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That's only a small part of the problem. Modern rape laws, and further ‘anti-rape’ lobbying efforts, are attacking consent as a defense, like they attack every defense. It’s not just ambiguity. The schema is not : he-said, she-said, what shall we do? ; but he-said-yes, she-said-yes, – still rape. If you’re drunk – consent invalid. If you’re a student or an employee – consent invalid. You agree the woman's consent does not matter to you in those cases?
I think the story is really a straightforward conspiracy by radfems and trads to impose their sexless tyrrany by classifying all sex as a felony. They haven't achieved it completely yet, but they're getting there.
For centuries, for all other crimes, it’s the accused . He gets the presumption of innocence. The acccuser has to prove a crime occurred. But we have allowed our justice system to be inverted and perverted in this holy crusade against rape. The rape our culture encourages, according to feminists.
I don’t think you can contain the damage to your outgroup. Your leaders are constantly being targeted under the absurd rape laws. I don’t think total abstinence or the pence rule can protect you from the sanctification of Woman’s Word. Remember, evidence is no longer required. Evidence Law is an obstacle to victims getting justice.
As you say, “it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped.”, therefore I’d have to side with any woman accusing you and send you to prison regardless of what actually happened.
yeah, because you don’t believe in consent. Sex is bad and consent is irrelevant, just like your radfem sisters.
Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.
We just saw an example of this within the last few days: a rape scandal in Canadian junior-league hockey. From that thread, we have a description of video evidence recorded by the accused, explicitly to establish consent:
This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives. Nor is this surprising, given that people here are willing to argue that such evidence is insufficient to establish consent.
I disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced. If you have video of the entire encounter, they can claim they were coerced before filming began, and then the "start" of the video was staged. And of course such coercion is entirely possible, even if one might suspect it unlikely.
The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun. It remains a deeply powerful and fundamentally meaningful act, despite generations of propaganda to the contrary, and with that power and fundamental meaning comes an irreducible capacity for serious harm. You can ignore that fact, as our society strove to do for some decades, but the consequences accumulate and sooner or later must be addressed. Telling people that sex was meaningless fun didn't make it true, it only encouraged them to walk blind into extremely painful realities.
We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.
This fails for the same reasons the video evidence does. You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done. By all means, argue that the women should tough it out and that if they make the wrong call, they eat the consequences. I won't be the one you're arguing against, but I'm skeptical you'll prevail in any arena more consequential or connected to the real world than this one. People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons; the fact that our current social dysfunctions render this sympathy increasingly toxic doesn't mean that withdrawing it will result in anything actually improving on net. Some fraction of men will abuse women if they can, and a much larger fraction of men will take advantage of women in a way that will inflict trauma on those women long-term. Given our current social structure, the women are in a position to do something about it, and woe betide those who get in their way.
"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.
Or perhaps the current system is a straightforward conspiracy by tits-and-beer "liberals" and people like you to continue getting away with rape and abuse. But wouldn't that be rather an uncharitable accusation?
In any case, your claim of "All sex" is obviously unsupportable. The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife. The sex they seek to criminalize and you apparently seek to enable is not the sex we are currently having, nor the sex we intend to have in the future. I am safe from the radfems, and my wife is safe from the pickup artists or whoever. Nothing prevents you or anyone else from forming long-term pair bonds based on deep trust and mutual commitment and avoiding the whole mess entirely, all the while enjoying all the high-quality sex you please. Denying strangers access to your wallet and genitals is a simple, straightforward policy with much to recommend it, and safe sex is as much a myth as safe guns or safe liquor. Even if you have no interest in controlling your sexual appetites, you can at least take a cue from Diogenes: "would that I could sooth the pangs of hunger by rubbing my belly."
Alternatively, pay your money and take your chances. Just don't complain when the dice come up snake-eyes.
For centuries, we had strong social and legal restrictions that were effective at preventing and punishing premarital sex, and understood that this was good and necessary. Our societies understood that men and women are fundamentally different, and that "equality" between their legal interests is not really possible. Then we burned all that down because, like all good children of the Enlightenment, We Knew Better. And now those changes that you preferred have created such misery that changes you don't prefer are being forced through anyway.
