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.
♦◊♦
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
I’m too much of a control freak to lead this lifestyle – I couldn’t mentally handle being so completely out of it, not in a million years. It sounds like a terribly dangerous way to live, and unlike other dangerous lifestyles (such as being a multi-pitch rock climber, a base jumper, an extreme skier, etc), the risks to it are something by definition you cannot use the full power of your rational conscious mind to minimize. A
And of course the risks here are primarily to others, not to himself.
I read this with ambivalence…..
I’ve been arguing for a bit, here on GMP, that you can’t complain about bumps & bruises if you play a contact sport.
On some level- I have no moral qualms about you treating women who are playing the same games as you getting caught up in some rough stuff.
I’m sure you would laugh it off if you came out of a blackout tied over a sawhorse pulling an infected train or with your dick in the pocket of your shirt & a length of 2×4 kicked up your colon.
Party On!
I’m a Drunk, Alcoholics go to Meetings.
This illustrates exactly why I do two of the thing I do in my life. When I drink, I try to keep it under the limit to where I would lose my mental faculties. Granted I have had “black-outs” 2-3 times but only when I was younger and learning that limit. Second, I have rarely have sex outside of a committed (if sometimes non-monogamous) relationship. I would lose my mind completely if some woman a slept with years earlier called me up and said “what happened was rape.”
*have rarely HAD
Not exactly sure why the “risk” is on the guy, here. He’s too loaded to know what’s going on and has to find out later. IOW, it didn’t bother him, hurt him physically, or get him pregnant. He just had fun.
And he’s taking the risk?
In addition to which, either he’d better buy or bring his own. Must spend a hell of a lot on booze.
Yeah, I agree mostly. Though he is a potential target for rape too. Men do get raped, by both men and women, and so it is a possibility.
I think this author is so deep in the throes of addiction that he is bordering on sociopathic in his morality. That he recognizes he may physically and emotionally harm someone ANOTHER someone, is horrifying. But he is willing to do it because he is deep in his addiction.
It can be likened to a drunk driver. They know they could kill people. They hear stories of children and other innocents who are killed with startling regularity by drunk drivers. But they need to drive to keep drinking, therefore they keep putting themselves in the position to keep killing innocent people.
Both are disgusting, criminal behaviors and I pray that he seeks help and sees the deeply amoral territory into which he’s agreed to tread.
The risk is on him too.
He points out that he had sex without remembering it. That means he was raped… He is right to point out that it is exactly the same as what his female rape victims went through.
How is it the same, if the woman is at risk of pregnancy and a higher risk of being infected with an STI than a man? How is it the same if it is her bodily integrity that is breached, as opposed to entering someone else’s body and leaving a deposit? How is it the same in light of the average size and strength difference between men and women, not to mention the movement restricting clothing women are socialized to wear to parties? How is it the same in our current social construction of sex wherein a man conquers a woman when he breaks down her supposed reluctance to sex and is rewarded by the cheers of male friends for scoring, whereas a woman will much more likely bear the mark of a slut who puts out for anybody, accused of having no self respect, and if she complains aloud about the feeling of victimization, she’s told she’s playing the “victim card,” it was her own fault for putting herself in that position, even “crying rape?”
For these reasons and many more, this does not seem like “the same” for me.
How is it the same when he himself admits that it made him feel vaguely funny, whereas he has been explicitly told that at least one of his female rape victims was significantly emotionally harmed?
I think it’s because by the time anybody is blackout enough that they don’t know they’re having sex with someone, they’re at risk for far more then just rape. And yeah, while the context surrounding the incident shifts some depending on gender, the vulnerability remains the same.
Also, as far as I define consent? It’s rape either way.
Finally, you’re channelling some SERIOUS Dworkin with that first question, which, I’m going to point out, is both very heteronormative and also pretty unimaginative when it comes to sex.
BAWW BUT the women suffer worse! Like zomg they can get pregnants and stuff, men laugh it off like this guy and feel they still got lucky. Men don’t feel pain, or get harmed in rape right?
“How is it the same if it is her bodily integrity that is breached, as opposed to entering someone else’s body and leaving a deposit?”
This is pretty telling of your idea of body integrity. Let’s see, how about men not wanting to have sex with people they don’t wanna have sex with? How about there is a risk of STI, risk of damage to the penis or other organs that are used, there are issues with being drugged (some rapists may use viagra or “roofies” etc which can cause harm). There’s also the issue of the psychological damaged caused by rape. And another issue is that should that rapist have a child from the rape, he can be FORCED TO PAY CHILD SUPPORT FOR IT. The 18 years of financial risk alone from child support is a huge deal especially to people who are living in poverty, hell I myself would be crippled financially if I had to pay child support.
