We all want to have lots of fun and stay safe at the same time, and there are things that can be done which make the social world a much safer place. Here they are.
Don't drink so much that you might have sex with someone without checking that s/he is awake and willing.
Don't assume that if you have had sex with someone on a previous occasion that this entitles you to have sex on that person whenever you feel inclined.
Don't assume that a person who enjoys or accepts one kind of sexual activity (such as kissing) is therefore available for any and every other kind of sexual contact that you wish to engage in.
Don't tell someone that s/he is 'safe' with you when you actually intend to rape the person.
If you know you get a bit rapey when you are overexcited, ask your friends to keep an eye on you and remove you from the party if you start crossing the line.
If you know one of your friends is a bit rapey, make sure that he is never left alone with someone who he might attack. In fact, stop being friends with that person. Rapists are not nice friends for you.
Stay safe and look out for your friends.
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Showing posts with label rape. Show all posts
Friday, 20 December 2013
Saturday, 14 September 2013
Innocence, guilt and 'trial by tabloid.'
An absolute cornerstone of the law is that a person accused of a crime is innocent until proven guilty. Accused, arrested, charged and put in the dock, you are still not guilty of the crime until a jury of your peers has heard and seen the evidence against you and the defence your solicitor has made, and decided that the evidence against you convinces them beyond reasonable doubt that you did the Bad Thing.
Anyone who has any problem with that is a buckethead. Mistakes happen; even when it seems pretty clear that A did something awful to B, it might not actually be true. B could be a liar, or mistaken. Yet there are still plenty of people who will insist that, even after being acquitted of doing a Bad Thing, A probably did do it, really. So being accused of a crime is a pretty horrible thing. The fact that being accused of a crime now seems to be a cue for the tabloids to declare open season on your life, your family, friends, career and personal habits is also a pretty horrible thing. Just ask Christopher Jeffries or Colin Stagg, convicted of murder by the press rather than in a court of law and forever portrayed as dangerous and evil when both were wholly innocent and the crimes they were accused of later proven to have been committed by other people.
So it probably doesn't seem all that unreasonable to call for anonymity to be granted to those accused - but not yet convicted - of rape. Michael LeVell has been acquitted of rape but only after the papers had a gleeful rampage through every aspect of his personal life; alcoholism, infidelity and, for all I know or care, the odd overdue library book. As he is innocent according to the law, it's considered a bit much that his reputation has been so comprehensively trashed and now, apparently, an awful lot of people are going to carry on thinking that there's no smoke without fire and anyway he's got weird eyes so he must have done something, etc.
However, there is a bit of a problem when it comes to conflating the fates of those accused of murder and those accused of rape, and the problem is that, in a rape case, the victim is there, in court, and able to name the person - had already, often repeatedly, named the person who committed the crime. In a case of murder by a stranger, or by someone outside of the immediate family, there's often quite a lot of room for error on the part of the police. The murder victim, being dead, is unable to name the criminal or pick him/her out of a lineup. The victim of rape who chooses to press charges is alive, is a witness to the crime and much less likely to be mistaken. (Yes, sometimes a victim is mistaken as to the identity of the attacker; that is one of many reasons why a person accused of a crime has the right to trial by jury. Etc.)
So there is, actually, a very good case for preventing the media from naming - and subsequently mounting an attack on every aspect of the life of - an individual accused of murder. There's a good case to be made for restricting the tendency of the press to rummage round and snark about the personal life of those accused of a crime to the extent that the accused has been convicted of the crime by the media before a trial occurs. There's a case for reminding the tabloid press that newspapers are not the equivalent of a jury.
Anyone who has any problem with that is a buckethead. Mistakes happen; even when it seems pretty clear that A did something awful to B, it might not actually be true. B could be a liar, or mistaken. Yet there are still plenty of people who will insist that, even after being acquitted of doing a Bad Thing, A probably did do it, really. So being accused of a crime is a pretty horrible thing. The fact that being accused of a crime now seems to be a cue for the tabloids to declare open season on your life, your family, friends, career and personal habits is also a pretty horrible thing. Just ask Christopher Jeffries or Colin Stagg, convicted of murder by the press rather than in a court of law and forever portrayed as dangerous and evil when both were wholly innocent and the crimes they were accused of later proven to have been committed by other people.
