Balderdash! - Comments
in singapore, men don't have any 'modesty', or none worth protecting; women own it exclusively.
men also don't have any form privacy worth protecting too.
this makes for an interesting discussion
We live in a sexist society.
down with the oppression of the matriarchy! :)
Did someone say the Matriarchy?
http://www.sinfest.net/archive_p...hp?
comicID=1947
Feminarchy lah
It's a bad law. Does another bad law, which screws over a different set of people, make things better? Hmm.
In some ways it could.
Theory of the Second Best.
There's a good litmus test for legislation: "Least amount of people screwed"
Ref. earlier sentiments about taxation.
Hi, molester.
And in this case? Does it? Do you think some men being able to rape with impunity makes it okay, or in any way better, that other men on prosecuted under flimsy grounds?
*are prosecuted
You should ask me after I finish my thesis.
But the short answer is that marital rape immunity isn't really immunity.
I think it's a faux equivalence; don't see any reason why you can't repeal marital rape immunity AND the decency law below.
Although I'm somewhat amused by the fact that while repealing the marital rape immunity sounds fine from a theoretical/moral point of view (ie. that rape is rape regardless of marriage), in actual prosecution the evidentiary burden is going to be a bitch.
The evidentiary burden in every single rape case is a bitch. Marriage makes no difference.
What I don't understand is why, in this post, Gabriel seems to think one bad law justifies another.
I didn't say that.
Then why is there a reference to marital rape immunity in this post? Your responses to my previous comments seem to indicate that you believe it at least mitigates, if not justifies, this bizarre "outrage of modesty" offence. It's hard to understand what else you mean if you won't explain.
I can think of particularly tricky examples in marriage; eg. the evidentiary burden when in a marriage where sexual intercourse has taken place several times (as is normal for most marriages), which particular instance quantifies as rape and which doesn't.
Or in the context of divorce proceedings being underway. I've heard of one case where the couple actually still were having sex while in the midst of divorce proceedings - this wasn't in dispute - but the wife turned on the husband with the rape thing when certain issues got acrimonious.
Or yet another one where in the midst of nonconsummation annulment hearings - brought up by the wife - then she threw out the rape charge (okay the latter is a mondo weird example.)
I still don't understand how proving non-consent is any harder or easier in these cases than with ex-lovers, friends, colleagues, etc. In every case the elements of the crime have to be proven, both penetration and non-consent. If there is a clear pecuniary motive for someone to lie on the witness stand, I agree this may or may not go to their credibility as witnesses, but again, this could be present in a large variety of settings. However, to my knowledge, criminal prosecutions don't accompany divorce proceedings as such - they would be entirely separate and would in many cases probably take longer - so the idea that someone could in the middle of a divorce proceeding "conveniently" secure a rape conviction to make a quick buck is somewhat fantasist. Also, in the many years that the marital rape exclusion has been removed from other countries, you'd be hard pressed to find many real cases of the spectre of vengeful, mercenary ex-wife alleging rape for no better reason than malice or greed. The vast majority of rapes go unreported; there is no reason to expect marital rapes, where it's especially difficult for a woman to find a sympathetic audience, to be any different on this count.
I especially don't understand the first scenario that you bring up. Presumably the complainant is identifying one, or more, specific instances of penetration* as non-consensual. What does the question of whether there was consensual sex at other times have to do with the simple question of whether those identified instances of non-consensual penetration took place in the manner alleged? Either they took place or they didn't; what else the parties did at other times is really neither here nor there.
(* On a side note, I don't call such incidents "sexual intercourse" since I think of sex as something two people do together, not something one persons takes from someone else. Someone who is being raped is not, to my mind, "having sex" - they are being assaulted.)
This reminds me of how LDPVTP claims having sex with a prostitute isn't having sex.
My point is not that the nature of marriage brings an inherently extra level of difficulty when it comes to marital rape. My point is that the condition of being married will, ceteris paribus, tend to lead to more ambiguous situations.