Let’s see what else we can pull out of the hat, male victims of rape are often laughed at, told they are lucky, even police have laughed at them when reporting it. Male victims of rape are believed LESS THAN WOMEN and have huge amounts of stigma attached to it. Male victims of rape have less services available for them to deal with that trauma not to mention a lot of people don’t realize men can be raped by women and there is a severe lack of awareness campaigns for female rapist, male victims which is about 1 in 5 of rapes, yes women make up 20% of rapists in the U.S according to the CDC. Are 1 in 5 anti-rape campaign ads showing a female rapist or male victim? Can you actually find a single campaign showing a female rapist? The ONLY poster I have seen similar to that was made by an MRA.
This pissing contest of who is harmed more is fucking stupid, both can be harmed FULLSTOP. There are women who don’t think much of their rape, there are men who are crippled by their rape. Maybe if you had bothered to study the pain n suffering of males even 1/4 of how much you obviously study female suffering you might realize that your argument is pretty insulting on a website for men at how you belittle male rape and quite frankly is pretty narrow-minded.
By the way, the size difference that so many love to cling to in showing women are so much more vulnerable than men has a fatal flaw. Fight, Flight, FREEZE. Pay attention to the FREEEZE part. Some people in fear will FREEEZE UP and go along with whatever to try get it over with and not suffer more. There are men who are told point blank if they don’t have sex with a woman SHE will goto the police n claim he raped her, these are men who are probably bigger yet words alone can coerce and force them into being raped. Some get knives against their throat, some are abused when drunk, some are sober yet still freeze up because not everyone fights off rapists. There’s also the issue of men are not supposed to hit women which makes defending yourself from a woman even more hard because you can’t hit her, and are afraid of hurting her whilst trying to get out. Then you have various areas of the world where the law is probably biased against men, so even if he struggles free the bruises on her arms can be used against him to paint HIM as the bad guy, even just the THREAT of this makes ME fucking scared to ever defend myself against a woman. I am bigger than most people, male n female, yet that will work against me if my abuser is smaller as I have a chance to be seen as the aggressor simply because of my size and my gender.
But hey, none of that matters because da womenz are da fragile beings and da men are super duper stronnggg and nothing hurts men right?
Sabrina,
Dan addressed the rest, I’d just like to address your remarks that engaging in sex with somebody clearly too inebriated to give clear consent is rape whether it’s man on women, or women on man.
Penetration may be the benchmark for legal rape in many states, but some on tgmp and in other spots recognize that since a vagina is made to be penetrated when a woman subjects another to penetrating her vagina against their will, or in the absence of clear consent that this is forced envelopment.
If you look at the new CDC report (the full report not the summary) men are subjected to precisely as much rape as women are (in the last 12 month categories) when you accept rape definitions to include “forced to penetrate” or what some are calling forced envelopment.
I agree that your argument is very heteronormative, but additionally you seem to want to try to convince people that PIV sex against the will (or in the absence of clear consent) only counts as rape in ONE gendered direction.
How the same act can be rape when a woman doesn’t consent, but just sex when the man doesn’t consent is not fairness, even-handed, justice, or even what I have been taught the foundation of feminism is all about.
This is wrong on so many levels, I don’t know where to start.
Firstly Male and female rapes are equally bad.
Rape is bad because of: The violation of personal boundaries, the disrespect, and the fact that someone used your body for pleasure without your consent. It is bad because of the flashbacks that stop you from enjoying normal sex. It is bad because of the fear of intimacy that it creates. It is bad because you beat yourself up for failing to prevent it. It is bad because society treats you a a pariah, women are interested in you, until you let on how badly you have been violated, then they back off. It’s bad because it causes so much pain you turn to alcohol, drugs, work, danger, and even suicide to numb it.
Yes rape is bad because of STDs, but a man’s chance of catching one is not zero, and it is in the same ballpark as woman’s chances.
There is also a mass of rape culture that you are obviously unaware of. Men don’t need to dress slutty for people to assume they wanted it. They just have to be men. Society doesn’t teach men that we have sexual boundaries, so we don’t learn to enforce them. Society teaches us that erection equals consent; that is exactly the same as saying that orgasm equals consent, a physiological response to sexual stimulation.
Men are not taught how to express emotional pain, a man saying that he feels funny is often in the same ballpark as a woman saying that she has been seriously emotionally harmed.
Defining rape by penetration is a way of erasing male rape victims. You are a rape apologist.
