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How do you distinguish between someone who got drunk partly in order to get laid and someone who did not? Surely you agree that not every drunk girl at a party is trying to get laid and that there is some level of drunkenness where someone's failure to dissent (or even positive consent) should not be taken very seriously (e.g. if your friend got falling-down-drunk and asked you to help him jump off a bridge into shallow water you would be an awful person if you helped him do so).
Yes, but jumping off a bridge into shallow water is an objectively bad idea, whereas having sex is not.
If my friend wanted to jump off a bridge while sober, I also wouldn't help him with it.
Though, as XKCD notes.
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Questions of false accusations and such aside, I will say that I think I can probably identify the difference here with pretty high accuracy. The party girl that knows how to drink aggressively but still be mostly doing what she wants behaves differently from the girl that accidentally had too many and is out of it. I might not be able to tell the difference if I'm only encountering them at the end point of drunkenness, but if we were hanging out and drinking together, I think I know the difference.
Let's suppose for the sake of argument that you can perfectly tell the difference. Even so, many other young men probably cannot and for these young men, Moran's advice is probably useful.
Also, it's sort of funny that you are confident you can always tell the difference and fuckduck9000 thinks it is impossible (though in a slightly different context).
To be clear, I'm one of the people that thinks Moran's advice is good advice. I also know that I've hooked up with drunk girls, received no complaints, and married one. I'm not saying my judgment is literally perfect, but I also don't think this is anywhere near impossible.
I don't think @fuckduck9000 thinks it's impossible either just that the difference doesn't matter. Unless I'm misunderstanding.
Okay, thanks for the clarification. I agree that it's certainly possible to make an accurate guess in many situations but I also don't think everyone possesses this skill.
He said "How would you know/foresee this?" in response to my comment "I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight" which was in the context of potential problems with having sex with drunk people. It's not quite the same as saying it's impossible to know when a drunk person really planned to get drunk in order to have sex and when they didn't, but it's not so different.
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You could ask them if they want to get drunk & laid, or just drunk?
I was assuming we were in the context where the girl is already drunk and perhaps so intoxicated that she may not be making decisions she would agree with when sober. In this context, I think it may be hard to determine if part of her reason for getting drunk was to make it easier to get laid (and I wouldn't necessarily trust the accuracy of an extremely drunk person's response to such a question).
So you want the man to make the decisions for her? Sounds kind of... patriarchal.
I honestly don't care if it sounds patriarchal or not. I'm not a modern progessive (though I'm not exactly conservative or traditional either) and the things I care about are not based on what sounds patriarchal or not. Consent is not the only moral value that matters in sex and sometimes you do have a responsibility to not enable people to make bad decisions, and especially not to take advantage of their propensity to make bad decisions for your own benefit. That's true when a man does it to a woman, when a woman does it to a man or any other combination of genders.
But what makes 'having sex while drunk' a bad decision, per se? Me and one other person in this thread met our wives this way -- it happens a lot. My experience with alcohol is not so much that people do things that they don't want to do when sober as that they do things that they'd like to, but are too inhibited for whatever reasons. Sure sometimes these inhibitions are in some way 'correct', but there's not really a bright line there that I can see. (other than of course if somebody is actually passed out or otherwise physically incapable of articulating consent or lack thereof -- which most people are comfortable just calling 'rape' without any beating about the bush around 'bad decisions' or 'impaired judgement'.
I certainly wouldn't say that having sex while drunk is always a bad decision, but certainly sometimes it's a bad decision. In my experience, it is plenty common that people make bad decisions while drunk. I'm not sure whether those bad decisions are "things that they'd like to do, but are too inhibited for whatever reasons" but I do think they are things the person involved regrets.
something something 'a life without regrets is not worth living'?
ed: It's also very possible to regret not having sex when you were drunk -- it's not really possible to know ahead of time. 'Zero risk tolerance' is not a life-strategy I'd advise.
This is a fair point and one that I don't think I ever stated any disagreement with. Sometimes sex while drunk is a good idea and sometimes it's not is not an exciting conclusion but it's probably true.
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+1 for met his wife while both were almost too drunk to walk.
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I don't. If you consent to sex, whatever your motives, drunk or not, it's done. It's just sex. It's not like jumping off a bridge. No necks get broken. Nothing morally relevant is happening.
This is one of the Big Lies at the heart of the whole Woke/Progressive meme-plex and the fact that so many people seem to believe it is one of the major reasons (if not THE reason) that gender relations in current year are so fucked.
I will say this idea is the most compatible with maximal freedom and legal equality. I don't think it has been tried and found wanting. It has been found counter-intuitive; and left untried. Very few people believe this. Look at how @hydroacetylene assumed no one was even biting the bullet, or standard feminist discourse like the op.
[Preface: I'm defining "corruption" to mostly mean "there are kinds of subterfuge that human beings engage in to get ahead in zero-growth socioeconomic environments that generate a dead-weight loss for those not participating in said subterfuge. Normative statement is that this is bad, the people who do this and encourage more of it are bad, even if the terms are "lead or silver", and there's probably a good argument to be made that it applies.]
