Since abaya threw this to the gallery, my answer would be help her up, help her get a taxi and send her back to her hotel.

He found a woman he didn't know who was so drunk she was vomiting, couldn't stand, and was calling him by someone else's name and took her back to his hotel to have sex with her.

It's hard for me to understand any interpretation in which that isn't being an asshole.

according to her, he did call her a taxi but she asked to go to his place
then, also according to her, they weren't having sex until 8 hours later in the morning, in the shower, and she was enjoying it until she realized he wasn't her friend.

that's how it's confusing.


EDIT: what I wrote is where she describes her memory end point the night before and the start point in the morning. everything else is what she claims he told her. so her falling all over, calling him different names, and puking were all things he relayed to her the next day. doesn't sound like he was trying to hide her drunken state, and doesn't fit the profile you (Gilda) suspect of someone who's trying to alter the facts to put him in the best light. it sounds more likely that he took care of a drunk girl and then when she came to (but not the REAL coming to, because the REAL person would never act like what followed...), they started to talk about her life and then somehow sex was brought up and she has hazy rememberings that she consented.

they're sitting there having conversation, he believes is with a sobering up individual. there's no indication he had sex with her when she was puking or obviously impaired, that's all assumption and the points that she remember seem to contradict that being the case. the timeline is getting frustrated by the addition of this and that, but this is how I'm piecing it together anyway.

abaya:

i have hesitated to post anything to this thread because in the end my only response was that i felt (and feel) badly that you had to endure that experience, and that you have to endure its repetitions. including this one.

if my experience is any guide, ambiguity can be hard to live with: worse in some ways than a clear action, no matter the outcomes....it's hard to cathect (in the awful parlance of the 30s freud translations)...so it's hard to "get over" because it's hard to assign a clear meaning to...it obviously resists being stuffed into clear narratives that are not particular: the narrative is that of what happened. if there are gaps, they aren't going to be filled in.
so it keeps coming back.
and you get to relive it when you write or talk about it.

i read through the thread and see it as a large repetition: because it appears that no resolution into anything other than ambiguity is possible, nothing is resolved here into anything other than ambiguity. the outcomes are contained in the premises (the story itself): the thread is a tautology.

i hope that this repetition serves some good function for you: that this will be among a series the result of which is this becoming something that you can let slide away into a kind of past that no longer causes pain when you remember.

Further details revealed after that have led me to the conclusion that this was probably rape. This is part of what I was trying to say in my last post, but apparently didn't express very clearly.

Whether or not a crime punishable by our judicial system occurred, I really don't think there's any question that the guy is a douche. Furthermore, in many (most?) criminal codes throughout the US, having sex with a girl who is drunk-EVEN IF the guy is drunk, too-can get you convicted of sexual assault. Consent CANNOT be given while you're drunk. It's a legal impossibility, in the same way that a contract made while you're drunk isn't valid. When I was a freshman in college, they had a series of lectures that everyone had to go to in the first few weeks where they had cops come in and explain it to us so that no one would be surprised if they got arrested. Now, certainly there is prosecutorial discretion involved and it's not at all likely that most of these cases see trial, but that remains the law.

The whole "consciousness" question is pretty irrelevant. If someone gave you laughing gas and had you sign your bank account away in exchange for a bag of poo, you would have been conscious, too, but that doesn't count for a whole lot. She may have been "conscious" in the sense that she wasn't asleep or dead, but she had no legal capacity to give any sort of consent.

All legal arguments aside, the decent thing to do would be help the person up and get them back to their hotel. If you're a stickler for rules and kind of heartless, I can see you wanting to call the police. Buying the person another drink and having sex with her really doesn't fall into any reasonable category besides "taking advantage of the situation." And that, pretty clearly, makes you an asshole.

I said "better light". People who've done wrong often try to put a more positive interpretation on things that lessens or mitigates their accountability for their actions without altering things completely. Even if this is the coldly factual account of what happened on his part, with nothing altered to make him look better, this guy is still a major creep, or at least was acting like one.

He took care of the drunk girl who was vomiting, couldn't stand on her own, and was calling him by the wrong name by taking her back to his hotel and having sex with her.

Not what I'd call a nice guy.

I agree with you there, Gilda that as it is portrayed to us currently, she could have been raped earlier in the evening. The only account we have of her engaged in sex was while in the shower the next morning and she definately remembers enjoying it, albeit regretting who she was with.