Men get raped it matters and we need to help male rape victims and stop male rape.
interesting….
Oh, yeah. Presumably, if this clown had had two fewer drinks, he wouldn’t have been “raped”. He’d have said, hell yeah.
not remembering sex =/ rape
not consenting to sex, and someone penetrating you or forcing you to penetrate = rape.
As a recovering addict it’s painful to read this story because I recognize the warped sort of thinking that allows someone to say, “I am doing something terrible. I am putting myself at risk too. But I don’t want to stop because the partying is still fun” Anonymous tells himself what all addicts tell themselves ”
When you party, when you move in party circles, you accept certain tradeoffs.” We “accept” these tradeoffs because the only other option is to examine them and feel the consequences of our choices, and above all addicts want to avoid that. As a gay man who chose the party world for many years, I have been raped and am probably guilty of rape. What frightens me is that I don’t really know. Just some hazy memories I have to live with. I know that I have used drugs as bait to attract sexual partners, and have no idea where that falls the consent continnum, but pretty much figure it is at the low end. Anonymous, if you read this, ask for help. The party may still be fun, but I can guarantee it won’t be forever, and when it stops being fun it’s immediately awful. Stop now before you end up being court ordered into treatment so you can face the charges of rape that have been brought against you. You can choose to change.
Your analogy is wrong, dude. It’s not “Do people who’ve been in car accidents give up driving,” it’s “Do people who’ve caused accidents because they were driving drunk give up driving drunk?” The answer there is either “yes” or “we eventually force them to, because they present a danger to others.”
You’re not “risking rape,” you’re risking comitting rape. There is a difference. That’s a risk that you obviously do seem comfortable with, and that’s not a huge surprise: the stakes are really low for someone like you — just a little bit of occasional shame when you’re “severely depressed.” Meanwhile, you get to benefit from that fuzzy grey-area you describe, where you can rest secure in the knowledge that there are huge swathes of society that will assure that you actually aren’t a rapist. It may not be convincing to you all of the time, but when the self-loathing gets to be too much, you can certainly visit those places for a while. It’s where much of the world lives.
All you’re really doing here is declaring that there’s a certain amount of shame that you’re willing to live. Your shame is hardly the only consequence of your rapes, and the fact that it’s the only thing you’re concerned with here is really disturbing.
Plus 1 for this.
I am in 100% agreement with this.
This man is a rapist who has decided his partying is more important than NOT raping women. And that is disturbing on so many levels.
And as I said in my connected piece, he WRONGLY assumes that nearly everyone living this party lifestyle accepts rape as a part of being a black-out drunk/drug user. In reality, I’d guess very few people he would talk to would say, “Yes, I accept I may be raped because of my partying.”
That’s just a fucked up thing he tells himself so that he doesn’t have to feel like a monster going out into the world to do more damage.
“You’re not “risking rape,” you’re risking comitting rape.”
Isn’t he at risk of both, he stated pretty clearly he’s been raped. How do 3 women agreeing with Dan agree with he’s not risking rape WHEN HE WAS RAPED WHILST IN THE PARTY LIFESTYLE. 100% agreement?
Dan, Joanna, Sabrina, Julie, open your eyes and read this
“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,”
No less than 3 times has he mentioned being raped, and yet you all agree that he is not at risk of rape??? WHAT THE FUCK? The guy may be a rapist but he’s also A RAPE VICTIM WHO IS AT RISK OF RAPE FROM THE VERY LIFESTYLE HE IS TALKING ABOUT.
It’s pretty fucking sad that I have to point this out, but hey hate the rapist all you want but don’t misrepresent his friggen risk or position in life. The lifestyle he talks about is toxic to himself, to others, and quite frankly is one of the reasons I don’t get shitfaced because I don’t feel like passing out during sex n being raped n what not. It should be a big warning to everyone that 1, alcohol n sex is risky, and 2, EVEN RAPISTS GET RAPED.
It somewhat frustrates me that I’ve argued elsewhere (on the “Nice Guys commit rape too” comments) that most if not nearly all rapists are just sociopathic predators who don’t give a damn about anyone other than themselves, and rationalize away their crimes into something acceptable (“everyone else is at it too”, “she sent me signals, I really though I had consent, I didn’t know, etc, etc”). People say “no no no, it’s more complicated than that, people genuinely do get it wrong and misunderstand, they aren’t just predators, the culture is the problem”, and so on.
A week later GMP publishes an article from a bona fide rapist, and lo and behold – it’s very obvious to everyone that he is just a predator rationalizing away his crimes who doesn’t care about anyone other than himself.
Yes. Very well said.
This. THIS. A thousand times this.