We tried "nothing morally relevant is happening" in the '60s and '70s, back before women regained the upper hand in the gender wars thanks to the end of the economic golden age in the West that elevated men-as-class to what very well might be a global maximum of their political power.
As I understand it our implementation of it was working just fine.
Of course, it is counter-intuitive to women that men shouldn't have to fully commit to them for evolutionary biology reasons (even though the economic boom made it possible for women to support themselves independently, pregnancy is still a problem, and concern about pregnancy needs multiple generations with the safety tech to evolve out of it), so the literal first chance they got, they took an axe to this system and completely destroyed it. The existing backdrop of Western Christian sexual ethics made that shift easier, as did the re-emergence of a literal death sentence STD that modern science still hasn't fully cracked (the previous one, syphilis, met its end through simple penicillin 40 years prior).
The trick is that going completely and utterly to the male side of the equation (which is what the sexual revolution ultimately was, and why it happened when male sociopolitical power was at its peak) with technology that actually made that viewpoint feasible (to say nothing of the advancements that have made sex even safer than it was 60 years ago) actually is the correct call if your goal is to minimize the amount of total social corruption(1).
This isn't to say that there still aren't problems with this approach, of course- since this still converges on the Pareto distribution of sex that young men complain about today (socially-enforced monogamy helps with this, but you don't get that without objective consequences for sex, so destroying them through technology means that's out the window), it does nothing by itself to tackle the fornication-pro-quo problem (the motte of #metoo) and related corruption, unsophisticated ideological consistency combined with certain initial social conditions means the end point actually is pedophilia(2), and a couple others I'm probably forgetting.
And there was real progress at fixing this from both men and (the non-corrupt) women right as Western society was descending into its current state of corruption- "man pays for everything" divorce laws [in terms of the end effect] are specifically meant to stop men from trading up to newer, younger women once they had dependents (the higher time preference that certain statistical US populations tend to have mean this isn't as effective a deterrent for them), "workplace harassment" laws are specifically meant to curb the "no, ass-grabbing as you walk the cubicles isn't OK" thing that inherently-diminished female power to control who touches them when inherently leads to, and so on(3).
The problem, of course, is that the conditions that enabled libertine sexual ethics which required those compromises no longer exist, but it is in the interest of the corrupt that the thumbs (with painted nails or not) remain on the scales just the same.
(1) Freedom, especially sexual freedom, is inherently incompatible with the sociobiological incentives of the statistical women-as-class even if they're expected to behave identically to men to earn a living, which is why when the economic pie shrinks (inherently favoring them) a small number of men are inherently able to leverage the instinctive need for social sanction of a large number of women against the rest of the men. Economic progress is the only bloodless way out- corruption cannot drive out corruption.
(2) Traditionalist-conservatives tend to have this blind spot where they're just parroting Boomer observations without thinking critically about whether the initial conditions are still true. The parents were correct- Tradcon anger over Liberal/Progressive pedophilia is correct if you're stuck in, or reacting to, 1970s sexual ethics- but their modern Rightist [millenial] children are almost completely off base when they claim the Left is still driven by this in 2020 given the Progressives hate straight sex and the men who want it far more than the Right [in living memory] ever did.
(3) Consent laws may or may not be an exception to this progress; I argue it's difficult to separate what ended up being imposed/"compromised on" as distinct from the more general complete and utter wrecking of under-18 rights that occurred in the '80s. Of course, given a choice between dealing with the occasional pregnant 9 year old and the "any woman has unilateral ex post facto legal authority to deem any past sex rape, but 10 year old men are still liable for child support after being [statutorily] raped" our current attempt to avoid pregnant 9 year olds has directly resulted in...
That’s vastly overstated by redpillers and incels anyway, for example by using that misleading archeological Y-chromosome 17:1 ratio.
I had a guy here literally link me to the wiki pareto distribution article (which said nothing about men and women) to justify his belief that it was four stacies to one alpha.
fornication-pro-quo is a minor efficiency loss, not worth the gigantic legal resources expanded to root it out.
You kinda lose me in the last two non-numbered paragraphs. What do you call the ‘present state of corruption’, if it does not include the one-sided divorce laws, one-sided consent laws? Why are those things compromises when they seem straightforwardly pro-woman, and your thesis is that women took back power ? Then you say they lost their reason to compromise, but do it anyway – the obvious conclusion is that they were never compromises.
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I agree that there's a reason the sexual revolution happened at the apex of male power. But ultimately it doesn't really serve most men, it serves a proportion of high-status men, and it always has, as you kind of imply here:
Libertine sexual ethics don't serve women, who get neither sexual pleasure nor status from these encounters (often the opposite on both counts), and who risk shaming, social sanction, actual physical danger and so on to get it.
What young women want, if anything, from men is attention. And as we were discussing with @raggedy_anthem last month, young women in 2023 don't actually get any more attention from young men than their equivalents did in 1923 or 1823 or 1023. The only difference is that today they're expected to put out for it. How that "serves" women in any way is unclear, but it was always going to be something that women realized eventually.
