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The New York Times reports that one Mr. Saifullah Khan, a Yale senior, was acquitted of the criminal charge of raping a dorm mate. There was no disagreement that an assignation had taken place. The unnamed complainant said that she had been too drunk to have given consent, so he was guilty of rape.
One jury member reported that, having watched
the security
camera video of two of them going to her dorm room, the jury didn't
believe
that she was drunk
enough that consent could not have existed. There was no other
proof that consent had not been obtained and some circumstantial
evidence to the contrary, thus he could not be guilty beyond reasonable
doubt.
The Times pointed out that there is no clear agreement about what constitutes "consent."
A 2015 poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Washington Post found that 47 percent of current and recent college students said that someone undressing themselves signaled agreement to further sexual activity; 49 percent said it did not.
We find it nearly impossible to imagine any man not regarding a woman undressing while alone with him as signaling "agreement to further sexual activity"; research suggests that most men are in "agreement to further sexual activity" pretty much any time anywhere whether they're undressed or not.
The Yale rape story shows that the two participants had vastly different and fundamentally incompatible interpretations of their having gotten together sexually and of the proper protocol for such activities. Since the #MeToo storm broke, many articles have tiptoed around the politically incorrect fact that men and women generally have different views of physical interaction, up to and including sex.
For example, Pajamas Media argues that "Your Inability to Tell A Man 'No' Does Not Constitute Sexual Assault." The (male) author asserts that if a woman agrees to have sex, she's consented, regardless of what may be going on inside her head then or later. He asserts that "yes" means "yes" no matter how reluctant she may have felt at the time or how she felt about it afterward.
Have you heard about the new standards for sexual assault that liberal feminists have created? It's called "Yes means yes" and its uglier cousin is called "enthusiastic consent." See, the idea isn't just that a woman is willing if she doesn't say "no" or even if she consents; the new feminist standard is that she must verbally consent enthusiastically... or it's RAPE!
This "enthusiastic consent" standard is illustrated by a Vox article written by an anonymous but female author who asserted that her inability to tell her husband "no" was the equivalent of sexual assault.
The "safe spaces" movement doesn't help women protect themselves either. The basic idea of "safe spaces" is that nobody should ever offend anyone because giving offense is the equivalent of violence and offended people need "safe spaces" where they can recover from the trauma. Could that be why a woman might hesitate to say "no?" After all, he might be so crushed if she doesn't get naked for him - and no doubt a certain type of guy is adept at putting on the appropriate puppy-dog face for such a moment.
It might offend him if she rejects him and, as we've been told over and over by liberals, whomever is upset, offended, or outraged is always right - even if she didn't particularly want to have sex with him.
On the other hand, feminists seem to believe that women can accuse men of rape pretty much regardless of what happened.
Oh, you said "yes," but he seemed like kind of a jerk later, so you're saying your consent wasn't "enthusiastic"? Wow, you've been raped. You either have to hate men, desperately want to please women who hate men, or be baffled by human nature to support something like this.
The Times' Yale rape story has a telling passage:
He [Mr. Khan] also said that he had called his longtime girlfriend, with whom he had an open relationship, from the complainant's bedroom. [emphasis added]
The Times referred to Mr. Khan as having an "open relationship" with his "longtime girlfriend." The Times' writer makes the implicit assumption that if a man has a "longtime girlfriend," the relationship will be, or should be, monogamous, and that it would be odd for him to call his girlfriend from the bedroom of a woman with whom he'd just had sex. That's why the writer felt the need to specify that the relationship was an open one, suggesting that the girlfriend was aware of and accepting of Mr. Khan's extracurricular excursions.
Despite a half century of experience with the Sexual Revolution, the presumption of monogamy still seems to be widely held. People are often inclined to complain of "cheating" when a regular sexual partner has sex with somebody else, whereas, one might refer to someone who has recurring one-night stands as a "player" but not as a "cheater," because he's never promised anyone any loyalty even by implication.
But in today's hookup scene, logically speaking, why would we use the word "cheated" at all? Without marriage there is no commitment. What we do speaks so loudly that it's hard to hear anything we say.
By having sex without the commitment that has
traditionally signified marriage, a person
declares
that sex is hardly more significant than shaking hands. How can
anyone
logically claim to be hurt by an uncommitted partner's "cheating" if
there was never any commitment to begin with?
In this case, it's reasonable to suspect that the complainant found out about Mr. Khan's longstanding girlfriend after sending him affectionate texts the following day, decided that she'd been cheated, and in revenge, claimed that having sex with her when he had another longstanding girlfriend was rape.
She probably didn't realize that most men are more than willing to go as far as a woman will permit regardless of other relationships. As Pajamas Media put it,
As I told a female friend who didn't feel great about telling a guy she liked "no," "That's your job. Most men will try to sexually escalate the situation as far as possible, as quickly as possible just like it's their job. On the other hand, your job is to say 'no' as often as necessary to stop the two of you from doing anything you don't want to do." In other words, when you're talking about consent, women already have all the power. The men can beg, pout, bargain, complain, or pressure all they want, but the women are always the ones who get to decide exactly how far a consensual sexual encounter is going to go. If you're a woman and that's too tough for you, then maybe you're just not ready to have sex. [emphasis added]
Pajamas Media is on to something in saying, "maybe you're just not ready to have sex." When the pill arrived, feminists proclaimed that women could now enjoy casual sex just as men did. Although the woman identified as "A" in the New York Times article "Sex on Campus - She Can Play That Game, Too" enjoys casual hookups with multiple men because she doesn't have time for a "relationship," "Sex, Lies, and Anti-Science Feminists" explains the biological mechanisms which cause sex to have a strong emotional impact on most women.