“I’m a rapist, but hey, I’m willing to risk those women getting raped by me so I can have a good time”
What the actual?
So the rapist, who was raped in this lifestyle, isn’t at risk of rape considering it’s already happened?
I don’t accept that simply not remembering sex, or regretting sex, necessarily means that you were raped. I have had sex I don’t remember whatsoever in my life, but I know it was not rape. I have had sex I regret in my life, but I know it was not rape. I don’t think this person feels violated, because he says that he does not feel violated. He does not feel like a rape survivor “whatever that’s supposed to feel like”.
I think he is taking a pretty cheap shot, either trying to downplay the rapes he has committed, or garner sympathy of some kind.
Do you think that not remembering or regretting sex means that you were absolutely raped?
I’m glad Good Men published this piece, though it is difficult to read. I don’t think that I agree he is sociopathic, but I would certainly agree that he is an addict who at this point cannot stop himself and cannot comprehend that life lived sober is not necessarily grey and boring. I can think of a number of people I have known with addiction problems whose morality was pretty nonexistent in any meaningful way, though I’m sure they thought of themselves as decent people.
He makes a point that people consent to things while drunk and high that they wouldn’t consent to sober.
I think that a lot of this is because we live in a very judgemental and sex-negative culture. Alcohol gives us an excuse to be liberated.
I have recently quit drinking, and I have found that being in a partying and drinking environment while sober lowers my inhibitions. I was flirting with a very tipsy woman from work, who I am not normally attracted to, and found myself thinking “Hey, a one night stand might be kinda fun.” I didn’t initiate as everyone knew that I was sober, and I wouldn’t get away with it. When she flirts with me in the lunch-room I’m not remotely interested… well maybe not completely uninterested, which is kind of my point.
I think a lot of “alcohol lowers inhibitions” is really, alcohol gives me the permission to do stuff that I wanted to do anyway, but I couldn’t admit to wanting to do it. It’s almost the definition of being liberated.
To be clear, this only applies to people who are tipsy, meaning: feeling the effects of alcohol, but still able to walk, talk, flirt, and understand what they are doing. If you’re passed out on the floor, and unable to string a sentence together, then obviously things are different.
To clarify “I wouldn’t get away with it”, what I mean is that I would be judged under our sex-negative culture, not I’d get away with rape, because it wouldn’t be rape. In my opinion she was sober enough to consent.
Alcohol makes me less self-conscious, I might dance naked somewhere drunk but I wouldn’t sober because of my insecurities. Alcohol is often called liquid courage and it may actually help calm me down in sex so maybe a drink or 2 would be beneficial as I am often nervous as hell but too much and I lose my ability to consent. When you’re crippled with anxiety like me a bit of alcohol can help although it usually just makes me more tired so I try to find other ways to overcome my issues.
By your definition of rape – self-induced intoxication and then hooking up with people you but later regret the next day, then I think most men & women have been “raped” at a time in their life. You make it sound like making immature decisions when drunk or high is an anomaly.
Having a random drunken one-night stand with a stranger equally intoxicated is only a big deal if you want it to be. I think this article is offensive to people who were genuinely taken advantage of.
As someone who’s both made regrettable decisions which drunk or high and accidentally gotten blackout and then woken up mid-intercourse, I’d just like to stress that they are very different experiences.
On the one hand you have an inner monologue of “Oooh I shouldn’t be doing this but it feels so good and hmm whatever I’ll deal with it tomorrow”, and on the other it goes more like “Why am I lying in this room and why are the lights off and who is this person sitting on my stomach making these funny grunts and WAIT WHERE ARE MY CLOTHES” followed closely by “holyshit I’m literally throwing up”.
On the one hand you usually know who the other person is who’s in bed with you, while on the other you have never seen them before in your life.
I think your comment is offensive to people who HAVE been genuinely taken advantage of this way.
Can people blackout, as in stop recording memories but still be alert and look like they can fully consent? I don’t mean in your case, but I’ve been trying to find out if you can have alcohol only hit your memories where you can have sex, want sex at the time but you’re not storing those memories so you wake up the next day wondering wtf happened? I know anesthetics do this as I apparently had full conversations after surgery which I don’t remember anything of but those are pretty hard hitting drugs and it’d probably be obvious I wasn’t 100% with it.
If so then there could be a lot of sex happening that people don’t remember and the other party could have had no idea that they were with someone who’s blacked out? I hope it doesn’t work like that and there are clear indications because I’d hate to be appearing to be consensual when I can’t, or be with someone in that state and not be able to detect something is amiss.
