Continuing on with the question of adults making choices and living with the full results of them.
You either get to stand by your word or you abandon your claims to the right to have other people take you at your word. You can have your "yes" mean yes" and not later claim that you get to make it mean "no" when it suits you or you will encourage a system in which people can claim to believe that your "no" means "yes." If that latter alternative sounds familiar, it has been a slogan used by rapists for decades. It featured in that
infamous chant by Yale frat boys that made the news a few years ago. There is no other acceptable standard that adults must be held to. They must be required to respect what other adults say and that the words "yes" and "no" mean what they mean. That won't turn out to be a one sided contract, it must hold for both parties and both words or it invites that kind of muddled thinking and the opportunities that the more powerful or privileged party can make of the resulting ambiguity. Certainly the law won't work in a system when yes can mean no any better than a system in which no can be claimed to mean yes.
It was one of the main goals of feminism, from the beginning, that women have equal rights to make contracts and decisions that were as legally binding as those of men. In the past it was the legal policy in many places that men had to do those things in the names of women because women were biologically incapable of making those choices and contracts on a reliable basis. As recently as the 1960s, it was often impossible for women to get insurance without having a man sign for them. It is one of the most appalling things in this argument that people calling themselves feminists are insisting, essentially, that those anti-feminist men were right and that women have a right to not be believed when they say "yes".
That adults have to have these things pointed out to them is a real scandal. That the supposed intellectual class that college and university students are alleged to be needs to have them pointed out to them leads me to think that the age of adulthood is probably set far too low, in too many cases. It isn't merely a situation that applies to women, there has been a general infantalization of the culture in the past few decades, under the influence of commercial media. If the puerile antics of ivy league frat boys didn't lead to that conclusion the claims of those who push the idea that adults who have given consent to sex can, even days or weeks later, decide that their unsuspecting partner raped them, confirms that the childishness isn't restricted to the frat boys.
It is simply and plainly unrealistic to think that universities can both treat their students as adults, respecting their ability to make their own choices and also to protect those adults from their bad choices, especially those made in private, without any witnesses to corroborate the claims of one side or the other when disputed claims are made. Since almost all college students are legally adults, universities can't be forced to both treat them as if they were minor children, on the one hand and full adults possessing the full right and responsibilities of adulthood. Even insisting on them doing both at the same time won't make that possible and that is exactly what is being demanded of them in this case.
That is especially true when it is a question of rape among adults, when the existence of a crime hinges on consent being given or the request to have sex refused, something that generally happens in private, without witnesses.
It is a right of adults to consent or reject to have sex and the crime of rape hinges on the question of consent and unless that is in writing, in a form which can be used as evidence, that will always depend on whether or not one or the other is believed. That it is unsexy as hell to turn consent, each and every time, into a written contract would make the suggestion of it absurd. But if one party can claim to not believe the verbal assent or refusal of the other or claim that they get a right to change the meaning of their "yes" to "no" after the fact, the only way to avoid claims of rape is to write it out, every time. The fact that consent to having sex is often implied by the absence of an explicit if not forceful refusal, and that, in many cases going back to someone's room or car can imply consent and is often understood as consent makes it especially important that no claims that the words "yes" and "no" do not have have real, binding and final meaning are made or tolerated by rational adults.
The sexist ambient culture in which women live being what it is, it is in the interest of everyone that ambiguities be eliminated, not claimed as some kind of expression of freedom and, irrationally, adulthood.
It is important to remember that in this post I'm addressing only the matter of rape of rational adults, not of minor children and adults who are intellectually unable to give legal consent. The issues and rational conclusions about sexual abuse of those people is a far different and far less ambiguous matter, something that is often forgotten in the general smokescreen raised around the issue of sex and rights.
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Mixing in intoxication doesn't help at all. There is a reason that alcohol was used as the original date rape drug, it impairs judgment and leads people to do things that they, sober, would not do. It is often easier to talk a drunk person into doing things that they will later regret. It is easier to get a drunk person to surrender their money than a sober one, one of the reasons that casinos keep the drinks flowing. And it is often easier for an objectionable sex partner to get consent from someone who is drunk.* There is a term for that and it isn't rape, it is "I got drunk and made a fool of myself" or "I got drunk and he/she made a fool of me". There is a difference between being made a fool, especially by yourself, and being the victim of a crime.
