Alcohol and drugs dissolve clear boundaries of consent. Mostly that works out okay. Sometimes it doesn’t.
Editor’s note: This is a difficult article to read, and to publish. It is a frank, open confession about a certain commonly-accepted form of rape culture, and readers with rape triggers should probably avoid reading it. We at the Good Men Project do not endorse or support the author’s worldview, but it does speak to a very common experience that is often taken for granted and rarely talked about, except in vague and theoretical terms. We thank the author for being willing to speak openly about it, and share his struggle with his own experiences, though we want to make very clear that we do not agree with his conclusions.
When you party, when you move in party circles, you accept certain tradeoffs.
You accept that you’ll always be the bad guy in after-school specials and sitcoms about teenagers. You’re the bad kid who offers Buffy Summers a beer and gets her almost eaten by a snake demon. You accept that you won’t always be able to piece together everything that happened the next day. You’re forced to enjoy Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night” not because you like Katy Perry but because you just plain recognize it.
You accept these tradeoffs because they come with amazing times. They come with glowing memories of an intensity entirely beyond the mundane, they come with crazy sex with amazing people, they come with living a few hours at a time in a world where anything, anything at all, can happen. I’ve moved from one party scene to another my whole adult life, because nobody wants to be that creepy old person or that inappropriately young person, but there are always plenty of people who won’t walk away from that incredible sense of liberation and possibility that you only find at the bottom of the bottle and a hot room full of crazy people.
I swear to God, it is only after the fact that you start figuring out that one of the tradeoffs you’ve accepted is a certain amount of rape. The way crooked businesses accept paying fines for their infractions as the cost of doing business, you gradually, an inch at a time, realize that some of the stories you’ve heard, some of the stories you’ve lived, didn’t involve what they call good consent nowadays.
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With what I’ve learned as an adult, I’m pretty sure I’m technically a rapist. Technically nothing. One woman told me herself. Our encounter was years before—I’d been in a drinking contest and she’d been drinking and flirting with me (yes, actually flirting) all evening. As blurry and fucked-up as I was, I read her kiss of congratulation to me as a stronger signal than it was, and with friends hooting and cheering us on, I pressed her up against a wall and… well. Call it rape or call it a particularly harsh third base, I walked away with the impression that it had been consensual, if not really sensible. (She had a boyfriend at the time, but their boundaries were fuzzy.)
Years later, she was in a recovery program—not for alcohol, ironically—and she got in touch with me during the part where she made peace with her past. She wanted to clarify that what had happened between us was without her consent, that it hurt her physically and emotionally, that it was, yes, rape.
We talk about who is and is not a rapist, like it’s an inextricable part of their identity. “I’m a Libra, a diabetic, and a rapist.” That doesn’t work, though. Evidently I walked around for years as a rapist, totally unaware. Nobody stuck that label on me, I certainly never applied it to myself, even now it only feels like it fits when I’m severely depressed. The label, the crime, simply coalesced for me one day, dragging years of backstory behind it.
That is the damnable thing. We all cluck our tongues at those evil bastards who force themselves on girls—or guys—who are insensibly passed out. At the same time, we all acknowledge that a glass or two of wine helps pave the way for a lot of good times. And in the trackless, unmappable gray swamps in between, we cough and change the subject.
In the real world, especially among experienced drinkers, being blackout drunk doesn’t necessarily look like being passed out on the floor, helpless prey for any passing predator. It can look like being drunk, but fully in control. It can look like being passionately excited. It can look like being a great dancer. It can look like being very sexually aggressive.
It’s not just booze, of course. Ecstasy makes everything incredibly tactile and you want to touch everyone. Weed makes some people insatiably horny. I had to fend off a young woman recently who was talking a mile a minute and sliding her hands inside my shirt, I was still together enough to tell she wasn’t all there, on what turned out to be a mixture of acid and cocaine. There is plenty of fun stuff out there, but mostly it’s booze. For the majority of people, it’s going to be drinking they have to watch out for.
♦◊♦
A friend of mine once told me about a girl who he knew for a fact had only had two drinks. He didn’t know she was on prescription medication that amplified those two drinks beyond all measure. He thought she was just very horny when she wouldn’t leave him alone or take “Are you okay?” for an answer. It wasn’t until she kept calling him by the wrong name and couldn’t remember the right one that he realized she was not able to consent, and called a halt to things before they went any further. He says he had to dissuade her from pursuing things further, because she was really into it, apart from not knowing who he was or where she was.
“Can you imagine?” he tells me in horrified tones. “I was almost a rapist.”
How do I tell him that I was in a similar position and made a different call? How do I tell him that I am what he’s terrified he almost was?
