Jim, I’d say in those cases it wasn’t rape. Certainly such cases are hard to prove.
I think my main point in writing this article was not to define rape, but merely to demonstrate Heather MacDonald’s double standard.
Girls themselves are not defining these experiences as rape, so there isn’t actually a problem of girls crying rape when they’ve had casual sex. So why does MacDonald write as if there is? Because she disapproves of casual, drunken sex wants to lecture girls about their sluttish behaviour. Fine, if you want to do that. But she doesn’t lecture the men, because she doesn’t see anything wrong in men indulging in exactly the same behaviour.
This is what the double standard means. Opposing the double standard doesn’t mean being in favour of promiscuity – it means judging men and women in the same way. I shouldn’t have to keep saying this, but there are posters on this thread who seem unable to grasp this elementary point.
I’m still a virgin, though – kept myself in my pants, no matter how beered-up I was. I don’t think it’s wrong or hypocritical of me to demand young women to do the same and save all of us some trouble.
No, of course it isn’t hypocritical. Restraint, and for some young people even chastity, might save them a lot of heartache.
What would be hypocritical, of course, is to have bedded lots of the “other kind” of girl but to demand chastity in your wife. This is the old double standard, which I thought was confined to the Muslim world, but which I am finding alive and well and posting on this blog.