For instance - the identification of which instance being consensual or non-consensual - assuming a husband and wife have had a history of (presumably) consensual sex. Then she says - "last Thursday he raped me". The husband points to regular consensual sex over a previous period of time or denies that anything happened last Thursday. Any competent lawyer can demonstrate that if there's a prior pattern of consensual previous sexual intercourse, it can cast doubt on whether this particular instance was part of that pattern or an aberrant instance of non-consent.
Whiel I agree that many fictional scenarios analogous to the above (ex-bf, workplace fling, FWB etc) can be constructed OUTSIDE the boundaries of marriage, I'm just trying to point out that such scenarios are *far more likely* to happen within a marriage context than they would outside it - ie that ambiguous circumstances with enhanced evidentiary burden are far more likely to happen in a marriage scenario than they would in a workplace or stranger-in-the-alley context.
It's part of the same reason why, in the contemporary workplace, conduct codes are defined as rigidly as possible so as to remove or drastically reduce the possibility of ambiguous situations occurring. Unfortunately one can't impose similar conduct codes for all instances of marriage.
Also re "quick conviction to secure a buck", the idea was - and is - not so much to secure a conviction, but to be used as a bargaining tactic, a means of applying pressure ahead of a civil divorce trial. That is the real complication - the far greater likelihood of allegations of rape being used as a weapon that need not even see trial - and no I'm not saying you should decriminalise rape/murder in order to eliminate the risk of false accusation; I'm just pointing out unintended* circumstances that, even if worth the trade-off of protecting women from abusive marriages, shouldn't be cavalierly dismissed as "fantasist". How is that any different from me saying: "All women really want it"??????
*(Although in my more misogynistic moments I wonder just how "unintended" it is - I take the cynical view that the boot stamping on the human face, forever and ever is just as easily a stiletto heel if given the chance. Viciousness and oppression is a human - not a gender trait.)
Not to mention the real impact of an criminal allegation on one's life - even if it's another story, the "tar-and-feather" effect on one's reputation/livelihood/life that an allegation, even if one unproven or dismissed, can have on a person. (And let us be really honest - if you've ever been through a divorce, you'll know that both parties reach for every weapon available to hand)
I can sympathise wi
I can sympathise with the chronic female fear of rape (try having Gabriel sit on you for a brief taste of that fear) - but is the best solution the creation of a society where you ADD more fear to males - not righteous fear of punishment for wrongdoing, but fear of the unjustified allegation, fear of persecution, fear where a male is automatically presumed to be in the wrong, fear where at any time a misstatement or inadvertent gesture leads to a Kafkaesque round of tribunals, counselling, hearings, arbitration, loss of livelihood, loss of reputation, destruction of relationships? (And I've seen it happen. I'm seeing it happen now)
And I say ADD because, however right it is that rapists - both in and out of marriage - are punished and judicially deterred from their actions - the fact is that the psychos are always going to be out there; and the fear is always going to remain.
Hudood law: If a woman wants to prove a man raped her, she needs 4 male witnesses
'Developed' countries' law: If a man wants to prove he didn't molest a woman, he needs witnesses
So much for the presumption of innocence.
I would add, as a side note, that I would assume that Jol does not support affirmative action.
re: "you'd be hard pressed to find many real cases of the spectre of vengeful, mercenary ex-wife alleging rape for no better reason than malice or greed. The vast majority of rapes go unreported; there is no reason to expect marital rapes, where it's especially difficult for a woman to find a sympathetic audience, to be any different on this count."
The second sentence answers the first.
The vast majority of allegations go unreported; there is no reason to expect mercenary ex-wives alleging rape for no better reason than malice or greed, where it's especially difficult for a man to find a sympathetic audience, to be any different on this count.
I know this kind of argument devolves into the battle of the anecdotes here, but I assure you many many MANY men have capitulated in the face of the damoclean sword of allegation, even if they can get a fair hearing in the court of law; they won't in the court of public opinion. And there are equally many many MANY women who knows this and use it as a weapon.