So it probably doesn't seem all that unreasonable to call for anonymity to be granted to those accused - but not yet convicted - of rape. Michael LeVell has been acquitted of rape but only after the papers had a gleeful rampage through every aspect of his personal life; alcoholism, infidelity and, for all I know or care, the odd overdue library book. As he is innocent according to the law, it's considered a bit much that his reputation has been so comprehensively trashed and now, apparently, an awful lot of people are going to carry on thinking that there's no smoke without fire and anyway he's got weird eyes so he must have done something, etc.
However, there is a bit of a problem when it comes to conflating the fates of those accused of murder and those accused of rape, and the problem is that, in a rape case, the victim is there, in court, and able to name the person - had already, often repeatedly, named the person who committed the crime. In a case of murder by a stranger, or by someone outside of the immediate family, there's often quite a lot of room for error on the part of the police. The murder victim, being dead, is unable to name the criminal or pick him/her out of a lineup. The victim of rape who chooses to press charges is alive, is a witness to the crime and much less likely to be mistaken. (Yes, sometimes a victim is mistaken as to the identity of the attacker; that is one of many reasons why a person accused of a crime has the right to trial by jury. Etc.)
So there is, actually, a very good case for preventing the media from naming - and subsequently mounting an attack on every aspect of the life of - an individual accused of murder. There's a good case to be made for restricting the tendency of the press to rummage round and snark about the personal life of those accused of a crime to the extent that the accused has been convicted of the crime by the media before a trial occurs. There's a case for reminding the tabloid press that newspapers are not the equivalent of a jury.
Tuesday, 21 August 2012
It's really FUCKING simple...
The next post on this blog was going to be a nice bouncy one about how I'm off to White Mischief in a couple of days with a whole load of new badges and stuff. But the news is all full of screaming arseholes again, so I felt like addressing them.
And yes, OK, sorry, got to be done, TRIGGER WARNING.
If you are doing any kind of sex with any other person, it's not just a matter of behaving as if they won't mind if they don't notice. Or if no one else notices that you did or are doing it to someone who is not screaming and shouting in protest.
If you are doing sex with someone that person should be expressing appreciation and participating with equal enthusiasm. That's the bare minimum of civilised sexual interaction. If you are in a state where you are incapable of noticing whether or not the other person is enthusiastic about what's going on, you're not fit to be having any kind of physical contact with human beings (or with livestock, before anyone starts...)
But, but, but, waa, waa, waa... Here are some of the things that people who are well-intentioned but not all that smart sometimes say.
'I don't mind when my partner touches me up if I'm asleep/we grope each other in our sleep and we've been doing it for years. Should one/both of us go to jaaaaaaaiiiiiiiil if those nasty feminists say so?'
If you are in a happy relationship and both of you have agreed that half-asleep sex is romantic and lovely, that's fine. If your relationship is a healthy one, both (or however many there are) of you will also know at a very deep level that if the initiating touch is greeted with a sleepy grumble or a moving away, the toucher STOPS touching.
'We are into BDSM/roleplay and it turns us on for one person to be doing all the doing and the other one to be either lying still or tied up and gagged.'
You've negotiated it beforehand. (If you haven't, then the active one is either a predator or a fucking idiot.) You've agreed a method of checking that it's all OK, at intervals, which doesn't break the fantasy. (If you haven't, then you are both idiots, even if the active one has no wish to abuse the other. People who are enthusiastic and willing about all sorts of out-there sex can still get asthma attacks/cramp/sudden remembrance that they left the gas on and need to STOP the sex and deal with the problem).
'S/he is a person with disabilities which mean that s/he can't actively participate/speak his/her appreciation.'
Yes, that's on the edge of likelihood but hey, people with disabilities are not necessarily asexual. However, if a person has *no means whatsoever* of communicating pleasure or displeasure then this is not a person you should be engaging in sexual activity with. If you are contemplating sexual interaction with someone whose methods of communication are limited for physical reasons, you need to be very careful in establishing a method that works quickly.
Oh, and the old grey areas of confusion (50-shades-of-grey areas of confusion is a whole other blog post. Which I might get round to fairly soon). There's a difference between confusion and sexual assault, and the difference is that the confused-but-harmless person WILL STOP at the first objection. I had an encounter with a harmless idiot once. We met at a party in a house he lived in. We chatted, in the course of the evening, about kinky sex. We had a lot to drink and we went to bed together. I woke up while he was in the process of tying me to the bed, very incompetently.
