Cross posted on genfem.com
Iulia Neagu, a Princeton Freshman, wrote an op-ed this week about the “ambiguous situation” of date rape called “The real ‘Sex on a Saturday Night.’” Among the many inaccurate and victim blaming points in her piece, she writes:
We live in times when sexual discrimination has, more or less, disappeared from our society. Yet it still prevails when talking about a ubiquitous thing like sex. If both people were drunk and if the girl has the right to make the accusation of rape, then why shouldn’t the boy enjoy the same privileges? If a culprit is required, then both of them should be guilty or there should be no culprit at all.
A more eloquent feminist than myself should explain all of the reasons this piece is rife with dangerous messages, but here is a short list:
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It implies that the victim is to blame for being raped because she was intoxicated. Note: The victim is never to blame.
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It reinforces an already misogynistic rape culture in which it is on the woman not to get herself into potentially dangerous situations. In this culture, men are not told not to drink too much or to curb their violent tendencies so that they don’t rape, but women are told to behave appropriately so that they do not bring acts of sexual violence upon themselves.
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It implies that women commonly get drunk, have sex with men and cry rape. To say that situations like that are rare is an understatement. It is much more common that rape goes underreported because op-eds like Neagu’s create a society where the victim is guilty until proven innocent.
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It questions why the guy is “always to blame,” when any rape study will show that women are overwhelmingly the victims of rape by men, and that even in cases where men are raped, other men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators (99% of all rapists are men ). There are pretty obvious biological reasons why it is easier for men to rape women than vice-versa.
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It attempts to level the playing field on sexual assault by implying that the victim shares the responsibility of the crime. That the victim is willing, even. From Neagu’s piece:
[By drinking] the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state. In the case of our girl, this happened to be sex with a stranger.
I learned tonight that the reason the media has always sexualized black women is that back in the day sexualized victims gave slave owners permission to rape their black slaves without the burden of accountability. Similarly, a victim who is “asking for it,” because of the alcohol in her system, allows the victim to share in the accountability of the crime.
It is horrifying to me that a woman wrote this op-ed.
Jessica Roy’s take in NYULocal, “Princetonian Op-Ed Plays the Rape Blame Game. ” The comments here are almost as upsetting and ill-informed as Neagu’s original op-ed .
8 Comments
plus ca change … in my day it was the annoying Katie Roiphe
“Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state.”
OK, this statement by the writer is straight up, classic victim blaming. Craziness. Or naivete. From my POV she’s both, saying on one hand that sexual discrimination no longer exists (Princeton must be Mars), and on the other that if it does its the woman’s fault.
This type of crass victim blaming detracts from what would otherwise be a meaningful discussion of what constitutes consent, and how to arrive at consent, when both partners are inebriated.
“We live in times when sexual discrimination has, more or less, disappeared from our society.”
Without doubt, that is the most asinine statement in Iulia Neagu’s article!
How anybody could actually say that is simply beyond me – especially anybody female!
Beyond that, the article is also full of some really sexist ideas about men, women and sex – the core of which are that a man has some kind of right to rape an incapacitated woman, especially if he’s “nerdy” and the woman happens to be his girlfriend!
In fact, it’s the woman’s fault, because she committed the horrible crime of getting drunk!
I’m sure Ms Neagu came by these sexist ideas honestly – after all, that’s how our society presents sex and male-female relations (the whole “men = insatiable sex predator/women = desireless sex gatekeeper” model)
Perhaps somebody should mail her a copy of “Yes Means Yes”?
Ahhh, *this* revisited.
No means no, whether the no comes from a male or female it still means the same thing – you’re not getting any so back the fuck off.
What else means no? Intoxication/being under the influence, because you can’t consent while intoxicated.
So let’s review:
No means NO
Intoxicated means No
Having sex with someone who says no is rape.
“What else means no? Intoxication/being under the influence, because you can’t consent while intoxicated. ”
So in other words, she’s right about the “if both parties were drunk, either both committed rape or neither did” thing…
“Therefore, the girl willingly got herself into a state in which she could not act rationally. This, in my opinion, is equivalent to agreeing to anything that might happen to her while in this state.”
The most annoying part about that statement is that she’s saying anyone who is drunk also is agreeing to ANYTHING that could happen to her while drunk: being mugged, getting hit by a car, blah blah blah. Yeah, I’m sure many of us have woken up and went “Ugh, what was I thinking?”, but that’s very different from the morning I woke up and went “Who the fuck are you? Get off of me!”
But I like to draw an analogy between the drunken pedestrian and the drunk driver. If a drunk (or sober, even) driver hits a drunk pedestrian, it’s the driver’s fault. We don’t go “Oh, the pedestrian was drunk and therefore it’s their fault the driver hit them”. Sure, maybe it wasn’t smart to wander around at 2 am in all black on a poorly lit street, but it doesn’t remove the burden from the the driver to be alert and not RUN OVER PEOPLE.
So if a guy wakes up in the morning and goes “Who the fuck are you? Get off of me?”. Yep. I think that’s rape if their partner didn’t get legitimate consent. “We all need to be responsible for our own actions” (which I think was the oped writer’s point, shitty though it came across) includes making sure you have legal freaking consent! Just like you shouldn’t get into the driver’s seat after drinking, you should probably be cautious about hopping into the sack (especially with a stranger) after you’ve been drinking.
That being said, I have a rule of thumb where I would ask a potential partner how drunk they are, what their level of coherence is, factor that into my own judgement of how inebriated they are, and then ask for consent. It’s gotten me an odd look or two, but no one has ever woken up next to me in the morning scared or confused or upset. I don’t see why it’s so difficult for people to just cover their own ass or err on the side of caution when it comes to drunken hook-ups. It’s not that hard!
I don’t know… perhaps we need a campaign like “don’t drink and drive, you could accidentally kill someone with your car”, that says “make sure you have legal consent before sex… it keeps you from being a rapist”
I actually showed this to my editor at my university’s newspaper, and I’ve been allowed to substitute a response to this in lieu of my usual column (I write sex health and relationship column stuff).
“If both people were drunk and if the girl has the right to make the accusation of rape, then why shouldn’t the boy enjoy the same privileges? ”
Nice wording, I enjoy reporting rape so much I think i’ll do it again tomorrow.