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In reply to the discussion: Wall Street Journal thinks that rape is not a crime or that women are criminals for being raped. [View all]Xithras
(16,191 posts)When a woman initiates sexual activity, it is because she has made the decision to do so. When a man decides to initiate sexual activity, it is because he has made a decision to do so. If you are capable of making that decision, you are capable of giving consent.
The problem is that women are capable of having sex long after they lose the ability to make that decision and provide consent. If a woman cannot make that decision and is incapable of initiating sex, she can still be stripped and her body can be used for sex without her consent. If a MAN is so drunk that he is no longer capable of consenting, then he won't be initiating sex with anybody.
Therefore, if a drunk man has sex with a drunk woman, and she was incapable of giving consent, then it is is ALWAYS rape. The very fact that the man was able to INITIATE the sex means that he was also able to make THE DECISION to begin sexual activity, which also means that he was capable of giving CONSENT. Unless he can somehow prove that he was sleep-fucking, then he made the CHOICE to initiate sex with a partner who was incapable of giving consent.
The defining line here isn't gender, but the identity of the INITIATOR of the sexual activity. If both people initiate the sexual activity, then it is consensual. If only one person initiates the activity, then it is rape. It is NOT possible to INITIATE sexual activity once you are so drunk that you cannot consent (your body may respond to it, but you can't start the process on your own).
And yes, that does go both ways. If a man is so drunk that he cannot initiate sex, and a woman initiates sex with him anyway, then it IS rape. The fact that his body responds to the stimulation is irrelevant to consent. Consensual sex is always mutually initiated. Sex that is not mutually initiated is always rape.
The problem with a lot of these pundits is that they conflate "being drunk" with "ability to consent". A woman can be drunk AND be capable of giving consent. A man can be drunk AND be capable of giving consent. You lose your ability to consent when you get SO drunk that you lose your decision-making abilities. Most of these "the guy was drunk too" nimrods deliberately confuse "I was so drunk I got stupid" with "she was so drunk that she was practically unconscious". They are very different things. If the man was genuinely as drunk as the woman in these cases, there wouldn't have been a rape to begin with.
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