I’m grateful to commenter DJ Ri-Mix, who offers up another date rape jam for our collection: “Shots” by LMFAO and featuring Lil Jon. This one is a doozy, ladies!

Date Rape Anthem: LMFAO’s “Shots,” an ode to repeatedly ingesting one-ounce doses of liquor. And cock-sucking!

Relevant Lyrics:

Shots shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots

Everybody
The ladies love us / When we pour shots
They need an excuse / To suck our cocks
We came to get crunk / How ‘bout you?
Bottles up / Let’s go round two

Why It’s So Rapey: Hold up—that was round one? We’re only at round one, and all the ladies who previously had no intention of sucking LMFAO’s cocks have already found an excuse to do so? WTF happens in round two?

The women come around everytime I’m pourin’ shots
Their panties hit the ground everytime I give em shots
So cups in the air, everybody lets take shots.

In-da-club vaginal penetration, I’m guessing.

I kind of get LMFAO: They’re a couple of hipster hip-hop boys, so when they do shit like name themselves “LMFAO,” and appear on the Kardashian sisters’ reality television show, and go to Canada, and rap about receiving oral sex from drunk chicks, their tongues are at least a little bit in-cheek. Still: Proudly proclaiming that women “need an excuse to suck our cocks” and trade their panties for liquor isn’t exactly LMFAO-out-loud funny—it’s actually been done before, guys, and peppering your babe-a-licious video with some hipster sensibilities doesn’t magically transform a Lil Jon song into satire.

Thomas looks at a study of 1882 college students who were asked four questions to determine if they had ever raped (or attempted to rape) anyone:

1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?

2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?

3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

Questions like these are bound to lead to underreporting—what guy is going to admit to forcing a girl to give him head? As it turns out, a lot of guys will admit to this, 120 to be exact: That’s six percent of the survey’s respondents who copped to either rape or attempted rape. Importantly, Thomas notes, the survey does not actually ask these guys if they’ve ever exactly “raped” anyone:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

And they didn’t just admit to raping—they admitted to raping repeatedly (as long as it’s not really “rape,” of course!) According to the study, a small percentage of men are responsible for committing a large portion of sexual assaults—that’s a whole lot of “accidents,” “misreadings,” and “gray areas”:

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.

What does this mean about our “accidental” rapists?

a) The vast majority of acquaintance rapes are committed by the same people;

b) These people don’t see themselves as “rapists”;

c) They are, however, able recognize that they regularly threat, force, and intoxicate women in order to have sex with them.

Oops! There’s no “accident” here—these guys just deny, evade punishment, and repeat.

So, what do we do to stop these guys? Well, here’s a start: Let’s call them rapists. It’s not just rapists who fail to recognize these behaviors—threatening, forcing, incapacitating—as “real” rape. We all have to stop making excuses for calling a rapist a rapist—and doubting, minimizing, or lashing out against the people who do use that word. Women need to know that they can call their experiences “rape” and report them as crimes. They need to know that they can call their rapists “rapists,” even if the rapist is also someone’s “friend,” “acquaintance,” “co-worker,” “fraternity brother,” or “respected member of our community.” As Thomas says:

The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over—to believe that what happens to our friends—what our friends do to our friends—is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape.”

. . . The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

That last point is an important one. People who excuse rapists usually see that equation from the other end: “He’s my friend, so he can’t be a rapist.” We need to reverse that equation—”He’s a rapist, so he can’t be my friend.” Perhaps them we could begin addressing why the dictionary definition of rape is overlooked—threatening, forcing, and incapacitating for sex—in our to avoid applying the word—”rapist”—to anyone we know.

Debunked, after the jump:

- “Yes means yes” is dangerous in a world where “no means no”
- Women exploit rape laws to criminalize consensual sex they later regret
- Some rapes just happen on accident

By the by—if you’re in need of a primer, here’s the relevant reading material:

Verbal assault: The abuse and debasement of “rape”
Drunk girls deserve to get raped
Writer to rape victims: sometimes it’s too late to say no
On the difficulty of saying no

Now, on to the theories:

Not everybody accepts the “yes means yes” standard of consent, so we have to stick to “no means no” [Source].

I’ve heard this argument time and again: Telling people that consent ought to be based on “yes” instead of “no” is dangerous, because the nation’s sex partners (and courtrooms) just don’t agree with that standard. According to this theory, if a woman expects a man to respect her bodily autonomy implicitly, she’s gonna get raped and there’s nothing she can do about it.

Well: Of course not everyone agrees with it. That’s why feminists devote books and blogs and documentaries to critiquing current models of consent—necause we believe by changing attitudes and changing laws, we can make lives (not to mention sex!) better. That being said: “yes means yes” is actually consistent with the legal standard in many jurisdictions, and if rapists go around assuming that “no means no,” they may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

I’m most familiar with rape laws in Washington, D.C., so I’m going to stick to D.C. code here. In D.C., there is no crime called “rape”—instead, sexual assaults are categorized as various degrees of “sexual abuse.”

In D.C., you could be charged with first degree sexual abuse if you cause a person to submit to a sex act using any of the following tactics: by physically forcing them; by threatening them; by rendering them unconscious; or by drugging them. This crime can be punished with up to life in prison. You could be charged with second degree sexual abuse if you have sex with someone when you have reason to know that they are incapable of knowing what’s going on, incapable of saying no, or incapable of “communicating unwillingness” to have sex. This crime can be punished with up to 20 years in prison. In these crimes, the rapist is aware that their victim does not want to participate in the sex act, and does it anyway (”no means no”), or is aware that their victim cannot consent, and does it anyway (”passed out means no”).

Misdemeanor sexual abuse requires a less stringent standard of consent. Under D.C. law, the misdemeanor charge applies to “whoever engages in a sexual act or sexual contact with another person and who should have knowledge or reason to know that the act was committed without that other person’s permission.” This crime can be punished with up to six months in prison.

Here, the standard does not require force, threat, or incapacitation. It doesn’t even require penetration—it covers all “sexual contact.” The misdemeanor charge only requires the absence of consent. In this crime, the rapist is not aware that the victim is powerless to say no—he is only aware that the victim has not offered a “yes.” In D.C., you can go to prison for six months for having sex with someone without gaining their permission—even if the victim did not explicitly say “no.”

“Yes means yes” is more than just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking of bloggers living in a feminist dreamworld. For everyone who engages in sex, not abiding by “yes means yes” can also mean very real jail time.

—

Rape laws are invalid because they’re based on how the victim “feels” the next morning. [Source].

Again, in D.C., the severity of a sex abuse charge depends entirely upon the actions of the perpetrator, and not at all on the feelings of the victim. The legal system does not care how traumatized the victim is, whether the victim has changed her mind about how she feels about her sexual assault since it happened, or whether the victim wants to press charges. Let’s recap: According to the law, the only things that matter are: (a) whether the perpetrator had reason to know that the victim did not consent, (b) whether the perpetrator had reason to know that the victim could not consent, and (c) whether the rapist used force. D.C. law is only concerned with the severity of the rapist’s actions—not whether the victim “secretly liked it,” “totally wanted it,” or “only regretted it later.”

If the story of Polanski’s victim has taught us anything, it’s that rape laws are not about the victim. They’re about the perpetrator. The American justice system has been continually criticized for failing to serve sexual assault victims. Rape trials don’t exist to make victims feel better—they exist to help prevent future rapes. And so, even though reporting rape, pressing charges, and enduring a trial is a notoriously difficult process for victims of sexual assault, victims are still encouraged to step forward in the hopes that others will not become victims.

From a legal perspective, it makes perfect sense that rape laws would be centered exclusively on the perpetrator’s actions and not at all on the victim’s feelings. If a person routinely has sex with people without their consent, he may catch a few victims who “secretly liked it.” That’s not the point. The point is that that behavior is reckless, dangerous to the public, and unacceptable.

That being said, locking someone up for a few months doesn’t strike me as a very effective rape avoidance tactic. It would be much more productive if we focused our efforts on prevent rapists from believing that behavior was acceptable in the first place.

—

Some rapes happen on accident [Source].

As Thomas notes on the Yes Means Yes! blog, the dominant analogy used to address rape likens it to a terrible and unpreventable disaster. Under this model, rape is like a hurricane. Everyone agrees that hurricanes are devastating. Hurricanes cannot be prevented—they can only be predicted, planned for, and vigilantly avoided. Because no one can be blamed for causing a hurricane, the onus is on the victims to make sure they stay out of the disaster’s path.

Similarly, because many people are convinced that nothing can stop a rapist from raping, women are encouraged to conform to a series of disaster-avoidance behaviors: stay indoors, wear longer skirts, quit drinking, travel in packs, and avoid trusting men.

Of course, rapes have a pretty obvious culprit: rapists. Still, some people continue to cast date rape scenarios in particular as unavoidable accidents. Since acquaintance rapes are absent of any obvious malicious intent, they are considered a product of an unfortunate miscommunication. These rapists did not intend to rape anyone. In a way, they too are victims—victims of the problematic gray area of sexual consent.

This focus on some rapes as “accidents” suffers from a misapplication of the term “accident.” I often find analogies misleading in discussion of sexual assault (see: that hurricane bullshit), but I’m going to use an analogy in this instance because I think it may be helpful. What if we thought about rape in terms of another type of accident—a car accident?

In the United States, driving a car is a privilege. In order to be cleared to drive, you must pass tests, register your information with the government, have enough money to buy a vehicle, and secure insurance in case you get into a wreck. For some people, the privilege of stepping behind the wheel inspires a certain amount of hubris. These people believe that because they are driving a car, they can take certain liberties on the road—including cutting others off in order to save time, running red lights, shirking stop signs, and generally being a gigantic asshole. Their concern lies only in getting where they want to go as fast as they can, and not at all with all the other humans on the road they have an obligation to protect.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was hit by a car when he was in a crosswalk (he’s fine, thanks for asking). In D.C., of course, pedestrians legally hold the right of way in a crosswalk. But my boyfriend did not share the privilege of the driver—he was a pedestrian, and so he was forced to wait patiently at the very wide, very well-marked, very busy crosswalk until one of the big privileged cars deigned to stop for him. If a pedestrian decides to step out into the street as oncoming traffic approaches, he has to hope that his legal right to cross—not to mention his human life—outweighs the driver’s sense of privilege to keep on trucking. Asserting your rights, of course, comes with a certain amount of danger. But pedestrians have no choice but to cross busy streets. And sometimes, they get hit.

Now, the driver who hit him did not set out with the intention of running into a human with her car. She didn’t mean to hurt anybody. But she also knew full well that cars are required to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. She was simply so accustomed to her driving privilege that she never dreamed that this could actually happen—and that she would ever be held responsible for her habitual disregard for the law. After all, a lot of motorists act this way, and most pedestrians just stay out of their way. When a pedestrian is hit in a crosswalk, it’s not an accident. It’s the result of the motorist who has normalized her dangerous actions.

When rapists engage in sex acts without bothering to gain their sex partner’s consent, they are not “accidentally” raping someone. Rapes don’t come from miscommunication. They are not isolated, unpreventable incidents. They are a product of institutionalized, reinforced, life-long privilege. They are the symptoms of a flaw in the rapist’s entire worldview. They are the product of the way the rapist has habitually devalued women, laid claim to the bodies of others, pursued what he wants no matter what—and never thought anything of it because he has never been called on it. That’s not an accident. That’s a system.

As it turns out, I’m not the only one hoping that the widespread media coverage of date rape drugging will die down a bit. A fraternity on the University of Arizona campus has been accused of sabotaging 10,000 campus newspapers in order to cover up a small item in which a woman alleged having been drugged and possibly sexually assaulted at one of the frat’s parties.

The copies of the Arizona Daily Wildcat containing the offending “Police Beat” item were apparently removed from their racks and strewn on the outskirts of campus shortly after publication on Oct. 8. The Daily Wildcat pinned the sabotage on the fraternity named in the piece, Phi Kappa Psi, after the Spanish homework of members Alex Cornell and Nick Kovaleski surfaced at the site of the discarded newspapers—a revelation the Phoenix New Times astutely notes mirrors a plot point from the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. The New Times phoned Phi Kappa Psi President Keith Peters “to find out if two ‘pledges’ were really dumb enough to steal 10,000 free newspapers and then leave their homework with the stolen stash.” Peters declined to comment.

The student paper later received less hilarious evidence linking Phi Kappa Psi to the crime—e-mails from friends and relatives of fraternity members confirming that the theft was engineered “under the orders of fraternity leadership.” Despite the paper’s leads, the University of Arizona Police Department closed the case “without questioning any Phi Psi members.”

Nevertheless, the prank has directed significant campus attention to the original item, a modest 250-word crime brief. It’s clear that Phi Kappa Psi severely miscalculated their damage control over the drugging accusations. Even on a college campus, a straight item on an attempted date rape will hardly cause a stir. An item on a fraternity’s elaborate—and absurdly botched—plan to keep that attempted date rape item hush-hush, on the other hand? People actually care about that.

But let’s get back to the reason this 10,000 paper cover-up is so offensive in the first place: Apparently, the fraternity really, really, really didn’t want people to know that its parties may feature date rape drugs. Below is the original crime report that Phi Kappa Psi was so afraid of getting out there. (Heads up for the future, boys: Newspapers are on the Internet these days). According to the alleged victim’s testimony, she experienced symptoms of GHB after attending a Phi Kappa Psi party in September:

The woman claimed that on arrival, a fraternity member she knew gave her a drink. Later, an unidentified man gave her another drink. The woman told police she had assumed both drinks contained vodka, as they were both colorless. The woman reported that at approximately 11:30 p.m., she had begun feeling “overly flirtatious.” The woman also claimed to have experienced a loss of both hearing and bladder control. The woman told officers that her friend had walked her back to her residence at the Arizona-Sonora Residence Hall at approximately 1 a.m. on Sept. 27, at which point she vomited. The woman’s friends later told her that between the hours of 11:30 p.m. on Sept. 26 and 1 a.m. on Sept. 27, she had made out with three different men at the party. The next day, the woman looked up GHB online and believed she had experience its symptoms. She also told police that she had attempted to contact the fraternity president and had left several messages at the fraternity, but had received no replies. She told officers she was reporting the incident to document the event in the hopes of preventing any future sexual assaults.

Photo by kenlund, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Kathryn Holmquist’s little piece of horrific sex advice—sometimes, girls, it’s “too late to say no”—has evolved into a more advanced discussion on this blog. The question: Why should women be required to say “no” in the first place?

The “no means no” mantra that Holmquist is railing against is itself pretty old-school. “No means no” operates on the outdated assumption that men are the “scorers,” women are the “gatekeepers,” and the goal of every sexual encounter is for men to sneak past a woman’s line of defense and get her to not say no. In this model, the default setting of women’s bodies is “available.” Only by verbalizing a “no” can a woman signal that her body is not up for grabs. In recent years, that bullshit has been replaced by more progressive models which focus on raising the consent bar from “absence of no” to “enthusiastic yes.”

On the other hand, “no” is still a really helpful tool for women to use when they must quite urgently communicate to a person that, actually, he does not own her body. Mrs. D lays it out:

“no” should be said, clearly, when the first unwanted interaction occurs. A guy starts to get handsy, you push his hand away, and say “no, stop it.” You’re making out with a guy, and he wants more, you stop what you’re doing and verbally make it clear you’re not interested in more. Most women won’t do this…they’ll do a fully choreographed routine to get away from him without directly telling him no. That is social conditioning imposed on women that needs to change.

She makes a good point: Because women are consistently told that their bodies are public property, it can be a pretty transgressive, frightening, and even dangerous move to tell a man “no.” Saying “no” communicates to a man that he does not own you, and if you’re dealing with a rapist, he may not take too kindly to that suggestion. This power gives “no” its effectiveness, but it also makes the word sometimes difficult to verbalize. (At this point, I’d like to stop and administer another big fuck-you to Kathryn Holmquist for making saying “no” even harder).

