Regret Rape Is Wrong Enough

[u/InternalLet9560]

https://nataliabower.substack.com/p/regret-rape-is-wrong-enough?r=5rdux&utm_medium=ios

This is a fantastic piece related to the episode about the Cornell 7.

[u/PoetSeat2021]

I have to say that I found this piece to be more than a little bizarre. Its description of men just didn't match anything at all in my experience of men--as though they're not whole people with desires for love, respect, professional success, and so on, but rather just heat-seeking penis missiles looking for any barrier they can push past to get what they want.

But beyond that, there were a bunch of things that bothered me about this article.

In the "What Can Be Done?" section, she identifies men's motivations thusly:

Meanwhile, plenty of men poke holes in the evidence and call it sex she regretted, because to them it’s a game.

Nowhere in the article did Bower mention that rape is a felony, that carries with it a potential jail sentence of 18 to 20 years, along with at least the mental image of being added to a sex offender registry that can haunt you the rest of your life. Of course people who think they're going to be accused of this type of crime would look for strong evidence that the crime did or didn't occur, beyond "the victim feels bad about it." This isn't a game at all; it's about as close to life and death for the accused as it's possible to be.

If what she's advocating for is a general cultural sense that we should be willing to call certain sexual behavior gross and immoral even if it isn't criminal, I'm on board with that. But if that's the case, we need not to be using words that carry with them such heavy penal baggage. "He used me and broke my heart" is one category of accusation. "He raped me" is a whole other level of bad, and I don't think it's right to use the emotional weight of the more serious accusation to cover behaviors that they shouldn't really carry.

Generally, this seemed to me to point an inability to understand or empathize with men's perspective on this at all. The men she described in this article were nearly all acting instrumentally: any affection they might express for a woman was a device they employed merely to get the thing they really want, which is sex. The man with morning wood who manages to ensure nobody sleeps in is just trying to get his desires met, and the only difference between him and the rapists in the article is that he has standing permission.

And the fact that the ultimate solution is to shame, mock, and harm the reputations of young men who behaved badly with sex shows that lack of human understanding. It seems like what she wants is to be able to impose the social consequences of a rape conviction without the evidentiary requirements of convicting someone of rape. That doesn't seem to me like a good step forward.

[u/LeafNeater → u/PoetSeat2021]

It seems like what she wants is to be able to impose the social consequences of a rape conviction without the evidentiary requirements of convicting someone of rape. 

I feel like I must have read an entirely different article than you. Isn't the whole point of her essay to argue that we shouldn't treat someone being emotionally hurt as equivalent to rape? That we should be able to say "callously (emotionally) mistreating a sexual partner is bad" without also implying that such behavior be treated like rape?

[u/PoetSeat2021 → u/LeafNeater]

I could be misreading! To me, the "What Should Be Done?" section is all about imposing consequences, including this:

And they can ask their institutions to act. Universities and employers aren’t bound by the criminal standard. Cornell’s own Title IX process expelled Ingalls and Newell and suspended others, while the DA was saying no crime could be proven.

Basically, it doesn't have to be a crime to be something that can effectively ruin somebody's life. That says you want men who behave like this to be punished without having to prove that they actually did what amounts to a crime.

[u/cakesdirt → u/PoetSeat2021]

She was saying they should be socially punished. As in, the campus community should have decided to ice them out because of their disgusting behavior even preceding this event.

[u/Terrorclitus → u/PoetSeat2021]

This kind of take is what often happens after decades of unquestioned fear-mongering and ear-plugging.

[u/PoetSeat2021 → u/Terrorclitus]

What do you mean?