As I’ve mentioned once or twice before, I am in law school. This semester, we’re taking criminal law.
Now, this one professor irritates me on sort of a low level; he says “um” a lot, and that always has bothered me, he shows movies that I think are a little ridiculous, and most irritatingly of all, he always has “he” as the aggressor pronoun and “she” as the victim pronoun. But, these things are fairly waivable.
Something happen today that really irritated me.
We are talking about “intent” and what constitutes that. We are following the Model Penal Code, which outlines in Section 2.02 what the general requirements of culpability. Subsection 2)b) relates what it means by “knowingly” committing a crime.
The language of the MPC is in legalese, so in order to clarify what this stuff means, he gave an example. The one he gave was this:
“Party A (defendant) spikes punch with alcohol b/c he wants to seduce one of the guests but knows another guest is violent allergic to alcohol.
He can be penalized for homicide if the allergic guest dies.”
I raise my hand. “Isn’t that rape, not seduction”.
Him, “Well, that might be “date-rape”, but what we’re focusing on is the homicide, not him getting lucky”.
WTF ponies?!?
We’re going to be LAWYERS. Aside from cops, we are going to be the people most involved in the criminal process. If professors are teaching us that poisoning women is just a wink-wink, nudge-nudge “getting lucky” lubricant, we are normalizing rape.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard this idea that getting a girl drunk is just an easier way to get her into bed. I can’t possibly imagine what’s so fascinating about having sex with a woman who isn’t even there to give equal effort. But this is even worse, because arguably, those are women who knowingly drink- this is about someone making them drunk with her consent.
This is what feminists mean by a “rape culture”.
That’s sickening.
Crikeyfuck.
Not that you were obligated to do so (especially since the professor, I’m given to understand, controls your grade), but did you say this in class? Even if most of the people there were like, “gawd, someone make that feminist shut up,” maybe a few of them would listen, and in the future, notice. Maybe.
(Aside: Perhaps it was unwise for me to publishing a post about The Little Mermaid and dildos directly after this one.)
It’s funny; the mere question “isn’t that rape” got the class going “gawd, would someone make the feminist shut up?!?”
I don’t think I’m that much of a feminist, but apparently I got the reputation as THE feminist in the class.
Ugh. I recently met a *sexual assault unit* detective with a similar attitude.
Hey, well done. Saying stuff like that is how you keep the rape culture from propagating. I can’t believe the professor decided to up the ante with support for drink-spiking creeps.
As a grad student at Texas, I had a right-wing professor claim in a big lecture class that each execution saves eight innocent lives according to some bullshit study. (Obviously he did not refer to it as ‘some bullshit study’.) I whispered to my fellow TA, who was actually working for a nonprofit that tried to keep innocent people from being executed, and he interrupted and got the professor to admit that the study probably wasn’t something to rely on.
Anyway, somebody has to get up and block that kind of stuff from being transmitted in a law school class. Goodness.
Please tell me this *ahem* gentleman is rapidly approaching retirement age? Please?
Oh, and best not to go drinking with this guy or even attend a party where he has access to the punchbowl, since clearly he requires a semi-conscious companion in order to “get lucky”. Ew.
The funny thing is, outside of feminist blogs, no one even seems to understand what I’m talking about. The idea that you shouldn’t ply women with drinks to get them to “consent”, and that if you do it’s “rape” is hit with some heavy resistence.
I have a thread on facebook where a friend of my husband’s keeps talking about how people need to have “personal responsibility” for getting drunk and horny.
Not on him getting lucky?
My shit.
Is there any percentage in complaining about this? Maybe not now, but after the semester? I would do it at some point: I know at my university this is the sort of thing that would, in fact, get listened to, the kind of thing administration does take seriously.
And let me add, if you’re worried, you won’t get him fired, or even in big trouble: he’ll just have it pointed out to him, by his dean or whoever, that this isn’t cool behavior anymore (as if it ever was) and maybe he should cut it out.