Yes. It’s called anterograde amnesia and it’s what people mean when saying they were “blackout drunk.” It’s not the same as being “passed out drunk” which is when you lose consciousness.
And therein lies a big problem. With alcohol intoxication induced anterograde amnesia It is entirely possible to consent but not remember consenting nor to whom consent was given. When the effects wear off, from your perspective the sex you’re having (or had) was entirely non-consensual, whereas from the other person’s perspective (who was likely also intoxicated, but perhaps not to the same degree) they had obtained consent.
I’m too ignorant to speculate as to the prevalence of such a scenario, but do know that it’s well within the realm of possibility.
That. Is. Scary. :S
Thanks for the link, been wanting to know what it was for a while.
I should say, I have second-hand experience of it (or so I’ve been led to believe). Went to a party with a girl, who drank a lot of booze, quickly, and she was super flirty with me. She wanted to go to sleep at the party but I decided to take her back to her dorm instead. Once there, she invited me in to stay the night but I declined. She later had no memory of the incident.
Had I had taken her up on her offer and had sex with her, would that have been rape? I was sober enough to realize she should sleep it off, but what if I had been just as drunk as she? It seems perilous that the line between rape and not-rape might be whether you are together enough to determine whether someone’s apparent enthusiastic consent might be remembered in the morning.
If you were both drunk, you would have been raping each other probably. If you were sober enough to realize she should sleep it off then you’d probably be raping or at least taking advantage of her although it depends largely on just how drunk she is. If you felt she needed to sleep it off then that’s past consent stage I think. It becomes very tricky when people have alcohol because some people may have a little bit and be smashed, others have a lot n be fine. We can guess as to how drunk they are but it’s not always a good idea, like with the blackout amnesia stuff. Safer to avoid sex with alcohol.
I think it’s safe to say if she didn’t remember the proposition the next day, she likely wouldn’t have remembered the sex positively either. Fortunately (or not) I have a very high tolerance for alcohol, and wasn’t too drunk to say “let’s wait” instead of “fuck yeah!” I mean, she appeared to be enthusiastically consenting. I’m not sure I could fault someone else for taking an enthusiastic yes for an answer, particularly if they’re also too drunk to consider whether or not it is good consent.
I hear your pain. My rape was very different, but I understand.
A male friend of mine was passed out on the lawn outside a house-party, and girl who had been trying to talk to him all night stuck her hand into his trousers and fondled his penis, then started dry humping him. He woke up partway through. That is serious sexual assault and attempted rape. He felt very violated in the morning.
If he tried to prosecute, she wouldn’t use the “victim is a slut defence”, she would use the “Victim is a man” defence. But in reality, he is unable to even see himself as a victim.
If you look at hook-up culture in college and beyond, of which I was certainly a part, alcohol is at the heart of it. Would men and women make the same decisions about sex if they weren’t innebriated? In many ways, alcohol does allow people to shed their inhibitions, but it also can get them into trouble. I was talking to a woman whose son goes to Amherst College, my alma mater, and she said that women cannot give consent to have sex after having two drinks (I’m not sure if that’s a campus policy or the law), that if you have sex with a girl who has had more than two drinks, it’s techincally considered rape because she could not give her consent in the first place. So what’s the answer? No sex at all, I suppose. Or possibly men and women need to sign waivers of some sort before they go out drinking for the night that says they consent to sex if they’ve had more than two drinks (I’m guessing it’s more for men), but that if they say ‘no’ during hooking up that absolutely means ‘no’. Maybe someone will develop some sort of app for this purpose.
How many drinks for men though? Or is it yet another onlywomengetraped policy/idea?
“I was talking to a woman whose son goes to Amherst College, my alma mater, and she said that women cannot give consent to have sex after having two drinks”
This seems outright discriminatory. The campus policy should be to also instruct women that men cannot consent to sex after two drinks.
This seems rather gender-norming to me. It embraces the idea that sex is a gift women give to men, and if a man conspires to get that gift “on the cheap” he is a bastard. This policy also seems to have a cheap view of men’s sexuality that it is not worth protecting.
This campus policy needs to be overturned.
this actually changed my perspective on things. Ok so when a guy gets drunk and sleeps with someone he would never sleep with other wise it’s a mistake and a lil embarrassing when his bros are all like “yooo dude i can’t believe u got w that!!”. But when a girl does the same thing it’s rape an emotionally traumatizing…. I’m a girl and I’ve slept with less then savory characters but I do not feel raped just embarrassed. So how do we tell the difference b/w rape and an oopsie daisy?
