And it's about rape, so this is the warning.
Specifically, it's about drinking and rape. Recently, I had begun watching the first season of Veronica Mars. For those of you who don't know it, it's about a girl named Veronica Mars in high school whose best friend died a year before the show starts and she tries to figure out who murdered her. Veronica is quite a strong character and I like her a lot.
From the beginning, Veronica has recounted the story of how she lost her virginity - she was drugged and raped at a party. She's always very clear on this point, that she was raped. She never calls it anything else, never blames the drugs she was slipped or herself for being stupid. (Though she does regret going to the party.) The point is that she remembers nothing after a certain point at the party until the next morning when she wakes up alone and raped.
But then (SPOILER ALERT)
Then, she finds out what happened - her ex-boyfriend, who was just as completely wasted as she was, (made clear by the show) walks into a bedroom where she had been left by other members of the party. When he sits on the bed next to her, she rouses from her drugged slumber and initiates sexual intercourse.
After that, she stops calling it rape.
Rape occurs when someone is too drunk, too drugged, too anything-other-than-sober, to give consent. But Veronica stopped calling it rape after she found out her ex, Duncan, had been just as out of it as she had been and that she had started it and never told him to stop.
My question is: Is it still rape if both people are not in their right mind to give consent? Or is rape (in some circumstances) only what you make of it, like Veronica Mars did when she suddenly changed her mind on what to call it?
I'm hoping for a real discussion on this because I think that rape has a lot of fuzzy areas. It's not always cut and dry. I feel like, as feminists, we've begun to delve into the mythology of rape (mythologies such as the idea that the common rapist is a stranger on the street, that silence is consent, that anyone deserves to be raped, etc) but that there are many different scenarios to consider.
Personally, I'm still upset that she stopped calling it rape, but I'm not exactly sure how I feel about the ex-boyfriend, seeing as he was also too drunk to legally give consent and that she initiated and never gave any indication that she didn't want to continue. It's a very confusing scenario and the show pretty much doesn't go any deeper than that after the dynamics are suddenly complicated to such an extreme degree - she just stops calling it rape. Which implies that rape is subjective and I don't accept that.
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Interesting...
I think this is the key line: "Then he sits on the bed next to her, she rouses from her drugged slumber and initiates sexual intercourse." I don't understand how she could be raped if she initiated the sex. Was he raped? I don't know. Does the show every say what he thought of this encounter?
He was under the impression that they had consensual enjoyable sex and a mutual silent agreement to never speak of it again. He knows he was drunk but its unclear if he ever finds out that he was also drugged with GHB. He's appalled when he finds out she thinks it was rape, he had no idea that she didn't remember it.
There are some things about this story that are shady. There are some things that it seems like he should have noticed, like how out of it she was (more mentioned in season 2), but you can pretty much write all of that off as his perceptions being confused by the alcohol and GHB. There's also the fact that he rememebrs it, however hazily, and she doesn't, but she did have a lot more alcohol than him on top of the GHB. It does seem like he honestly thought she remembered it as fondly as he did, until she confronts him and he is shocked.
Mostly, he's traumatized about it because he thinks she might be his sister; he has found out that his father had an affair with her mother years ago.
I have a hard time considering situations like this, where both people were too drunk to reasonably consent (and got that way of their own volition) and neither indicated a lack of consent while it occured, as rape. Because it's not really clear that one person raped the other. Yes, you could say that the person who initiated the sex committed rape, but that doesn't seem right when they were also drunk and the other person didn't indicate a lack of consent. I'm not sure what to call it, but "rape" doesn't seem accurate.
I don't believe Duncan raped Veronica. They were both drugged without their knowledge, and they were both pretty drunk --Veronica probably a little more, considering that she didn't remember it and is small enough that the same dose would affect her much more but in his state I don't think Duncan could be expected to notice -- but this brings up an interesting question.