When is it difficult to say “no”? Obviously, if a person is passed out drunk, it can be impossible to verbalize a no. It can also be difficult to say “no” when there is a physical and social power dynamic encouraging you to stay silent—when your sex partner is stronger than you, older than you, more respected than you, more confident than you, 0r simply maler than you (remember the part about everyone just assuming that men have a claim on a woman’s body?) In other words, it can be difficult to say “no” when you find yourself in a rape scenario.

But acquaintance rapes present a peculiar barrier to saying “no.” In an acquaintance rape, the power dynamic is a little bit different—you may be hanging out with someone who is bigger, stronger, and maler than you are, but you know them and you trust them. You’re friends. That implicit power imbalance doesn’t even enter your brain. A couple of comments left on a Daily Kos piece on rape discuss how that sense of security can make “no” a lot more difficult:

When the action moves to the uncontrolled environment of a car, a park or a private home, the rules blur. When a boy goes “too far”, this is date rape. It can be devastating, with the girl feeling betrayed and no longer trusting her own instincts. She may live with the emotional pain of it for years. And all because she believed that it’s never too late to say no.

Well, that’s an interesting approach. Personally, I would think that telling boys and girls that they must respect their sex partners’ stated boundaries, no matter what, would help us all avoid rapes. Remember: Rape is sex without a person’s consent. A reasonable person would argue that the problem here is the person who forces a non-consenting person into sex. According to Holmquist, the real problem is the person who refuses to consent to the raping:

The worst advice you could possibly give would be to tell her that she can always say no, even when she is no longer in control. Girls, just like boys, need to be told about the likely consequences of their actions.

To Holmquist, telling girls that they can’t say no after they’ve crossed an arbitrary purity line—after they’ve gotten into the car, kissed too deeply, wore too short of a skirt, had one too many drinks—will encourage girls to remain completely chaste until they’re ready to go all the way. While this theory would do absolutely nothing to prevent rape, it would help reduce reported rapes: If we adopt Holmquist’s logic, girls who are sexually violated will no longer recognize their experience as rape, because they’ve been told that even the most modest of sexual activities—kissing!!—implies consent to the kitchen sink.

Holmquist continues:

This is not to say that “ladies” don’t get date-raped. Nor am I saying that girls who behave in a certain way deserve what they get. What I am saying is that girls, if they want to act like boys—getting drunk and being sexually predatory—have to understand that a boy, if he is that way inclined, may take advantage. And boys, for their own protection, need to understand that a drunk girl who he thinks wants sex, may turn around the next day and accuse him of rape. Both are responsible for this tragedy.

Actually, boys can get a valuable heads-up on that rape accusation a lot earlier if “drunk girls” are simply allowed to verbalize their lack of consent before the rape happens. And girls are a lot more likely to escape from an unwanted sexual situation if they’re not robbed of the only recourse they’ve got. As LiveJournal user nacbrie points out, saying “no” is often the only way that victims can “opt out” of a given sexual scenario, on account of the physical and cultural power imbalances that are generally at play in rape. So as long as we’re holding girls responsible for their own rapes, can Kathryn Holmquist be held accountable for some tragedy, as well? Because anyone who thinks that the best strategy for reducing rape statistics is to make young girls complicit in their own rapes is a tragic figure indeed.

Earlier this week, we looked at the popular fear of date rape drugs, and how that fear helps distract us from acquaintance rapes that involve willingly ingested substances, like beer. Beer, you say? In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I talk booze—the most common date-rape drug, the cause of a shit ton of other problems, and a pretty fun thing to drink, in moderation. After the jump: we bemoan the double standard of passing out, yearn for a consentalizer test, and check in on how our femininity is holding up—it’s tipsy, thanks for asking!

SADY: hello! good evening! it is time to discuss date rape drugging, or so i hear!

AMANDA: it is that allotted time!

SADY: first of all, i have to say that your take on the whole scenario was (AS USUAL!) highly impressive and nuanced.

AMANDA: well—some issues were perhaps underrepresented there. there are A LOT OF ISSUES. with this ISSUE.

SADY: well, this whole report – that date rapes involving date rape drugs are less rare than date rapes involving date drinking—is kind of set to be a highly polarizing thing. like, some people have been like, “see? the floozies are just out getting drunk! and making up accounts of druggedness!” and others are like, “there are, too, date rape drugs!” and what impressed me about your take was that you didn’t (a) minimize assault, or (b) discount that date rape drugs might in fact be less common than acquaintance rape without that factor involved.

AMANDA: I saw that Broadsheet had already written a pretty thought out post that discussed why some women might report being drugged when that was not necessarily the case—and obviously, i read the Daily Mail’s amazingly stupid take on it which suggested that women are big drunk liars—so i thought i’d focus on the media’s focus on date rape drugs. which is so interesting, because even calling them “date rape drugs” is misleading—the narrative really suggests that when this does happen, it’s mostly strangers swooping in with these drugs, and not “dates” per se.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and this is a terminology flaw which i myself have fallen victim to: using “date rape” to mean “rape that was not the stranger-jumps-from-bushes-with-gun” sort of rape, rather than “rape by one’s date,” which is what it should (and does) mean. i mean: i have to tell you. i don’t doubt that date rape drugs are used. a friend of mine just told me a story about how she suspects she may have been drugged, and although she was not assaulted, all the details line up.

AMANDA: oh yes! that is a point that i realized after i wrote my piece! it’s possible that druggings are more common than they appear in these studies, but they do not lead to assaults. and that can skew the data, and getting drugged is still an awful thing to have happen to you, even if it doesn’t end in assault. [Note: Marcella Chester has since counted the ways that the data on drink-spiking can go awry. Read it!].

SADY: right, it’s still a violation.

AMANDA: but the whole issue of rape is an issue of skewed data, because reports are so infrequent. but i would THINK—and i dont know this—that reports of drug-assisted rapes are higher than those that don’t involve drugs. because the media is pretty clear about reviling dudes who drug women, and less clear about reviling men who rape women who are drunk.

SADY: yeah. exactly. like, if you’re drunk, it just means you’re a big old mess and/or tramp anyway, and probably you were just drunk enough to “have sex” and “regret it” and etc.

AMANDA: and i think that “reporting” difference is true anecdotally as well—they may not even tell their friends or their boyfriends or what have you, or they will tell them and they’ll be discounted. Etc.

SADY: whereas if you were DRUGGED, you can clearly point to an outside agency in getting you to the point where you could not give informed consent.

AMANDA: right. there’s a degree of “proof” that society accepts with those rapes.

SADY: yeah, and, i mean, i have to tell you: i like to drink. i’m having a drink as we speak! and i am a lady who’s pretty smart about listening to my body, drinks-wise, and not having more than i can handle. but there have been occasions – whether i didn’t have enough sleep the night before, or forgot to eat lunch, or whatever – where A Normal Number of Drinks magically became, for that night, One Too Many Drinks, and i ended up in a messy state. and I was always surrounded by people who cared enough for me to point out that i was a mess, and call me a taxi, and whatever. but HOW SHITTY WOULD IT HAVE BEEN, STILL for someone to assault me in that state? i mean, why the fuck are Drinks considered an extra culpability on your part?

AMANDA: i too love drinking! and perhaps that should be disclosed whenever i defend ladies who like to drink against charges of flooziness! so, FULL DISCLOSURE, drinking! but so: the researchers note that drinking can be sometimes unpredictable, and if your diet or sleep or mood is different it can affect how alcohol affects you. so when, a couple weeks ago, my boyfriend told me he “felt like he had been drugged” because his level of hangover way outstripped the number of drinks he had, i thought it was kind of interesting. but i didn’t actually think he HAD BEEN DRUGGED. though i suppose that’s possible. but i feel like, perhaps, when women are unexpectedly slammed with alcohol—and particularly if they are assaulted while in this state—they may be told over and over again that these experiences are a result of being drugged. i’m not sure if that actually ever happens. but i DO know that if a woman was ever considered unreliable because she reported she was drugged and raped, and it turned out she wasn’t actually drugged, then that would be very sad.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and that’s the thing: while saying you were drugged can be pointed to as an example of how you didn’t exercise agency in the matter (which is important for rape survivors, because as we all know making Bad Decisions means you totally shouldn’t have the right to pursue a criminal sentence for someone who had sex with you against your will) it is also a wedge that can be used to destroy your credibility. which is why women i’ve known who came to the conclusion that there must have been some drugging involved in their assaults have been hesitant to come forward, because they’re afraid that would be used against them. which, in that case, what was your crime? having too many drinks? FALLING ASLEEP????? not to be a big old spoiler, but dudes get to have too many drinks and fall asleep all the time! i mean, a gentleman of my personal acquaintance had too many drinks and was wandering around and got – apparently – randomly beaten up by some dudes in his neighborhood, and as far as i know the police did not tsk-tsk him for wandering around all drunk and beatable.

AMANDA: i know. dudes get to have SO MUCH PASSING OUT without the consequences! and young dudes still binge drink a lot more than women do, not that you would realize that given the media attention given to the matter. male drinking tends to be a bit invisible, i think—it’s just something men do, so there’s no excessive fear about it. even though men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than women are. i mean, there are fears about men drinking, but they are fears about literally drinking too much and dying from drinking too much. not fears about drinking too much and getting raped, or even drinking too much and raping another person.

SADY: which maybe SHOULD be a fear. i think this is an important point: these studies which say women who have been raped frequently have also been drinking? they maybe miss the point that women have been drinking while in an environment where everyone – dudes included – is also drinking. and i genuinely think that, if ladies have these regimens over watching their ladyfriends’ drink consumption and making sure they are safe, dudes should also have people watching them to make sure that they don’t get to the point where they are legitimately too drunk to even get what consent MEANS.

AMANDA: yeah. and, i mean, it would help if kids knew what consent means before they knew what “body shots” means. i think it should be on the driving test, personally.

SADY: yeah. that’s a worrisome statement i just made, because it seems to remove some culpability from the rapist. but i suspect that (a) assholes who drink become bigger assholes, and (b) since we all recognize that a drunk asshole is liable to get in a bar fight or whatever, we should also recognize that a drunk asshole might be an asshole who is even more inclined to rape than he was previously.

AMANDA: yeah. it seems that while society’s prescriptions for female drinking include “drinking correctly”—covering your glass, going with friends—male drinking is just defined by “drinking more.” which—again—i like drinking. and if my drinking becomes a personal problem, that will be bad for me. but if my drinking becomes a problem for other people—like i end up raping women or hitting my kids when i’m drunk—then that’s something that REALLY needs to be addressed by society.

SADY: yeah, precisely. and the reason i think this relates to date rape drugs (ha, remember those? HI, date rape drugs!) is that, you know, they exist. and even if they exist less than rapes which occur while the rapist and/or the victim were drinking, that’s still a problem. one incident of someone drugging a person in order to rape them is too many, i would estimate. but the fact that rape occurs more often in proximity to alcohol – well: first of all, i can recall being pressured to drink A Bit Too Much by certain dates, so i think it’s reasonable to state that alcohol can also be an agent of coercion. and, (b) people drink. Specifically young people who want to socialize. As an extremely shy person who is far less shy after drinking, I get the reasons for this. And the fact is that if alcohol coincides with rape, this DOES NOT MAGICALLY REMOVE THE FACT THAT RAPE IS BAD from the equation!

AMANDA: exactly. and i think a lot of it comes down to ladies drinking, because drinking is a dude thing, and when ladies drink it means they’re, horror of horrors, ACTING LIKE MEN, or taking away dude-time, or revealing that drinking does not actually make you more masculine and / or awesome. but sorry, dudes, i’m not going to stop drinking!

SADY: yeah! i mean: i think the Horror of Drinking is the Horror of Unladylikeness, presented in vaguely medical terms. fact is: yep, when ladies drink a bit, they let down their various guards and DO NOT always behave in the manner in which society has accustomed us to expect from ladies. they get loud. they get a bit rude or wacky, at times. they EVEN make out with people that they would otherwise be constrained from making out with! (and oh, how I know that feeling.) BUT, with all the loud and wacky and unladylike behavior they are engaging in, GUESS WHAT? you still don’t get to assault them! because we are not in Ye Medieval Tymes any more, and rape is not just something that happens to Virtuous Women of Goode Renowne. it can happen to ladies who are acting up, too. and, miraculously, it is still a crime. just like you don’t get to rob somebody because you think he is a jerk.

AMANDA: yeah. ok, do you wanna break? i think i’m going to go buy some beer

SADY: do it, lady! ENJOY YOUR BEERS. YOUR BEERS OF FREEDOM.

Photo by jbcurio, Creative Commons Attribution License

French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévi is back to explain why Roman Polanski ought to be released from prison already. Add this one to the long list of Polanski defenses: Polanski is a human!

Lévi writes for the Huffington Post:

Time is passing. And Roman Polanski is still in prison, goes to bed and wakes up in prison, sees his wife one hour a week in the visiting room of a prison—all while his 11 and 16-year-old children, when they have the courage to go to school, have to confront the gaze of friends who have heard at home that the dad of the little Polanskis, the man everyone fluttered around vicariously via their children, the parent of a student that they were exhilarated to recognize on TV the night of the Césars, was ultimately a criminal, a rapist, a sodomite, a pedophile.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/for-roman-polanksi_b_336126.html

Roman Polanski, the argument goes, is just like you and me. He has a life! A wife! Children! A César award! Okay—maybe Roman Polanski isn’t the ideal stand-in for the Rapist Everyman. But film accolades aside, Lévi’s point is that Polanski has been a very visible and productive member of society in both his professional and personal life. The implication is that happily married men can’t simultaneously be criminals, good fathers can’t also be rapists, and international award-winners can’t find the time to prey on children.

Our tendency to strictly separate the categories of “rapist” and “human” is something we’re going to have to deal with again and again once we really start dealing with sexual assaults and the people who commit most of them—people with lives, wives, and children, if not Polanski’s fame and fortune. It’s not going to be easy to expand our idea of “rapist” to encompass otherwise upstanding members of society, but I think the continued media attention on Polanski’s case will help us get there. If the public is willing to believe that one of the most celebrated film directors in the world is capable of rape, maybe they’ll also be willing to consider less sensationalized rape cases with an open mind.

Photo via Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary, Wikipedia Commons

I, for one, am celebrating. First: the research suggests that women aren’t regularly being drugged on their night out—wonderful news! But it also means that we may finally retire all the media scare-tactics, the girls-night-out drink protection strategies, and mercifully, every single absurd product that has arisen out of society’s inflated concern of drink spiking—and has dangerously distracted the rape conversation from addressing the real experiences of victims.

Confession: I have always been a roofie skeptic. This is not to say that I’m an all-out Date Rape Drug Denier: I do think that these drugs exist, and I do believe that some women have been drugged by men who intend to rape them. I just think that this happens about as often as the classic stranger-rapist-in-the-bushes scenario—in terms of real rape statistics, hardly ever. A 2006 study of 120 date rape cases in the United Kingdom revealed that 119 of the cases involved alcohol, but only two involved the date rape drug GHB. Of course, those two cases are not insignificant, and the experiences of women who have been drugged should not be discounted. That being said, these numbers just don’t support the widespread fear that girls’ nights out are being sabotaged by amateur druggists.

But despite my reservations about the actual risk of “date rape drugs,” I have completely assimilated to the behavior modifications required by the “date rape drug” myth. When I step away from my beer, I’ll tell a friend to watch over my glass. When I’m sitting at the bar, I’ll nurse my drink close to my body. I will go so far as to take my beverage along to the bathroom while I’m having a piss. And I’m not alone. According to a study in UK’s More magazine, “77 per cent of women claimed to keep hold of their drink even when they go to the toilet.”