And back to my earlier point - is screwing over a different set of people really the solution?
Re the evidentiary burden, I understand your point. But I disagree. Your claim seems to be that a history of A woman consenting to sex with B man on W, X and Y occasions would throw doubt on whether, on Z occasion, A woman did consent to B man. But I don't understand how this works - could you please explain? To my mind, having had sex with someone before doesn't mean you're forever "on tap", to speak crudely. There is nothing abherrational about not wanting to have sex on a particular instance. What is abherrational is the man's behaviour if he did rape. But that remains equally abherrational whether it's the first date, a relationship, a quickie in a back alley, or a married couple. In each caes it needs to evaluated on its individual merits and has nothing at all to do with whether the couple has had consensual sex in the past.
I don't think concern about false allegations is fantasist. I recognise they can do enormous damage, and that they do exist. But I don't believe that the vast majority of women look at "the rape thing" as some kind of "option" to try to screw over other people. Think of horribly antagonistic famous divorces where the wife would have a lot to gain. I can't think of a single well-publicised case where the ex-wife alleged rape. Heather Mills didn't allege rape. Britney Spears didn't allege rape. I know other people who have gone through acrimonious divorces who have had quite a bit to gain, who have not alleged rape. If it's so terribly easy, why don't women all do it at the drop of a hat?
However, I'm not sure about what it is exactly that we disagree, except emphasis. I agree removing the marital rape exclusion may lead to more false convictions than before, in exactly the same way that criminalising non-marital rape may lead to more false convictions than before. However, for the same reasons that non-marital rape should be criminalised, so should marital rape. I don't get the feeling we disagree.
The last thing I would add is that I don't think rapists are psychos, I think rape is a product of an unhealthy sexual culture. And so I agree with you that "fear" is not the solution. I think the ultimate solution to this isn't found in the court of law but in changing our sexual culture. If straight men only saw sex as performative, i.e. something in which both partners participate, rather than something they "take" or "score" from women, there would be less contested consent and the incidents experienced and reported by women as rape (including those where the men thought they had consent) would decline. We should approach sex like music or dance: you don't start dancing with someone who is just standing there uneasily and had to be dragged onto the dancefloor, and you don't start jamming with a bass player who is barely touching his guitar and whom you had to badger into being in the studio. But a lot of men don't (and are trained not to) seek enthusiasm, merely assent,
[hm, comment cut off... I will retype...]
or lack of demurral, which leads to problems. "Oh come on, just a quickie... come on... come on... please.., come on..." "okay but hurry up and get it over with" should never be seen as satisfactory by anyone. If men only ever had sex with women who said (and weren't paid or pestered to say) "Hell yeah, you're so hot, let's go at it", I think incidents reported as rape would decline.
Moreover, women need to see our own bodies and sexuality as something we control, for our own pleasure, not something we allow access to if the right boxes are ticked. It's very hard to do this because our media and sexual culture are saturated with conflicting messages: "good girls don't do it" (unless they're married, for procreation etc.) and "good girls do it just the way he likes it". Nowhere in this is "good girls do it the way they feel like doing it, when they feel like doing it, and for their own reasons". Women face enormous cultural pressure to say, variously, "yes" and "no" simultaneously, but never really from an autonomous understanding of our own desires so much as whether all the other calculations add up. (Trust me, women actually sometimes have this internal dialogue, "I have no idea if I want this, but is it okay to say no? Does it make me a bitch to say no?" - when if we have no idea whether we want something, the answer should definitely be no!) Changing this - not seeing women's sexuality as an adjunct to pleasing men, but as our own - would remove the entire concept of "after sex regrets" - why would you regret something if you never felt you had "given up" the magical pussy you are meant to gatekeep, and you have never encountered the concept of being a "slut"?
And part of creating this healthier sexual culture, to me, involves getting rid of such notions as that a history of consensual sex between A and B has anything to do with whether A attacked B on one particular occasion. It just has nothing to do with the question.
Commenting by HaloScan