It is not a perfect defense, and it certainly cannot protect us from a Blue Tribe enjoying complete social and political dominance. Nor does it protect us as well as, say, the favor of the nakedly corrupt actors exploiting that dominance. It protects us better than anything you can offer, though. I am not immune to being me-too'd, but I am as close to immune as I can reasonably be, and probably closer to immune than I would be if I tried to convert to Bluedom, simply from social effects.
Sure. But not living around Blues and minimizing my interaction with them means that I have almost zero social contact with people who actually believe this, or would be willing to exploit it. That's the actual defense, and the fact that it breaks down when attempting to share institutions with Blues is simply more proof that such coexistence is a bad idea in general. In any case, my system gives the best chance of survival available to people like me. The accusations used to smear Kavanaugh were an appalling injustice, but his strict adherence to avoiding stupid antics spared him. If he'd spent his life maximizing body count as opposed to keeping meticulous journals of his day-to-day activities, there is zero chance he would have survived them.
The Pence Rule works, which is one of the reasons that I consider attempts to smear it as sexism to be so appalling.
I'll take my chances, and I like my odds. False rape accusations are about as low on my list of concerns as unwanted pregnancy (we want them) or HIV infection (blood transfusion after a major accident, maybe?). It's not a thing that's worth worrying about.
Consent is necessary but insufficient, which is very different from "not believing in consent". I do not believe that sex is bad; within a marriage, and maybe even within a committed relationship, it's absolutely fantastic. As a potentially-zero-sum competition between alienated atomic individualists, it's dangerous and stupid for everyone involved, like playing Russian roulette. The radfems are fools, and if people like you are successful in wresting social dominance from them, I'll fight you the same as I fight them now. What I won't do is agree that their brand of foolishness justifies your brand of foolishness, or ally with you to help your brand of foolishness win over theirs. You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.
Then perhaps people like you should side with the sorts of people that will leave you alone (and have a lengthy track record of doing so), rather than the ones that will not, so that when socioeconomic conditions stop being able to sustain liberalism and that freedom dries up it's your brand of [master] morality and not theirs with a better chance of coming out on top.
Reasons which are no longer relevant or correct, but their biological and cultural inertia remains. Traditionalism has, traditionally, never needed to come up with an answer for why women with the same (or more) sociopolitical power as men should obey rules meant to deal with the problems women create when they're the less powerful gender; that's the entire reason why it's been losing ground for the 300ish years since the Industrial Revolution. Traditionalist moral philosophy just isn't set up to handle post-scarcity environments for what should be obvious reasons, and corruption in post-scarcity environments is inherently progressive-biased anyway (as the former masters of North America, being a network of matriarchies that failed to advance technologically in any way over the 10,000 years they had the continent to themselves under functionally post-scarcity conditions, demonstrate).
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No, that has actually been done here, there’s video, text messages, no one is disputing that she said yes.
‘He said she said ‘ goes : ‘He said she said yes, she said she said no’ – If he’s telling the truth, she said ‘yes’, so he’s innocent of rape. And if she said “no”, he’s guilty.
That’s not the situation here at all: all agree she said yes, but for some cockamamie reason the consent has been declared invalid so - schocker – he’s guilty, yet again.
You and the radfems don’t accept consent as a defense because you don’t accept innocence as a defense. The way you see it, he may be innocent of rape, but he’s still guilty of being a man and having sex.
Right, and that's absurd. They have overshot the standard for innocence by several orders of magnitude. They should be released with the court’s deepest apologies, maybe teach the prosecutor what a real case should look like.
No argument there. @orthoxerox is just another guy on the trad-radfem side, he does not recognize women’s consent because there’s always a man hiding in the bushes, coercing them.
I get it, you’re not big on sex, like your prophets before you.
I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).
Maybe the ‘accumulated harm’ demands that all Jan 6 protestors be sent to prison. The accumulated harm is not a real thing here.
You can sympathize with women, admire them, fear them, as much as you like. Their legal ability to turn their agency and reasoning faculties on and off at will still won’t make any sense.