I tried to make it clear that my comments were made in relation to the narrative as presented when I first responded. If anything, it appears that when people on the board expressed that this was rape, more details that made it appear more like rape came forth.

And really the only reason I'm responding at this point is because it certainly feels, although I'm not sure, that these little comments at the end of the latest replies that any other understanding that he's an asshole is incomprehensible somehow places me in the same category. And that's bullshit to lay at my feet when more than one person thought the narrative shifted.

I don't think we're laying it at your feet so much as we're confused why you believe that it was a socially/morally acceptable choice to choose a course of action that led to them having sex, despite all the (fairly obvious) signs that she was very drunk and sick. Seeing someone who is in that condition and thinking, "I bet I can get with this girl if I help her feel better" seems opportunistic at best and predatory at worst. I think MOST people would either get her a cab and send her home or call the police or call an ambulance.

Frosstbyte, thanks for addressing Carno's statement. Basically, if you read up on the alcohol-induced blackout, you would see that a person can be conscious and still not acting in a fashion that suggests "a conscious decision." Those are two sides of the same word... I think that's one of the problems here.

Gilda and roachboy, thanks for your posts. I really appreciate them. Roachboy, as I said in my journal, the telling of this story has brought the experience to the surface again... simultaneously, it has contributed to some form of healing, just as it happens each time I get triggered. Usually it is only my husband who has been able to comfort me, but putting it all out in a public forum has somehow made it more real, more accessible, and given me some sense of "facing it down."

Smooth, is this some kind of trial for you? Why are you so hung up on this? You might ask me the same thing, but frankly I don't feel a need to explain why I'm "hung up on" one of the most traumatic things I've experienced. The story never changed. Yes, I added details as it went on, because back on page 1 when this was still about the OP, I didn't feel particularly inclined to give a play-by-play of every gory detail about my story. That's not good forum etiquette, and it would have required a post about as long as one of these pages in order to get all the details out. No one does that.

Anyway, six posts ago you were bowing out. I am really not sure why you continued to post, other than that this situation is perhaps causing its own kind of reaction in you... but that is a simple guess. I'm not calling you an asshole, mind you. Nobody here is. But you have some kind of defensive, even accusative, tone to your posts that I don't understand.

I interpreted this:

"he had the forethought to put on a condom several times (so he says), and he remembers that we had "great sex"... and we ended up in the shower, conveniently (especially in terms of evidence)."

as meaning his account of what happened included multiple acts, the last of which occurred in the shower. I'm sure abaya will correct me if I've read that wrong.

Nope. I was calling him a jerk, not you.

because you and others directly asked me questions after that post.
this place is neither yours nor mine and my change of mind to respond to those questions isn't of any concern to anyone but myself

I'm unsure how I can be both defensive and accusatory, but that's neither here nor there. I certainly didn't set out to come across that way, and I may be reacting to what appears to be people bandwagoning in a different direction and me left in the wind explaining how I could be so insensative as to not comprehend how this guy is a total asshole, when in reality no one on here knows a single effn thing about what happened other than what you're putting out there.

and I never said it was morally or socially appropriate to take visibly sick or drunk women home with the intent to get with them. nor did I say you were "hung up" on anything...in fact, only you in this latest response used that phrase yet you placed it in quotes...which should go some way in explaining why I feel myself becoming defensive.

all I said was that you were responsible for losing your virginity. and that was based off you saying you were conscious and enjoying sex in the shower until you realized you weren't with your friend. it's not a trial to me, but I never asked you for proof just pointed out that your narrative shifted and now that we've got no one else in here I'm not going to be one of the guys who automatically takes your account as an invitation to indict the dude for rape or being an asshole, especially when you don't even know what happened yourself.

Gilda, no correction here, you had it right. There were multiple acts, he told me, though the only one I was sobering up to was the one in the shower.

I can accept that as a reason for your defense. I just do not appreciate your assumption that I am somehow deliberately obscuring things, as if I have some kind of motive for doing so. I am telling the story as I know it, and as it comes back to me from whatever corner I shoved it into 3 years ago to not have to think about it in detail anymore. Yes, that means the story comes in bits and pieces, but that is often how traumatic events are recalled. I have not thought about the event in this much detail since it happened. But everything I said here was true to what the guy told me, and to my bits of memory toward the morning.