When I hear about sober guys hooking up with fucked up girls, I always think it's at least kind of rapey, if not actually rape. It depends on the situation, and I'll give a lot of slack to people who are already in sexual relationships with each other, because they probably would have consented to the same sex while sober. But what happens when both people are drunk?
What about people who don't seem drunk, or seem substantially less drunk than they actually are? I'm a very obvious drunk, but I have friends who are much more difficult to read, and I have friends who do act differently when they're drunk, but I can only tell because I know them when they're sober. Can it still be rape if it's no one's fault?
There's a similar debate when it comes to the mentally handicapped and people with Alzheimer's. It's rape if a fully-functioning person has sex with a mentally disabled person, but it's not rape if it's two mentally disabled people having sex.
In situations like this, it comes down to an imbalance of power. This is why a fourteen year old can't have consensual sex with a forty year old, but can have consensual sex with another fourteen year old. (It might be illegal anyway, but only an idiot would prosecute.) A sober person can take advantage of a drunk person, but two drunk people are really just taking advantage of each other.
Which brings me back to the Veronica Mars situation. If you think about it, Duncan also had a very good reason to feel violated -- his ex-girlfriend took advantage of his state to have sex with him, even though he never would have consented to it sober because at the time he thought she was his sister.
I agree.
If anything it sounds like you could make a case that she raped him, since she initiated it, and we know that because he thought she was his sister that he would most certainly have not done it if he was sober. So if he really wanted to he could pursue a legal case against her or at least be morally justified in feeling raped.
However in this type of situation I don't think the term rape applies because I don't think either party can be blamed for this. It is a mutual mistake or mutual misunderstanding in my book.
Thanks for posting this.
He could try to pursue a case against her, but I really doubt it would hold up in court, particularly since she was probably more messed up than he was, and she didn't get that way on her own. He'd have a much better case against Dick or Logan, who are technically responsible for what happened.
Would Veronica have consented sober? At that point, she was still in love with Duncan, and this was before she became as hardened as she was by season 1, so she might have forgiven him for the sudden out-of-the-blue break-up. That probably has something to do with why she stopped calling it rape after she found out what happened.
Duncan, on the other hand, would NEVER have consented without lots of alcohol and a secret dose of GHB.
Well, in the flashback it seems that she initiated it in the sense that she kissed him first, not in the sense that she in any way pressured or forced him to do it. If you believe the flashback, they were equally messed up (if anything Veronica was more out of it) and they equally consented or did not consent.
Also at that point Veronica did not know about the possibility of them being related, so its not like she should have known Duncan would never consent.
Now, there are some things that happen in Season 2 that make this whole thing seem a little shady to me. But I guess that's a separate conversation.
I think Duncan didn't rape her, but there are a couple of issues here. First, I think it would make a good deal of sense to consider the person who drugged her guilty of rape. It seems unnatural to say that she was raped but that the person she actually had intercourse with didn't rape her, which is perhaps why she stopped thinking of herself as having been raped, but I think that may be the best description of the situation.
There's also the issue of drunken hook-ups, which I think isn't the central issue of the present case (admittedly, if Duncan hadn't been seriously impaired himself one hopes he'd have noticed how out of it she was), but which has been brought up. Some people do get drunk deliberately to lower there inhibitions. People who do that generally don't make rape accusations then next day (or ever); if someone has made a rape accusation, that's usually pretty strong evidence that something other than just a drunken hook-up happened. But rape apologists like to muddy the waters and use any excuse to do so. If someone had been very drunk and is hazy on the details of what happened, unfortunately most people don't draw the conclusion that if it was anything like consensual sex she wouldn't be claiming rape. Instead, the defenders of the rapist will use the haziness to claim that the victim might really have consented. So it's convenient to be able to say that consent is impossible in those cases, and rely on the fact that in non-rape drunken hook-ups nobody makes accusations. I'm not sure that's the best way to go in dealing with those cases, but it's obviously necessary to figure out some way to make sure rapists aren't automatically safe if they pick drunk victims.
"I think it would make a good deal of sense to consider the person who drugged her guilty of rape."