If the employee, the student, the woman, cannot be counted on to make one decision because her body is weak and her mind easily influenced, how can she be counted on to make any?
No, in the absence of evidence for a crime, I want no consequences at all.
Not only are you living under the radfem one, you’re a pillar of it.
She could easily accuse you, anytime, of getting insufficiently affirmative enthusiastic continual consent, that one time in boca. Marital rape is a common thing, you know. Oh god, she wasn’t drunk, was she?
I originally set out to find where the battle lines really are in this triangle. And I think it’s pretty clear that you are in fact allied to radfems, in your shared hatred of ‘fornication’ and in support of modern rape and harassment laws, against classical liberals like me.
I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.
I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.
Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?
Looking at the mod log, I think his most recent ban was for two weeks, so it would still have been a pretty substantial step up, six times as long (though maybe one of the others was longer, I didn't look).
I don't know, when people are willing to talk, and seem sincere (which seemed to me to be the case here), it seems reasonable to set cap bans at a few years.
Even if you end up needing to ban them again years down the line, there's a difference in messaging between "you'd be welcome back later, if only you can behave" and "leave, and never come back," and the former seems better. Even if the one in question isn't likely to listen, it sends the message better to everyone else that it isn't about personal antagonism.
Or so it seems to me, but you surely have the experience I do not.
(this is not to say that I disagree that the comment was pretty bad)
Well, maybe. Back on the subreddit, for a while Zorba set a cap of 1 year on bans. We still perma'd spammers and the like, but the idea (IIRC, this was a while ago) was basically that most users who eat a 1 year ban just won't ever come back, and those who do may very well have changed for the better in the interim. What actually happened was, the best posters who ate a 1 year ban just never came back, while the worst posters did come back, as bad as ever--or worse!
At that point the "perma" slowly crept back in, partly because, as it turns out, there's not really any such thing as a user ban--only an identity ban. On reddit, anyone was free to roll up a new user account at any time. We have a few more tools available here on the Motte, but still it's the case that a determined user could probably find a way to roll a fresh alt. There are costs to that--posts have to be manually approved for a while, for example--but a permaban doesn't strictly mean that a person has been kicked off the site. Rather, in this reputation economy they lose the benefits of being a known quantity. And a new user with no reputation has a harder time getting away with the kind of posts that degrade discourse.
It's far from a perfect system--and even here away from reddit, as a moderator my actual options for responding to posts are extremely limited. I've got a carrot that many people don't care about (AAQC reports) and two sticks (warnings and bans). Beyond that, the only way I can hope to modify anyone's behavior is through direct appeal, which takes a lot of time and doesn't always land the way I want it to.
In the instant case, the user just had a long string of bad posts uninterrupted with anything like an AAQC or other valuable contribution. We don't like to lose interesting perspectives, but at some point the amount of harm someone like that does to the discourse just becomes more than the mod team thinks it's worth.
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In case anyone's wondering about this ban, the real reason is that fuckduck got into a fight with a mod the other day, but the clique needed another excuse to ban him.
I probably should have made an alt account to say this, because now I'll probably get perma'ed for misusing an apostrophe next week or something.
Edit: called it https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184547?context=8#context
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"Friends don't let friends drive drunk". While it's not (yet) a legal duty, it's now a moral duty to stop your friend from getting behind the wheel, even if that means they can't give you a ride or that you'll have to pay for their ride home. And yes, this moral duty means you have to drink less yourself if you see your friend getting sloshed and bragging about their driving ability. And if you challenge them to a race, thinking they are more willing to answer that challenge and more likely to lose when drunk, then you will end up in legal trouble.
It's only a moral duty if you accept the state as a moral authority. If you believe in a higher authority or a superseding principle - like the idea that a person is only moral if they are responsible for their actions, then your duty is to uphold that principle. Forgoing that principle to look after your friend then puts the responsibility on you, but that is by choice.
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A), it's still their responsibility, even if I have a residual advisory duty to help them avoid death.
B), I have no such moral duty to prevent strangers and friends alike from having sex.
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