I do understand and don’t disagree. Two very drunk people have sex - is it fair that one gender is going to be unfairly targeted as being the aggressor if things go wrong and the other person regrets a drunk decision? No it is not - again assuming everything was as consensual as a drunk agreement can be.
But it’s not a fair world. And as it relates to this, the fact that men overwhelmingly are the aggressors in rape cases and women get raped on a regular basis in the US every day —- well, tough shit fellow hombres. We have to be aware of that and have to be cleaner than clean if we want to avoid the risk of being unfairly accused. Hell, most women who are raped are not believed or are somehow left to believe they somehow asked for it.
And speaking for myself as a white male, it’d be pretty soft of me to whine about that. The privileges I was born with (and did absolutely nothing to earn) are plenty. If one of the “burdens” I have to bear is to have to be extra careful about having sex when with a drunk girl, so be it.
I appreciate the civility in your reply, a tone I will endeavour to return. If my response comes across as trenchant, please parse that as my passion about the subject matter and not any attack on you.
First, I
vehemently reject your framing of complaints about this double standard as 'soft whining'. A description of this sort might invoke a man going to a Dodgers game on Mother's Day, where they were giving out free handbags to any woman who attended, and reminding them that California state law means you have to give me a freebie too. That, I could see getting an eye roll and a 'technically he's right, but I hope he's happy, whatever bro' dismissal
What I am railing against has consequences that are not measured in a missed freebie. We are talking unequal protection under the law in criminal cases with severe consequences -- like we're looking at here. When it happens on campus, we are talking a Title 9 violation. And these are not just my idle exaggerations, these are the conclusions of court cases and lawsuits -- and more are coming every day.
Secondly, I reject your framing that the correct response to this is a "tough shit, fellow men, there's no reason to advocate against anti-male sexist biases". That's up to you how or if you want to be an activist, but even at that, us having different angles of activism doesn't mean that we must therefore be opposers, or that you must therefore seek to defend or strengthen this sexist double standard. Plenty of my allies on this issue are feminists who understand that the underlying hypocrisy of the slut/stud dichotomy has plenty of misogynistic consequences, and that through allyship, we can cover more of the issue than we could separately.
You don't have to be my opposer on this situation. If you choose to, of course that's your choice.
Thirdly, though neither of us are likely to experience any life-changing metanoia over this discussion, I think there's an important blind spot in your rhetoric and I think it's a dangerous one: while you correctly conclude that most victims of sexual assault are women and that victims of sexual assault face a challenge being accepted as such, the underlying inference that this difficulty singularly applies to women victims.
On the contrary, I'd say this difficulty is even greater for male victims of sexual assault.
If you recall my discussion of a bog-standard series of events in Las Vegas that lead to statutory rape, while yes it is difficult for a woman in that situation to get justice, at least we're even willing to say she was a victim of rape in the first place, and we as a society are far less likely to do so for men.
And this is precisely because of the double standard I'm speaking of, the same double standard you are dismissing as 'soft whining', that women who commit sexual assault receive much lighter sentences and are incarcerated far less --as with all crimes, actually; Dr. Sonja Starr's 2010 study estimated this bias as over 6x larger the equivalently measured pro-white race bias, and I don't need to convince you how big THAT bias is.
And yes, judges have on occasions defended their double standards with an open candor that would make Tim Peel shit his pants.
If judicial double standards don't sway you, just look at our culture. How many more movies like Wedding Crashers or 40 Days and 40 Nights or Super or Big Daddy need to be released before even someone in your position decides to say "yeah, this needs to change"?
Cause I gotta tell you, I don't like it, I don't like any of it, and I think it's important enough that it merits activism and that it merits serious treatment and that laws need to keep changing as they have.
And if you disagree, well, then you disagree. And to complain about
that, I'd
definitely count as 'soft whining'
Peace out.
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