The Daily Princetonian: The real 'Sex on a Saturday Night'

A woman is responsible for her behavior if she gets drunk, gets behind the wheel of a car and kills someone, but she is not responsible for her behavior if she gets drunk and has sex.

Clearly, we need to start charging pedestrians for property damage to drunk women's cars, when they come in contact with drunk women.

What would happen if we charged women with rape for having sex with willing drunk men.

Gimme a break!

I don't like the example given though, it's too ambiguous which is how disagreements occur in the first place. Some people hear "blacked out" and think "passed out", which is obviously rape. I've always understood blacked out to mean conscious and aware, but in a state where you won't recall the events. THAT is the situation that needs to be addressed, a person too drunk to recall their decisions but sober enough to make them, or for a person to believe they're making them reasonably. Some people picture a drunk girl so drunk she can barely stand and is only vaguely aware of where she is, and someone taking advantage of that, other people picture a guy's ex showing up at his door drunk looking for sex.

So what happens? People end up commenting about and arguing over VERY different situations. A drunk girl who goes looking for sex, who hooks up with an ex or a guy she wouldn't have been with if sober, or who ends up doing more with a guy than she'd originally wanted, should not be rape. But in this authors example the mere fact that she "got herself drunk" isn't enough to absolve anyone. If she was borderline unconscious, that's not a defensible action. These issues are never black and white and men have been railroaded by laws and policies that assume it is, it shouldn't go the other direction either. People need to start looking at these issues on a case by case basis, and being clear on what they're describing when suggesting hypotheticals.

Wow, the womyn's studies department really went to town in bashing her in the comments.

While I agree her examples were weak and her writing needs work, I agree with her point.

Her friend was conscious but drunk, so was the guy. To me that's no place for the justice system to be. She feels bad, to fucking bad - talk to your shrink about it. She DID choose to get drunk and no matter what she has to bear responsibility for her choices.

what a shame the world has come to a point where women are responsible for nothing negative and everything posative.

"Conscious" is just too vague for me. You can be conscious but not aware of your surroundings, unable to react to things going on around you, etc. The problem here is the same problem with ANY of these types of cases which is that only the two people in the room know what happened, and at that each remembers it differently, and if one or more often BOTH of them are inebriated it's just impossible to know what happened, what people's motivations are, etc.

My opinion on this issue has definitely been swayed by seeing the male perspective, but I am still processing everyone's opinion while forming my own.

I tend to agree with the writer of the article as well as some of the commenter's here at MANN.

Here are some things I am pondering:

> If the girl chose to drink then she needs to take responsibility for what happens

> The double standard is unfair to men

> If the girl is so drunk then how can anyone really know what happened

> I think in cases of one-on-one drunk sex we should error on the side of not ruining an innocent man's life.

> what about men that prey on girls in this state or take it a step further than just one-on-one drunk sex. Such as recording, posting on the internet, passing her around for group sex (acts she normally would not do), etc. There are plenty of low-end porn "companies" that find drunk women in the bars, ask them to do some "modeling" give them even more drinks and then film them in various acts and make a profit and laugh about what they are doing.

> Giving drink/drugs is usually how older men prey on girls as young as 13 (i.e.Polanski), of course that kind of sex is illegal, but based on the comments on Polanski, it seems most men here do not consider it rape. I know quite a few girls that were given alcohol/drugs at a young age by a "family friend" (i.e. stepfather) only to wake up the next morning to realize they had sex.

> Where should the line of consent be in cases of inebriation? how would it effect men if the line of consent was changed? How would it effect women?

...Just stuff to think about

The problem is precisely that the whole damn thing is vague - you know, as in, wake up the next day from a drunken binge and the whole night before is vague.

What were their motivations? Simple, drunk + horny = fucking. Did she regret it the next day, you bet she did. Does that mean she did not want it at the time, hell no it does not.

Point is, according to the author her friend was, let's put it differently, awake when the sex occurred (she knew she had fucked and she knew who she had fucked the next morning so she was aware at the time), and no one poured drinks down her throat.

Did she want to have sex? No one - even the girl herself - knows. Does that mean she said no? does not sound like it. So how was he to know she did not want to fuck him? Well, you say, he should have just known better then to fuck a drunk girl. Good point if he had been the designated driver, but he wasn't and thus was equally inebriated, so if she's not expected to make good choices why the hell is he?

My point is simple, in cases like this, no government body, or representative agency from any level has any business at all sticking it's nose in the situation.

Well, what if she feels violated? That should be between her and her shrink to talk through because there is simply no way humanly possible to prove ANY aspect of what happened beyond a reasonable doubt since neither one can remember themselves beyond a reasonable doubt.

Could he be a scumbag who takes advantage of drunk girls? Sure, but can YOU prove it? Sorry, but I can't stand the police state we live in where our judicial system feels the need to regulate all aspects of human interaction even when it is absolutely impossible to do so.

she really wants to push the issue all she has to do is lie. simply say she was sober, he was drunk and attacked her and she remembers the whole damn thing. He's fried. But since she was honest but full of regret, she can use it as a learning experience for next time to know her fucking limit like men are expected to.

If you're sober enough to make a decision, then; you're sober enough to live with the consequences of that decision. If the woman in question had gotten shitfaced, blacked out, then decided to drive home and mowed down innocent pedestrians; or, put rat poison in her boyfriends food we wouldn't even be having this discussion.

Drunk driving is a crime no matter who is doing it, so is murder (well, sometimes women get held accountable, if they keep on murdering decade, after decade, after decade), the problem here is sex is viewed under the law and by a large portion of society as something that males do to females.

Therefore, because women NEVER want sex, initiate sex, or actively participate in sex, the man is at fault 100% of the time when she says he is.

I get that you are reasoning that she made a decision to participate in sex with the man she now wishes to accuse of raping her, and that is perfectly logical. The problem is, she would argue that the next day she decided that she did not want to have sex that night and therefore, he should not have had sex with her. Oh, I know that makes no sense at all, but that is how the law says it is. In most places, she has until the day she dies (no statute of limitations) to retroactively decide that any sexual encounter she's ever had was actually rape.

Besides, women are allowed to get drunk and be stupid. It's up to men to make sure they don't do anything they will regret, cause trust me, if she regrets anything she did while drunk even if it has nothing to do with sex, she will blame a man for it.

Self control is NOT something society expects or requires women to have, only men must show restraint.