RAPE, RACE, AND DRUNK WOMEN INSIDE RAPE CULTURE - PART 1

A few months ago, I was talking to a friend of mine about drinking during my college years. 

One of the first things I told her about was an embarrassing incident where I had 2 glass of wine with a male friend I was attracted to. Actually I hadn't even finished the second  glass of wine before I moved from drowsy to dizzy -- and dinner hadn't been served yet. It wasn't long before I needed a nap. 

He was surprised. I wasn't because I wasn't used to drinking yet. I was drinking at the same pace he was, maybe slower -- wasn't slow enough.

I'd driven to see this friend and I wasn't okay to drive (and it was way too early to end the date) so he let e sleep in his hotel room. We would eventually date. But on this night he stayed out on the balcony, maybe walked back and forth a few times. I nodded off a few times but didn't really sleep as I recall. 

• He didn't rape me. 
• He didn't even pressure me. 
• Let's just chalk this up to him being honorable. And be assured that I do understand that men shouldn't go to jail for rape when they are dishonorable. They should only go to jail when they are guilty of rape

Before that, the very first time I got drunk, I had a Long Island Ice Tea.

It was made at a college bar by a fellow student who was bragging that he could make me an ice tea that tasted like ice tea, that I wouldn't hate it because it tasted like alcohol. He was right. He did it. College campus bars aren't trying to cheap out on the liquor to make a profit. College kids want to make good drinks. I think a Long Island Ice tea usually has 4 or 5 shots in it and mine might have had more as this guy was trying to impress

On our way to a friend's dorm room, the drink I've been sipping still in hand from the bar, a random white girl says to me as she passes, "You know you're not allowed to walk out here with that right?" The two friends and I are like, "Um...no why?" Then she proceeds to explain open container law or some such. We get inside the dorm quickly.

Inside the room of a sick friend, sitting on the bed I start drinking the drink faster because I do want to know what it feels like to be drunk -  not just slightly buzzed. As the conversation gets going I forget myself and start drinking the Long Island Ice Tea like it's just iced tea. 

Next stop was supposed to be college town for more drinking but I was already done. I was weaving on my feet. Even drunk, I knew I could probably make it to college town but I wouldn't be able walk back. 

So my friends walked me back to the first floor of my dorm and I go up 5 flights alone.  My perceptions were quite altered, the long hallway didn't seem wide enought to walk down. My resident advisor gave me strange looks and asked if I was okay when I passed his room. A male friend opened my room door for me when I was having problems getting the key in the lock. I flopped down on my bed, door open, and talked to a friend on the phone - laughing loud. A little while later this same friend came back and closed my room door. Then, I went to sleep sudden-like

• The friend that opened and closed the door didn't rape me. 
• He didn't even pressure me. 
• Let's just chalk this up to him being honorable. And be assured that I do understand that men shouldn't go to jail for rape when they are dishonorable. They should only go to jail when they are guilty of rap

The other time I remember getting drunk, I didn't know it was happening. I was playing bid whist at somebody's apartment.

As I recall it was all girls. We were playing a "rise and fly" tournament. (Bid whist is a card game you play with a partner. Partners who lose rise and fly and another pair takes their place.)  My partner and I never lost, so I didn't get up from my chair the entire night. Somebody kept filling my cup with strawberry daiquiris. I have no idea how many I had because my cup was never empty.   And, I love sweetened glazed strawberries without any alcohol at all so... 

I didn't know that I was extremely drunk until I stood up to go home. 

I saw male friends on my way back to my dorm room.

• They didn't rape me. 
• They didn't even pressure me. 
• Let's just chalk this up to them being honorable. And be assured that I do understand that men shouldn't go to jail for rape when they are dishonorable. They should only go to jail when they are guilty of rape

When I related these stories to a friend a few months ago, she characterized my being dizzy and needing sleep suddenly as "You passed out." .

Other than that card game, I don't recall staying awake more than 15 to 30 minutes after I've after I hit the point where I get extremely dizzy.  But I didn't characterize this as passing out because I think of that as pretty much dropping to the ground and being unconscious. 

Whether I've ever completely done something called "passing out" or not, I've been very drunk. And I have been a few times since college. And you know what? 

Nobody ever came back to me with stories about stuff I did that I don't remember unless it was after I decided to sleep.  Frankly, when I've seen people get seriously wild after drinking I've always considered it 20% alcohol effect and 80% performance art -- especially during the college years.

But the thing I've come to realize is this: Whether you call my suddenly needing to sleep "sleeping" or "passing out" my memory may not be as detailed but it's still reality based.

If I hadn't been drunk on bid whist night, I might have been able to remember which suits fell into my hands the next day. I couldn't remember then and I can't remember now because the minor details were gone.

