The problem with the whole Alice and Bob thing is that certain men seem to have this urge to cite the most questionable possible hypothetical examples as if this was some kind of evidence of anything.
It's a troll-y tactic because it tends to polarize and derail any kind of discussion into a deeply pointless argument about what constitutes a criminal offence in some hypothetical scenario with absolutely no relevance to the debate at hand.
If you read the whole thread, including his later posts which get progressively wackier and wackier, Ted rather successfully derailed a constructive discussion of how to address a specific problem at a specific conference into a polarized and angry regurgitation of a highly toxic debate about what is and isn't 'rape' and how bad rape is and whether some rapes are worse than others. To the net detriment of everybody involved. This was not a good thing to do.
I've cited elsewhere in this comment section some useful references that it's worth reading. The whole hypothetical scenario about two people getting drunk and having sex without explicit consent is essentially a derailing tactic. If you look at the actual source Matthew was quoting, it does not match any of them very well. The majority of rape cases by any metric - reported to law enforcement, reported to health authorities, reported to surveys of any kind, whether reported by the attacker or the victim - do not involve such a questionable scenario. Even where they involve alcohol consumption they tend to involve far more consumption by the victim than the aggressor, and they involve consumption to the point where the victim is _not physically capable_ of consenting - not the messier question of whether when they say 'yes' they really _mean_ 'yes', but the kind of 'not consenting' which involves being passed out and unresponsive.
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Re: Definitions
Date: 2012-10-30 03:05 am (UTC)It's a troll-y tactic because it tends to polarize and derail any kind of discussion into a deeply pointless argument about what constitutes a criminal offence in some hypothetical scenario with absolutely no relevance to the debate at hand.
If you read the whole thread, including his later posts which get progressively wackier and wackier, Ted rather successfully derailed a constructive discussion of how to address a specific problem at a specific conference into a polarized and angry regurgitation of a highly toxic debate about what is and isn't 'rape' and how bad rape is and whether some rapes are worse than others. To the net detriment of everybody involved. This was not a good thing to do.
I've cited elsewhere in this comment section some useful references that it's worth reading. The whole hypothetical scenario about two people getting drunk and having sex without explicit consent is essentially a derailing tactic. If you look at the actual source Matthew was quoting, it does not match any of them very well. The majority of rape cases by any metric - reported to law enforcement, reported to health authorities, reported to surveys of any kind, whether reported by the attacker or the victim - do not involve such a questionable scenario. Even where they involve alcohol consumption they tend to involve far more consumption by the victim than the aggressor, and they involve consumption to the point where the victim is _not physically capable_ of consenting - not the messier question of whether when they say 'yes' they really _mean_ 'yes', but the kind of 'not consenting' which involves being passed out and unresponsive.