Everything gets fuzzy when drugs and alcohol are involved. Let’s say we have two people who are both very drunk and neither remembers exactly what happened the next day. Who is to say one person was a rapist and the other was raped? What if you don’t know how drunk the other person is? I don’t really think we can call most of this rape. I don’t believe that rape can happen accidentally. You make a conscious decision to not heed a very clear lack of consent and you are raping someone.
I concur with Colin. Like boss (who posted above), when I was at university, I had drunk sex with a guy I was seeing. It really was something that just happened (I gave nonverbal consent), and I felt icky and weird about it the next day — it wasn’t supposed to happen that soon into our relationship — but I didn’t feel violated. I didn’t feel scared. It didn’t wreck my life. Am I supposed to feel that way? I get this weird feeling that I am. OTOH, at around the same age (early 20s) I had plenty of female friends who had the same drunken experience with the “hot guy at the bar,” and they *did* feel violated and taken advantage of, but not for the reasons you might think — because he didn’t call the next day and ask them to go out on a proper date.
Add alcohol into any mix, and things do get murky, especially when judgment is impaired to the point where it wipes out the person’s memory. A woman who thought she said “no” (in retrospect) might have actually said “yes” and did all of the very intimate things with a man enthusiastically when she was under the influence. Nothing about this issue is clear cut. The problem, at least to my mind, seems to be more about one of the many problems associated with alcoholism (and drinking in general) and how this affects the people around us.
If you’re drunk, don’t have sex. If it’s something you both want, it’s something you’ll both want the next day. I don’t see what’s murky about this.
Nobody is telling women they are “supposed to feel violated.” Women have been violated – raped – when intoxicated. Others have had intoxicated sex and it’s been OK or minimally OK (“icky and weird”). Your experiences are your experiences.
The point is that there’s a pretty clear cut ethical line that can be drawn before taking an action that could end in either “weird” or rape.
@boss- evidently one would contact Allyssa Royse & she will set you straight….
Or you could continue being strong & responsible and own your adulthood….
I think the way I’ve always viewed defining rape to oneself personally, is how you feel about it. If you don’t feel you were raped, that’s your definition.
If you came to me and said, “I feel like I was raped, but I don’t know if it counts” I’d say you were. But in this case, you don’t, and unless someone prosecuted him, it’s really only up to you.
Specifically, I think we have to look at the case of the woman whom he injured with a forceful “third base” – she felt violated and hurt. That definition is hers, and it’s real.
But really, it’s up to you.
See, here’s the thing, Joanna. I do believe that it’s possible for a woman to give her tacit or explicit consent to sex, drunk or sober, and *still* feel violated and hurt — only it’s the woman who is in essence violating herself insofar that sex is an unpalatable means to an end that benefits only her partner. I have married female acquaintances who have serious issues with sex and find it “dirty” and “disgusting” even when it’s with their husband (just think of Carrie White’s religion-obsessed mom), and yes, they feel hurt and violated afterward. I don’t know even begin to know what else to say about this.
Yeah, man, that’s tough.
Is it rape if she consents and feels terrible later? Honestly, I can’t say. I don’t think so. But it also depends upon the scenario in which the consent was given… Was she coerced? What would be the consequences for her saying “no”?
It’s not black and white, and that’s what’s so frustrating about it all.
I do think, to some degree, that it is on people in relationships to be clear with their partners about sex and to communicate their consent. The people who are saying “yes” when they mean no are in a situation where they are in emotional distress and they need to make changes to fix that. It is far beyond my capacity to address how those changes need to happen. I’d recommend therapy for those individuals to address the root of the problems.
I might even argue that those who say “yes” (when they really mean “no”) should take themselves out of circulation for a while — and I’m speaking in terms of sex, of course — and get therapy to figure out what’s going on to cause such internal conflict. This is not conducive for healthy relationships of any kind, both in and outside of marriage or a long-term commitment.
I am taking everything you have said to the natural conclusion. I am sorry if you think that calling you out for your statements is unfair, but it is the simple truth.
This piece troubles me more than I can even begin to express. This is why number 4 from this piece is so important to any conversation about consent: http://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/want-the-best-sex-of-your-life-just-ask/
The editors’ prime objective in publishing this piece was to take this particular form of rape and hold it to the light and examine it, and to make clear that there are people like this in the world. Many of them. And some men or women reading this are this guy, doing these same things, and thinking they’re okay.
They are not okay. Never. Jamie is right, it is intensely troubling and we need to reform the way we see the relationship between sex and alcohol. As it stands now, it’s too often dangerous.