I blame the date-rape-drug-industrial-complex for forcing me to squat over a dingy bar toilet with a pint in one hand and a wad of toilet paper in the other. According to the study, the constant reminder that date rape drugs are a real danger to women has significantly altered our behavior patterns, even though law enforcement sources have found that the drugs pose a “very limited threat.” As the researchers note, “routinized DFSA is improbable as a widespread crime; it involves a stranger extracting an individual from her social group unnoticed, administering a substance undetected, precisely controlling drug effect, and reliably erasing memory of the experience.”

Importantly, this “date rape drug” narrative does not describe a date rape; it describes another form of stranger rape. This time, the rapist isn’t jumping out of the bushes—he’s jumping out from below the bar-stool to sprinkle odorless powder in your drink before dragging you to an undisclosed location. As the study notes, “the media tend to represent drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) as a significant and widespread problem, to the extent that newspapers have appropriated the phrase ‘date rape’ to refer to this crime.” This is the most dangerous aspect of the frenzy over “date rape drugs”—the way the myth has managed to completely co-opt the conversation about acquaintance rape. Instead of concerning ourselves with the disconcerting fact that most rapists are known to the victim, the public has been told to turn its attentions to yet another outlandish crime scenario that does not pose a significant threat to women.

How has the “date rape drug” myth gained so much traction in the public consciousness? The study floats a theory: The worry over “date rape drugs” helps “give shape to otherwise nebulous threats,” in turn”allowing us to displace worry about other, less manageable threats.” We drum up concern over the risk of “date rape drugs”—then devise strategies for managing that risk—because it’s easier than actually doing the business of preventing rape. It’s easier to keep your thumb over your bottle than it is to stop your boyfriend from raping you. It’s easier to take your drink to the bathroom than to understand why a person you trust would assault you. It’s easier to tell grown women what to do than to teach our children not to grow up to be rapists. And it is a whole lot easier to avoid a crime that rarely happens than to prevent the type of sexual assaults that occur every single day.

This is why the “date rape drug” myth arose hand-in-hand with public awareness of acquaintance rape. While society has begun to recognize rapes against wives, girlfriends, friends, and co-workers as serious crimes, it has failed to embrace the idea that husbands, boyfriends, trusted friends, the guys in your office, and other seemingly normal men can be rapists. We’re still much more comfortable thinking of rapists as men who lurk in the shadows, guys who only emerge in polite society in order to secure another rape victim. The news that most rapists aren’t easily-identifiable as villains—men hunch-backed from crouching in the bushes, their hands caked with sedatives—has failed to inspire solutions aimed at preventing men from raping.

The public is similarly slow to accept that most victims don’t fit the storybook stereotype of a buttoned-up virgin sipping on hot cocoa. Thankfully, the requirement that victims be the model of chastity has eroded a bit in recent years. Now, society is ready to accept that a rape victim is still a rape victim if she goes out to a bar with her girlfriends and has a few drinks—as long as her intoxication is capped off with a surprise roofie. The more likely scenario—that a rape victim goes out to a bar with her girlfriends, willingly ingests alcohol, and then is raped—is more difficult for the public to swallow.

As the idea of “acquaintance rape” and the myth of the “date rape drug” rose, so did another trend society wasn’t ready for—women who drink like men. Female drinking has increased rapidly in recent years (though we’re still far outstripped by the boys)—in 2006, 15 percent of women engaged in binge-drinking, compared to 30 percent of males. As the study notes, society has failed to process its discomfort with girls who drink: “Despite greater gender equality when it comes to public drinking, there is no clear language through which the female experience can be discussed, let alone celebrated in the manner that remains central to masculinity. . . . female drinking is widely seen as challenging gender norms, either as a deviant subversion of ideals of femininity or as part of a broader project of female emancipation.”

The idea that women who drink are an affront to the “ideals of femininity” has contributed to the widespread perception that drunk women are less-than-perfect rape victims. The perception that female drinking is a conscious sexual subversion on the part of women is problematic on a number of levels. First, it tells women who drink that they’re asking for it; that if they are raped, they are somehow responsible for the crime committed against them; that it is their deviant decisions that caused them to be raped. Second, it tells rapists that women who drink are not valued by society; that they are considered “lesser” women; that everyone knows drunk girls are down for sex, and no one will believe they can be raped. In other words, it points out exactly who rapists ought to target in order to avoid the consequences of their crimes. This is how rapists have historically gotten away with raping their wives, and raping prostitutes, and raping fat women, and raping promiscuous women—because society has told them over and over again that these women cannot be raped.

I hope that our culture’s outlandish fears over “date rape drugs” go away for a very, very long time. And I hope we replace the fears over drink spiking with educational solutions aimed at teaching men and women how to recognize consent, respect each other’s bodies, and really, truly prevent rape. Consider the testimony of one inventor of “date rape drug” detectors: “I knew somebody who was date raped, and I couldn’t believe nobody had a product to stop it,” he told the press. The problem of date rape can’t be solved with roofie-sensitive drink coasters. It can only be remedied by changing attitudes.

Monday, Sept. 28, was a good day for the sexual assault euphemism.

Discussing the Roman Polanski case with the ladies of The View, Whoopi Goldberg mitigated accusations that Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl by insisting that the crime wasn’t “rape-rape.” In a statement to the United Nations that same day, Vatican rep Archbishop Silvano Tomasi spun the public outcry over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church by clarifying that the priests “involved in the abuses” are not pedophiles but “ebophiles,” a “sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

Both Goldberg and Tomasi were criticized for employing wordplay that minimized sexual assault. “Look, sex with underage boys is an area where you don’t want to be displaying your connoisseurship and nitpicking about aesthetic distinctions,” the Economist chided Tomasi. The blog Jezebel called Goldberg’s repetition a product of the actor’s “fantastical moral universe.” In that universe, anything less terrifying than the most barbaric form of rape doesn’t deserve to live under the same terminological roof.

How did we get to a place where “rape” needed to be repeated to mean anything?

In ancient law, rape was seen as an affront to female chastity as opposed to a violation of the human body. Raping a married woman robbed her husband of his property; raping an unmarried virgin robbed the woman’s family of her future value in marriage. Rape inside marriage was impossible, as a man could not rob what was already his. Similarly, a woman’s premarital sexual activity in effect nullified the crime of rape—women who chose to have sex outside of marriage had already devalued themselves and had no chastity left to steal.

Modern models of sexual assault have evolved to view rape as a crime against a victim as opposed to a victim’s male relatives. But these outmoded conceptions still invade our thinking about sexual assault. Spousal rape has been illegal throughout the United States since 1993, but many states still view the crime as a lesser offense than rape by a stranger. In many jurisdictions, only vaginal penetration by a penis is considered “rape” because of the potential of the act to produce offspring—and a cuckolded husband. The FBI manages to ignore an entire class of rape victims: men. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, “Forcible rape…is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” In the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), a mechanism the Justice Department employs to track crime rates, males can be considered victims of rape, but same-sex assaults are entirely obscured: “at least one offender must be of a different sex than the victim for the event to be classified as a forcible rape.”

Part of the trouble over the modern definition of “rape” originates from the term “statutory rape,” used to describe sex between an adult and a minor deemed too young to consent to the activity. Initially, the motivation behind statutory rape law was indistinguishable from that of ancient rape law: guard the chastity of the unmarried women. Defenders of “age of consent” laws have since adopted a more compelling rationale for the legislation: protect young people from sexual coercion and abuse. According to a Guttmacher Institute study, women “who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely to have experienced coercive sex: Seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age 14 and 60 percent of those who had sex before age 15 report having had a forced sexual experience.”

Because a lack of consent is so difficult to prove in rape cases, modern statutory rape law arose to address the frequency of sexual abuse against minors by turning lack of consent into an irrefutable
fact. But while “statutory rape” persists to protect youth against rape, it also punishes autonomous teens who are told that, just like in the olden times, young women aren’t allowed to choose sex. The
term’s conflation of sex partner and rape victim has resulted in some troubling cultural perceptions—from Goldberg’s assertion that statutory rapes are necessarily not “real” rapes, to the idea that
women who choose to have sex before turning 18 are necessarily victims.

These highly restrictive and often arbitrary legal definitions of rape have also failed victims struggling to effectively describe their own experiences. In the 1980s, the term “date rape” arose in order to
address rapes committed by friends, partners, or acquaintances of the victim. The term gave voice to victims who had been told that pursuing relationships outside of marriage qualified as a compromise of that ancient chastity requirement. Today, “date rape” scenarios constitute 90 percent of rape cases. The vast majority of the time, rape is date rape. But there remains a reluctance to drop the “date” qualifier from the equation. By emphasizing the circumstances surrounding the sexual assault—circumstances that the victim helped create by agreeing to the date, making friends, or having sex—the term can still imply that a “date rape” is somehow less than a “real” rape.

In 2005, Pulitzer Prize–winning sex writer Laura Sessions Stepp heard the term “gray rape” for the first time. She was teaching a journalism class at George Washington University when a group of students told her that they used the term to describe sexual experiences marked by drunkenness, memory loss, and questionable consent. “I remember coming home to my husband after that class and saying, ‘Oh my God—you’ll never believe what they’re calling this,’” says Stepp.

While the term helped Stepp’s students to discuss an underreported experience on college campuses, it also carved out a convenient space for self-blaming. Victims who are traditionally ignored and devalued by the legal system—intoxicated, promiscuous, or male victims—may latch on to the term “gray rape” in order to describe their experiences without faulting their assailants. In 2005, the GW Hatchet entered “gray rape” into the public record for the first time this decade. In the story, GW student James Daley says he “woke up one morning naked and drunk in an unfamiliar apartment with condoms strewn about the room,” and later deduced that a girl had bought him “a lot of drinks”and led Daley to her room. Daley told the Hatchet “he felt taken advantage of and would not have hooked up with her if he had not been so drunk,” feelings that might prompt a sexual assault investigation—if “gray rape” weren’t there to imply this kind of thing happens to everyone.

In 2008, D.C.-area writer Latoya Peterson coined the term “not-rape” to describe experiences that fell outside the limited legal and cultural definitions of sexual assault. “The language surrounding rape is so strict, any experience which does not reach this very high level of scrutiny is completely disregarded,” says Peterson. To Peterson, “not-rape” is an attempt to give a voice to assaults that are
self-repressed, unreported, or silenced. “In our culture, the word can have even more power than the action,” she says. “We’re so invested in not accusing someone of rape, we completely lose sight of all these terrible things that happen to women and girls.”

Terms like “date rape,” “gray rape,” and “not-rape” help reveal serious offenses that are nevertheless denied recognition as legitimate “rapes.” They also represent a challenge to a definition of
rape that is finely tuned to ignore the majority of victims, sensationalize the least likely offenses, and shame those who would call their experiences what they know them to be: rape.

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

The Line, a new documentary film about sex and consent, hit the American University campus last week. Today, The Line’s blog addressed the recent controversy at AU over student newspaper the Eagle’s anonymous sex column, which presented a drunk, hazy, and painful sexual experience as a normal college hook-up:

It’s three in the morning. You have it inside you right now. It kind of hurts. You’ve had one too many cups of jungle juice. You think his name is Andrew, but you’re not really sure. You thought you would never be that girl, but there you are, in your drunken haze.

Some members of the campus community were outraged that the newspaper would normalize a possible date rape scenario. But the Line video also pointed to another controversial section of the Eagle’s column: “You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else.”

What the hell is “something else”?

Some students who responded to the column online proved perturbed by both the column’s rape associations and its overly vague description of the morning-after olfactory bouquet. Axe Body Spray has repeatedly been accused of “smelling like date rape.” It would make sense for the morning after your drunken sexual experience to smell like booze. But what else does painful drunk sex smell like? And why does the Eagle think the third smell is so obvious that they don’t even have to spell it out for campus readers?

Mike Johnson first criticized the column’s “date rape” overtones before expressing frustration with the use of “something else”:

Oh and what does he smell like? B.O.? Ribbed Trojans? I’m not sure what the deal is on that one.

Disco Stick took a stab at it:

What does “well, something else” mean? I’m interpreting it as “your pussy” or “jizz.” I’m having a little trouble deciding which one though. Could it be both? Please let me know asap.

The imprecise descriptor was further complicated by the column’s irregular sentence structure. The sentence, “You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else,” is, I believe, attempting to convey the experience of a woman who wakes up to two things:

a) an unfamiliar ceiling;

b) a man who smells like booze, AXE body spray and (whatever).

As the sentence reads, however, it has the woman waking up to:

a) an unfamiliar ceiling;

b) some guy who smells like booze;

c) AXE body spray;

d) “something else.”

Taken in that context, the possibilities of this “something else” extend far beyond body odor, condoms, pussy, or jizz. The woman in question could have awoken to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and an albatross. Given the context of the story, she also could have woken up to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and an STD. For feminists on campus upset with the Eagle’s casual treatment of date rape in the column, the grammatical error could also lead to a happier ending: Personally, I’d like to see this girl wake up to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and a copy of Yes Means Yes!

It’s three in the morning. You have it inside you right now. It kind of hurts. You’ve had one too many cups of jungle juice. You think his name is Andrew, but you’re not really sure. You thought you would never be that girl, but there you are, in your drunken haze.

You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else. He wants to cuddle and you’re starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up [ ________ ].

Reader: How did the AU Eagle complete that sentence?

a. You’re starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up was rape.

b. You’re starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up was a product of society’s shaming of female sexuality, which encourages women to resort to dangerous, heavily intoxicated, and painful sex with strangers instead of openly pursuing empowered, respectful, and satisfying sexual experiences with desired sexual partners.

c. You’re starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up could turn into something.

If you picked choice C, congratulations. That’s right: The Eagle chose to use a woman’s hazy, drunk, and painful sexual experience in order to illustrate the serious on-campus problem of . . . drunk women wanting boyfriends!

“A lot of people think that their first sexual experience in college is something meaningful,” the column continued. “We can tell you that it is not. ” The columnists then informed AU females some strategies they should try next time, instead of painful drunk sex: “lets face it girls, more often then not you’ll have to slow the guy down. That’s more than okay—it adds to your ‘mystique.’ Flirt with them, step in a little bit closer, laugh at all his jokes, flip your hair, basically everything you see in the movies without the sex. I said without the sex.”

So, women who want to get laid on the AU campus can either a) endure drunk and painful stranger fucking, or b) laugh at jokes that aren’t funny, and . . . not have sex. What the fuck? And these are the paper’s sex columnists!

Some readers and on-campus groups agreed that the Eagle’s sexual scenario posed more pressing questions than “Why can’t the drunk girl find a boyfriend?” Like, “Was that hypothetical girl just hypothetically raped?”

Many members of the campus community argued that she was. AU Students For Choice penned an e-mail to its members calling the piece “alarming,” and describing the opening scene as “an explicit rape.” And in a letter to the Eagle, campus group Women’s Initiative wrote, “This is called rape . . . Not only does the column normalize sexual assault as a drunken hook-up that happens to everyone, but it places the responsibility of stopping sexual assault on women by telling them to ’slow the guy down.’”

Readers also chimed in on the consent issue. “Next time you write a sex article don’t write it like a date rape story,” wrote one commenter. Wrote another: “If it hurts, and you’re so wasted you don’t know what’s going on, then that is rape. And that’s not okay or normal.”

But others came to the Eagle’s defense. “How the hell is that rape?” wrote one. “I hear of this kind of stuff happening all the time. We’ve all been there at one time or another when you have drunk sex, so what? Its the people who end up trying to build a relationship off of that who are stupid.”

In its own response to the campus outcry, the Eagle defended the piece as “provocative” and called the outrage “confusing.” “For better or worse, many drunken hook-ups on this campus are completely consensual. Women’s Initiative knows it. AU Students For Choice knows it. Sometimes, people get drunk intending to hook-up!” The Eagle then attempted to shame all members of the campus community who voiced concern about the Eagle’s strange sex advice. “Baseless charges and unwarranted outrage make these groups look silly,” the retort read. “On issues as serious as rape and sexual assault, they should know better than to cry wolf.”