There are some convoluted plot elements in this particular show that make this idea very complicated (not necessarily wrong).
Here, at the end of season 1 (leaving out spoilers for season 2), is what we have established happened:
Duncan and Veronica used to be boyfriend and girlfriend, but broke up due to complicated things that pulle dthem apart, but its clear they still have feelings for each other.
Veronica goes to a party thrown by a group of peopel who don't like her.
Dick, a crass and mean guy, puts GHB in a coke to give to his girlfriend at the time, Madison, a very bitchy girl, becuase she won't drink alcohol because she's dieting. He gives it to her without telling her there's GHB in it, to loosen her up, so I'd say he's the most guilty person of the night-- he basically intended to date rape his girlfriend (its implied they've already had sex, but still). But she says "ew, this is regular, not diet" and she spits in it and hands it to Veronica as a mean joke (Veronica doesn't see who hands her the drink, she's already a little drunk at this point). Veronica drinks it and ends up drugged, but no one know she's drugged-- they all think she drank too much and they think its funny because they all hate her at this point.
Meanwhile, Duncan is all depressed about big things in his life, and his best friend Logan gives him a drink with GHB in it without telling him, in a very misguided attempt to get him to have some fun at the party. By the end of season 1 we like Logan and its clear that he didn't mean for Duncan to have nonconsensual sex or anything like that, he just wanted him to have some fun getting drunk with his friends. But its still an appallingly stupid thing to do, and might carry some legal liability. Of course, Logan was already drunk and possibly on GHB at that time (that he would have taken on purpose) so how liable is he? So Duncan ends up on GHB and some alcohol without knowing he's been drugged.
He sees Veronica being fed shots by some guys, and he goes to "rescue" her, but ends up getting pulled away by his friends again. Dick ends up carrying her to a guest bedroom, again not knowing that she is under the influence of the GHB that he tried to give his girlfriend. He makes some crass jokes about wanting his virgin little brother who is there to have sex with her, but its not clear whether he really means for it to happen or not. Then they leave her there alone.
Then Duncan finds her on that bed, and she apparently wakes up and has sex with him, but he leaves in the morning before she wakes up because he#s freaked out by the idea that she might be his sister (he found out their parents had an affair years ago). She wakes up alone, not knowing what happened.
So in the end, the people who did the drugging did not mean for what happened to happen. Legally they're possibly still responsible, but they had no intent for any of this to happen.
So, after this horrible confluence of events, I think we're left at the end of season 1 with the following: No one specifically meant for Veronica to be raped, but she was raped. Can you have a rape without a rapist?
No, I think we're saying she was not raped.
I hadn't remembered all the twists and turns, but I think I still stand by my answer; Dick's a rapist. Sure, he'd meant to drug someone entirely different without her consent, but if you're trying to shoot someone and miss, but hit and kill some other unfortunate victim, that's still murder. Seems to me the same applies here.
Yeah, I think Dick was the only one out of the night who intended to commit date rape (as of season 1). He did hand Madison a drink with GHB in it without telling her there was GHB in it. Presumably the point was to have sex with her. The way the show sets it up its hard to feel that bad for Madison, because she was having sex with Dick anyway and while Veronica was experiencing rape, Madison was out front spraypainting "SLUT" onto her car. But Madison was the intended victim as far as we can tell. At one point Veronica blames Madison for drugging her, which I think is ridiculous; Madison was being an immature bitch by spitting in a drink and handing it to her, but she didn't know there was GHB in it so she isn't responsible for that. Its just that Veronica hates Madison.
The problem with the show I think is that when it starts, Dick is really a horrible person. Very very bad. As the show keeps going, they decided they really liked the actor and wanted to keep him around so they started toning him down to comic relief. I believe that later on in the show someone asked the creator why we were still supposed to accept Dick around as comic relief after what he did at that party (trying to drug Madison and telling his little brother to have sex with a passed-out Veronica), and the creator said something like well, remember, no one was really a reliable narrator there, we don't really know the details. Hrmph.