I feel like I single out your comments for scrutiny and end up replying to them, but I want to stress that I don't do this in a negative way.
When you suggest young women want (if anything) from men attention that puzzles me, because I feel like young (and old) men give women lots of attention. Loads, even. In fact the attention given them is often deflected back as unwanted attention, creepiness, etc. I'm sure there's a model for this that I'm not perceiving for whatever reason.
One aspect I suppose is that attention isn't given any more equally to all women than it is to all men.
The model is that all attention is not considered equal. An old black guy commenting "Beauitful! :O :O :O" on your Insta post showing off your body is not considered equal to a young male model-type called Branden Alexander-Vanderbilt posting the same comment.
Consider two situations: an old lady gives you the look in the street vs. a beautiful young woman.
Well sure, that's the hot take. No offense intended. I was wondering if that same POV is held by @2rafa
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Amen my brother. We have a world where everyone decided that having sex with tons of strangers is a good and healthy way to live, and no one can figure out why there's so many broken families and so much depression and mental illness everywhere.
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Well yes, you’ve established that it isn’t rape. But it’s still a scummy thing to do to sleep with someone who will foreseeably suffer emotional harm from it.
But in this case, the moral harm entirely comes from the reaction of her social circle, no? She has to lie that he raped her to protect her reputation. It sounds to me like her peergroup is the problem here, not the sex. It sounds like the problem isn't "open sex-positive norms", but "trying to live sex-positive norms while actually in a very sex-negative environment."
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I honestly find this a very strange attitude. First, sex can and often does have nontrivial physical consequences, ranging from mild soreness the next day to pregnancy or STDs. Second, many people obviously have a very strong emotional reaction to sex. I certainly think emotional consequences are different from physical consequences but I don't think they don't matter at all. For example, suppose you had a child and told them they are stupid and unlovable. No necks have been broken and yet it's clear that your actions are morally relevant (I'm not trying to equate this example to drunk sex, just trying to point out that physical harm is not a prerequisite for moral relevance). I think having sex with someone that you know they will later regret carries some moral weight. Obviously a lot depends on the situation, often both parties are partly responsible and just because something is morally wrong doesn't mean it should necessarily be illegal. But I think it's wrong to discount it completely.
and @hydroacetylene
How would you know/foresee this? I guess if you are positive you are an absolutely terrible lay in every circumstance, you could theoretically have a duty to protect the opposite sex from your depradations... but no, it's their business. You don't have a crystal ball, and it's up to them to carry the consequences of their decisions, whether it's drinking, having sex, driving drunk, having sex while driving drunk etc. Who's responsible if she's drunk and runs some kid over in her car while you're having sex with her? You see my point? Being drunk makes women less responsible for the consequences of their actions when they choose to have sex, but ordinary humans more responsible when they choose to drive.
Both parties share some responsibility; how much depends on the details of the situation. As an analogy, imagine your drunk friend asked you where his keys were because he wanted to drive. If you help him find his keys and then he drives drunk and gets into an accident then he certainly is responsible, but so are you. If you have sex with someone intoxicated and know that they will likely regret it then in my opinion you are partly responsible.
Edit: "How would you know/foresee this?" The same way you try to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation. Of course sometimes it is possible to make an honest mistake. For example, suppose that someone wants to have sex with you and tells you over and over that they just want to hook up but later you find out that they really wanted a relationship. In most such situations, I think your position would be quite defensible and the person who wanted to have sex with you should bear most or all of the responsibility for their decision. But I think anyone who's been an adult long enough has seen some situations where a man was knowingly using a woman's emotional neediness for sex and I don't think that's a good thing (and even less so if intoxication is involved). By the way, I think you could read Moran's advice to young men from the OP's post as, in part, advice for "how to know/foresee this."
It’s bizarre. Why does the man have the responsibility to look into the future and use his good judgment, when the woman couldn’t be bothered/failed to do so? She could have used “the way to predict how other people will feel about something in any other social situation “ to simply say no in the first place, instead of relying on his predictions, his self-control, to say no for her against her expressed wish. Let’s just consider her acquiescence the ‘honest mistake’ that is nobody else’s problem, problem solved. Do better next time.
As I think I stated pretty clearly, my view is that both parties share some responsibility and how much each one is responsible depends on the details of the situation. When people are extremely drunk they often make bad decisions. Of course they are responsible for making those bad decisions, but if you abet them then you are also responsible. And even more so if you knowingly abet their bad decisions for your own benefit.
I don't think I'm saying anything too crazy or that most people would even argue with if sex and gender weren't involved.
And I reject that view. If you drink and (agree to) do something, it is strictly your responsibility.
I mean if that's really your view then I guess I probably can't argue you out of it. But it honestly seems kind of strange to me. Suppose that your friend gets really drunk and wants to drive his car. Assume for the sake of the thought experiment that he's going to drive it on a totally deserted road so there's no risk of him hurting other people. You think it would be funny to watch him drive his car drunk so you give him his keys when he asks. He then crashes his car and gets badly hurt. Do you really mean to say that his injury is strictly his responsibility and you have no blame at all?
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