You've got it wrong here. You are leaving out the blackout portion of it, and I see that as key. I was not passed out, but I was not making "conscious" decisions at any point the whole night. The first real decision that *I* made was to get the hell out of that shower... it was not a conscious decision to enjoy the sex, it was not a conscious decision to think that I was having sex with my friend. When I was shifting from the blacked-out me (enjoying the shower, also thinking it was with someone I knew) to the ME I know (which again, took about 30 seconds of a literal fog lifting off my brain), I wasn't reacting in "regret" just because I "realized" it wasn't my friend. No. That is a gross misunderstanding. I--the non-blacked-out ME--was reacting in shock to the ENTIRE situation, every single part of it... the whole scene, from the guy to the act to the setting to myself... ALL of it being utterly foreign and involuntary to me. It was as if two different people had passed through the night in the same body, and one of them was knocked out until morning. That is the only way I can explain it, and I don't want to have to explain it again.

Woah, something's gone out of hand, here...

While you are certianly not obligated to respond to her inquiry, she is certainly free to ask. The question doesn't make this board hers or yours...

While I never sensed any accusation or defensiveness on your part before, I'm starting to sense it, now!

What would it matter to you if people "bandwagon?" Some posters have mentioned that they find your stance "incomprehensible" but you're the one who is interpreting this to mean that you are "insensitive." I understand that you simply have a different pont of view. Is it so hard to imagine that they may have the same understanding as me?

Well, I'm relieved to see that you can tell when you're being defensive. Let me ask, why do you feel this need? Why don't you just post as if you have nothing to defend? What's the worse that can happen? Personally, I think that's the situation you're in...

abaya never said that you called her "hung up." She said that she thought you were hung up and then mentioned that she might be, as well, but that she would have good reason to be. The quotes she was using was to quote herself since she had used that very phrase in a sentence, earlier...

Okay, something's gone terribly wrong here. You're making totally wild accusations now and it's crazy. There is no trial on you, no one said that you had "asked for proof," and no one thinks she should indict anyone.

Honestly, where is all this coming from?

now here's the thing, I'm not forgetting about the black out portion. Neither you nor I have any idea what happened during it. how could either of us draw any conclusions about it other than from supposition?

But humor this: what if you don't really know the REAL "you."
How are any of us, including you, to know whether the real you is the socially inhibited you, who believed that sex before marriage (or maybe love--no assumptions here) was wrong

OR

the real you is the socially unhibited persona who was freely engaging in something that was pleasurable?

it was pleasurable by your own measure, on a physical level, until the values you had intentionally plumbed right out of your head the night before came rushing back.


Both could be the real you, for example, maybe the blacked out you is the preferrable you. the one you used to unleash with alcohol when you knew you were prone to do crazy things. maybe what I've offered will give you an angle by which to own your past...in a way that doesn't filter it through guilt of doing that which you regretted.

Perhaps, abaya, you wanted to experience sex and your last concious decision was to chose to do it in the only way your body and conscious would allow you to enjoy it--surrealisticly.


@knifemissle,
honestly, a lot of it comes from responses like yourswhen you see my name and jump in opposition to whatever I post...whereever I post, it's tiresome

it is neither mine nor abaya's thread or board, just adults having conversations and allowing them to drift where they might...but it's evidently comforting to some members to center around this portion of the discussion between abaya and myself. anyone was free to ignore my posts and continue with the OP, but this seems more interesting to the participants...who am I to refute the direction this organic development took.

Gilda, I agree with you that abaya relates various parts of multiple acts of sex. But she gives the caveat that he is extremely drunk, as well (to the point of missing his flight) so his recollection is no more noteworthy than hers...and here we have his words filtered through hers. What we do know, is that she was deriving physical pleasure from the only sex act she remembers. Is it illogical to suspect that she was deriving pleasure from the earlier acts, too?

It's an interesting proposition to hold that one person is a jerk for acting a certain way and not have the same opinion of a person who can try and understand the concsiousness of the jerk but not act like that.

what makes a jerk? someone who thinks like one? or someone who acts like one?
and is there really a split between what one thinks and how one acts in terms of who that person actually is? which one takes precedence?

the question of intent becomes salient in that we have no idea what either of them were thinking when they met. perhaps he had no intention of having sex with abaya. maybe that came much later in the interaction, after the exterior signs of intoxication had long worn off, and they were discussing each other's life...each other's goals and wishes and other things. perhaps he felt a genuine connnection with her, or her with him. maybe they fell into love with one another for a fleeting moment in time, certainly not the type that many of us here are knowledgable about--what with our lumped up notions of commodification of love entangled with sex and how two people show, in western capitalism, that they love one another. perhaps they enjoyed the *now* that so many meditators attempt to seek...to be unfettered by the social.

the incident may be the least of the concerns, but the baggage that comes with it, that is created by our environment, that appears to have caused abaya more "harm" than the act of sexual intercourse itself.