Which is different from rape, non-consensual sex, which is often a result of one or both parties being drunk. Like it or not, someone who gets very drunk and passes out has made themselves more vulnerable to being raped. A child has the excuse of being a child with the presumed lack of understanding and judgement and experience with alcohol. an excuse which is essential to their right to enhanced levels of protection due to their lack of maturity. An adult will find it far harder to escape the expectation that they should have known the possible consequences of getting drunk, especially in a milieu which places them in greater danger of being attacked. There is no argument that will keep that question out of peoples' minds in judging an attack made on someone who has voluntarily done to themselves what a creep who slips them a drug does to them involuntarily. To pretend that even judges instructing juries or prosecutors deciding which cases are realistically prosecuted can change that fact is, as well, demanding the impossible. People are not going to ignore the acts of even credible victims helping set up the scenario in which they were attacked. If they were predisposed to believe the accused the choice of the accuser to be drunk will provide them with an excuse to not believe the accusation.
There is nothing feminist about denying reality. There is nothing liberating about denying reality. There is nothing feminist about pretending that the impossible is possible or pretending to have achieved that impossible condition is likely to lead to better results. That currently sold model of feminism, in which women act as frat boys and Hollywood producers want them to, pretending that the choice to act that way isn't the product of thorough training and indoctrination by the media does nothing to enhance the conditions women live in. The currently sold brand of feminism is a huge step backwards. Programs like "Friends" on the less damaging end of things, in a million ads and commercials in the middle and in even mainstream movies on the worst, all teach women the worst ideas that Betty Friedan pointed out oppressed women a half a century ago. Minus the house work, perhaps. June Cleaver's house work in high heels is about the only thing missing. But I'm only going to deal with one part of that program of self-imposed backlash.
There is nothing liberating about getting drunk, suspending judgment, impairing an ability to watch out for yourself and, in the event of an attack, to defend yourself. Getting drunk turns an adult into a vulnerable child who is more easily taken advantage of by people who want to do that and of making choices they would not have made, sober. Taking one drink and keeping your adult abilities intact is one thing, getting drunk to the point where you lose those is entirely different. Getting drunk is an escape from adult responsibilities and it carries a loss of the ability to exercise rights. There is no way that a university or even the judicial system can step in and do for an adult what they claim is their sole responsibility to do. There is nothing that enhances the rights of women in insisting that isn't the case, attempting to claim, both. To insist on a right to that an unnamed form of in loco parentis while objecting to it as being patronizing is to insist on having a right to both of two opposing alternatives at the same time. Insisting on that impossible condition does nothing to enhance the standing of feminism as a serious movement that serious people have a moral obligation to take seriously.
The currently unfashionable "second-wave" feminism was such a movement. That is the reason it was the target of the media and political backlash that includes "third-wave" "feminism". It was a movement by serious women who demanded their full rights including that the aspects of culture that oppressed them had to be changed. That it was women who were demanding their rights, issues of sex were central to that and that impinged on what people found sexually stimulating, in all too many ways based in differential levels of power and status**. In all too many cases, the culture has reinforced those to sell people on things through what they were accustomed to finding sexually appealing, including aspects of that which are oppressive. The old ideas about women and men were oppressive, the idea that there were major intellectual and mental differences between men and women were used to oppress women. There is no way to retain the belief in those differences, to have them embedded in the culture and in the law and to achieve full equality. Yet that is exactly what the currently fashionable thing that has hijacked the word "feminism" insists on doing. It won't happen, no matter how many times you insist that it will.
* Back in the 1970s, in response to the inevitable problems of having gay life so tied up in bars, there was an all too minor and all too short lived sobriety effort among gay folk. Part of the problem was people waking up to find that they'd agreed to have sex with someone they really didn't want to or in ways they would rather not have or should not have often consenting to it. Getting drunk while gay was not liberating, it wasn't positive, it wasn't good, it created problems and, in a lot of cases, destroyed lives.
I've come to think that the current model of feminism creates, in some ways, a situation similar to that which gay men experienced in the run up to AIDS, in which the most irresponsible and puerile behavior was sold as liberating and celebrated as such. Biology, hard truth, reality shows that isn't sustainable and the results are not liberating. Not even on a rather short term.
** Another similarity with the struggle for gay rights and the fact that gay men are often their own worst oppressors through the sexualization of inequality.