Joanna,
Thank you for the courage it took to go ahead and put this out for discussion. I am sure there was some serious back and forth on that. And thank you to Anonymous for having the courage to write it, even though I find it frightening. I think consensus shows that there is a serious problem with this type of thinking, as well as consensus that Anonymous has some unadressed issues. Out of darkness comes light, but to get there we need to examine the darkness and accept that it’s real. This attitude is very common in the party culture. There are both men and women who put themselves, and others, at risk for rape, sexually transmitted disease, the humiliation of being photographed for videoed without their knowledge or consent, all to chase the high. I’ve been there in the height of my own addiction, and I’ve seen it happen that consent gets very blurry.
As a sober man my views are very different. Consent means the ability to say no with no repercussion. It is the ability to change your mind at any time, again with no repercussion, and it means conducting myself with respect for the other person to be willing to say no myself if I think they are coming from a place of diminished capacity. Being high is no excuse for rape.
Jeff, thank you so much for this comment.
“Consent means the ability to say no with no repercussion. It is the ability to change your mind at any time, again with no repercussion”
I love this.
@ Anonymous- Party on Dude, F’em if they can’t take a joke- right….
Do you think you’ll will be as blasé coming out of a blackout and realizing you’ve been sodomized?
Hate the game, not the player….
Hate the sin, not the sinner.
Oops didn’t think my first comment got past the good taste test.
No, you’ve managed to post two comments that were pretty intense. I think we get your point.
Wow..this was very uncomfortable to read because I never thought about it from the guys (or…rapist’s?) point of view. In real terms it is such a sketchy area-is ‘consent’ only valid when both parties are 100% in control of their faculties? (which is in a party atmosphere highly unlikely). What if the girl changes her mind at the 11th hour and the guy then proceeds to badger her into it? Is applying pressure to get consent (verbal and/or physical) still the same kind of consent that is freely given? Honestly I find the fact that there are guys like the author of this article carrying round such a disturbing secret..well scary, but sadly not surprising. By all means party on but learn to recognize a ‘no’ when you hear one-even in your ‘fucked-up’ state.
The problem here has nothing to do with drugs, partying, drinking… The problem here is that the author is lowlife scum who uses drugs and alcohol as an excuse.
Well, that’s your opinion and I’m not really going to argue that portion of it.
My takeaway on this is similar to what others have said: the author is deep in the throes of addiction.
Regarding his views on rape, I really believe he is in earnest when he says he is willing to risk rape to let the good times keep rolling.
I really get the feeling that if he woke up from a drunken passout to a woman drilling him from behind with a belt-on dildo he would not consider that rape, just the “cost of doing business”.
The issue is that he is projecting the ultra-hardcore partier/addict mentality onto others and assuming they have the same views.
But, that may not be the case. There are also newbies or people less seasoned/jaded at every party. He’s talking about a huge violation with somebody who most likely does not have his “come hell or high water I’m going to party on” attitude–somebody who got in over their head in terms of inebriation.
Hey, Anonymous Writer.
Rape trigger warnings notwithstanding, I read this whole article. And I have to say, I get it. I’m not saying that what you write about is right or good… but I understand. I started out ready to judge you up one side and down the other, but I understand.
The problem is not with you. And regardless of what others may say (I’ve learned to be judicious in my comment-skipping), the partying and drunkenness is not the problem.
The problem is this screwed-up culture of ours that tells us You Must Be Having Great Sex All The Time and at the same time tells us Don’t Ever Talk About Sex, Especially Not To Those You’re Having It With.
If we lived in a truly sex-positive culture… a culture that taught about enthusiastic consent, that taught men how to recognize a “no” even when it wasn’t spoken… your cost of doing business might not be so high.
Have you raped women? Almost certainly. Have you been raped? That’s for you to decide, but it sounds like it to me. Is it your fault? …. Hard to say. I’d argue it’s nobody’s fault – and that doesn’t make it less awful or wrong.
I hope someday you find a place where you can party safely, enjoy sex with as many or as few fully-consenting partners as you wish, and somehow escape or overcome the awful mixed-up messages we live with every day.
you are all gigantic babies
I can only imagine that we are supposed to read this in light of this person being a “nice man”. Except it reads as though it was written by a juvenile borderline sociopath. Is the nice guy club so short of members that we have to start admitting guys who are only a little bit rapey?
If you ever find yourself in a situation where you’ve taken so many drugs or drunk so much booze that negotiating consent becomes too complex to the point that you have raped 1 to 6 women then (among all the other issues in your psyche) you likely have a drug/drinks problem that you need to get help over.
Intense piece. Sad and difficult to read as well. But necessary. I’m glad GMP decided to post this article.
