I hate Ann CoulterFollow

No. It's how the term ends up being applied. Those are two radically different things.

Not sure what you point is. Let's assume she's in a hospital and has a condition that requires the loss of a limb. If she's able to give consent (not drugged or passed out), does not agree to have the limb cut off, is not forced to have itcut off, but has it cut off, there's an incredibly easy explanation:


She didn't want to, but made a choice to anyway. In this case, she's faced with two unpleasant options. Have the limb removed, or face some other serious medical effect (gangrene say). Would anyone charge the hospital with a crime in that case? Nope. Because despite not wanting to do something, the woman made the choice to do so.


Funny thing is that you thought you were coming up with a ridiculous case, but you ended up providing a pretty decent example. Similarly, I assert that in many cases, a woman may not want to have sex with someone at a particular time, but chooses to do so anyway. The reasons can vary wildy. Maybe she doesn't want to disappoint the boyfriend. Maybe she feels she's obligated to do so. Maybe she feels sorry for the guy.

Ultimately, if she at some point chooses to have sex, it doesn't matter whether she wanted to originally or not. She made a choice. And yeah. Giving in to pressure to have sex isn't a great choice, but it is still a choice. And in my opinion, you can't charge someone with rape in that case.


It comes back to a major issue of mine. Personal responsiblity. You make choices in life. Sometimes you chose to do things you don't want to do. But those are still your choices. My argument is that unless the woman was physically forced to have sex, she made a choice. She could have simply walked away. She could have chosen to do anything else. We can skirt around this issue all day long, but at the end of the day, she made the choice to have sex. Arguing that we should charge people with a crime because they talked someone else into making a bad choice is silly IMO.


If you don't want to have sex with someone. Don't have sex with that person. Make it so the only way he's getting sex is if he physically forces you. Make it so that it's absolutely impossible for anyone to argue that you weren't raped.


That's what we should be teaching women in those schools. Not trying to change the definitions of things so that she can make that bad choice but still blame the guy for it. I'm sorry if you think that's wrong, but I think you're crazy to think that any other approach will work. This is not about trying to argue that guys should get off easy in sexual assault cases. It's the opposite. It's about ensuring that women aren't running around following a set of ridiculous rules and ideas dreamed up by a group of unrealistic feminists and thinking that they're going to be protected from having to make choices.


And if that means arguing with a bunch of people who can't see past some simplistic definitions they read on random internet sites somewhere, then so be it.

Edit: Why bother?

Edited, Jun 15th 2006 at 1:18am EDT by Nexa

Make 'im stab ya in the head for evidence, girls! That's the Gbaji way!

I have been very consistent with my argument on this. It's not about what the law says, or what some definition on a web site says.

Right, it's about your subjective perception of the world, not the facts.

As allways. WE KNOW.

Man, watching you guys arguing semantics like this really brings back the old days. [:sniff:]

After reading all this, it would be consensual head-stabbing.

I loved him before, but now...I'd totally be his domestic-concubine.

Nexa

Of course it is. But isn't it interesting that I keep talking about situations when there *isn't* a direct threat of obvious violence, but you keep going back to the "gun to the head" scenario?

This is the whole point I'm trying to get at. The common perception of what constitutes "force" or "coercion" has changed over time from the very reasonable and obvious situation of someone putting a gun to your head to women being told that if the guy talks her into sex, or hands her a drink prior to attempting to have sex with her, that's "force" as well.

The result being that many women press charges of rape today in situations in which they wouldn't have previously, not because they were afraid, but because they didn't consider it rape until some half-wit feminazi with an agenda told them it was, and indoctrinated them and every campus student in the country that this is "date rape" and instead of being victims (which they never considered themselves to be before), they should somehow stand up for themselves by pressing charges which in 99% of cases will never result in a conviction. Worse, we have attorneys in various DA's offices who, due to public pressure on this issue, feel they must champion the cause of these "victims" and follow through with these legal charges, when in any sane system, they'd never come near it without some evidence beyond a single person's claim.


The situation where a guy puts a gun to a woman's head and forces her to have sex was rape before. It's rape now. It always has been. That's not "new". What's "new" and what came along with the term "date rape" was the idea that women are victims of rape if the "force" used on them was nothing more then words. It's a classic example of proponents of a cause creating the conditions they're supposedly fighting against (on paper anyway). If you're a feminist and you want more attention and support, how better to gain it then to come up with a way to increase the numbers of rapes reported in the US? And to do that, you just need to convince more women to file charges. And to do that, you need to convince women they've been raped. If this was just about awareness or overcoming fear in cases of rape reporting, I'd have no problem with it. But what's going on goes so far beyond that it's silly. People like Koss have effectively redefined rape so that the majority of sexual encounters between men and woman *can* meet the definition. Once that's done, it's just a matter of convincing more women that they've been raped.

The statistic that 73% of date rape victims in the study did not think they were raped is telling. It's not that they though they were, but were afraid to report it. They honestly did not think they were raped! Until someone convinced them they were. Think about that. You really have to question the motivation of someone who deliberately runs around convincing people that they are victims. To try to pretend this isn't happening, or that there isn't an agenda behind it, is absurd.


And yeah. That's what date rape "is". While the textbook definition looks all peachy, those definitions are written by people just like Smash, who continually insist on defining things in the most obvious terms rather then the realistic ones. Just as he keeps insisting on using the "gun to the head" analogy when talking about date rape, so to do those writing the definitions stick to obvious and "sanitized" descriptions about "rape by an acquantance". Meanwhile ignoring that date rape *also* includes "rape because you were talked into it", and "I was raped because I had too many drinks so I couldn't have given consent".

It's just bizarre to me that there's such a blind spot for this. I state a dozen times exactly what I'm talking about, and I still get a "but it's rape if she's got a gun to her head". That's not the issue. My problem isnt the cases where it's obviously rape, and now we call that rape "date rape". My problem is with the cases that were never considered rape before, but now are considered "date rape" (and therefore "rape"). It's those situation I'm talking about. It's those situations that are the "change" to rape as we know it that came about with the introduction of the term "date rape". So, it's very correct to say that this is what date rape is really about. The rest is just semantics and smokescreen to cover an agenda that IMO is incredibly sexist and just plain stupid.

I think my problem of your daterape argument is that you too narrowly define daterape and lean heavily on omission and exclusion while focusing on one example to prove your flawed argument.

You have to love the wit and humor of Hank.

Cite?


Not for me, I couldn't care less if you have one or not.

But for my brethren.