The students crying “rape!” and the students crying “completely consensual!” will probably have to agree to disagree—if there’s one thing I’ve learned from sex blogging, it’s that arguments over whether theoretical scenarios constitute rape are rarely resolved. But that doesn’t mean the two camps can’t find a mutually productive discussion somewhere in this mess.

The groups who claim that the Eagle piece “normalized sexual assault,” and those who claim that drunk sex “happens all the time” and that “people get drunk intending to hook up!” aren’t talking past one another—even though they refuse to agree on rape, they’re still voicing different perspectives on the same problem. If the Eagle finds the question “is this rape?” silly and baseless, why not ask them some alternate questions: Why is it considered normal for women on campus to choose disappointing, painful, hazy sex? Why is it a campus trend for women not to just unexpectedly wake up in a stranger’s bed, but to get drunk with the intention of waking up there? And since when is declaring painful sex “normal” a valid excuse for perpetuating it?

Pandagon’s Amanda Marcotte has got some pretty good answers to these questions. In a post on the Hofstra false rape accusation, Marcotte explains how slut-shaming can lead women to resort to dangerous, heavily intoxicated, and painful sex with strangers—instead of openly pursuing empowered, respectful, and satisfying sexual experiences with desired sexual partners. She writes:

There is nothing wrong with you if you want to have group sex. Now, I wouldn’t recommend that you go about it as this young woman did. Like it or not, but a single woman in a group sex situation with a bunch of men she barely knows that have been drinking heavily is something that could turn to rape, or even if it doesn’t, it could seem menacing once you’re into it, and therefore you may not feel safe changing your mind if it gets weird. A lot of young men have really mixed-up, fucked-up attitudes about this sort of thing, because the homoerotic element is going to turn them on and then they’re going to get upset about that, and they might get more aggressive to demonstrate that they’re Not Gay. There’s a serious amount of danger there. That said, it’s foolish to assume that some young women aren’t going to have group sex fantasies, and the sheer amount of shame that is placed on them for wanting to act those out will push a lot of them to make really, really bad choices under the influence of inhibition-lowering drugs like alcohol.

The only cure for this is to stop shaming women for being sexual. Without the shame driving people to make rash, dangerous, and foolish choices, you’re going to have a lot more planning of group sex that involves vetting partners and getting consent and creating safe words and all that. And then, you own your choice and take responsibility for it. Which makes you not inclined to say it was rape if the word gets out that you did this. If your reputation isn’t in danger, then you have no cause to do bad things in an attempt to save it.

I don’t mind that the Eagle’s semester-opening sex column presented rash, drunk, awful sex as a normal college experience—it can be. But instead of examining why college women have sex they don’t like, or telling college women that they deserve to have better sex, the Eagle told AU’s female population that good girls don’t give it up. That attitude isn’t going to make sex on AU’s campus any better, but it will help to keep it drunk. Hey—at least it will be “normal,” right?

Have you always wanted to blame your casual sexual encounters on the Goose, but the words just never came out right? Put another way: Do you have a bunch of date-rapey sentiments to unload upon the general public, but don’t want to have to use your recognizable, human voice? The “I Am T-Pain” iPhone application is here to help.

According to Pitchfork’s review of T-Pain’s new democratization of the Auto-Tune, the function “can make anyone’s voice sound like that of a sex-addicted robot. I just tried it; it works.” T-Pain has plenty of sketchy drunk sex jams to choose from, but the sketchiest is his lasting contribution to Jamie Foxx’s Blame It (On the Alcohol). Give your $2.99 to T-Pain, and let’s review:

Girl I know you feel good, just like you look
Couple more shots you open up like a book
I ain´t trippin (cause ima read ya)
Shawty I ain´t trippin  (I jus wanna please ya)
I’mma take a shot of Nuvo, shawty then you know
What’s goin’ down we can go and kick it like judo.

Ya know what I mean:
Shawty got drunk and thought it all was a dream,
So I made her say I, I, I, I!
Now she got her hand on my leg
And got my seats all wet in my ride (all wet in my ride)
All over my ride (all over my ride),
She look me dead in the eye (eye, eye, eye)
Then my pants got bigga and she already knew what to figga
Had her looking at her boyfriend like, fuck that nigga!

That’s right, ladies: When T-Pain opens you up like a book in his ride, but you are so drunk you think you are sleeping, don’t worry! You are allowed to wake up the next morning and blame it on the Goose (alternately, you may blame it on the ‘Tron). What are we not to blame it on? You guessed it: T-Pain.

Shit, now I’m expected to increase my own intelligence while I’m avoiding getting raped? What exactly does being a “smart” rape avoider entail anyway? Flashcards?

I’m thinking I better start off with “How to be dumb and avoid date rape” before I move on to this multitasking shit. After all, preventing yourself from becoming a full-fledged dumb rape victim requires some pretty advanced instruction:

The Catholic University of America (CUA) this summer revised its student rules to clarify that the school condemns sexual assault more strongly than consensual sex. The change to the policy, which became official July 27, comes in the aftermath of litigation questioning the propriety and effectiveness of the university’s longtime regulations.

Prior to the change, the CUA campus code performed an awkward lumping operation when it came to sex: Its sexual misconduct clause outlawed “physical conduct of a sexual nature that is unwanted by either party and/or that is disruptive to the university community, such as any sexual expression that is inconsistent with the teaching and moral values of the Catholic church.”

The new rules are all about distinctions. The university has tossed the “Sexual Misconduct” clause in favor of one that clearly differentiates between consensual “Sexual Relationships,” which it calls “inconsistent” with the religious nature of the university, and “Sexual Assault,” which is “unacceptable behavior, will not be tolerated, and will be adjudicated to the fullest extent afforded to the university.” According to CUA’s new policy, prohibited “sexual relationships” include “sexual acts of any kind outside the confines of marriage.” (Less genitally-inclined displays of disruption, like men kissing, are still undefined.) Prohibited “sexual assault” is defined more progressively: “sexual contact without meaningful, explicit, ongoing consent.”

The school’s administration quietly published the revision in its online Code of Student Conduct last month, noting only that its “sexual offenses section [was] strengthened to clearly articulate unacceptable behavior.” CUA did not return a request for comment.

Why has CUA struggled to nail the wording on its sexual assault policy? While other schools strive to protect their students from predators and themselves from lawsuits, CUA has to juggle a third consideration: protecting its relationship with the Vatican.

As the national university of the Roman Catholic Church, CUA earns points with the Pope by outlawing sex among its students, on-campus and off. Keeping undergraduates’ hands to themselves is easier said than done, but the Holy See doesn’t come knocking for evidence of enforcement. Fucking in CUA dorm rooms is common, but the infraction rarely—if ever—rises to administrative review. During the 2006-2007 school year—the only year the university has reported figures on the infraction—CUA recorded zero violations.

Enforcing a “sexual assault” policy, on the other hand, is required under U.S. law. According to university watchdog group Security on Campus, Title IX “prohibits sexual harassment of college and university students whether the harasser is an employee or another student,” as sexual assault is considered “an extreme form of sexual harassment”—and qualifies as gender discrimination.

By creating a clear distinction between the two infractions—sex, which is unenforceable, and sexual assault, which must be strictly enforced—CUA may begin to move past the legal and moral mess that has marked its sex policies for years.

The controversy over those policies came to a head earlier this year, when two students involved in a contested sexual assault incident on the CUA campus later sued the university (Screw U, 5/7/09). The incident involved a female CUA student, a male CUA student, and three of his high school buddies, all of whom engaged in one very visible violation of the sexual misconduct policy in the spring of 2008: a late-night, open-door, thoroughly witnessed group-sex session in a CUA dormitory. The female student later reported the incident as a sexual assault; the male student, who was expelled, maintained that the incident was consensual. Both students cited Title IX in their complaints against the university. The female student alleged the university acted with “deliberate indifference” to her sexual assault claim; the male student claimed that the sex policy was administered inconsistently. (Both suits have since been settled out of court.)

Here’s where the university’s former sex policies failed. The boy’s suit claims that the university failed to give him a “fair and impartial disciplinary hearing” to make his case that the incident was consensual. As a result, the suit alleged, CUA effectively expelled him over a couple of lesser infractions—engaging in oral sex and consuming alcohol—while his female accuser received no punishment for the same offenses. In order to prove that he was unduly punished for his maleness, the boy’s lawyers invoked a CUA celebrity: Antonella Barba, a pop singer who made national news when she competed in the sixth season of American Idol in 2007.

At the height of her American Idol exposure, Barba was a CUA undergraduate. During the course of the competition, photographs of Barba in various stages of Catholic shame surfaced on the Internet. Most of the photos—like the one of her posing in a wet T-shirt and thong next to the World War II Memorial—are fit for Maxim but not necessarily prohibited by catechism. One photo, however, allegedly shows Barba—or a look-alike—performing oral sex on a man. CUA’s response to the matter amounted to an expression of sympathy for Barba and her family. She graduated from the university in 2008.

Even though the boy was expelled over a much more serious offense—allegedly engaging in oral sex without his sex partner’s consent—his lawsuit still built his discrimination case upon CUA’s failure to enforce the campus’s many consensual sexual infractions. The boy’s lawyers demanded that CUA deliver “all documents relating to any investigation, determination, discussions, complaints discipline, or the like concerning Antonella Barba, including, but not limited to, all documents relating to your decision not to expel her.” In most sexual assault policies, the differences between the boy’s case and Barba’s would be glaring. At CUA, the infractions were hardly discrete. According to the old policy, both instances of sexual misconduct were outlawed in the very same sentence, and no further definition of consent was provided.

CUA’s revised sexual assault policy helps to clarify the importance of that little nuance between the cases—consent. The university’s new sexual assault policy still prohibits premarital sex, but it also clearly acknowledges the importance of consent in these forbidden relationships. The separation of sex and assault will help the university prove that it is not “deliberately indifferent” to the possibility of on-campus assault—even as it deliberately avoids policing the consensual stuff. Previously, CUA prefaced its sexual assault policy with the following proposed strategy, which urged both victim and perpetrator to remain chaste: “The optimal approach and most appropriate solution to this issue is for all persons to develop and live by a value system that respects other persons’ bodily integrity and the sacredness of human sexuality.”

By eliminating that “solution,” CUA has opened its sexual assault policy to those victims who may have strayed from the catechism, consensually, in the past. The definition will both help the university discipline sexual assault offenders and confine its judgment on consensual dorm-fuckers to the religious realm.

Illustration by Doug Boehm

Lea Haben, “relationship coach,” wants to warn her clients about the dangers of on-line dating:

Haben said, “I’ve had clients that experienced full-on date rape* and I’ve had clients that have come very, very close to date rape. ” . . . Haben said look closely and you’ll find warning signs right there on a person’s profile page. “He’s not even wearing a shirt. His interests are snuggling, his favorite thing is skin to skin contact. Notice the profile if it’s very vague or you don’t get a good sense, ask for more information.”

Snuggling. Sure, it may sound sensitive, but we all know what snuggling really means: danger. It’s the number one dangerous interest! And beware: Plenty of local online daters are sneaking this secret code-word into their otherwise innocuous personals ads (emphasis mine):

Available, no fakes no spam be for real writes:

“Not having my old friends around is getting rather tiresome and I am sick of being alone, so I am looking for someone to enjoy dining out, movies, video games, going to the museums, cooking, or just “snuggling“. I am easy going and down to earth once you get me to open up, I can be a little reserved at first.”

SWM searching for SWF for LTR writes:

“I’m not a huge bar scene person, I’ll go occasionally but it’s not something my life revolves around. I’m more content staying in with someone special “snuggling“ and watching a movie or on the weekends going to out to try or see something new.”

Carbon Leaf this Friday? writes:

“I enjoy all out door activities. All things wine. Trying new restaurants, movies, dancing, concerts, plays, walks, “snuggling” at home etc.”

Are you There? writes:

“I’m a 27 y/o single mom. I’m 5′7, a “thick” girl,. I’m a romantic. I like reading, watching movies, “snuggling“ on the couch, holding hands taking a walk.”

Disgusting. With all the snugglers out there, how will an online dater ever find true love? Now, now, not everyone can be into snuggling. Let’s try searching for a different code word. Like “rape”:

Do you want to be punished? Spanked? (Nw DC do you have a rape fantasy) writes:

“Warning this is not for every girl. This is for the kinkiest woman using craig’s list. this is for the woman who wants and needs to be punnished, the woman who was a cutter in tenth grade, the kind of woman who wants and needs to be dirty with a man who doesn’t know her and won’t judge her for acting out what she wants. this add is for the woman who hates herself and wants to be left tied to the toilet dripping my cum from her pussy, wondering what to name the bastard child I am not ever going to see.”

your fantasy writes:

“tell me if you have a rape fantasy. i would like to hear it. it gets me off when reading them.”

Daddy seeks a submissive slut writes:

- You being a COMPLETE SUBMISSIVE in the bedroom and doing ANYTHING DADDY tells you to!
- Being a submissive SLAVE.
- You like pain and crying.
- Hard, heavy anal sex
- Bare hand spanking, wooden paddle, leather belt, leg spreaders!
- Forced deep throating, cock choking, and skull fucking.
- Slapping your pussy, rough fingering fisting and handling, (generally, I want your lips and asshole red, and swollen before I am ready to fuck)
- Tie you down and force fuck you in all your holes.
- Make you suck me off in a semi-public situations, as well as fingering your ass and
pussy when ever I please.
- Degradation / Verbal Abuse.
- DP fuck you with my toys.
- Force rape you when I want! And let my friends fuck you as well.
- Golden showers.
- Incest talk…

I can tone it down or up depending on your level of comfort.

Well, it’s nice to know that even in this day and age, not every online dater is a monstrous, shirtless snuggler. There are also those singles looking for the one girl who hates herself, is willing to provide him with free erotica, and is open to being forced raped by a stranger and his closest friends whenever he wants. Now get back out there, champ!

* On a side note, what the fuck is “full-on” date rape? A more committed, all-systems-go version of regular old date rape?

Photo by d70focus

These rape prevention tips, like all trustworthy advice, came to me courtesy of a friend’s ex-roommate’s mom’s yoga instructor. Some of the ideas here, culled from interviews with imprisoned rapists, are helpful enough—”be aware of your surroundings”; “go for the groin”; “if you are ever thrown into the trunk of a car, kick out the back tail lights and stick your arm out the hole and start waving like crazy.” Others—don’t wear clothes you can remove, stop helping babies, never ever drive anywhere—are more likely to keep women dependent than protected.

As we’ve seen before, targeting rape prevention advice at women can start off as empowering, and slowly descend into crippling—or worse, preemptive victim blaming. I don’t know—maybe it’s because I hesitate to take the advice of convicted rapists. But something tells me that it might be more worthwhile focus our efforts on the rapists who rape people, instead of burdening every woman with paranoia, hairstyle advice, and unnecessary umbrellas.

TIP #1: DON’T GROW OUT YOUR HAIR.

The first thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle.. They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed. They are also likely to go after a woman
with long hair. Women with short hair are not common targets.

Yes: rapists are administering hairstyle advice now. As a woman with short hair—I told my stylist to give me the ‘Ol Rape-Proof Cut w/ Blow Dry—I find this tidbit a bit counter-intuitive (and vaguely insulting). I’m sure some potential rapists must consider us short-hairs too masculine, sexless, or gay to bother to grab. On the other hand, there are those rapists who think that a good forced entry is all we need to become real women. So, I don’t know—wear a hat?

—

TIP #2: DON’T WEAR ANYTHING THAT CAN BE CUT BY A SCISSOR.

The second thing men look for is clothing. They will look for women who’s clothing is easy to remove quickly. Many of them carry scissors around specifically to cut clothing.

Good thing I invested in a full wardrobe of rubber overalls this year. Sure, only wearing clothes that cannot be cut off—much less manually removed!—from your body may make you more resistant to heat stroke and/or drowning. Ask yourself: Do I really need to be leaving the house today?

