things for the sake of the other they find less than maximally enjoyable. Marital rape where the husband forces himself upon her, this is clearly not.

Perhaps you might well beg to differ, but society broadly doesn't consider "get thee to a nunnery" to be the appropriate response when encountering women with any kind of mental illness. If I couldn't fuck because I was depressed, I'd be more depressed.

You're ignoring the quoted part that this comment is, obviously a response to.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent.

That's the same language we, as a society, use for minors. That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.

That seems arguing for making consensual sex with a mentally unwell person count as statutory rape, or at least I feel this is a valid interpretation.

It is, more or less. Certainly with mental retardation and possible with schizophrenia. If you're consulting a lawyer regarding your sex life, you had better have a damn good reason to be swimming in those murky waters.

And y'know? If they are mentally unwell, they aren't able to fully and properly consent. So are the accusations false? They're in that fuzzy area of "not quite false, not quite true".

If they're not children and aren't subject to conservatorship, they should be presumed to be able to fully and properly consent. Again, when it comes to "guilty" or "not guilty" there is no middle ground.

Ah come on, Nybbler, we have the concept of impaired consent by reason of drugs, drunkenness, mental state at the time, which doesn't have to reach the level of "so impaired that they need to be under conservatorship".

I'm pushing back against "a man has a right to fuck crazy bitches" with "stick your dick in crazy but don't be surprised what happens after". It's the equivalent of "how was I to know the leopards would eat my face?" If you're having sex with someone unstable because she's easy and will do wild shit in bed, you have no right to be surprised when she later goes on to claim crazy stuff about you.

Ah come on, Nybbler, we have the concept of impaired consent by reason of drugs, drunkenness, mental state at the time, which doesn't have to reach the level of "so impaired that they need to be under conservatorship".

Some of these tend to be abused rather often, and very one-sided; nobody's going to find him not guilty of rape because he was on drugs or drunk or depressed when he did it, so I view their use in negating consent (except in cases like surreptitious administration of drugs) as special pleading.

I'm pushing back against "a man has a right to fuck crazy bitches"

A man has no right to fuck crazy bitches (in that said bitches can always refuse) and is properly advised against it. But 'crazy bitches' in that phrase is only vernacular, not psychiatric or legal. If a man does fuck crazy bitches with their consent at the time, claims by said crazy bitches that they didn't consent because they are, after all, crazy bitches with bad judgement, should be laughed out of court.

The leopards eating my face is about crazy people doing the same thing to you that you like them doing to someone else.

It's not about crazy people doing any crazy thing to you, because all crazy things aren't equal.

Unless the women came on to him with the sales pitch "I falsely accused my boyfriend of rape so I could dump him and be with you" or something similar, this isn't like leopards eating his face.

It's not being too fussy about who you sleep with, even if they are observably unstable, because you don't care and you only want to get your dick wet.

Then the time bomb goes off. And you are all "how could this happen?" Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.

Well, it happened because you couldn't keep it in your pants and took a risk, and now the risk has happened.

There is a large difference between something being a bad idea that carries risk, and those risks being a good thing that the rest of society should make worse. There may be cases where it's better to leave people to their fates, but only when the actual costs of doing so are high enough, like if putting up more safety fences or warning labels is too costly compared to the benefit. The obvious topical comparison would be that, if a woman gets raped because of choosing to keep questionable company or choosing to date an abusive man or walking down a dark alley, we still put the rapist in jail if feasible. We certainly don't help domestic abusers on the basis of "you took that risk when you chose to date a crazy person, so society will punish you on the abuser's behalf". Not even feminists creating policies that help female abusers who use accusations of abuse/rape/etc. as weapons generally do so on purpose, they are just biased enough to genuinely think that such accusations from women must be true.

Okay. But then these women shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions (eg they shouldn’t be able to drink, shouldn’t be able to sign contracts, shouldn’t be able to vote). If that isn’t the standard, then they have agency and can consent to sex.

I am at the stage that if people are going to be crying about "this poor 25 year old infant had no agency about the guy she slept with", then yeah - they should not be allowed behave like adults.

On the other hand, for both women and men, there are people it is too risky to sleep with, and if you go ahead and do it because you're too horny or careless or whatever, then it's like running the risks of STIs- you can't be surprised you got a dose of the clap if you've been promiscuous, have not used protection, and have slept around with people who are in impaired states or none too careful about their sexual experiences.

There's allegedly a graffito from Pompeii:

VIII.2 (in the basilica); 1882: The one who buggers a fire burns his penis

I am at the stage that if people are going to be crying about "this poor 25 year old infant had no agency about the guy she slept with", then yeah - they should not be allowed behave like adults.

That's where we are. I believe Evan Rachel Wood is the superannuated poster child for this one.

But then these women shouldn’t be allowed to make any decisions (eg they shouldn’t be able to drink, shouldn’t be able to sign contracts, shouldn’t be able to vote).

Yes_Chad.jpg

Freedom and responsibility go hand in hand. If we are not willing to let such women suffer the consequences of their mistakes, which we obviously aren't, then they cannot be permitted the freedom to make those mistakes in the first place.

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