Here’s the plain, awful fact: people can have more and better sex drunk than they can sober. Some of the best, most fulfilling relationships of my life have started out with joyously drunken sex. I’ve had amazing times, orgies sometimes, where it’s simultaneously true that everyone’s consenting and having fun, and that they wouldn’t be consenting and having fun if they were stone sober.
Those aren’t the times that bother me. The ones that bother me are the ones where I got loaded, had some fun with a lady, and then she never wanted to contact me again. Messages go unanswered, social contact is dropped.
There are men, rape-apologist pieces of shit, who will tell you that women cry “rape” every time they have sex they later regret. I carry no brief for those assholes. What eats at me is that there’ve been cases, more than one and less than six, in my life where either explanation would seem plausible. If a woman had consensual sex with a guy because they were both drunk, and later she decided he was a loser and she regretted it, she might refuse to have further contact with him because, hey, awkward. But if a woman was raped by a man who thought she was still capable of consent when she was too far gone, she might refuse to have further contact with him because, hey, rapist.
That’s not the worst part either.
It’s been pointed out to me that I’m using a lot of heteronormative language here, men/me as rapist, women as rape victims, and I honest to God don’t mean to do that. It’s just the linguistic habits I grew up with.
But there have been times I’ve cut off all contact with women after drunkenly fooling around with them, the same criterion that, in reverse, makes me suspect myself of rape.
There have been times of “I regret going to bed with her” and times of “I don’t recall going to bed with her.”
There’s been at least one time I was informed, days after the fact, by multiple eyewitnesses, that I’d had sex with a girl. This came as news to me, and explained a couple messages I’d gotten from her, a girl I generally had no interest in getting involved with.
It must be bad manners to admit to being a rapist and to also say one is a rape survivor, all in one article. I don’t know any set of social mores where that’s okay. I certainly don’t feel like a rape survivor, whatever that’s supposed to feel like. I just can’t quite find a workable standard where I’m one but not the other. I don’t say that as any kind of apology or justification for my actions or my mistakes. I’m just trying to state the facts nobody ever quite wants to state.
Some might think it’s monstrous of me to keep drinking, keep partying. But I have had so many good, positive, happy experiences because I took a chance and altered my state and connected with someone else sexually, it seems crazy to throw all that away. Do people who’ve been in car accidents give up driving?
When I sit down and think about it, it seems like I’ve accepted a certain amount of rape as the cost of doing business, and so have most of the people I know. And that seems like the most sick, fucked-up, broken solution to anything ever. And maybe finding it livable-with condemns us all to hell. I don’t know. I can’t even talk about it under my own name.
For more on the Good Men Project’s decision to publish this story, see Joanna Schroeder’s “This Is Why We Published A Rapist’s Story” on the Good Feed Blog.
Photo—NathanPeck/Flickr
About Anonymous
Disregard the feminist whinging. Drunken, semi-conscious sex is problematic on its own, but nowhere as bad as forcible, conscious rape. The linkage is an attempt by feminists to overplay the victim card and lend moral credence to their own biases.
Any time you accuse someone of playing a “card,” note that you are being a serious a*hole.
“Nowhere as bad.” Gimme a break. Like you can tell someone who’s been raped that there’s a hierarchy to the pain they feel. “I’m sorry that you were raped and you feel used dear, but at least you weren’t conscious for most of it!”
I agree. “Date rape” is just as bad. Rape is rape. If she is too drunk to say no, that doesn’t mean she is saying yes.
A statement with a “Nowhere as bad.” clause does NOT imply emotional equivalence between two different things. Other sorts of harm exist than emotional harm. Having something or someone physically harm is not emotional. Having someone violate your privacy is a sort of harm, but it is not emotional. Having someone steal your property is a sort of harm, but it is not emotional in and of itself, because people do sometimes give up their property voluntarily or not care if they have one or two articles of their property stolen.
You might be right, Betty and Erika, about “date rape” qualifying as just as bad as “forcible, conscious rape” but you have no rational argument backing that claim up here. Additionally, one can probably argue and maintain that the degree of the violation of someone’s wishes comes as greater in a “forcible, conscious rape” than “date rape”.
If someone gets their purely material property like clothes or books or shoes, stolen by someone they know and did like, then the thief has more opportunities in life and probably has an easier time in the world. So, even though the victim has their material property stolen, at least one situation consistent with the victims wishes, at some point in time, might still happen. But, if one’s material property gets stolen by a complete stranger, then it is not likely that any situation consistent with the victim’s wishes will happen. Consequently, the degree of harm in the different types of theft is NOT necessarily the same.