Rape and sexual assault victims often experience physical pleasure. It's irrelevant to the issue of whether or not it was a rape.

My statements were regarding the guy abaya has been talking about, not you. What you do with that is up to you.

lol, that's not at all what I was asking :D
I was asking you to explore the ramifcations of whether a "person" is determined by one's thoughts or deeds?

Where does the rest of it come from?

First of all, I didn't see your name and then jump in. Do you honestly think that? What have my other posts to you looked like? Do you think we have some history, I saw your post and thought "hey, it's smooth again. I'll really nail it to him, this time!" Really?

I read your post and that's to what I responded. I hardly even noticed that it was written by some guy who calls himself "smooth." I must say, you're taking all this rather personally, aren't you?

Secondly, I prefer not to think of it as "opposition." If I agree with you then I will say so and if I disagree, I will express that, too. Again, I didn't decide to oppose you and then read what you posted.

If people often disagree with you it just means you have unpopular views. Welcome to life. If it's any consolation, I'm like that. Remember, I defend pedophilic rights! If people seem to do it wherever you go it only means they frequent the same forums that you do. So what? It may be tiresome but it's hardly sinister. More specifically, it hardly warrants lashing out...

Indeed, who are you to refute the direction? I don't even know what you're talking about...

I believe identity is a function of one's mind, which probably comes as no surprise.

How we see others is a matter of interpreting their behavior. There is no other means by which to judge others.

knifemissile, just give it a rest.
I thought by not really responding to you that you'd move on, but you didn't

I don't know what you're talking about when you wrote that I'm lashing out
that doesn't even make sense to me

and yes, when you see my name you post in predictable ways
I'm trying to read what abaya says and make sense of it, among others
my posts have been about content
your posts, when directed toward me anyway, are about how I carry myself in the discussion

this is what happens when you do that and I respond and then the thread dies because it looks to others that we're having some interpersonal conflict when in reality I have no idea where half of your position is coming from in relation to the original topic or the divergent one.

actually, I dont think I'm holding an unpopular view.
not only are the responses pretty evently split between whether it's rape, abaya experienced behavior that both many men and women engage in any bar I've ever been inside.

I did notice that your response was light but I didn't interpret that as a desire for me to "move on." Because this is a public forum, If you really wanted me to not respond, you'd simply just not give me something to respond to...

Furthermore, a line like this:...really looks like you're provoking a response. I mean, if someone falsely accuses you of antagonizing them, how would you respond? I'm certain a response would be forthcoming. Just look at your own posts...

The rest is in a PM...

there's a sub-discipline in philosophy called action theory that addresses questions of agency and where it stops and starts.

i expect that folk in law would have some exposure to it (though maybe indirectly) in that it addresses a central problem in arguments about responsibility and/or intention. so some of it is linked to ethics, while other aspects address cognitive questions--and most of it is rooted in a very old-school (and outmoded) notion of the philosophical subject (the "i")--but no matter in this context.

the idea in general is trying to work out the distinction between an act and a reflex--both of which are actions--so which are distinguished by notions of intent. the usual question is something like whether blinking is or is not an act. the usual conclusion is that it isn't because it is a reflex. it can be in certain situations, but for the most part, you are not acting when you blink. it is an action, not an act.

in the story abaya outlines, everything is a problem---the blackout itself and (especially) the functionality that she apparently maintained across the blackout create all kinds of havoc around questions of consent.
this in turn creates real problems for establishing anything about the guy--whose side of the narrative not here, whose state of mind is not known--and what is more (as if this were not enough), what information abaya might have provided him in the course of the blackout is not known.

the rather curious result of all this, from within action theory, would be to conclude that there were actions but no acts (based on the information abaya provides).
this lay behind what i posted earlier about the story arising out of ambiguity and remaining locked within it.
it allows for no clear conclusions about anyone or anything.

except for the obvious fact that somewhere within this tangle of problems, she lost her virginity.
and that what happened is obviously problematic for abaya ex post facto.
that we (all of us) CAN know.

everything else is a tangle.
within this, smooth's points should make more sense (if they haven't to anyone)---and while i may agree with many of the judgments folk have arrived at about the guy, the fact is that there is no way--at all--to shift away from the fact that these judgments are motored primarily by sympathy with abaya and her story.

i have been sitting here thinking about this for a few minutes, after i typed the post you have just read. it sits strangely with me to conclude that there were actions but no acts in a situation that has resulted in pain for someone who is part of this community. but there seems no way around it.

