I think you're grossly misinterpreting the point Ted is trying to make especialy in his reply to you. He's clearly not talking about rape being ok if both are drunk. The first point I think is that we can't classify as rape any case in which everyone involved agrees (without pressure) it wasn't rape, otherwise all sex while drunk was rape which clearly diminshes the meaning of the word. There are probably even shades to that because it could range from simply having consensual sex while being drunk, being carried away by the mood of the moment and regretting it later and up to the edge case where someone was really incapable of making clear they don't want something. The thing is from a scientific point of view it's absolutely inacceptable to just assume that having sex after drinking enough alcohol to effect decsicion making is rape. Clearly even a single glass of wine does influence our emotions and decision making processes so we can easily drift into criminalizing a lot of consensual activities and the real question here is at which point we need to classify an adult person as too drunk to decide things for themselves. I'm no legal expert but I think you need to be quite drunk when signing any contract (which is a legal form of consent) to claim you didn't actually consent. Anyway from the E-Mails posted I can't really see where Ted called rape ok if people were drunk. He merely argued that the definition of rape used in the study is at the least vague. However I also think that it's very hard to find a really good definition that doesn't have edge cases, especially when the victims themselves may be in denial, which mind you can go in both directions, they could be regretting (maybe it was just bad) what they consented to in that moment but they could also be making themselves believe that they consented as a way to cope with it. The point is we don't know and so one can not simply count a case where the victim denies it was rape as rape.
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Date: 2012-10-30 10:13 am (UTC)He's clearly not talking about rape being ok if both are drunk.
The first point I think is that we can't classify as rape any case in which everyone involved agrees (without pressure) it wasn't rape, otherwise all sex while drunk was rape which clearly diminshes the meaning of the word. There are probably even shades to that because it could range from simply having consensual sex while being drunk, being carried away by the mood of the moment and regretting it later and up to the edge case where someone was really incapable of making clear they don't want something.
The thing is from a scientific point of view it's absolutely inacceptable to just assume that having sex after drinking enough alcohol to effect decsicion making is rape. Clearly even a single glass of wine does influence our emotions and decision making processes so we can easily drift into criminalizing a lot of consensual activities and the real question here is at which point we need to classify an adult person as too drunk to decide things for themselves. I'm no legal expert but I think you need to be quite drunk when signing any contract (which is a legal form of consent) to claim you didn't actually consent.
Anyway from the E-Mails posted I can't really see where Ted called rape ok if people were drunk. He merely argued that the definition of rape used in the study is at the least vague. However I also think that it's very hard to find a really good definition that doesn't have edge cases, especially when the victims themselves may be in denial, which mind you can go in both directions, they could be regretting (maybe it was just bad) what they consented to in that moment but they could also be making themselves believe that they consented as a way to cope with it. The point is we don't know and so one can not simply count a case where the victim denies it was rape as rape.