So I yanked my hand free and whacked him with it, and read him a righteous lecture on how lucky we both were - him, that I wasn't about to press charges and me, that he was a fuckwit and not seriously dangerous. His justification was that his last girlfriend had found it erotic. I explained to him that different people like different things, that it's unwise to assume anything and finally, you total bellend, you hadn't listened to a word I said, had you? I'm a TOP! I'm the one who does the tying up!
He was very sorry. To this day I think he was a wally rather than a sexual predator. Because he stopped, straight away. This is why I believe women who say they have been assaulted and/or raped, even if they were drunk, even if they were wearing short skirts, even if they had snogged the face off the rapist earlier. We know the difference between an idiot and a rapist. We know the difference between crappy, clumsy, drunken sex that we rather regret, and a sexual assault.
Anyway, if you've nothing to do on Thursday night, come and buy some badges. I'm still working on slogans that sum up the above...
And yes, OK, sorry, got to be done, TRIGGER WARNING.
If you are doing any kind of sex with any other person, it's not just a matter of behaving as if they won't mind if they don't notice. Or if no one else notices that you did or are doing it to someone who is not screaming and shouting in protest.
If you are doing sex with someone that person should be expressing appreciation and participating with equal enthusiasm. That's the bare minimum of civilised sexual interaction. If you are in a state where you are incapable of noticing whether or not the other person is enthusiastic about what's going on, you're not fit to be having any kind of physical contact with human beings (or with livestock, before anyone starts...)
But, but, but, waa, waa, waa... Here are some of the things that people who are well-intentioned but not all that smart sometimes say.
'I don't mind when my partner touches me up if I'm asleep/we grope each other in our sleep and we've been doing it for years. Should one/both of us go to jaaaaaaaiiiiiiiil if those nasty feminists say so?'
If you are in a happy relationship and both of you have agreed that half-asleep sex is romantic and lovely, that's fine. If your relationship is a healthy one, both (or however many there are) of you will also know at a very deep level that if the initiating touch is greeted with a sleepy grumble or a moving away, the toucher STOPS touching.
'We are into BDSM/roleplay and it turns us on for one person to be doing all the doing and the other one to be either lying still or tied up and gagged.'
You've negotiated it beforehand. (If you haven't, then the active one is either a predator or a fucking idiot.) You've agreed a method of checking that it's all OK, at intervals, which doesn't break the fantasy. (If you haven't, then you are both idiots, even if the active one has no wish to abuse the other. People who are enthusiastic and willing about all sorts of out-there sex can still get asthma attacks/cramp/sudden remembrance that they left the gas on and need to STOP the sex and deal with the problem).
'S/he is a person with disabilities which mean that s/he can't actively participate/speak his/her appreciation.'
Yes, that's on the edge of likelihood but hey, people with disabilities are not necessarily asexual. However, if a person has *no means whatsoever* of communicating pleasure or displeasure then this is not a person you should be engaging in sexual activity with. If you are contemplating sexual interaction with someone whose methods of communication are limited for physical reasons, you need to be very careful in establishing a method that works quickly.
Oh, and the old grey areas of confusion (50-shades-of-grey areas of confusion is a whole other blog post. Which I might get round to fairly soon). There's a difference between confusion and sexual assault, and the difference is that the confused-but-harmless person WILL STOP at the first objection. I had an encounter with a harmless idiot once. We met at a party in a house he lived in. We chatted, in the course of the evening, about kinky sex. We had a lot to drink and we went to bed together. I woke up while he was in the process of tying me to the bed, very incompetently.
So I yanked my hand free and whacked him with it, and read him a righteous lecture on how lucky we both were - him, that I wasn't about to press charges and me, that he was a fuckwit and not seriously dangerous. His justification was that his last girlfriend had found it erotic. I explained to him that different people like different things, that it's unwise to assume anything and finally, you total bellend, you hadn't listened to a word I said, had you? I'm a TOP! I'm the one who does the tying up!
He was very sorry. To this day I think he was a wally rather than a sexual predator. Because he stopped, straight away. This is why I believe women who say they have been assaulted and/or raped, even if they were drunk, even if they were wearing short skirts, even if they had snogged the face off the rapist earlier. We know the difference between an idiot and a rapist. We know the difference between crappy, clumsy, drunken sex that we rather regret, and a sexual assault.
Anyway, if you've nothing to do on Thursday night, come and buy some badges. I'm still working on slogans that sum up the above...
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