Holy Jesus shit, I can’t believe I am writing about this issue. The fact that I feel fired up enough about it surprises me, but after spending all of yesterday battling the /r/MensRights hivemind about it. The general consensus on MensRights, which is supposed to be a reddit dedicated to discussing male issues such as child support, false rape allegations, divorce, alimony, relationships, and all sorts of other injustices and feminist imbalance. However yesterday, after a Palestinian man was jailed for tricking a woman into thinking he was a Jew so he could have sex with her was jailed for rape, MensRights turned into a clusterfuck of people declaring how ridiculous it all was.
“It’s not rape, it’s fraud.”
“Some dumb skank sleeps with someone and regrets it and calls it rape?”
“The “horror” is out and out racism. It’s because the guy was Palestinian and she “never” would have slept with a Palestinian — at least, and not have her friends find out.”
“Guess what retard, if you fuck someone within the first couple of hours of meeting that person, they probably aren’t relationship material.”
“does anyone remember when people were responsible for their own actions? lets go back to that.”
The most disturbing was when someone quoted the part of the article that talk about how a court in Massachusetts aquitted a man who pretended to be another man’s twin brother so he could fuck his wife, a reply was, “A++++ to this guy. Bonus points for audacity and creativity.” Bonus points for raping someone else’s wife? Really, MensRights? Is this the message we want to be sending?
I was the only man in the discussion on this topic who sides with the woman, and I continue to be. There are threads going on right now discussing “Is lying to get sex rape?” and it’s the same thing, everyone says it’s fraud but not rape, like the fact that we’re talking about sex doesn’t matter. I’m beginning to wonder what is really at play here. Why are men opposed to this case being rape?
Many comments suggest that this case sets precedent that any time a woman regrets having sex, she can declare it rape and get a conviction. This is a common concern in MensRights, since many of the articles posted are all about false rape allegations (a serious problem that should not be understated in the least), so the importance of it is understandable. It’s suggested that telling a woman “I love you” before you have sex with her won’t be done anymore, which makes me wonder: do men commonly tell a woman they love her just to fuck her? I, personally, never have had to lie to a woman at all in order to sleep with her, but even if I was, would I really say “I love you” to do it? Do people really do that?
Regardless, saying “I love you” when you don’t mean it isn’t the same as purposefully pretending to be a Jew to fuck a Jewish woman when you know she wouldn’t fuck you if she knew you weren’t a Jew. If you tell a woman you love her, the most important thing is that she, and no lawyer, can prove that you didn’t mean it when you said it. A court can prove that you lied about other things, like your race, gender, medical history, but whether or not you loved her, not a big deal.
Another concern was “what if she finds out I have no money after she sleeps with me and accuses me of rape?” which is such a sad concern I am tempted to do a slow, sad facepalm. Do men commonly lie to women about how much money they have so they can sleep with them? Again, I’ve never had to, so I have a hard time relating, but if they do… I just can’t imagine a judge comparing lying about worth to lying about race or gender, but I suppose I can’t really know. It’s troubling to me, though, that both of these concerns seem to be centered around men pre-emptively assuming they lie to women to sleep with them and they’re worried about the consequences.
No one seems to think lying to women to sleep with them is wrong. I got one man to admit that he thought what this guy did was wrong, but he wouldn’t say the guy deserved punishment for it. I’m assuming that’s some sort of brotherly love instinct: brother, you did something wrong, but we’re not going to punish you for it because you are one of us. Understandable but still kind of sad.
But we’re all overlooking something really important here: let’s pull out the racism and descrimination cards, the other layers to this situation. If you’re somehow out of the loop, like I largely am, Palestinians/Arabs and Israelis/Jews hate each other. They’re at religious odds with each other and in general they just don’t get along. It’s obvious then that they probably don’t like to have sex with each other (which is to say that women of one creed don’t like to fuck men of the other creed, but men want to fuck everything regardless and the kink of fucking a woman of another creed is probably very alluring due to the ‘forbidden’ nature of it all). The conflict is rooted in enough history that there are people living today who have never known a world without the conflict, as my understanding goes, and that’s important to this issue.
Is it racism/discrimination that this woman, upon discovering that she fucked a Palestinian man who she had thought to be a Jew, suddenly decided that the consensual sex she had with this man (who up and left before she could even get dressed post-coitus) was actually rape? The question is more like: Is her revulsion, if we can assume that it was genuine at all to begin with, valid, to us?