The book Unprotected by Dr. Miriam Grossman also explores biological reasons why being discarded after sexual involvement hurts some women badly even when the sex itself was always by consent. Such women shouldn't have sex at all without first receiving a strong commitment from the man, because without that commitment, they simply aren't emotionally ready for the emotional costs of giving themselves to a man.
At one time, our society had a way to provide both women and men what they need: a well-understood universal consent and commitment mechanism, generally required of anyone who wanted to be accepted in polite society. It was called "marriage."
If a woman is hurt badly when a man toys with her and discards her,
it's understandable that she might decide that he'd been abusing
her even if she hadn't known it at the time. The Times is
wrong in
calling sex a "game": the truth is that sex is one of the most serious
activities humans
can undertake. In the past, one of the most damaging accusations
one could level at a man was to say that he had "toyed with her
affections," precisely because our grandfathers and grandmothers
understood the emotional damage that a "cad" could do.
Although a few women are realizing that they can't and don't enjoy sex as casually as many men do, the feminist mantra about casual sex has been gladly accepted by men. Having been told so loudly for so long that casual sex is OK for women, many men have a hard time grasping the idea that women can be badly hurt by being discarded after having sex. By saying that casual, uncommitted sex is now OK, feminists have reduced women to the status of interchangeable sex toys which can be enjoyed and discarded at will.
On the flip side, women who're hurt by abandonment don't seem to understand how men can engage in sexual involvement without any emotional involvement at all. The Economist shows that modern men are as willing to go to war to gain access to women as in Genghis Khan's day:
Wherever polygamy is widely practised ... turmoil tends to follow. The 20 most fragile states in the world are all somewhat or very polygamous. ...
Polygamy nearly always means rich men taking multiple wives. And if the top 10% of men marry four women each, then the bottom 30% cannot marry at all. ...
When polygamy creates a shortage of brides, it massively inflates this brideprice. In South Sudan, it can be anything from 30 to 300 cattle, far more wealth than an ill-educated young man can plausibly accumulate by legal means. ...
Young bachelors who cannot afford to marry also make easy recruits for rebel armies. If they fight, they can loot, and with loot, they can wed.
The classic "love 'em and leave 'em" technique also lives on - the Daily Mail described three men who fathered at least 78 children by at least 46 women. Although the women were a bit surprised to find out that their paramours were so widely traveled, their welfare payments always went up with each additional child so they were reasonably well off financially.
Most men think in terms of sex when seeing a woman for the first time and think about sex regularly after that. As one male researcher wrote:
I decided to try to quantify my urges. I stood in front of various businesses in the town where I live, a tally clicker hidden in each hand, and clicked a yes or no for every woman of appropriate ageroughly 18 to 60 who walked through the doors of those establishments within a four-minute period...
At most locales, my counters came up with the same statistic: roughly half of the women I saw were fantasizable: 45 yes, 47 no at the fancy cosmetics retailer; 16 yes, 15 no at the sceney brasserie where I ate lunch. Fifty percent seemed low to me and almost inconceivably high to Diane. Only two spots produced atypical results. At the kid-friendly novelty chocolatier, I clicked 35 yesses and 46 nos, but mostly because there were many uncomfortably attractive girls who had to be nos (as I couldn't be sure they were above the age of consent). And in front of the expensive clothing boutique I clicked yes to a full 75 percent.
The reaction of his female colleague was revealing:
Diane [his girlfriend] was and remains perplexed by the whole thing. "How do you get any work done?" she marvels. "With all this imaginary sex going on in your brain, how do you even drive without smashing into trees?"
We've done our best to highlight what should be a totally obvious fact that there are immense gaps between the way men and women perceive sexual interaction. This should come as no surprise - in order to achieve reproductive success, a woman needs a lot of support from others, be it the welfare syste or a husband, while men can do just fine by a serious of one-night stands and moving on.
The #MeToo movement seems to have been triggered by a few women who became justifiably enraged at their ill-treatment by Harvey Weinstein and managed to destroy his career. Their thesis hasn't been accepted by all women, however. Brigitte Bardot, who knows a thing or two about how things are done in the movie business, criticized the movement:
Bardot asserted that for actresses specifically, "not women in general," "the vast majority of cases" are "hypocritical, ridiculous, without interest."
The actresses who first accused Mr. Weinstein had become vastly wealthy by appearing in his movies which is why Ms. Bardot accuses them of hypocrisy. As she sees it, they entered voluntarily into business transactions which made them rich beyond most moviegoers' dreams of avarice and complaining about the deal after they'd received what they wanted is beyond the pale. As other women piled on and accused other non-Hollywood men, however, many women have been given the jobs of men who were dismissed because of the accusations.
Anyone the least bit familiar with human nature won't expect this situation to continue without a response. In the next article in this series, we'll take a look at the inevitable pushback and show where it will end up.