This has gotten really convoluted since I last stuck my head into this thread. abaya doesn't need my rescuing here, but I'm going to say my piece anyway.

Here's the bottom line: nobody gets to call "rape" but the victim. When the victim calls "rape", it's rape, and not until.

abaya isn't calling "rape". Any opinion to the contrary is meaningless.

abaya is causing for herself a transformative experience of this difficult event in her life. What is occasioning that is, she is sharing it openly with others, and she is taking responsibility for her agency in the matter. She isn't blaming herself or the guy. She understands and, to whatever degree is necessary, forgives him. Her next step will be to release herself from any lingering regret about it, and allowing it to be just another of the many experiences that contribute to who she is as a person--in other words, to grow from it rather than shrinking from it.

To those who seem to insist she view it some particular way, I respectfully say: knock it off. abaya is processing this on her own timeline, and when she comes fully out the other side of it, she'll be a bigger and stronger person for it. Please stop trying to turn her into the victim of something. She's much MUCH bigger than that.

That's ridiculous. Saying something is rape doesn't make it rape.

Given a certain set of actions, what it gets called is the ONLY thing that determines what it is.

You've heard perhaps the story of the three umpires? A rookie umpire, a seasoned umpire, and a master umpire were each asked how they know whether a pitch is a ball or a strike. The rookie says, "I call it like I see it." The seasoned umpire says, "I call it like it is." The master umpire says, "It's not anything until I call it."

I guess we disagree. I think the law defines what rape is, not individuals. For example, I think sex with underage people of sound and mature mental faculties should be legal if both parties consent, but some states believe that if someone has sex with someone under 18, then it is rape. My belief that it isn't rape doesn't change the fact that if I did that in a state where it was illegal, it would in fact be rape.

I've taken some time away from this thread, because I wasn't sure what it had become. Last night it became a very limited discussion that I was no longer interested in participating in, and I thought the thread would dwindle from there.

Tonight it's something else... a more philosophical discussion that opens the topic back up a bit, though I'm still not sure what direction it's all heading in. Eh, maybe it doesn't need a direction.

I don't know what everyone else is getting out of this thread, but for me it's been invaluable to slice open a badly-healed wound and expose it to the public air. I don't know why that's so therapeutic, but it is. It's helped me to advance much further along that "timeline" that ratbastid mentioned... wherever that puts me, I don't know. Not on the other side, but certainly better than I was before this thread began.

Roachboy, maybe as a nerdy PhD student I'm inclined to academic analysis in general :) , but your analysis is compelling. I like to situate most every human behavior/thought in some kind of theory (established or novel), and you have helped me by situating my story in some kind of greater, if "tangled" understanding. Hope that makes sense.

Thanks also, ratbastid, for your recent thoughts. No, I don't need your "rescuing," but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate your words and intent all the same. You are right about pretty much everything, there. The only question I had was, when you said this: ... why did you use the word "victim," if that's the very concept you're trying to avoid? It's just a bit confusing, that's all.

Hm. Poor choice of words, you're right. Perhaps I meant "victim", in quotes... Just like with rape, one is a "victim" if one says one is a victim.

I'm not talking about the law here. The law is a hammer, and from the legalistic point of view, everything looks like a nail. I'm talking about how individuals deal with their lives. Whether or not the law says you "are" a victim, BEING a victim about it is a choice that leaves you with no freedom or ability to be powerful in the face of it. It's bigger than you, you have no control over it, etc, etc, etc. On the plus side, you don't have to be responsible for the situation, or anything else in your life. You can always justify ANYTHING in terms of the victim that you are. It's a perfectly valid choice, and there are plenty of people who might agree with you or even try to talk you into it. But it completely robs your power.

Thanks for the clarification, rb. And I wholly agree with what you've said here... Even if a person is assaulted in cold blood and presses charges, getting their attacker in jail, that person does not have to become a "victim" to the crime (in the personal sense, not the legal sense). One can see justice done without surrendering one's own power over the situation, if that makes sense. Anyway, makes sense to me. :)