Two different stories about consent and "rape", a paradox

Discussion in 'Religion & Philosophy' started by kazenatsu, May 25, 2022.

?

Was it "rape"?

  1. It was not rape in 1st story or 2nd story

    0 vote(s)
    0.0%
  2. It was rape in 1st story, not in 2nd story

    2 vote(s)
    10.0%
  3. It was rape in 2nd story, not 1st story

    3 vote(s)
    15.0%
  4. It was rape in both 1st story and 2nd story

    13 vote(s)
    65.0%
  5. In both stories it was sort of rape and sort of not rape, not simple

    2 vote(s)
    10.0%
  1. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    This thread involves perceptions of morality.

    This may seem weird, but I think some of you will find it very interesting, and certainly thought-provoking about the way we think about sexual consent. It might even make you feel a little hypocritical and inconsistent.

    I want you to take a look at both of these two threads.

    If you are a conservative, I want you to read this one first:
    woman sent to prison for "sexual assault" for misrepresenting her gender

    If you are a social progressive, I want you to read this one first:
    Woman claimed her husband repeatedly raped her, jury says he is not guilty

    I'm now going to take a poll, because I have a theory that most of those who strongly believe it was rape in the first story will insist that it was not rape in the second story, and that most of those who strongly believe it is not rape in the first story will insist it was rape in the second story.

    Even though both stories are about consent being violated.
     
    Last edited: May 25, 2022
  2. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    Both are rape.
     
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  3. Dirty Rotten Imbecile

    Dirty Rotten Imbecile Well-Known Member

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    Yeah I mean it’s all rape to me. A wife or husband have the right to say no.
     
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  4. Bowerbird

    Bowerbird Well-Known Member

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    You know - I do not even have to read it to know that. Katz has seemingly been trying to justify rape in more than one thread.

    NSW is about to pass some VERY abroad consent laws

    https://www.wlsnsw.org.au/law-reform/consent-review-sexual-offences/

     
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  5. Swensson

    Swensson Devil's advocate

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    How do you come to that theory? Seems to me that "Rape is a type of sexual assault usually involving sexual intercourse or other forms of sexual penetration carried out against a person without that person's consent." (Source). You seem to agree that both stories have consent being violated, I assume you agree that both stories involve sexual intercourse. Wherein lie the moral perceptions?
     
  6. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Don't you come from Sweden? In that country, they view almost everything as rape. (Feminism having taken over in the media and politics and shaping the society's opinions)

    Hopefully it's not too off topic but I'll post a quick little summary of what happened to Julian Assange in Sweden, and we all know the disaster that ended up creating for him (part of another wider story that I won't even bring up here).

    Julian Assange, a citizen of Australia, who had become a minor celebrity at that time among journalists and praised as "a hero", was temporarily staying in Sweden, where he had many admirers who wanted to hear him talk.

    He was sleeping with two women, at the same time. When both women found out about each other, they were very angry. They went together to authorities to see if they could legally compel Assange to submit to an HIV test, somewhat fearful that they might have contracted that sexually transmitted disease. (If the man they had been sleeping with had been two-timing them, what type of man was that? How many other women had he been sleeping with?) Once at the police building, a radical feminist prosecutor talked them into pressing rape charges against Assange. Not that Assange had actually committed true "rape" against either of them, nor is that even the original reason they had gone to the police in the first place, but Sweden does now have rather unique and very "progressive" laws governing consent and sex in the bedroom, and under those laws Assange could be prosecuted, and the women were very angry at him (angry at him mainly for two-timing them).

    Many people from other parts of the world would view the actual reasons for the "sexual violation" accusations against him as ridiculous. In one case he was accused of putting on a condom and then taking it off without the woman immediately realizing it. Even by her own admission in the police report, she realized the condom was off less than a minute after intercourse began but she did not say anything and continued to let the intercourse continue. In the case of the other woman, he was accused of pulling apart the woman's legs and having sex with her. She had not given consent in that specific sexual instance, but neither did she say no either. They were sleeping together in the same bed, only partially dressed, and they had previously had sex before in that bed. Shortly afterwards the woman had attended a social gathering with Assange, the two seemed to be a "couple", and all the witnesses described the woman as acting normal. This was the farthest thing away from what most would consider real rape, but under Swedish law, based off the women's accusations and facts, the man could still be charged with "sexual violation" (practically a milder category of "rape") in both cases.
    Longer thread with much more details about that story: Assange Accusations in Sweden
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  7. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I do remember reading about a case in Australia that concerned a controversial new feminist-inspired sexual consent law.
    A man had rough anal sex with a woman that she was not very into. Afterwards she was left with intense pain and a little bit of bleeding. She had never said "no", but it was argued she had never said it was okay either. Legally it was argued that since she had never given her explicit affirmative verbal consent, under that new law that had recently been passed, the situation could be considered rape.
    The man ended up being convicted of rape for what some commentators argued was really more of a case of "regret sex".
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  8. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Both are rape by the definition of sex without consent. Doesn't mean I quite put it on the same level as physically forcing or using a threat to rape a stranger, but still it should be something legally punishable. One thing that troubles me (philosophically, no longer relevant personally) is where is the line? Pretending to be a man when you're a women is clearly over the line, but what about other things like pretending to be rich, pretending to be unmarried, or putting on makeup (joking)... I feel like people lie in hard and soft ways all the time to secure sex. When have they crossed the line legally or morally?
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  9. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm truly surprised no one has voted the "It was rape in 2nd story, not 1st story" option.