Well of course it isn’t. We’re Westerners. We’re better than racism, religious intolerance, and culture conflicts, or at least we like to think we are. Obviously, we aren’t, but if we’re objectively looking in at another culture of course we’re going to pretend those people are horrible savages that we could never relate to. Fact is, we all have hang ups, and there are all people of certain types we don’t want to sleep with. I, personally, don’t like really fat women or dudes, and if a really fat woman or a dude somehow tricked me into sleeping with them and then revealed their true identity, I’d kind of hope I could press rape charges.
A lot of the men I talked to online seem to fail to grasp this: yes, it sucks that a lot of this situation is motivated by racial and religious tensions, but that doesn’t make those tensions less real or valid. For all we know when this woman discovered she had slept with an Arab she became violently, uncontrollably ill, and wretched. Maybe this issue really does run that deep, and for women who seem to think sex is more important and meaningful than most men do, it seems likely that who she slept with would matter a lot to this woman, just like it matters to most women.
Unfortunately for this woman’s argument, supposedly sleeping with someone within a couple hours of meeting them is something “skanks”, “sluts”, and “whores” do. I guess I, myself, am a skanky slutty whore because I’ve totally slept with several people on the first date and I see nothing wrong or unusual about it. As far as I’m concerned this “point” is bullshit slanderous character attack along the lines of “she deserved to be raped”.
But all that matters very little when the actual law states that rape by deception is still rape, which is something I, and every other man on MensRight and male blogger, failed to look up. From research.lawyers.com:
unlawful sexual activity and usu. sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against the will usu. of a female or with a person who is beneath a certain age or incapable of valid consent because of mental illness, mental deficiency, intoxication, unconsciousness, or deception
When this man misrepresented himself in order to sleep with this woman, he raped her. The racial and religious conflict doesn’t matter, those are just the details of the situation. For all it matters he told her he was a candy striper and she fucked him and then it turned out he wasn’t a candy striper. Admittedly that seems like a minor thing: “Really, a woman can accuse me of rape because I lied about my job?! That’s fucked up!”
You know what is fucked up? Lying to someone so you can sleep with them. If you have to lie to a woman in order to sleep with her, then you’re doing it wrong. Just the same as if you lie to someone to get them to give you a million dollars—that’s illegal, too. Just the same if you lie to someone to sell them something that doesn’t do what you promised—again, illegal. Let me sum this up as concisely as possible…
Lying to people is bad! Sometimes there are consequences.
In this case, the consequence was going to jail for rape. If you purposefully deceive someone in order to sleep with them, you’re raping them. Period. It’s precedent and law. From this article on rape by fraud and deception:
In another case of “fraud” rape, a lab technician posed as a medical doctor and sexually assaulted a woman. [...] “We have always known that ‘No means no,’ and the current law allows us to effectively prosecute those cases,” Leone said. “What this bill makes clear is that you cannot deceive or defraud a victim into saying yes.”
California and Tennessee already have “rape by fraud” legislation.
Long story short, yesterday I learned that some men are fucked up and think that lying to a woman to get her to sleep with you is par for the course, which is one of the most incredibly sad things I have learned so far in my life.
Where does it end? Lying is a moral issue, not a legal one.
If you dress beyond your means and she assumed you’re rich and sleeps with you and then finds out you aren’t– rape? If you’re driving a friends car, and she sleeps with you thinking it’s yours — rape? Misunderstandings? Marketing? For Christs sake, if I sleep with a woman in a pushup bra can I claim I was raped because her tits were a lie? I can make this list more goofy, or scarey, but you get the point.
Rape is, and always has been, non-concensual sex. If the sex was concensual, and you went back later and changed your mind — My personal take is that the statute of limitations has passed. There are a few girls I regret sleeping with, that weren’t honest about having boyfriends/husbands, but give me a break.. I can undo that by claiming rape now?
This is beyond idiotic.
If they can prove that you purposefully deceived them with that information and can convince a judge (and/or jury) that you intentionally deceived her in order to elicit sex, then yes it was rape. I guess in hypothetical crazy world sure, all those cases you mention could become rape if some judge decided that they were, but since we live in the real world, it’s not likely.
Slippery slope arguments are not really arguments, they’re just straw men put up to elicit rage and cause people to come to your side of the argument. You’re purposefully casting this event in a different, imbalanced light, in the same way people like Glenn Beck stir up rage in their conservative audiences. It’s relatively shameful.
Rape doesn’t have to be non-consensual. Period. Just because most of us men can’t imagine finding ourselves in a situation where we’d have consensual sex we’d later discover we didn’t want to have, doesn’t mean that consensual rape doesn’t exist in situations like this.