This sort of reasoning might not extend very well to date rape vs. forcible, conscious rape, but it is not necessarily impossible.
this article scared the shit out of me, and that’s a good thing. reading it reiterated to me that i’ve been on both sides of (and witnessed without doing anything about) a lot of grey-area situations like those described and crystallized a thought i’ve been having for a while: i need to stop drinking so much. i’ve been sober since i read this article last week, and a week is a big deal for me.
basically i learned from this guy who doesn’t want to stop partying that i do want to stop partying. really scary, really educational. thanks for showing me what it looks like from the outside.
I’m glad you’re fine with raping people. Your peace of mind is the most important, after all.
I like the way you nicely skipped over his thoughts of his own potential victimhood when he too is too drunk to consent. But then i guess using your own style of phrase; “I’m glad you are fine with men being raped. A woman’s right to choose is the most important after all”.
Please try and read the whole article first, I am not condoning this mans behaviour or attitude, but his account is far more complex than a simple mea culpa
This account should be both a wake-up call AND proof of the absurdity and dangerous consequences of the inflation of the value of the meaning of the word “rape” – the very fact that it’s possible to talk about such a thing as “gray-rape” demonstrates this dangerousness. The maximalist idea that “everything short of explicit verbal consent is rape”, which makes 90% of sex “rape”, is dangerous in that it banalizes rape. Anyone who is not impared beyond judgment knows whether a person is consenting or not. And anyone who is too impared to judge is therefore, by this very criterion, no less a rape victim than s/he is a rapist, as the author rightly points out. Unless, of course, the impared person resorts to physical force, whether implicit or explicit. This is rape, because rape is not sex, it is violence. It is not “ambiguous” or gray. All the implication that it IS does is let rapists off the hook. By creating that doubt, as if rape were on a sliding scale from consensual sex, and was not something fundamentally different.
Thanks for your honesty, OP. I actually appreciated it. But it seems me that you’ve so entrenched yourself in the ritual of undiscriminating, uninhibited sex that you don’t realize your own ability to snap out of it and behave in a way that is perhaps less destructive for both yourself and others. So you’ve realized that you yourself may have been victimized in the past, and you don’t really know how you feel about it but you certainly don’t feel like a rape survivor. That’s all well and good for you. And you feel like since you have conflicted feelings about your own experiences, and since partying for you is such a wondrous thing, there’s no strong reason to stop potentially raping people. But dude, when you rape another person, it’s not YOUR conflicted feelings or YOUR glorious past experiences that matter. It’s the other person’s. Her feelings, her pain, this one experience that, for her, is awful. A happy-go-lucky drunken encounter for you may be one of the lowest, most excruciating moments of her life, and you don’t even seem to care. Frankly, I find your position to be quite solipsistic. I wonder at your lack of empathy. Most of us, no matter how drunk we are, still know the difference between right and wrong, extremely stupid and not stupid. I mean, we may do dumb things, but most of us still won’t jump out of windows or step into moving traffic or throw chairs at people or strangle babies or eat poop. We won’t do these things because we can’t rid ourselves of the way we’ve been conditioned, even when we’re seriously intoxicated. Most people who DO do that kind of stuff are either prone to do it when sober anyway or are hiding some latent inclination to do it. And though discretion may be gone, we’re still the same old people with the same old likes and dislikes, same old habits and hatreds. No matter how blackout drunk my brother is, he will never eat tomatoes. No matter how blackout drunk my best friend is, she still sings the same old stupid song “Sweet Caroline.” Every g-d time. A man who has learned not to rape–to abhor rape–will not rape, even when blackout drunk. That may take an element out of your partying, all that sex, but is that not worth it to preserve another person’s mental, emotional, and physical well-being? I mean, all the hemming and hawing you do in your spiel, I don’t buy it. You are playing the part of a rape apologist, even though you say you aren’t one, because you’re telling us that you refuse to unlearn rape because you think it’s impossible and unnecessary.
Have a little respect for your reader. Many of us aren’t going to be so easily reeled in by your skillful prevaricating. I think you’re just not being honest with yourself.
I do understand the intoxicatingly blissful euphoria that comes with an electric dim lit crowded bar, throbbing heightened displays of loose wit and zeal which only manifest with crowds who have been indulging in booze and drugs. I also get that you need to rationalize your inappropriate actions when indisposed to think clearly for the sake of falling asleep at night
But I am not on your side. Because anonymous, it doesn’t sound like you have put into place any changes to your lifestyle to ensure this horrendous act doesn’t happen again when you have another particularly big night. I’m especially worried because this article indicates you have forgiven yourself in some capacity, because otherwise the palpable shame and rightful self-disgust would keep you silent. Rape is a crime. You seem more consumed with the connotations of bearing the label ‘rapist’-which you are now branded with forever by the way….rather than the crippling pain/degradation/self loathing/humiliation/emotional, physical turmoil (when you forced yourself on her in public against a wall) you inflicted on this woman. Proven by your gormless surprise when she was seeking help for this vile crime against humanity even years later. Empathy. Try to imagine with all social contexts in place, being that girl. But I don’t expect an egotistical, self involved, cruel rapist to have that basic level of imagination.