—

TIP #3: DON’T STAY OUT LATE (DON’T WAKE UP EARLY, EITHER).

Men are most likely to attack & rape in the early morning, between 5:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.

So you should probably drop out of high school.

—

TIP #4: DON’T EAT. DON’T WORK. DON’T PISS.

The number one place women are abducted from/attacked is grocery store parking lots. The number two: office parking lots/garages. Number three: public restrooms.

Don’t have a man to protect you? Think twice about performing every daily human function. Bonus: Fearing the grocery store doubles as a cost-effective diet.

—

TIP #5: DON’T LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT A LARGE, PHALLIC OBJECT.

These men said they would not pick on women who have umbrellas, or other similar objects that can be used from a distance, in their hands.

Not raining? Try carying around a “similar object” everywhere you go—like a big lead pole, or a decorative cane. You know the old saying: better off carrying a useless decorative cane than sorry.

—

TIP #6: DON’T CARE SO MUCH ABOUT BABIES.

Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on her porch the night before last, and she called the police because it was lat e and she thought it was weird. The police told her ‘Whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.’ The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to the street and get run over. The policeman said, ‘We already have a unit on the way, whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.’ He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby’s cry recorded and uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby. He said they have not verified it, but have had several calls by women saying that they hear baby’s cries outside their doors when they’re home alone at night. Please pass this on and DO NOT open the door for a crying baby.

What?

—

TIP #7: DON’T BE SO COMFORTABLE LIVING YOUR LIFE.

IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY. (And better paranoid than dead.)

Paranoid or Dead: The modern woman’s dilemma.

—

TIP #8: DON’T BE SUCH A WOMAN.

As women, we are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP! It may get you raped or killed. Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was a good-looking, well-educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting women. He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked ‘for help’ into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he abducted his next victim.

Our tipster tells us to stop being “sympathetic,” but the real message here is, “stop being so fucking stupid.” (Oh, and the old useless decorative cane trick? We invented that shit). It’s not difficult to parse the real message in this advice—If you don’t want to get raped, stop being a woman. And if you can’t do that, live a life in complete fear of who you are. Stop growing your hair out—you tempt the rapists. Stop wearing skirts—you tempt the rapists. And then a little curveball: Stop doing anything too manly, either, like leaving the house without a man—you tempt the rapists. Just stop having a vagina to tempt the rapists already. Instead, live your life paralyzed by a fear of rape, because, as one tip says, it’s “better than having them find your body in a remote location.” Because, as women, that’s our only choice: hate our lives, or die horrifically. Even the vagina spaceship sounds better than this.

1976: “This invention relates to inserts for use within the vagina of a woman for the harming of a man who may insert a penis into the vagina of the woman. This invention represents improvements in such inserts and it provides more efficient means to lock on the penis and to lacerate the locked on penis.”

Pros: Claims to be an improvement on previous penis weapons stored within the vagina.

Cons: Improves upon penis weapons stored within the vagina by locking onto the penis you don’t want inside you.

—

1977: “An anti-rape device adapted to be inserted into the vaginal cavity of a human female, comprising a base member, elongated penis penetrating means attached to the base member to project outwardly toward the mouth of the vaginal cavity when the device is operationally positioned within the vaginal cavity of a human female, and retractable means normally surrounding said elongated penis penetrating means to protect the walls of the vaginal cavity from contacting said penis penetrating means, said retractable means being adapted to be retracted upon penetration of the vaginal cavity by a male penis to permit penetration of the penis by said penis penetrating means.”

Pros: At least attempts to “protect the walls of the vaginal cavity” from the penis weapon.

Cons: Where does the tampon go? What if I have to pee? How do I explain this to my consensual sex partner? “Will you excuse my while I slip into something less likely to elongate from my vaginal opening to irreversibly damage your genitalia?”

—

1978: “An anti-rape defensive weapon is provided comprising a barbed shank similar to a fish-hook barb carried in a barrel like hand grip arranged to expose the barbed shank when the device is pressed against the flesh of an assailant.”

Pros: Does not go into your vagina; “is not illegal to carry because it does not meet the description of a lethal weapon.”

Cons: So, this anti-rape device works by not stuffing a barbed shank inside a vagina? I’m . . . not exactly following.

—

1979: “An anti-rape device having a hollow housing adapted to be worn within a human vagina. The housing has a front opening and contains a hypodermic syringe having a volume of rape-deterring fluid and a needle facing and aligned with the front opening.”

Pros: It’s . . . elaborate.

Cons: Seriously, what woman would consent to putting a hypodermic needle inside her vagina? Is her dad making her do this? If so, she should tell a trusted friend, because she should not have to be doing this. Also, couldn’t we put this rape-deterring fluid technology to use somewhere else? Like in a handbag?

—

1983: “An anti-rape device is adapted to be worn in the vaginal cavity of a female. The device comprises a hollow housing with adhesive means on the interior of the housing to adhere to any rapist and an irritant-containing pouch positioned within the housing which ruptures upon forceful contact with the rapist. The adhesive means ensures the device will adhere to the rapist thereby causing continued discomfort.”

Pros: It’s like a science experiment in your vagina!

Cons: I’m no scientist.

—

1993: “A rape prevention device including a belt adapted to encircle the waist of a wearer and a shield portion extending through the legs and crotch of the wearer from a rear region of the belt to a front region of the belt. The shield portion includes a plurality of shield segments adapted to cover the genitalia of the wearer.”

Pros: Again, not technically insode the vagina.

Cons: Just a chastity belt.

—

1997: “A female security device placed within a vaginal cavity to protect and minimize physical damage caused by physical sexual intercourse. The female security device includes a cylindrical housing including a first open end and a second closed end. The second closed end is inserted deeper within the vaginal cavity than the first open end and an inner surface of the cylindrical housing is able to absorb any fluid dispensed therein. Pressure sensors are positioned there- around for sensing contractions in walls of the vaginal cavity and a pressure sensor is positioned therein for sensing pressure caused by insertion of an object into the cylindrical cavity. A needle is positioned to extend into the cylindrical cavity for contacting the object inserted therein and retaining a tissue sample of the object. A microcomputer is connected to the external and internal sensors for determining when an object has been inserted therein and a reservoir is connected for releasing an identification dye to discolor the object upon making such a determination. Furthermore, the needle is able to inject a tissue irritant into the object upon contact therewith and thus cause an irritation to form. An auditory recorder may also be connected to the microcomputer and activated upon a determination that an object has been inserted therein for recording all sounds occurring during the sexual intercourse and a vibrating ring may be activated at that time to notify the user that the device has been activated.”

Pros: Pressure sensors? Check. Microcomputer? Check. Airbag? Check. Tissue irritant? Check. Auditory recorder? Check. Vibrating ring which alerts you that your vagina has  been breached, in case you didn’t notice? Check.

Cons: Not for the woman unequipped to land a spaceship into her vagina.

What’s the rapiest song you could choose to sing at your local watering hole’s karaoke night? Three out of three random Internet commenters agree: Sublime’s “Date Rape” will never get you laid. Readers, please: Don’t be Date Rape Karaoke Guy this weekend!

This guy, who calls himself “SINNED,” probably does the best karaoke rendition of “Date Rape”  you could hope for—that low grovel! that strained falsetto!—and it’s still unimaginably creepy.

You know how I know SINNED puts the “date rape” in “Date Rape”? Because even through this masterful camera phone recording, you may observe how SINNED masterfully changes the “Date Rape” lyrics from “If it wasn’t for date rape I’d never get laid” to “If it wasn’t for date rape SINNED would never get laid.”

That’s right—he chose to refer to his rapiness in the third person instead of using the standard “I.” That’s how rapey he is.

Later in the song, as you will know if you attended Middle School, the rapist becomes the rape victim. This only serves to enhance the grodiness of Date Rape Karaoke Guy, who first identifies with the vaginal rapist, then reveals that he considers anal rape to be hilarious.

I don’t care how easy the melody is, dudes: Never, ever, ever be Date Rape Karaoke Guy.

But don’t take my word for it! Three out of three random Internet commentators agree that “Date Rape” is the rapiest song you could ever choose to sing, in public, to a fake ska back-up band. With reverb.

Kiki of Seattle writes of her recent run-in with the Date Rape Karaoke Guy:

Unfortunately, Stacy was unable to hear a word I sang as some creepy guy kept talking to her throught my entire song. He asked her to dance repeatedly and would not take a hint. At one he told her that he was doing her a favor in asking her to dance. Once I had finished, I sat down and that creepy guy (we’ll refer to him as Perve) started talking to me. I just wanted to drink my diet coke and enjoy our girl time in peace. Perve wanted me to dance with him. I did not want to dance with Perve, and I told him that I would not be dancing.

A couple songs later, Stacy gave a lovely performance of “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. A few songs after that, it was Perve’s time to shine. His song of choice? “Date Rape” by Sublime. Considering that this particular venue prides itself on its 12,000+ song book, I don’t understand why that would be the song he chose. It did, however, fit him perfectly.

Karaoke Queen “Sonya,” meanwhile, doles out some advice on how to avoid becoming Date Rape Karaoke Gay: Don’t sing Sublime’s “Date Rape.” It’s that easy:

“Date Rape.” Like, really? Why would you pick that? I mean, you’re at a bar, probably trying to get laid, and you’re gonna sing Date Rape? Really?

Also, don’t sing Sublime’s “Santeria.”

But the most damning evidence comes from the guy with the camera phone who took the initiative to videotape Date Rape Karaoke Guy and post the footage on YouTube:

SINNED has done this song 120 times now and still can’t get laid! Poor bastard!

Michael Jackson’s death at 50 from cardiac arrest has inspired the entire world to revisit the King of Pop’s body of work. And though I’m a huge MJ fan, I’d be remiss in my role as Pop Culture Fun Killer if I didn’t point out some defining characteristics of Jackson’s music videos: rapey, stalkey, and victim-blamey.

Off-screen, Jackson’s sex life was notoriously tortured—rumors in the press pegged Jackson alternately as a lifelong virgin, a pedophile, and a freak. In his music videos, we saw Jackson play with sexual violence and physical domination in order to portray the image of complete sexual control.

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: “The Way You Make Me Feel”

Relevant Lyrics:

The way you make me feel
You really turn me on
You knock me off of my feet
My lonely days are gone

Why It’s So Rapey: Here, Michael Jackson presents an interesting contribution to the Date Rape Canon—one that defies lyrical explanation. The words to “The Way You Make Me Feel” only convey that the object of Jackson’s affection “really turns [him] on.” The song’s undertones of sexual violence all come courtesy Jackson’s notoriously specific body language. The music video makes clear the way the woman makes Jackson feel—like stalking, verbally harassing, and physically intimidating her into loving him.

Meanwhile, Jackson’s female victim repeatedly fails to verbally dissuade Jackson from terrorizing her. The woman in the video, who attempts to evade Jackson’s advances through the darkened night streets, remains silent throughout. The disconnect between Jackson’s physical and verbal messages, and the woman’s inability to articulate opposition, mirror the unspoken nature of much sexual violence, which often goes unidentified and unreported. But it’s not the only MJ jam to play on the stalking theme:

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: “Billie Jean”

Relevant Lyrics:

For forty days and for forty nights
The law was on her side
But who can stand when she’s in demand
Her schemes and plans
‘Cause we danced on the floor in the round
So take my strong advice, just remember to always think twice

Why It’s So Rapey: In the “Billie Jean” video, a rogue Michael Jackson sneaks into a woman’s bed at night as he’s chased by a band of police. The woman, obscured beneath the covers, shows no sign of being awake, or in fact registering Jackson’s presence at all! The sheets nevertheless erupt into a metaphorical flash of light, signifying doin’ it. Then, Jackson vanishes into thin air, underlining the song’s assertion that Billie Jean is totally lying about all of this. Tragically for MJ, charges of sexual assault weren’t relegated to the fictional sphere: Jackson was acquitted of sex abuse allegations in 2005.

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: “Thriller”

Relevant Lyrics:

They’re out to get you, there’s demons closing in on every side
They will possess you unless you change that number on your dial
Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together, yeah
All through the night I’ll save you from the terror on the screen
I’ll make you see

That this is thriller, thriller night
‘Cause I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Thriller, thriller night
So let me hold you tight and share a
Killer, diller, chiller, thriller here tonight

Why It’s So Rapey: In “Thriller,” a young man attempts to scare his date by taunting herwith horror film phantoms—and insisting that she needs to come home with him to avoid them.

There’s a domestic violence lesson to be learned here: The guy who insists that you need his protection in return for sexual favors (implied) is actually much more dangerous than any of the shit he’s claiming to protect you from. (” I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try.”) In the case of “Thriller,” the bogeyman keeping the girl close to Jackson takes the form of ghouls, blood-seeking creatures, and “the thing with forty eyes.” In real life, the phantom dangers abusive men use to make women stay include “never being able to find a guy like me again,” “being unhappy forever,” and/or “doing it for the kids.”

It was just seven months ago that local blogger M@ joined the District haters over at Why I Hate D.C. In that time, M@’s very first post on the blog—which detailed a fantasy jog, rape, and murder on the Memorial Bridge—has inspired hundreds of anonymous comments threatening M@’s rape and death.

Last night, M@ was finally taken out of his misery. In a blog post published at 9:51 p.m., site administrator Dave Stroup wrote, “Due to a variety of reasons, I must report that M@ is no longer a contributor at why.i.hate.dc.” He made one of those reasons clear: “the moment that this site becomes associated with rape fantasy and all of the other bizarre circumstances surrounding some posts, is the moment something has to be done.”

M@ was the first to comment on the post.

“Well, Dave, it was time for me to quit this blog anyhow since I’m currently trying to leave the city,” he wrote. “I find it interesting that now would be the time for you to object to any content after seven months of vitriolic posting and commenting—but I’m OK with it. I’m literally moving on….”

In a post on his personal blog titled “M@: In His Own Words,” M@ added: “Though the administrator says he can no longer be associated with my brand of writing, I really think it’s best that I no longer associate myself with hack posts about the things that so many moronic ‘D.C. Bloggers’ seem to care about.” He also took issue with Stroup’s main rationale for dumping him: “I do not fantasize about rape,” M@ wrote.

M@ isn’t the only Why I Hate D.C. contributor to move on in recent days. Marissa, who blogs at The Anti DC, recently recused herself from her Why I Hate D.C. duties, citing “out of control obnoxious comments.” In an e-mail, Stroup explained that M@’s work on the blog had been the source of distraction for the blog’s other contributors:

The mission of Why I Hate DC is to provide insightful, humorous and often subversive commentary on life in the District of Columbia. M@’s posts had strayed from this mission and as such he is no longer affiliated with the blog. This fiasco has already caused enough trouble, and distracted me from getting back to writing about Mayor Fenty and the Metro.

Back on Why I Hate D.C., other commenters bid M@ farewell:

“long overdue,” wrote heather.

“Total freakshow,” Anonymous added.

“The Lazy Iguana” chimed in with commentary on the entirety of Why I Hate D.C., comparing the Web site to this “Happy Days” clip:

In an e-mail, which he also posted as a “RELEASE” on the blog, M@ had this to say about his parting of ways with Why I Hate D.C.:

Though greatly saddened by Dave Stroup’s decision to remove me as a contributor to “Why I Hate D.C.,” I welcome the chance to pursue new challenges and opportunities.

For the most part, the readership suffers from average intelligence, incapable of understanding not only irony but nuance beyond commentary on the city’s subway system or phenomena they refer to as “douchebaggery.” My work there seems akin to hiring an M Street attorney to negotiate the sale of an ice cream cone—way too much horsepower.