I get violent reactions from MRAs when I tell them they should teach their sons NOT to have sex with drunken, passed out females. I’m aware they could care less about the females themselves, so I try to put it in a perspective that they can understand, since they are all so obsessed about being charged with rape. “My son isn’t a violent criminal, so I’d never tell him that.” I don’t think that guys who do this are necessarily violent criminals. But I do think that they accept that this is ok to do. Not a big deal. And so need to be taught that it’s not ok.
Which reminds me when I was told that it was “silly” when I said that a guy should ensure that the female consents before he has sex with her (especially if he wants to avoid a rape charge). This was in a thread in which the subject was about how women need to be taught what consent was.
Omg, you make me so glad I was an engineering student.
I did have to take a few non-engineering-related classes (as strenuously as I tried to avoid them). One of the classes I had to take for a “diversity” credit (I will not go into my opinion of “diversity” credits here) was Intro to Sociocultural Anthropology. My professor was pretty cool–we had to read a book for the class during the second half of the semester about this woman who’d grown up in an African tribe. Her life unsurprisingly included an early nonconsensual marriage and domestic abuse. Near the end of the semester the professor asked the class if we would prefer to live in one of those cultures and several students waxed enthusiastically about the “simpler life,” “living closer to Nature,” etc. The professor remarked how surprised he was every year to hear especially his female students say that after teaching them what the conditions for women were in all those cultures, which shut the class up. But I thought it was cool.
I’ve always felt that the “living closer to nature” types were CRAZY. Nature is either a) actively trying to kill you or b) indifferent to your survivial. I’ll take civilization; I like my fridge, microwave, internet connection, and heat/AC.
…antibiotics, dentists, ERs, Vicodin, innoculations, the FDA, Emergency Services, etc…
That’s also why I think the “abortion is UNNATURAL” arguments are a load of hooey too.
I dunno, Lisa. The way your professor taught sounds kind of reductive and other-izing to me.
On one hand, it is important to understand the problems faced by women around the world, but on the other hand, the ways in which those problems are analyzed can lead to the conclusion that “those poor, ignorant savages treat their women so much worse than we enlightened Westerners do.”
I’m not trying to imply that Lisa was espousing culturally imperialist rhetoric. I think I’m just venting my frustration about certain cross-listed women’s studies classes I was stuck in where the professors had that mindset.
I TAed for an Introduction to Women’s Studies course last semester. Most of the students were there to get their “diversity credit” out of the way. Trying to teach feminism to young women who refused to engage with the material was really disheartening. Requiring a token “diversity credit” does very little to promote social justice.
Oooh, yeah, I can see how it would sound that way the way I told the story here…it wasn’t like that, though–he was very much into us exploring other cultures, etc–what he was really objecting to when he made that one remark, it was clear from all the other stuff he’d said and taught all semesters, was the “other-izing” fantasy that a lot of privileged Eurodescended white folks have about “noble savages.”
…cell phones, satellites, trains, air travel, motor vehicles, white phosphorous anti-personnel munitions…
Er, okay. Not quite all good.
I might point out that the hypothetical involved “spiking” a punchbowl with alcohol, not administering alcohol to a person to the point where they cannot give effective consent to sexual contact. There is a big difference between the two.
Which is what, precisely?
Administering a drug to facilitate sexual contact is perpetrator behaviour, plain and simple. Seduction and drugging are definitely NOT the same thing.
The level of alcohol consumption for a person to be incapable of giving consent vastly ranges from person to person. I’d like to know exactly what the difference is in your mind, mark, and also how you think this is justifiable or appropriate behaviour in any way.
Please see my blog which is addressing the Seduction and Game Industry and Rape.
eqiwthdenise.wordpress.com
also, for a raging debate with men on this topic: google the blog for Lady Raine.
We can use all the sane input we can get!
Thank you for this important post!