    I wonder if there could be a little bias here, if posting the two stories side by side together is making some people feel the first story is rape, when they might not otherwise view it that way if the story was read by itself in isolation.

    Or I wonder if there could be bias because both stories involved a jury convicting the perpetrator. I know there are many people who, if they are not sure of the facts or logic in a case that happened, will just resort to automatically trusting the decision that the jury came to.
    If I had posted two identical stories, except in both cases the jury had found the perpetrator innocent, would the results of the poll be any different? Would some of you have voted another way?

    Of course this type of bias is not always conscious and a few of you might not even realize your perception was shaped by it.

    It's also hard for me to believe everyone who has voted so far believes that a person pretending to be a different gender who has sex with someone else is committing rape. Because of the implications for transgender issues, I would have thought there would be many on the Left who would hold a position against it.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  10. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    It's also hard for me to believe everyone who has voted so far believes that a person pretending to be a different gender who has sex with someone else is committing rape. Because of the implications for transgender issues, I would have thought there would be many on the Left who would hold the position that it cannot be rape, because they both consented to the sex and gender does not really matter.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  11. LiveUninhibited

    LiveUninhibited Well-Known Member

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    Consent requires being informed of what's going on. Being blindfolded and having sex unknowingly with a strap-on instead of a man is clearly not informed consent. I'm just not sure where the line is though. I think putting on lots of make-up is not over the line, but it's also sort of misleading somebody to get them to be sexually interested when otherwise they may not be. I do think trans people should disclose their status before sex, and probably most men would not be okay with sexual activity with them personally even if they have no problem with it politically. But if they're bisexual it could be a good match.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
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  12. Swensson

    Swensson Devil's advocate

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    Yes I am from Sweden. My point wasn't in particular based on that though.

    You mention that both situations have violated consent, I assume you agree that they contain sexual intercourse. Rape is defined as sexual intercourse with violated consent.
     
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  13. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yes, they both involved intercourse, except in the first story it was an actual woman having sex with a woman, so she used a strap-on dildo. The other woman thought it was a penis.

    This was a major component that convinced the jury that it constituted "rape".

    The woman had consented to have sex with that other person, but the person was not really the same sort of person she thought that person was. What had actually been involved in the intercourse was not what that woman thought it was. She consented to intercourse numerous times, but afterwards found out that intercourse was not exactly what she had thought it was.

    She consented to sex, and never said "no", but the argument is that certain elements about that sex is not what she had consented to.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  14. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    There's a big difference between falling for a deception and consent.
     
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  15. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Consent obtained through deception is not consent, some would argue. Or she didn't know everything about exactly what was happening during those sexual encounters, so she did not actually fully give consent.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  16. yardmeat

    yardmeat Well-Known Member

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    Yeah, there's a big, big difference between sex/gender just not being discussed and someone deliberately misrepresenting themselves in order a to secure a sexual encounter.

    "Oh, this isn't what I was expecting, so I'm out now," is different from "Holy ****, you explicitly mislead me about this encounter and then explicitly lied in order to trick me into a sexual encounter."
     
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  17. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    So, what's the point of this thread?

    Also, where is the paradox you mentioned?
     
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  18. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    As it's been said over and over, rape is sexual assault, generally intercourse, without the consent of the other participant.

    Both of those stories are RAPE

    You were actually given this definition before.

    Definition of rape
    (Entry 1 of 4)

    1: unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against a person's will or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
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  19. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The paradox has not materialized. I was expecting the opinions and votes to be different.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  20. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    The woman in the first story did consent to intercourse.

    She just later found out it wasn't exactly the intercourse she had been imagining.
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
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  21. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yeah, but people misrepresent themselves all the time. "I'm rich", or "No, I don't have any children"
    In this case I think it's questionable whether the perpetrator really "misrepresented" herself at all. The ONLY thing she really lied about was her gender.

    How can you say there is a "difference between sex/gender and someone deliberately misrepresenting themselves" in this story??

    The fact that she happened to be the same person as the female friend that woman knew, how should that really matter at all to whether a rape actually occurred?

    If a man meets a woman, and the woman goes away and comes back with a mask on but wearing revealing clothing, and the man does not recognize her from before but chooses to have sex with her, how is that really dishonest against him?

    (I think there's an episode from Married with Children where the wife, Peggy, frustrated that her husband doesn't seem to be interested in her, secretly exercised for 5 weeks to develop a thin toned belly, then goes to the strip club where she knows her husband goes to after work, puts on a face veil and dresses like a belly dancer to trick her husband into thinking she is an alluring exotic dancer who is not his wife. Of course it works and he is initially very interested in her because he thinks it's a mysterious woman other than his wife.)
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022
  22. dairyair

    dairyair Well-Known Member

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    Read the entire post before responding
     
  23. Swensson

    Swensson Devil's advocate

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    Sure, the definition I mentioned includes "or other forms of sexual penetration".

    Yep. Consenting to sex is not the same as consenting to anything and everything that can be considered sex, or that can happen during sex.
     
  24. WillReadmore

    WillReadmore Well-Known Member

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    You have GOT to be kidding.
     
  25. kazenatsu

    kazenatsu Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm not. Why would you think I wasn't serious.

    What part of my argument there was unreasonable?


    (By the way, I do actually agree with you, but was just being a devil's advocate for the other position, because I can really see both sides of the issue here and believe the other side deserves to be represented)
     
    Last edited: May 26, 2022

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