Daniel Hoffman Gill, my friend, puts its best: “I find [Dave Stroup’s] ’sacking’ of you to be totally bizarre and flawed–clearly he’s jealous–but one thing is true, he has done you a favour; that blog was a shithole of mongbats.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

I have a confession to make: I love Dude Comedies. Any film where Two to Five Douchey Guys Shirk Their Societal Obligations to Embark on a Night They’ll Never Forget can probably coax ten bucks out of me. I’ll even watch the Dude Comedies where all female characters are relegated to the Fun-Hating-Wife or Slutty-Sex-Object category, as long as it allows for maximum high jinks. Superbad: Loved it! Old School: Great! 40 Year Old Virgin: Totally convinced me to overlook the whole chastity message! Talladega Nights: Watched it!

I understand these movies are literred with sexism and homophobia and penises; I am simply immune to it. My condition has become so severe that this is looking pretty good to me, honestly.

But no Dude Comedy can draw me in as douchily as the Judd Apatow Dude Comedy. I am powerless to it. I have a theory: Paul Rudd is often one of the dudes. But even a Clueless pedigree can’t justify my apparent obsession with man-children, marijuana-fueled Lord of the Rings fantasies, and underlying date-rape themes.

Help me.

In this week’s Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown tries. We laughed, we cried, we had a shmashmortion.

SADY: hello there lady. are you prepared – prepared, that is, to debate the fine points of dude comedy?

AMANDA: i can’t say i’m as prepared as you are, sady. but i am willing to confess: i believe that i enjoyed nearly all the films you profiled in your apatow series. when i saw them. in the theater.

SADY: yes, it’s true: apatow has become my great white whale. he is basically all i think about these days. i dream in Apatowvision. well: i enjoyed some of them too! (shhhhhh.) I enjoyed “Knocked Up” immensely, for example.

AMANDA: i CRIED at the end of knocked up. i was on a really bad date, which may have had something to do with it.

SADY: OH GOD. YOU SHARE MY TERRIBLE SECRET. i cried too. also, broke up with the dude i saw it with?

AMANDA: same. well i’m glad we’ve cleared the air.

Judd Apatow craftily inserted this song into the film’s end credits in order to make me cry.

SADY: yeah. my reactions to “knocked up” kind of define my relationship to the Apatow canon. I was totally digging Leslie Mann’s character – oh, that poor lady! She is totally at the end of her rope! – and then left the theater, and discussed it with people, and realized that YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ROOTING FOR PAUL RUDD. In that particular sub-plot.

AMANDA: i think i had the same reaction as you did, honestly. i thought she was sympathetic, but totally pathetic. all of apatow’s male characters are pathetic, too, but they seem to ease out of that gracefully without having to think about it too much.

SADY: right – plus, they are pathetic in a totally fun way! they get to hang out and do bong hits and fart on each others’ pillows and such! so, by the end, where it’s like, “sadly, we realize that procreative monogamy with one of these strange ‘woman’ creatures is necessary to maturation” you kind of get their sadness at giving up the pillow farts and lightbub battles. whereas women are just grown-ass-adults by the time they hit puberty, apparently. or at least they’re scripted that way.

AMANDA: yeah, so the women are just haggard at the end. one thing your reviews always touch on are these coiteries of man-children that apatow scripts. and you mention the rejoinder from defenders of the movie that ‘you’re not supposed to LIKE or IDENTIFY with them.’ and i do think that you are supposed to like these characters, and even like them for (and not despite of) their date rape punch-lines. but they’re still in a context, i think, where they’re there to provide a contrast to the hero of the story. their douchiness must be overcome, basically.

SADY: yeah, exactly. they’re given such loving attention, and their little world of date-rape jokes and vague bromosocial lady-avoidance is presented as so much fun. so you forgive them for being immature in order to forgive your own immaturity, like, “well, my wife may be at home sobbing but i can’t help it! i’m a regular bro!” and then you get a Valuable Life Lesson that sticks for maybe ten to fifteen minutes.

AMANDA: … but they’re funny!

SADY: it’s true! sometimes they really really are! I subconsciously repeat Jonah Hill’s pronunciation of “abortion” as “shmushmortion” at least once a week! and then i realize it’s a joke about making a lady have an abortion because obviously her fetus is YOUR decision!

AMANDA: yeah. and apatow’s versions of women i cannot excuse. they are either bitches or whores. but caricatures of douchebags, even lovable ones, i cannot resist. see: paul rudd in wet hot american summer. i think it’s just possible to love the character and not the character if they were a real person / your boyfriend.

SADY: exactly. question: where the lady douchebags at? where are the stoned ladies that can’t get it together to have an actual apartment, and get jobs that require nothing of them because they’re afraid real jobs would be too much of a commitment, and pretend to be gandalf or some business when no-one’s looking? the ladies who would rather watch “the muppet show,” again, than do anything useful with their lives? WHERE ARE THOSE LADIES? Because I want movies about them! They exist! So I am told in a way that has nothing to do with my own personal life, at all.

AMANDA: i know, which is why I desperately want Apatow to write a movie for them. partly because i think his brain might explode, but also because i think it would be funny.

SADY: exactly. like, writing a movie about a lady that is not a sexy/stupid harlot or a knife-tongued scold would be fantastic. because the closest we’ve got to an Apatowomany character, right now, is Juno. I DON’T WANT JUNO.

AMANDA: sometimes i look at popular culture and i think of the female characters who have had abortions and i get really sad that like carrie bradshaw is the only one i can think of. but that’s a tangent.

SADY: yes, well, my forthcoming feature movie film, “50 First Abortions,” will be an exciting new direction for film, i think.

AMANDA: indeed. I think we should start a letter campaign that mirrors the request of Pixar to make a film with a heroine who is not a princess.

SADY: but, you know? i think that women have all the same maturity/commitment/not-being-an-idiot problems that these dudes have. PLUS, what with all the work we have to do to make our bodies presentable, there are many more occasions for gross jokes about our inherent schlubbiness. HUMOROUS BIKINI WAXING SCENE? I think so!

This week, comments got heated on Who Can Make a Rape Joke?, inspiring a forthcoming piece, “Who Can Write An Article About Who Can Make A Rape Joke?”

Art says:

To say that Foxx’s Blame It has a “date rape theme” is a misinterpretation of the song at best and disingenuous at worst.

Amanda Hess says:

@Art: Can I entice you to change your mind with the following lyrical sample from Blame It (On the Alcohol) Remix?

T Pain:

Shawty didn’t you know? / it’s going down, we can go and kick it like judo / You know what I mean / Shawty got drunk, thought it all was a dream / So I made her say ahh, ah aaa

So, Shawty was so passed out she thought she was dreaming, so T Pain confirmed she could consent by forcing her to say “ahh.” AAHHHH! It must be real hard to get that noise out of a passed out drunk woman that T. Pain is fucking.

Joe says:

There’s no chance that Tribe Called Quest would ever EVER be considered a gangsta rap group or a group capable of making a gangsta rap song. Do you personally know any black person’s middle name? Because if you did that would probably mean that you were comfortable with hip hop and could distinguish between the genres. You do an excellent job of identifying misogny in everyday life, you just happen to be dead wrong in this regard.

Ryan says:

I agree with Joe. A Tribe Called Quest is as close to gangsta rap as the Beastie Boys are. Actually, I think the Beastie Boys are a bit closer to gangsta rap than Tribe.

Amanda Hess says:

Joe & Ryan -

I would not describe A Tribe Called Quest as gangsta rap, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t made clear.

My point about Tribe is this:

When “The Infamous Date Rape” was released, reviewers called it “just plain misogynistic.” Since then, however—”fifteen years of gangsta rap later”—reviewers have been forced to parse the misogyny of many, many rap songs that are (unlike Tribe) straight-up, unapologetically misogynistic. So through the lens of gangsta rap’s mainstream popularity over the past 20 years, the song now looks pretty positive to women.

Art says:

Amanda H., I still say you’re reaching. I will certainly admit that the T-Pain verse you quoted is disgusting and describes what I would consider date rape. No argument from me there. If you want to call T-Pain out for the verse…fine. If you want to call Foxx out for allowing the verse on his single…fine. BUT, I still say your assertion that Blame It has a “date-rape theme” is either either misguided or disingenuous. One verse does not a theme make. Further you wrote, “The song is, essentially, an attempted date rape by a movie star [Foxx] and a dude who sounds like a robot [Pain]“. The problem is there are no lyrics from Foxx that describe date-rape. In fact, other than the Pain verse you quoted, there are no others period.

Photo by fabbio

Date Rape Anthem: Vakill’s “Worst Fears Confirmed”

Relevant Lyrics:

It’s alright to show the late greats love
But some of y’all are riding dicks and don’t know it like a date-rape drug
Catch me with your little niece on the couch
Kick her out the house with no blouse, Capris on slouch
I ain’t fuck I just poked at her throat like a Capri sun pouch
Point blank I’m a fucking problem capech I’m out
And there it is

Why It’s So Rapey: Well, this is interesting. Vakill, born Donald Mason, is “known for his literate, witty, punch line-filled lyricism.” As far as date-rape jokes go, Vakill’s isn’t terribly offensive: He encourages listeners to rethink their idols by comparing blind hip-hop worship to being drugged and raped.

But this is a song called “Worst Fears Confirmed,” and Vakill isn’t going to let us off that easy. Vakill waits until after the date-rape joke to roll out the offensive rapiness. He goes on to outline a scenario where he puts his penis down the throat of a topless “little niece,” an action he compares to a straw poking “at her throat like a Capri sun pouch.” Recall that a straw must actually tear all the way through the skin of a Capri sun pouch in order to suck out the delicious liquid! Which is not a model of oral sex I can support for anyone, much less a sex partner as creepily described as the “your little niece” we have here.

Well, all fears confirmed now! I’d say Vakill’s work here is done.

So, R. Kelly has pulled the vocoder out of the closet and recorded a remix to Lil’ Wayne’s “Every Girl.” The original track declares, “I wish I could fuck every girl in the world.” Wayne doesn’t get into the logistics, but that’s gotta be a scenario that involves some nonconsensual sex. The original song, at least, sidesteps outright rape by inserting “in about 3 years” before the line “holla at me, Miley Cyrus.”

But now that the lyrics have been taken from Wayne’s mouth and into the hands of noted teen enthusiast R. Kelly, the use of the world “girl” seems a whole lot fuckin’ creepier. Let’s recap:

1995: R. Kelly, 27, marries 15-year-old Aaliyah while working with her on her debut album titled, strangely enough, “Age Ain’t Nothing But A Number.”

2002: R. Kelly, 35, is “indicted on 21 counts of having sexual intercourse with a minor.” He is later acquitted.

2008: R. Kelly, 41, tells BET:

BET: Let me ask you something real that millions of Americans are thinking about and wondering about you. Do you like teenage girls?

Kelly: When you say teenage, how old are we talking?

BET: Girls who are teenagers.

Kelly: 19?

BET: 19 and younger.

Kelly: I have some 19-year-old friends, but I don’t like anybody illegal if that’s what we’re talking about, underage.

2009: R. Kelly, 42, releases a song in which he declares, “I want to fuck every girl in the world.” Among them: a girl, her friend, her sister, her cousin, her mom, and “the Statue of Liberty.”

I suppose this song could be good PR for R. Kelly. See, he likes older women too—the Statue of Liberty is like over 100 years old! But I have to believe that the repetition, over and over, of wanting to fuck girls  can’t be doing him any favors. Add to that the fact that this song is absolutely terrible, and we might havethe—but can it be true? Hath the Gods of Nonconsensual Sex Tracks finally revealed to us the most worthless date rape jam ever: A song that sounds completely terribly, and is also super sexually creepy? I think we’ve got him!

The lawsuit alleges that “two basketball players raped [the student] at a May 2008 party at Townhouses, campus housing on Pershing Avenue, and that a third player came into the room where she was and assaulted her as the first two players were leaving.”

Pacific spokesman Richard Rojo isn’t denying that the incident occurred. But he is denying that it was rape, saying: “We would call it date rape.”

You know what date rape is? I’ll give you a hint: It’s right there in the name! It’s RAPE. Not to Rojo, RecordNet reports:

Rojo said the university considers “outright rape” and date rape to be different, in that date rape does not involve “a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly.”

It’s great to hear that rape is now a completely random crime that occurs only in proximity to a particular type of flora (bushes). Since 80 percent of rapists are known to the victim, this new development should severely cut down on rapes! Unfortunately, it also means that a lot more men are going to be getting raped, since victims are chosen entirely at random. I say, burn the bushes! Burn them! Then, when Richard Rojo has no more on-campus rapes to report, he can write his own dictionary or something. I’d buy it!

When I first described Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It (On the Alcohol)” as a date rape jam, I lamented that the song didn’t allow Foxx’s female target on the dance floor any input into the situation. “But what about the woman in the song?” I asked. “Of course, no holla back joint has dropped from Foxx’s fictional honey, so we can’t tell what she’s really thinking.”

But I think I’ve found her! And she is Lady Gaga. In extreme boozin’ song “Just Dance,” Gaga declares:

“I’ve had a little bit too much, much.”

“Where are my keys? I lost my phone.”

“What’s going on on the floor?”

“I can’t see straight anymore.”

“What’s the name of this club?”

“How’d I turn my shirt inside out?”

Anyway, Lady Gaga is wasted. So what does she want to do now?:

Just dance, gonna be okay, da da doo-doo-mmm
Just dance, spin that record babe, da da doo-doo-mmm

Cool, whatever. Just dance, Lady. But goddamnit, here comes up-and-coming R&B artist Colby O’Donis:

Shawty I can see that you got so much energy
The way you’re twirlin’ up them hips ’round and ’round
And now there’s no reason at all why you can’t leave here with me
In the meantime stay and let me watch you break it down

Typical. Gaga just wants to dance! “Just,” as in “only the dancing,” is even in the title of the song. Colby O wants her to dance into his pants—and there’s “no reason at all” why that shouldn’t happen. Here’s one reason: She can’t figure out how her shirt got turned inside out.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how this one ends because the lyrics then descend into incomprehensibility. Most agree that Gaga is saying “Spend the last dough / In your pocko” in the end there, but one interpretation offers a much more chilling ending: “It’s been molesto / I got it / And your popped coll.”

Molesto . . . Popped collar . . . AHHHHHHHHHH!

And then, very quickly, a commenter did a stupid thing!

“doovinator,” who appears in his photo with a young child wrapped around his neck, writes:

A woman once took me home with her; I thought we had some real, if drunken, feelings for each other after we’d met at a party. She took a shower, joined me in her bed, things progressed the way you might think they would, and I thought we had a lovely encounter, though she seemed a little bit tense and I mentioned it to her. She responded, “well, you’d be tense too, if you’d just been RAPED!”

Wait a minute, I said, that’s not how I saw it AT ALL. We didn’t exactly discuss our intentions beforehand, but she joined me in bed, nude and apparently willing, and hadn’t offered any resistance when I made my advances. She may have whispered “no” once or twice, but didn’t make any effort to stop me or even slow me down much. Some may call it “date rape”, but I really liked her, thought we were doing fine and would have loved to have had a further relationship. That didn’t happen.

~DJ

“Some may call it ‘date rape’, but I really liked her.” Okay, now I am taking a shower.

I’ve been writing a lot about date rape in popular culture lately, particularly in music. Most of my treatment has involved parsing the lyrics of popular songs with rape-scenario undertones: Asher Roth’s soft indictment of college date rape; A Tribe Called Quest’s anti-date rape, menstruation-joke opus; Slick Rick’s anal-themed rape song. But do the songs at least sound good? And does that make them worse?

Yesterday, commenter Jelita Jane made a good point about date-rape songs: some of them are terrible (Britney Spears‘ “Blur”), some of them are awesome (Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night’—don’t deny it)—and the success of the song often has little to do with how positive or negative its message is. Jelita Jane writes:

[The Toadies] have a song called Tyler that fully outlines a stalker/rapist’s nighttime jaunt into his obsession’s home. I don’t remember all the lyrics but I clearly recall, “I stumble in the hallway, outside her bedroom door/ I hear her call out to me, I hear the fear in her voice/ she pulls her covers tighter, I press against her door/ I will be with her tonight” it’s the creepiest song but somehow it’s still pretty awesome too . . .