Don’t expect to be absolved for your actions simply by writing a searingly honest yet empty, clearly unapologetic reflection. There is a reason there is no sympathy for rapists. and no one could have demonstrated why this is better than you. They are always only ever sorry for themselves…never the for the person they raped. Anonymous, I don’t know how to break it to you hun..but you belong in prison. But you’re obviously too clever to wind up in there. So I guess party on pitiful monster-who evidently lacks any self control or basic sense of compassion…Remember, one day if ever, you realize you actually care about other people in this world..castration is a surprisingly safe and efficient procedure these days-let’s face it, not like you’ve got any remote semblance of manhood to lose.
Interesting.
I have had the experiences that he describes: Orgies, sexy hook-ups, incandescently beautiful moments where reality was blurred and I made connections with complete strangers.
The part that confuses me is the part where the writer insists that one has to be drunk, high, or both in order to have these experiences. Most of mine happened while I was sober, and the remaining few times did not involve large amounts of booze and none of them involved drugs.
From where I’m standing, requiring enough booze to be blackout drunk to have a good time is just plain doing it wrong.
It seems we’re also talking about alcoholism here.
I’ve certainly had drunken sex I regretted. Most of the time, I’d say I just made a poor choice and the alcohol destroyed my judgement. To call that ‘rape’, or feel raped, just doesn’t really seem fitting when I’ve also been sexually assaulted whilst fully aware. I’m not saying it’s good to take advantage of someone, it’s immoral, but I’m sorry, it’s just not ‘rape’.
I mean, what happens if both parties are very, very drunk? Who’s to blame? It seems most people would automatically blame the male, but if he’s just as incapable of making clear decisions as she is, is he really a ‘rapist’? Is he even taking advantage of her? And what if it is a two males, or two female? Who’s to blame then?
However, there was a time when I was that drunk that it was certainly non-consensual. I even drunkenly blabbered ‘No’ a few times, in various forms. It differed from my sober ways of saying no, because instead of a forceful, blunt refusal which couldn’t possibly be interpreted, it was more like a ‘No, I have a boyfriend’, ‘No, I’m too drunk’, ‘No, I’m not really horny’. Yet I’m not sure how my drunken body language was appearing, so it’s difficult to tell in that half-conscious state how clear my signals were. Sure, I think it was clear enough but the truth is, I barely remember it. I do remember he was a lot less drunk than me, so in mind it was rape.
Reading this article though makes me realize that I myself was very nearly a rapist, or at least, I nearly took advantage of someone. I remember the event. I had been drinking, but wasn’t too drunk. The guy I was attempting to sleep with was absolutely hammered. In the end, he was too drunk to get it up which was a great thing, I now realize.
Makes me wonder just how many other female rapists or would-be rapists there are. I dare day men report it a lot less, and probably don’t feel raped a lot less then women do because society doesn’t focus on male rape. In fact, it often dismisses it as being impossible. Surely, it isn’t. If a woman can be raped because she’s too drunk to give consent, can’t a man also be in such a state? In fact, I don’t really see any real reason why male rape is dismissed so much.
Of course, I despise victim-blaming as much as the next sexual assault victim but I do think that women should be taught how to be more affirmative in their non-consent etc. because really, if you haven’t said ‘no’ clearly, and you’ve been flirting all night, and the guy might be a bit drunk, it might be easy for the guy to get confused.
I say this because I have noticed something about a few of the men who have sexually assaulted me. Despite my saying ‘No’, since I wasn’t yelling or screaming or punching them in the face, they kept on touching me in an effort to make me aroused enough to consent to sex. Of course, they should have still stopped after I’d told them to stop, they weren’t my partners, they had no right to touch me in the first place. However, in their minds, it was just persuasion, attempting to coax me into it. They were horny and believe with the right amount of work, I would become horny too. Fortunately, all of these men in particular got the message eventually, one way or another and it didn’t end up in rape.
So when does coercion become sexual assault? When is it no longer persuading someone to get them in the mood, and suddenly violating somebody’s body? How can women be taught to define the line better, and men taught to understand the line? (Of course, this applies to female predators and male victims as well, sorry for stereotypes).
I am a studying psychologist and human sexuality is something which constantly intrigues me. I found this article… kind of disturbing, but also relative and thought-provoking.