But giving consent to sex is not a minor detail, not to me, not to most women.

I might not remember chunks of conversation during moments when my full attention was on putting one foot in front of the other so as to walk from point A to point B.  I could not multitask. But I could respond to people talking directly to me -- and remember them vaguely later.

But I've never had not have a major personality shift or a shift in my core values due to alcohol.  

I might have gotten loud during my bid whist victories, but you could not tell me I craved up a dog and ate it for dinner.  You could not tell me I murdered someone. You could not tell me I suddenly did a strip tease in television room of the dorm.  I still know who I am, even drunk.

Less inhibited? Yes. Have I said things and done things I wouldn't have sober? Yes. I did and said things I regretted later because I DIDN'T CARE -- lack of inhibition due to alcohol will do that. But that's not the same thing as being insane.  

So can I say I knew what I was doing even when their were unpleasant consequences later? Yes. That's how I've managed to never think I could drive a car while drunk. I know who I am and what the consequences of my actions might be IF I CONSIDER those consequences to be major.    

Most people, including men, know not to get into a car and drive it when they are drunk as well and for the same reason I gave above - they know the consequences will be major.

This only looks like consent is possible,
even to a drunk man 
inside rape culture

Consequences for drunk driving are not easily forgotten -- even when most men, most people are drunk Anticipating the consequences of rape would penetrate the alcohol soaked brain of a man in the same way as consequences for drunk driving IF consequences for rape were

• (1) MAJOR (6 months, a year, a fraction of the time it takes a rape survivor to recover IF SHE recovers) or even just 

Drunk men are discerning in certain situations and not others

 

• (2) LIKELY ( Eighty percent of college rapes aren't reported to the police and only a fraction of the men that are reported for rape wind up even going to court, much less prison.  

The only moments completely gone from my memory due to alcohol, completely blanked out of my memory are the moments when I was asleep or passed out-- same as happens when I go to sleep without a drop of alcohol.  When I was awake and drunk, the inconsequential details dropped away


I am still who I am when I am drunk. And while that hasn't that often, even in my twenties, I've been around plenty of other people who were drunk. And a few thousand b.s. excuses based on alcohol later, I believe in **en vino veritas** (in wine there is truth).

When I was a kid, my white male neighbor got drunk and passed me on the stairs. He said, "I'll bet your father beats the hell out of your mother whenever he feels like it." I was confused for maybe an hour or two. I came to the conclusion that this was no invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-type racist moment brought on by alcohol. The man's racism was inside him all along and it came out when he had too much to drink.

When men say they beat their wives because of alcohol, I know they are beating their wives when there is no alcohol and threatening to beat them before they've had a drop.  

When a woman goes home after a business trip and say she slept with John the secretary because she got drunk, when John had no job function at the business conference to begin with, her husband knows she was not taken over by the alcohol alien living in her brain. He knows she's used to alcohol to overcome her fear of cheating. He knows she is lying to him about her motivations

Nate Parker's victim was either lying about the parts she remembers or she was not.  And statistics say that women don't lie about rape.

Besides,  a woke black woman knows that the black community will throw her under a bus and back over her twice even there's virtually no question about the rape accusation should she accuses a successful black man or even a potentially successful black man such as black man in college. Video didn't even stop some people from defending R. Kelly and supporting his career. Therefore a black woman has even more than the usual anti-motivation to NOT lie about rape than other women do. 

This is why so many women didn't report Bill Cosby.

I'm sure there are career alcoholics who have amnesia type black outs where they don't remember what was said and done while drunk. But this is not the most likely description of a teenager/early 20s young woman like Parker's victim. But even if I'm wrong in this case, even if Nate Parker's victim was an outlier and she started drinking at 13 years of age, in this case there was a witness to the other part of her rape, the solicitation of the gang rape.

However, my more general point is this:  A woman being drunk doesn't negate everything she did and said just like Parker's drinking doesn't negate what he did and said. As far as I am concerned her word is just as good as his -- better, she had a lot less motivation to lie.

Some might say that Parker was confused by the consent give two days earlier when they had oral sex. (In rape culture, that's an understandable position to take. It's wrong, but understandable within a rape culture mindset. So let me make this clear: If someone is unconscious they cannot give consent. Period. Two days ago doesn't matter.)

Even if Parker's having sex with her can't be defined as rape because some people can't figure when she completely passed out, if she was semi conscious before the sex act with Parker, and some sort of implied consent was there (for someone who knows it's likely there will be no consequences if he's wrong) -- we do know that she was unconscious when Parker invited Celestin and Kangas to gang rape her because Kangas testified to this.