A Hierarchy of Date Rape Jams:

Sweet, Positive Jams: Ever since Tupac “died,” artists with the ability to craft sweet jams with positive messages have been few and far between. The best bet in crafting a song about rape that’s good (and good for you!) is to go heavy on the social satire: i.e. babies being fed malt liquor; period jokes. See: Amanda Palmer’s “Oasis”; A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Infamous Date Rape.”

Sweet, Neutral Jams: These songs are heavily date-rapey, but are, at least, mitigated through storytelling devices: i.e., told from the perspective of a creepy rapist/murderer; told through a fucked-up dream about rape and murder. See: Toadies’ “Tyler”; Prince Paul’s “Beautiful Night”

Meh: Just about anyone can write a middling track with date rape undertones. Pass. See: Sublime’s “Date Rape”; Ludacris’ “One More Drink”; 50 Cent’s “She Wants It”; Asher Roth’s “I Love College”

Terrible, Neutral Jams: Britney Spears should never write “message” songs! Like the rest of her songs, they still don’t mean anything, and with Brit-Brit, it’s about 70-30 that the song also totally sucks. See: Britney Spears’ “Blur”

Terrible, Negative Jams: The hottest place in Billboard chart hell should be reserved for really, really, really bad songs that don’t just condone—but advocate—rape. One reader suggested that listening to Slick Rick’s ode to raping women in the butt is “more like actually getting date raped.” Listening to Anal Cunt is, similarly, an unpleasant experience, but at least you can’t tell what the fuck they’re talking about. See: Anal Cunt’s “You Were Too Ugly to Rape”; Slick Rick’s “Adults Only”

Sweet, Negative Jams: These songs—which are fucking sweet except for their terrible date-rape themes—are the most dangerous of all. Oftentimes, the jam is so sweet, the hook so catchy, Rod Stewart so awesome, that the underlying rape message gets by without comment. I listened to Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It (On the Alcohol)” three times before I realized how noxious it was. And it took CP movie reviewer Tricia Olszewski to reveal that epically sweet jam “Tonight’s the Night” is actually about holing a virgin in your house in order to have sex with her. See: Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night”; Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It (On the Alcohol); Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”

Terrible, Positive Jams: Still on the lookout for terrible jams with really positive date-rape messages. While a really sweet jam might cause record labels to overlook the song’s date-rapiness, a positive message can never make up for a really bad song. Might Kelly Osborne’s “Don’t Touch Me While I’m Sleeping” qualify?

Last November, I outlined some advice for well-meaning sexists on How Not to Advise Women Not to Get Raped. The post was in response to a guy named Aaron P. Taylor, who, in response to getting shut down by a female in da club, penned a manifesto entitled “Advice 4 Women: How to NOT Get a ‘Deserved Raping.’” The essay warned women against behaviors that indicate that she really “wants it”—even when her actual words (in the case of Taylor’s target, “Naaaaaaah!”) indicate that she actually does not want to have sex!

These behaviors include:

* flirting

* dancing (repeatedly)

* putting your face close to a man’s face

* kissing

* wearing a shirt that “shows just about everything but her nipples, then have a 30-minute conversation with a guy about how voluptuous and sensitive her breasts are, then spend half the night stroking her hand against the outer-lining of said breasts.” (It happens).

* anything else that gives a man a boner

Obviously, this argument—that women shouldn’t do certain things unless they’re down to fuck—is based entirely on a man’s expectations, and his own preferred end to every female interaction (sex). In reality, women aren’t soley interacting with men in order to eventually cause him to orgasm. And just because a behavior is “sexy” doesn’t make it “suggestive.” Most of the time, a dance is just a dance. A shirt is just a shirt. Putting your face close to a man’s face is just putting your face close to a man’s face. And a man getting a boner from any of that is his personal problem. Even if a woman is grinding her ass on your pelvis, all she’s suggesting is that—shocker!—she wants to grind her ass on your pelvis. Really, the only way a woman can actually suggest she wants to have sex with you is by saying, “I want to have sex with you!” It’s that easy.

One response to Taylor’s essay that hasn’t been raised, however, is how fucking shitty life would be for everybody if “dancing” really meant “fucking.” Taylor’s worldview offers one big problem for guys like Taylor: If women flirted, danced, wore revealing clothing, or did anything else that men happened to find arousing only in direct preparation for sex, da club would be a very lonely place. Under this model:

* A woman would never look at a man, lest he expect her to speak to him.

* A woman would never speak to a man, lest he expect her to flirt with him.

* A woman would never flirt with a man, lest he expect her to dance with him.

* A woman would never dance with a man, lest he expect her to kiss him.

* A woman would never kiss a man, lest he expect her to fuck him.

* A woman would never fuck a man, lest he expect the right to fuck her any time he wants, in any way he wants, in any orifice, whether she likes it or not.

In other words, women would never, ever, ever go to da club, lest a man chose to administer her a “deserved raping” for showing up. Don’t you see, Aaron P. Taylor? It’s a prison of your own design! Taylor is not just advising women how “not to get a deserved raping.” He’s also advising women how to make Aaron P. Taylor’s life a living hell. Which is, actually, the only reason women might want to refrain from doing whatever the fuck they want to do on the dance floor.

Photo by Yoshimai

Date Rape Anthem: The Music For Misanthropes blog suggests 50 Cent featuring Justin Timberlake’s “She Wants It.”

Relevant Lyrics:

She she, she want it, I want to give it to her
She know that, it’s right here for her
I want to, see you break it down
I’m ballin’, throwing money around

She work it girl, she work the pole
She break it down, she take it low
She fine as hell, she about the dough
She doing her thing out on the floor

Why It’s So Rapey: Hmm, how does 50 Cent know “she want it”? Oh yeah, she’s a stripper. Who flirts with you for money. Not the same thing, 50.

—

Date Rape Anthem: Commenter Cronin suggests Prince Paul’s “Beautiful Night (Manic Psychopath)” [Watch the video at FunnyOrDie].

Relevant Lyrics:

Took this girl out to the movies you know
Dinner, the whole shit, you know
We had the lovely time, y’know..
Took her back to the crib, y’know
I spent a lot of money on her
I-I-I passed off, so I felt like she should pass off (mm-hmm)
Y’know? But she didn’t.. so I took it!

Why It’s So Rapey: This rape-theft-murder scenario is presented as a dream, egged on by a Freudian interpreter. It’s actually pretty sweet. But as Cronin points out, it’s also “pretty freakin’ rapey.”

—

Date Rape Anthem: Rob of DCBlog43 suggests Ludacris featuring T. Pain’s “One More Drink”

Relevant Lyrics:

If I take one more drink,
I’m gon’ end up fuckin’ you,
Is that watchu wanna do, shawty?
If I take one more drink,
I’m gon’ end up fuckin’ you,
You too.

Why It’s So Rapey: This song, at least, asks shawty what she wanna do. Still, she’s only asked her opinion after T. Pain announces he’s “gon’ end up fuckin’” her (anyway?). Plus, T. Pain is a repeat offender.

The Sexist is out for the weekend, so we’re wrapping things up a little early this week. Today, kick off your Memorial Day holiday early by tying on a CockBib, throwing on some denim jeans, and blasting that new Jamie Foxx joint on the radio. Also, the Sexist reached its 1,000th blog post this week, which surely means something about where my life is headed.

1. Advice on How Not to Advise Women Not to Get Raped, in which a rape apologist by the name of “Rational Reader” rises again!

2. The Five Most Inappropriate CockBib Phrases, in which “Pussy Killer” isn’t even the most inappropriate of all!

3. George F. Will Hates Jeans, in which the rich shall not deign to dress in the uniform of the proles.

4. Top Five Date Rape Anthems, or, a soundtrack to your acquaintance-rape-justification.

5. Why Sex Positivity is Bad for Feminism, in which I probably would have headlined this differently if I knew anyone was going to actually read it.

Date Rape Anthem: Slick Rick’s “Adults Only.” This one came recommended by a friend: “I think listening to the Slick Rick song is more like actually getting date raped,” he said. [Listen to the song here].

Relevant Lyrics:

Now my mouth start foamin
The lights dim were kissin and my hands start roamin in her drawers
GIRL: “stop!”
Knew she was joking
Cause I aint even fuck her,
and her pussy was soaking wet
Already had her tit out
If I play my cards right,
fuck her dead in the hole she shit out

Why It’s So Rapey: And how! This is a song about how Slick Rick always surprises his sex partner by sticking his dick in her ass before gaining her consent. Rick! Even if she is an adult, she has to consent to every act, even—believe it or not—”fuck[ing] her dead in the hole she shit out”! Let’s see if she’s into that:

1. “GIRL: stop!”

2. “Meanwhile she acted quite passive”

3. “GIRL: ahh rick it hurts take it out of me!”

4. “Squirmin away although the table was barrin’ her”

5. “She said it felt like a bull dowser barrin’ her / Sqealin about she couldnt take it anymore in her”

6. “GIRL: rick Im not really into this ass kick / Meanwhile, Rick cummin’ by the gallon”

Yeah. she’s not. Rapist.

Photo by basurablancaphotos

Date Rape Anthem: Britney Spears’ “Blur”

Relevant Lyrics:

Who are you? What’d we do, last night?
Hey, yeah, yeah
Who are you? What’d we do, last night?
Hey, yeah, yeah

Can’t remember what I did last night
Maybe I shouldn’t have given in
But I just couldn’t fight
Hope I didn’t but I think I might’ve
Everything, everything is still a blur

Why It’s So Rapey: I feel bad bringing Britney into this. I really do. After all, Spears didn’t even write this track: this date rape joint is the product of three songwriters—Marcella Araiac, Stacy Barth, and Nathanial Hills—who are responsible for putting the words in the victim’s mouth.

Reviews have been mixed:

” Sometimes it’s forgettable, sometimes it’s downright weird—as on “Blur,” which lays out a date-rape scenario and then leaves it hanging there. By refusing to be either regretful or angry, it’s more disturbing than any Tori Amos song.” — Jack Feerick, Popdose

“Best of all is Blur, a dark, Danja-produced track. Some have suggested it’s about date rape, and while that’s debatable, it’s still a deeply unsettling song . . . It’s a sobering counterpoint to the fluff that makes up much of the album, and tellingly, it’s where Britney sounds most at home.” -– Nick Bond, Perth City Search (okay, a positive take was hard to find).

So Feerick doesn’t really believe the rape scenario. At the very least, he argues that the song makes Britney out to be a bad victim of sexual assault—isn’t it irresponsible for her to feel nothing about this “blur”? Bond’s glowing recommendation, on the other hand, suggests that Brit-Brit is great at playing the victim—she even sounds “at home” in the territory.

The song sucks, but it does raise an interesting point about narratives of date rape in the media. How creepy is it that Spears, who seems to have little artistic control over her own career and did not chip in at all on this song, is asked to lend her AutoTune talents to a date rape themed track with a hook that repeats, out of laziness or sheer insensitivity, “yeah, yeah . . . yeah, yeah”?

For that matter, how many song, film, and television representations of date rape are actually written and performed by victims of the crime (or people who take any effort to understand it)? How many are just guessing, leaving it to the victim performer to “play the victim” well enough to turn the song a “sobering counterpart” instead of just “downright weird”?

How about we get more to the point and call it: People Who Shouldn’t Have Sex: Rapists.

Date Rape Anthem: Asher Roth’s “I Love College”

Relevant Lyrics:

I can’t tell you what I learned from school but
I could tell you a story or two, um
Yeah, of course I learned some rules
Like don’t pass out with your shoes on (get the sharpie)

And don’t leave the house ’til the booze gone (no we’re not leaving)
And don’t have sex if she’s too gone
When it comes to condoms put two on (trust me)
Then tomorrow night find a new jawn

Why It’s So Rapey: On the surface, Roth’s love-letter to undergraduate debauchery condemns date rape (”don’t have sex if she’s too gone”). So why would this Village Voice detractor call the Morrisville, Pa. rapper’s first album “nothing more than a soundtrack for date rape”?

Maybe it has something to do with the context of Roth’s one-line defense of consensual sex. At the beginning of his video for “I Love College,” Roth awakes on a fraternity house couch with a half-naked girl passed out on his lap. He doesn’t date-rape her: He just pushes her off onto the floor and starts drinking again. Later, when the party is in full-swing, Roth boasts that he drank the party house dry as he “danced my face off and had this one girl completely naked.” He doesn’t date-rape her: He just uses her naked body to boost his cred in a rap song.

Roth’s song does sets limits for consensual sex—don’t do her if “she’s too gone”—while simultaneously urging college students to push those limits by getting wasted and getting it on—in other words, doing her when she’s juuuust gone enough. In a fraternity house full of people partying naked until all the booze is gone, “she’s too gone” might start to seem pretty relative.

Meanwhile, one in four women will be sexually assaulted while in college, making the listener wonder how Roth learned the “rules” of college behavior. Roth knows now not to a) pass out with your shoes on, b) leave before the booze is gone, c) date-rape a girl, and d) have unprotected sex. Has he learned from experience?

Still, it’s enough for commenters on feminist blog Feministe to defend Roth against charges of racism and sexism: “He does the bare minimum of saying, ‘…don’t have sex if she’s too far gone,’ whatever his motives,” one writes. “I honestly didn’t expect that much because date rape is usually so fucking hilarious to frat boys.”

Date Rape Anthem: A Tribe Called Quest’s “The Infamous Date Rape”

Relevant Lyrics:

I won’t cry over spilled milk
If you won’t let me take you to the Hilt
I don’t wanna bone you that much
That I would go for the unforbidden touch
I’m not the type that would go for that
I’ll have to fetch a brand new cat
Baby, baby, baby I don’t wanna be rude
I know because of your bloody attitude
I know why you act that way
It usually happens on the 28th day
I respect that crazily
When you’re done with the pads can you come check me
This ain’t a joint to disrespect you
Because one head ain’t better than two
Check it out

Why It’s Rapey: Critics have disagreed as to whether this track, off 1991’s The Low End Theory, furthers misogyny or simply comments on it. How do we deal with a song that, on the one hand, discourages date rape, but on the other, assumes that the woman only doesn’t want to have sex because she’s bleeding out of her vagina?

Professor Geoffrey Sirc, in his defense of teaching rap in writing classes, quotes the work of a student named Taika. Taika attributes this disconnect to a “code of the street, that if applied to rap music will explain many of the misunderstood lyrics.” Taika writes:

I evaluated the ‘Infamous Date Rape’ using the code. I looked for a message inside the message and came out with something much stronger that what is on the surface. That is what we as a nation of people need to learn how to do when it come to rap because if you judge rap without the code you are missing a valuable message and sometimes even a warning that is in rap music.

And so, you have the “wrong time of the month” joke layered on top of the warning: “I don’t wanna bone you that much / That I would go for the unforbidden touch.” But A Tribe Called Quest’s ambivalence toward the issue extends beyond period jokes. The song details two “date rape” experiences. First, Q Tip leads with a verse declaring “Listen to the rhyme, it’s a black date fact / Percentile rate of date rape is fat,” and suggests how men can do their part to prevent it: “If the vibe ain’t right, huh, ya leavin.” The next verse is less promising: Phife details an enthusiastically consensual sexual encounter which ends with a false reporter: “girly girl cried rape, yo, I didn’t really need it.”

On the one hand, the song suggests that men can, and should, take responsibility for preventing rape. On the other, it furthers the idea that women only object to rape “when the meow is completed.” I think we might be in need of a third, female perspective here—as Q Tip says, “This ain’t a joint to disrespect you /
Because one head ain’t better than two.”

Yesterday, I assembled a Justify Your Date Rape playlist of five popular songs which deal with forcing someone you know to have sex with you. Most of the commenters on the post were arguing over the definition of “date rape”—and whether Jamie Foxx’s joint, “Blame It (On the Alcohol)” qualifies (read the lyrics to the song here).