It was interesting how they filmed the flashbacks differently through different eyes. As one person tells what he remembers, the flashbacks show Veronica awake, dancing, singing "when I think about you I touch myself" and throwing herself on top of guys on the couch. When someone else tells it the same flashback is filmed so that Veronica is barely able to stand, Dick is the one singing that song, and the guys on the couch are sort of handing her off to one another because she's too out of it to get up. Seems like a pretty accurate depiction of real life eyewitness memory. Even if they aren't lying, they were all drunk and months have gone by.
Logan also purposely drugged Duncan, but its clear that he wasn't intending for anything like this to happen at all. So I don't know if you can say he's guilty of rape.
Basically this exact situation happened to me, except that I hadn't been drugged but rather had an extreme reaction to alcohol due to some medication I was on. I was in my own house with some friends (including an ex-boyfriend) and excused myself to go lie down.
I woke up in the morning to find a used condom next to the bed and my clothes off and was informed by other friends that at some point in the night, my ex-boyfriend had gone into my room and we had had what sounded like consensual sex (meaning I was heard sounding into it).
Initially, I did consider it rape. I was passed out, which is obviously not code for "come into my bed and initiate intercourse" and had no memory at all of the experience. The ex-boyfriend and I were not in regular contact anyway, but the impression I got from mutual friends is that he thought nothing of the incident.
About 4 years later, I ran into said ex at a bar and the first thing he did was apologize to me. He had heard through our mutual friends that I had no memory of sex with him and was completely horrified. He said that he had come to check on me and that I had initiated sex and that we had had a nice time after which he stayed for a while and then left. (Incidentally, this was further corroborated by a friend who came into the room worried about me who I apparently told to leave because everything was fine). He said he was sorry because he should have known that maybe I was too drunk but that he was drunk too and felt ok since I was initiating. He seemed visibly upset at the idea that he could have raped me.
I no longer consider the incident rape, but rather a cautionary tale for responsiblity when drunk on BOTH sides of a sexual encounter. I will never in the future merely retire when passed out knowing that I could do things I'm unaware of when blacked out and I'm fairly sure that he will never assume that someone drunk enough to pass out necessarily knows that they are saying yes later.
My friends are totally split on whether or not I should have forgiven him though...
I love that show! [I forget exactly what order things are revealed in, so if you haven't seen the next episode after the one you're talking about yet, there might be a few minor spoilers in this post, but nothing too important.]
The key part you left out is that Duncan wasn't just drunk, he was *also* drugged without his knowledge or consent. With, its implied, the exact same type of GHB that Veronica was given.
So they are both given GHB against their will, a drug that apparently can leave you conscious enough to have sex, but definitely not in a state to make legal consent, and then you typically don't remember it afterwards. I was always suspicious that Duncan remembered it and she didn't, it makes it seem like maybe he wasn't quite as out of it as her. But she has a confession from someone else that they slipped a roofie into Duncan's drink without telling him, so it seems like that really negates his liability.
I also think that Veronica really doesn't want to believe that Duncan would have hurt her on purpose. She cares about him and she has for a long time, and she always trusted him. When he says that she woke up and participated in sex, she believes him. He was out of it enough that his perceptions were way off, but she believes him when he says he thought she was awake and into it. And she and Duncan have enough of a history that its believable that she might have willingly hooked up with him at a party. If a guy that she had no such history with had told her the exact same thing, she would have probably never forgiven him and basically said that he should have known she wouldn't have sex with him like that. But with Duncan, its plausible that she would have and she wants to believe that.
I read an interesting article once contending that at that party Veronica was realy raped by the 09er party culture. She was accidentally drugged by being malisciously handed a drink by someone who was the original target of the roofie, but did not know there was a roofie in it. Duncan was drugged by a friend of his in an attmept to make him have some fun. Several people around the party gave Veronica more alcohol when she was clearly too far gone to agree to drink it (they were feeding her shots), but the people that did that weren't going to hurt her in any other way, they just wanted to make fun of her.No one meant for Veronica to be raped*, but from her perspective she totally was raped, and spent the next year of her life believing that. No one planned to rape her but no one cared enough to make sure she was ok.