Anonymous, I hope you consider the following questions. Have you ever thought sincerely about what kind of man you want to be? Did you have different aspirations or ideas about how you thought your life would have gone before you began parting? Have you ever set a code for yourself and how you would conduct yourself while sober or not sober? When you were younger, did you dream of the day you would get yourself into some sketchy situations where some women would feel violated from you? Do you honestly ever sit down and think about the women that never wanted contact with you again? Do you have any women or young girls close to you and can you imagine them navigating situations with men like yourself?
Despite all the intimacy you are having Anonymous, it actually seems like you are running away from intimacy. Bumping body parts together alone isn’t intimacy or closeness. You are totally scared to see who people are and to let them see who you really are! I sense a dumpster truck full of self loathing from you based on the piece you wrote. You don’t care how you treat others because the reality is you don’t really seem to care about yourself. You don’t like yourself very much, do you. Which makes getting lost in a mind altering state of sex and drink more comfortable. Because then you don’t have to think about all that more difficult and complicated stuff. People that are truly happy and satisfied with themselves don’t feel the need to get lost in this level of self pleasuring. You really need to do a lot of difficult self examining. I hope you get to a point in your life when you are strong enough to do that. Right now, it doesn’t sound like you are.
The fact that you wanted to remain anonymous wraps up how you really feel about what is going on in your life over any of the points or rationalizations you’ve made in your piece. You simply aren’t proud or comfortable with the man you are right now. Unfortunately, it might take a life changing event for you to get there.
As for a more general comment, this is one reason why I actually think casual sex for men and women is more often, more harmful, then it is healthy. Sex is healthy. Being instantly turned on or attracted to someone is healthy. Using someone to self gratify yourself is not really healthy behavior even if it is satisfying a healthy desire. There is a difference between healthy desires and healthy behaviors. Not all behaviors that lead to satisfying healthy desires are positive things. And I actually think casual sex is a big factor in negative experiences between men and women and some of the bitterness both sides can experience. Which is why it’s a stereotype that women can easily feel used for sex. Even today despite discussions about how many women now want casual sex. I think women still biologically can feel used for sex more often then men can.
I know from my own experience that when I was younger, I did try to do casual hook-ups. I hardly ever let them go as far as full blow sex but I was doing other things that I didn’t feel too good about. I wanted male attention desperately and was unfortunately willing to sacrifice some things to get it. I wanted male approval and I wrongly assumed that physical interest was the same thing as getting male approval. I got the message early that that was what I was suppose to be doing. Because that’s what a lot of my friends were doing. So I wonder how many young women are giving up pieces of themselves because they don’t want to feel like they are behind their peers or because people tell them that now is the time to “have fun”. I had fun in the short term but it left negative experiences with me long term. And it left me with a bad taste in my mouth for the things some men are capable of in how they treated me, and how they could treat other women. From my point of view, I just wanted some love and attention. Even thought I was turned on, it wasn’t about sex for me as a girl, it was about having a man interested enough in paying attention to me. And I think that ALOT of girls and young women experience the same thing. Especially in a world that tells females their worth is in their sexuality.
I also wonder what it says that these young women and men have to get drunk to make choices about sex. Some say that drugs or alcohol simply makes one less inhibited. As if being less inhibited was our natural state? Is being less inhibited better? Always better? Is it better to get so drunk and out of control that you are operating purely from one feeling? Is it any different to make a choice in a rage of lust as it is in a rage of anger or jealously?
There is a line where “less inhibited” stops being a positive thing. If you can’t get on stage and sing and you want to get on stage and sing, being less inhibited will help. But if you are drinking and doing drugs and are less inhibited, and making choices in a haze of drug and drink, “less inhibited” seems rather lously.
I think we really need to teaching young people more important tools surrounding mind altering drugs. More so then what we currently have. And we need to stop saying things like, “Oh you are young, get out the partying now”, or , “It’s okay because you are young right now.” I don’t think these are very healthy things to say. Who ever said that getting so wasted until you couldn’t make sound choices was normal? Who ever said that this was a good right of passage? Young women need to be just as educated as young men. While I don’t think a woman getting drunk is an invitation to get raped, young women need to be more aware of what getting drunk and loosing control of yourself puts you into a highly vulnerable position. And young men need to learn the same. That drinking also puts them in a vulnerable position of a different sorts, leaving them open to making choices that aren’t for their best, or for the best of those around them.
There is one truth that we may be forgetting & if someone else has said it, I appollogize; Addicts are lying sacks of shit.
So let’s take all of Anonymous’ tale for what it is.
A story spun by a junkie who has disappeared back under his rock.