But it doesn't appear to me that Parker was tried for soliciting a gang rape. 

Nothing on here appears to  imply Parker was charged with something that means
"Orchestrated A Gang Rape"

Brock Turner tried to claim confusion due to alcohol too.

Turner tried to claim the unconscious woman that he hid behind a dumpster so he could rape her gave consent earlier in the evening. He was drunk too, as many men are during date rape accusations, but someone how a man's memory is believed in these situations. The woman Turner raped was questioned by police as if it might have been true that she gave consent to have sex behind a dumpster then have something shoved inside of her that left dirt inside her.

Police questioned Turner's rape victim AS IF Turner didn't run like his ass was on fire when he was caught raping the victim hiding behind a dumpster.   As badly as his judge wanted to let Brock off so his life wouldn't be interrupted, so his future wouldn't be damaged, even he knew Brock was lying. He was forced to give him SOME jail time. With Brock's future in mind, he gave him the tiniest jail sentence he thought he could get away with - 6 months which will probably only be 3 months.

So now I'm trying to think of any instances where a man is considered to be so befuddled by booze about what happened when, to the point that he's not responsible for what he's done EXCEPT for when a rape is committed.

The only thing that immediately comes to mind is drunk driving back in the 1990s and 1980s.Not that long ago people, mostly men, would get away with calling "drunk driving" an "accident". 

Example: A co-worker of mine was engaged to a man who had killed someone while driving drunk in the 80s, his brother and father had as well -- no prison for any of them. (You know those car murdering so-and so-s were white, right?)  

Men claiming that women get confused about whether or not they gave consent isn't just related to social situations containing alcohol. Women are considered extra confused about everything before any alcohol is involved  just because they are not men.

Example: At my former job I would listen to men say that a stone cold sober woman was "confused" when it was crystal clear the woman was 3x as clever as they ever thought of being and she tricking them out of their rightful sequence on the holiday schedule.

This woman who would lie about the color of the sky if it was advantageous and sometimes just for fun. She was one of the first sociopaths-next-door types that I ever recognized as such  All of the other women I worked with could see what she was doing immediately.  But the men assumed she was stupid and "confused" as she "accidentally" screwed them out of their vacation time.

It wasn't until she'd "knocked them upside the head" at least 3 or 4 times that they finally realized that she was NOT confused and NOT dumber than they were. 

The same sort of sexist assumption is being placed upon female rape victims.

Before any alcohol is even added to a situation, a lot of men and women in this patriarchal society have been conditioned to believe that a woman can be unclear about giving consent just because women are just "emotional" and "illogical" to begin with and therefore easily confused.

So if a woman is already considered "easily confused" just because she's a woman, according to a lot of men and half the women in a patriarchal culture, then adding alcohol to that woman makes her a babbling idiot, yes?

However, anybody with an internet connection and little common sense can see that men, on average, are just as "emotion" based as women simply by looking at how much more often men are fearful and therefore violent and therefore put in jail.  Scores of black men are in jail trying to prove they are men by making enough money to mark them as men,  give them "provider" status -- Fear of failure at being a provider, having extra money to use or to gift to others drives a lot of poor, uneducated black men into drug dealing instead of working at McDonalds -- which doesn't pay enough to make a man "a provider."  

FEAR of not being "the provider" is the reason why a lot of black men are in jail, in addition to the racism. FEAR of not being the provider is the reason a lot of black men cannot share responsibility and the burden of financially providing for the family with their female partner.

Furthermore, there's a big difference in having less emotions and being less emotive.  Men are taught not to show their emotions. But that doesn't mean they aren't having any.

Besides, if men are less able to access and identify their emotions according to every Tom, Dick and Harry who has ever written a book comparing men and women since the 1940s, then how would MEN KNOW if they are less emotional and less apt to get "confused" about whether or not consent was given?

If men can't recognize their own emotions how are they comparing their emotions to women's emotions?  What other invisible things do men think they can see and compare? And is there medication they can take to cure this delusion? 

Also, to hear men tell it over the last few decades, they are visual creatures who lose  EMOTIONAL control when a well shaped woman seems sexually accessible.  

MEN HAVE EMOTIONS

MEN ARE EASILY CONFUSED  

MEN CLAIM CONFUSION OVER CONSENT BUT THEY HAVE MOTIVATION TO LIE

SARCASTIC RANT SEMI-COMPLETE 

 Rape, Race, and Drunk Women....Part 2
http://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/08/rape-race-and-drunk-women-part-2-nate.html
updated 8 22 16


RELATED:  
BEFORE I BELIEVED IN RAPE CULTUREhttp://thankherforsurviving.blogspot.com/2016/06/before-i-believed-in-rape-culture.html