*I am writing this paragraph based only on Season 1. I don't want to give anything away about Season 2 but once you've finished it you'll see why this asterisk is here.
It's important to remember that this is just a TV show, and this isn't exactly how events would play out in real life (I haven't seen the show itself, but I'm going off of your description). GHB & roofies don't just make you act drunk--they make you violently ill. I've been there when a friend of mine was drugged, and after one drink she was puking up blood in the toilet. Yes, she was acting drunk (out of it, couldn't stand, etc) but we all knew something was wrong.
The point is that if someone is this out of it, yes it is rape if someone has sex with him or her. If the other person is drugged, it seems highly unlikely that sex would be possible--I'm not a doctor, but I'm going off of seeing someone drugged before. Now, if the other person is just really drunk by their own choice, that makes it more complicated. If you get really really really drunk should you be held accountable for your actions? I personally think yes--you're held accountable if you drink and drive, so that should extend to other circumstances like rape.
That being said, this is an incredibly messy issue. I know people who claim that if a girl has been drinking at all it can't be considered rape. A guy can be put in a super complicated position if a drunk girl is hanging all over him saying she wants sex, but is obviously out of it. Where is the line? A lot of the time there isn't real clear evidence that a rape occurred vs. a drunken hookup--especially if one or both parties don't have a clear memory of the night. It's what one party remembers against what the other party remembers. Physical evidence of rape can look an awful lot like physical evidence from consensual sex. And you run into problems with the accused honestly believing it wasn't rape, especially if the other person was drunk and saying she wanted it.
Props on bringing up this question by the way--the problem is there is no one right answer. A lot more dialogue is needed to straighten out the issue.
I'm curious, do you know the effects of GHB specifically? Before this TV show I always thought of it only as a date rape drug, but this show features teenagers taking it for fun at a party. I guess its a difference in dosage.
Weird, because I thought Veronica *did* confront Duncan about the rape. She believed he had raped her, until he told her in his memory it was completely consensual and then revealed he thought she was his sister, which put a different spin on things!
VM was fantastic. I love Kristen Bell.
Yeah, she did confront him. Did someone say something else?
She confronts him and calls it rape, and he freaks out and is shocked she doesn't remember, and tells her it was consensual. They are both very emotional and distraught but they go through what happened and later in the episode veronica says "I wasn't raped. I was with Duncan."
I definitely think that there is such a thing as experiencing a sexual assault and having the emotional trauma from a sexual assault, while the person you were with did not necessarily sexually assault you. This is a great example of it.
If two people are very drunk and have sex, and one of them feels, after becoming sober, that they couldn't have consented to whatever happened (though they reacted positively during the encounter), what do you do? The other person, who thought everything was fine and thought the now-hurt person was into it and enjoying hirself, now gets called a rapist or assailant. That, to me, seems unfair. If the potential assailant was sober at the time, it would be a different, more simple, story, but adding the issue of both parties being intoxicated makes it more complicated.
What I think is important in situations like this is NOT placing as much blame as possible on the alleged assailant, but to raise awareness about this situation being traumatic so as to prevent intoxicated hookups that wouldn't have occurred while sober. It's also incredibly important to let the person who feels violated express hirself and seek psychological help. The victim/survivor still feels like ze had been violated, and should be offered emotional support and counseling.
To clarify - this is one of the VERY FEW situations in which there is not a clear assailant (or where it is not clear whether there is one at all). Most sexual assaults and incidents of rape have a clear perpetrator and a clear victim/survivor, the perp being the person who somehow coerced the other into sex (whatever 'sex' means in that context), and the survivor/victim being the one who did not consent to the sex. Here, because both parties are intoxicated AND the one who did not feel violated afterward (the dude, in VM) got positive signals of enjoyment/desire from the one who later felt violated, it gets complicated.