Mdesus wrote:

I don’t believe that the Foxx song describes date rape. In fact I don’t think it even comes close. . . . This girl gets drunk, and is flirting with these guys. She is talking about doing something she doesn’t normally do (sex). She’s not getting “date raped” she’s making a poor decision while she’s drunk. California may have some retarded law that basically says if the girl (and only the girl never the guy) is drunk then it’s automatically date rape. That does not make it true.

Isaac Beekman wrote:

Date rape exists, in part, because of a perceived blurry line between consent, and assault. That line ain’t really so blurry until people go around blurring it; for instance by asserting that something is ‘rapey’, meaning rape-like.

jenna wrote:

do you need the opinion of the person featured in something like foxx’s opus to qualify it as rape? so, do you need an inbalance of power to be experienced by BOTH the raper and the victim? the narration is sort of his perception of the situation, which overall has this sort of ‘i will conquer, you are powerless’ kind of feel. so that’s rapey on one part of the equation. but like does the girl also have to experience a sense of degradation or crappiness? . . . basically, whose experience of the situation matters more when you are establishing whether something is rape? the perpetrator’s or the victims? does it have to be both?

A friend of mine put it another way: “Can’t a woman be coy anymore?”

So, what’s rape, what’s “rapey,” and what’s just “coy”? Let’s start with the legal stuff.

Definitions vary be jurisdiction, but In the District of Columbia, you can commit First Degree Sexual Abuse by having sex with someone after using physical force, verbally threatening them, drugging them, or otherwise “rendering them unconscious”—which could include intentionally feeding them so many drinks that they pass out.

You can commit Second Degree Sexual Abuse by having sex with someone after just waiting until they are unconscious (even if you did not “render” them passed out), or having sex with them while they are incapable of knowing what’s going on, incapable of “declining participation” in the act, or incapable of “communicating unwillingness” to participate in the act. In other words, if they’re really crunk.

Misdemeanor Sexual Abuse, the least serious offense in D.C., can still carry up to 180 days in prison and a fine of $1,000. You can commit this misdemeanor by having sex with someone without their express permission.

So, let’s take Foxx’s song as an example. Did any sexual abuse occur in the song? No—this joint ends before they leave the club. That’s why I describe Foxx’s song as “rapey”—in my opinion, it encourages and even glamorizes tactics of date rapists. In other words, it lays out a scenario that could likely lead to a date rape. What tactics does Foxx use that could lead to jail time?

a) Not taking no for an answer: willfully denying the woman’s expressed verbal “unwillingness” to have sex (”she said she usually don’t / but i know that she front”)

b) Attempting to alter her state of consciousness in order to have sex with her (”I ain’t saying what you wanna do / but you know we probly gon’ do” . . . “ooh see, she spilled some drink on me / and now I’m knowing she tipsy”)

If Foxx and this woman did later have sex, he could be in trouble if a judge, jury, and an alcohol toxicology expert witness confirmed that she either a) was passed out, b) wasn’t passed out but didn’t know what was going on, c) wasn’t passed out but couldn’t communicate that she didn’t want to have sex, or simply d) did not expressly consent to the act. It doesn’t help that Foxx clearly announced his intentions prior to the act in order to coerce this woman into bed with alcohol (remember, if you attempt to commit any of the above offenses, you can be liable as well). Oh, and if T. Pain (and his vocoder) get involved? any of the acts, when “aided or abetted by one or more accomplices,” can carry a sentence 1.5 times harsher than the usual maximum jail time.

If Foxx and this woman do have sex at a time when she’s awake and mentally capable of consent, and she does consent to all the acts, and she’s of age, then Foxx is probably off the hook, legally, as a “date rapist.” Still, any attempt to have sex with someone by encouraging that person to “make a mistake” by fucking you is disgusting and rapey (this goes for men and women).

But what about the woman in the song? Of course, no holla back joint has dropped from Foxx’s fictional honey, so we can’t tell what she’s really thinking. How can we tell if she’s just “flirting” and acting “coy”?

Again, as far as the legal system is concerned, it doesn’t really matter if she is into Jamie Foxx, if she really, really, wants to have sex with him, and if she’s only denying his advances in order to play “hard to get.” All that matters is whether she’s legally able to consent to the act when the act occurs (a point that, we can assume, comes after the song ends).

More problematic, however, is the fact that we don’t hear from this woman—and that her actual inclination to fuck Jamie Foxx doesn’t seem to matter to Jamie Foxx (or to, you know, the recording industry in general). Instead, Foxx places this woman in an outdated model of female consent that allows him to fuck her in the easiest way possible, (before the weekend is over, and he skips town)—whether she wants it or not

The model Foxx choses is a familiar one: Woman says no, man coerces her with the aid of alcohol until she says yes. Implicit in the Foxx Model is the idea that women are never allowed to fully, enthusiastically, and SOBERLY consent to sex. If Jamie Foxx approached a woman, asked her to have sex, and she consented on her own terms, that would make her “easy.” And so, Foxx insists that the woman find outside force to “blame” for her promiscuity (in this case, henny, vodka, and tron). That way, she never has to admit that she desires to experience any sexual pleasure (and she doesn’t get to blame Foxx, either).

This is why the song is so problematic: under the Foxx model, the opinion of the woman he chooses to target is unimportant. If the woman doesn’t want to have sex with him, he assumes that all she needs is more alcohol to overcome her “coyness.” If she does want to have sex with him, he still assumes she needs more alcohol—to cover for her “sluttiness.” Either way, Foxx’s interest is in devaluing the woman’s right to choose—even if the choice is to fuck Jamie Foxx.

But Foxx and Pain aren’t the first to make raping someone you know into record gold. Below, five of the most notable date rape anthems in recording history.

Date Rape Anthem: Jamie Foxx’s “Blame It (On the Alcohol),” in which Foxx attempts to fuck a woman who “says she usually don’t” but that he knows is “frontin” because “she don’t wanna seem like she’s easy.” (But she is). Foxx knows she’s ready to admit she wants it when “she spilled some drink on me / And now I’m knowin’ she tipsy.” My neighbor has this song as her ringtone.

Relevant Lyrics:

Blame it on the goose, gotcha feeling loose
Blame it on the ‘tron, gotcha panties off
Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol, blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol
Blame it on the vodka, blame it on the henny
Blame it on the blue tap got you feeling dizzy
Blame it on the ah-ah-ah-alcohol, blame it on the ah-ah ah-ah ah-al-co-hol

Why It’s So Rapey: She doesn’t want it until she’s had such a serious combination of cocktails that she’s spilling drinks on Jamie Foxx. Foxx, of course, knew better than she alllll alongggg.

—

Date Rape Anthem: The Toadies’ “Possum Kingdom,” a first-person appeal to a future rape/murder victim to go with the Toadies’ ultimate skeezy dude “behind the boathouse.”

Relevant Lyrics:

Make up your mind
Decide to walk with me
Around the lake tonight
By my side
I’m not gonna lie
I’ll not be a gentleman
Behind the boathouse
I’ll show you my dark secret

Why It’s So Rapey: More a date-murder anthem, the Toadies still suggest that she’ll “Give it up to me, Give it up to me” before she becomes his “angel.”

—

Date Rape Anthem: Sublime’s “Date Rape,” a ska jaunt through a woman’s acquaintance rape, her legal battle, and the rapist’s punishment. Popular among Arizona middle school students.

Relevant Lyrics:

Thats when things got out of control.
She didnt want to, he had his way.
She said, lets go
He said, no way!
Come on babe its your lucky day.
Shut your mouth, were gonna do it my way.
Come on baby dont be afraid,
If it wasnt for date rape Id never get laid.

Why It’s So Rapey: This date rape song has a positive moral ending: “It does not pay / Drunk and horny.” But it then goes on to advocate for prison rape: “Well, I cant take pity on men of his kind,” Sublime’s Bradley Nowell sings. “Even though he now takes it in the behind.”

—

Date Rape Anthem: Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” a tug-of-war duet between an unwilling female and a drink-mixing male. Penned in 1944, decades before the term “date rape” entered our collective consciousness.

Relevant Lyrics:

I really can’t stay—Baby it’s cold outside
I’ve got to go away—Baby it’s cold outside
This evening has been—Been hoping that you’d drop in
So very nice—I’ll hold your hands, they’re just like ice
My mother will start to worry—Beautiful, what’s your hurry
My father will be pacing the floor—Listen to the fireplace roar
So really I’d better scurry—Beautiful, please don’t hurry
well Maybe just a half a drink more—Put some music on while I pour

The neighbors might think—Baby, it’s bad out there
Say, what’s in this drink—No cabs to be had out there
I wish I knew how —Your eyes are like starlight now
To break this spell—I’ll take your hat, your hair looks swell
I ought to say no, no, no, sir—Mind if I move a little closer
At least I’m gonna say that I tried—What’s the sense in hurting my pride
I really can’t stay—Baby don’t hold out
Ahh, but it’s cold outside

Why It’s So Rapey: Dubbed by Urban Dictionary as the “Christmas Date Rape Song,” “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” has endured as a classic date rape anthem because (a) it was ahead of its time; (b) the lyrics are unimaginably date-rapey—the woman tells the man her “answer is no,” but he continues to ply her with drinks and exaggerated weather-based fears until she sleeps over; and (c) it’s nevertheless celebrated as a Christmas classic.

—

Date Rape Anthem: Anal Cunt’s “You Were Too Ugly to Rape So I Beat the Shit Out of You,” a song which claims to have lyrics.

Relevant Lyrics:

I drank a case of whiskey
And you looked like Jeanine Jizm
I drank another case of whiskey
And you looked like Roseannie Barr

Why It’s So Rapey: Okay, I’m not sure “I drank a case of whiskey” qualifies as a date, and Anal Cunt does decide to “beat the shit” out of her instead of raping her, and I’m pretty sure they don’t actually say anything in this song, but I think it still counts.

I’m proud of ASU for sticking to its famously low standards. Arizona State may be the “Harvard of Date Rape” (classy, Daily Show), but at least it won’t bestow useless honors on just anyone.

In this week’s friendly neighborhood chat, Sady of Tiger Beatdown and I hang up our cardigans, lock the door so Mr. McFeely can’t come in, and talk about something that’s been on our mind for a while: those rapey filmmakers who rape you again, in the movie theater. Hey, kids. It’s okay. It’s not your fault. And you don’t have to let Seth Rogen touch you in that way ever again.

SADY: good afternoon or evening!

AMANDA: any time is a good time for high-brow discussion on the art of raping women on film

SADY: ha, yes! i myself have been spectacularly dour and serious on the subject as of late. i think i’m going to stop posting words and just type frowny faces from now on. seth rogen, :(. it’s funny, because i think that telling stories about rape from the perspective of ladies who’ve lived through it can be totally important, you know?

AMANDA: are there any rape scenes in movies that you think are important? i think the scene in Boys Don’t Cry was important.

SADY: yeah, that one was huge. it was intense and it was scary and it totally centered Brandon Teena and the fact that the rape was a crime about power and gender and the fact that they viewed him as “really” a woman and wanted to drive that home through forced sex. it’s funny but i think a lot of the more interesting rape scenes i’ve seen have been in TV. Mad Men—Joan gets raped, and it’s the same thing, it’s about the fact that her boyfriend is threatened by her power and her sexuality and wants to take that away from her. I guess what I’m saying is that you can have rape in your movie and I will NOT EVEN YELL AT YOU, if it’s a story about sexual assault and what that means and what it does to a person. not something that uses sexual assault to add spice or shock value or whatever. because the thing about rape: once that shit happens, you have to LIVE with it. it’s not a thing that you can just resolve with some punching or with a laugh line or whatever.

AMANDA: yeah, and I think it’s an interesting dynamic when it happens that way—particularly when the rape is committed by the protagonist, as in Observe and Report (ostensibly). because, really, rape is actually a pretty common thing to happen to a woman, and a lot of times the people who commit them are otherwise normal seeming friends, etc.—people who might even be protagonists in motion pictures!

SADY: Ha! Indeed! I think the thing about “Observe & Report” style rape, which is not even that different from your usual how-do-we-make-it-clear-this-guy-is-a-villain-oh-I-know-raping move, is that in each case it’s kind of about deploying rape as your “edgy” move. Oh, look, rape, BUT SHE LIKES IT, isn’t that crazy? Oh, an incredibly brutal rape, LOOK HOW BRUTAL THIS RAPING IS, isn’t that crazy?

From Brohem Can Sukkit: In response to Observe and Report’s “edgy” date rape scene:

Rogen: “when we’re having sex and she’s unconscious…”

You’re not “having sex” when one of you is UNCONSCIOUS you disgusting piece of shit! Now I even regret just having rented Knocked Up. I’ll never see anything associated with this scumbag again. He Fatty Arbuckled himself here as far as I’m concerned.

How many Hollywood stars can Seth Rogen drunk fuck on-screen before his illustrious career is over?

Observe and Report, Seth Rogen’s new film, is a dark rom-com about a mall security guard in love with a beautiful, alcoholic flashing victim Brandi (played by Anna Faris). Rogen’s character unsuspectingly date-rapes Brandi after she downs several shots, pops some pills, vomits all over herself, and passes out. But it’s okay, because she actually wanted it.

The clip from the scene is at the 2:40 mark. Rogen’s take on date rape:

SETH ROGEN: when we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay:

BRANDI: “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?”

See, she just prefers to fuck while sleeping! And so, an entire theater’s ambivalence toward date rape is miraculously resolved in a good, long, laugh, and the date rapist who is meant to be protecting Brandi from the penis flasher remains the hero.

If Observe and Report were really in the business of edgy, “dangerous,” black comedy, Brandi would leave Rogen for the arms of an even more heinous sexual abuser, like a gang rapist, then leave him for a child molesting middle-school teacher, before finally settling down with a serial prostitute killer. If only somebody in Hollywood had the balls to do it.

I’ve been struggling for a little while with what exactly I find so annoying about women who harbor fantasies of being raped. Now, thanks to a guy named “Miles Morse,” I think I’ve figured it out!

Generally, the rape fantasy falls under that protected class of private, consensual, adult activity—it’s two (or more, whatever) consenting adults engaging in a consensual role-play about not consenting. As such, the “fantasy” part of “rape fantasy” seems to resolve the problem—you can’t be raped if you want it, so there’s not much here to criticize. That is, until you write up your fantasy for Nerve.

In “I Roofied My Wife to Save Our Marriage,” Morse details his experience slipping his wife a sedative and taking her home to “rape” her—at her request. The tawdry details Morse includes here—the medicine cabinet concoction, the role-play at the local bar, the fuzzy grope against the car door—aren’t as disturbing as the details he leaves out. There’s no indication in Morse’s piece that he realizes that for most women, rape is a torture, not a luxury.

In Morse’s piece, the rape fantasy stops being a private preference and enters the realm of public offensiveness. The rape fantasy is not unlike the urge for a rich person to “slum it,” acting “ghetto” for a night to indulge in fantasies of being poor. It’s also not unlike the tendency for a happy, healthy person to daydream about falling ill or being hit by a car in order to gain sympathy from friends and family.

Of course, fantasies like this are fairly common, and can surely make for intriguing first-person writing—when the narrator acknowledges that they are the afflictions of a privileged class. By not mentioning rape in an essay on rape fantasy, Morse comes off as the college kid who throws ironic gang signs while sipping a ‘40 in his dorm room (Full disclosure: I have done this)—his harmless fantasy trivializes another’s exploitation.

I’ve heard that rape fantasies allow women to relinquish control in a controlled setting, to defy social norms, to allow their sexual lives to subsume their intellectual ones for a few moments. But when it comes time for these women—or their co-conspirator husbands—to sit down, think on their experiences, and write a in a public forum on their consensual rape fantasy, they might do well to let their thinking brains re-enter the equation.

Photo by Bicycle Bob.