I can easily imagine the impulse to chronicle one’s sex life in a diary. I can’t imagine turning it over to one’s friends. That’s what Karen Owen, a recent Duke grad did, except she framed her sex list as a mock honor’s thesis and sent it as a Powerpoint to three of her friends. One of them wasn’t much of a friend and forwarded it to, well, the whole world.
It’s amazing to me how an otherwise apparently intelligent person can still think that anything in electronic form is likely to stay private. Even I, who came of age when Facebook wasn’t capitalized and was a literal book, know this. Of course, it wasn’t just Owen’s privacy that was violated. Half of the baseball and lacrosse team had their privacy violated, too, through no fault of their own. She was utterly reckless with their privacy.
You can read all about it at Broadsheet and Jezebel, if you want the salacious details. I’m more interested in what’s not being discussed. First and foremost, Owen writes of an encounter (“Subject 5″) in which she was completely blacked out. This is normally considered to be sexual assault. Under North Carolina law, it appears to be second-degree rape:
A person is guilty of rape in the second degree if the person engages in vaginal intercourse with another person … Who is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless, and the person performing the act knows or should reasonably know the other person is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless.
It’s odd that neither Broadsheet nor Jezebel is calling this rape. Broadsheet doesn’t even mention it. Jezebel breezes past it:
With one subject, the author blacked out and doesn’t remember having sex, but doesn’t seem troubled, by her own account.
Owen doesn’t have a duty to prosecute it. However, a feminist website surely ought to call it by its rightful name. A situation where one partner is blacked out isn’t some “gray” situation. It is not marginal or borderline. It is sexual assault, period. That doesn’t change just because Owen seems to boast that “I had somehow, in my black out state, still managed to crawl into bed with a Duke athlete.”
I’m also surprised (though I shouldn’t be) at how gender is affecting the way people interpret this incident. Imagine if the genders were reversed. There’d be more feminist outrage at how the “subjects” were exposed to shame, instead of Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet saying the guys were “pantsed.” There’d be less unfeminist outrage – as expressed on the Today Show – that a girl did this. There’d be a lot more shaming of the “subjects,” who would also be at higher risk for desperate acts. We’ve all heard of young women and gays who’ve committed suicide after their sex lives were broadcast without their will; I haven’t yet heard of a heterosexual male doing the same. That still doesn’t make it okay to treat a guy’s privacy like a dirty tissue. Not even if he’s an alpha male!
To be clear, I don’t want anyone to be shamed. I don’t want anyone’s privacy to be violated. I’m just struck by the hypocrisy, and how it’s toxic to everyone involved.
Patron cat of Kittywampus (1985-2001)
‘There’d be more feminist outrage at how the “subjects” were exposed to shame, instead of Tracy Clark-Flory at Broadsheet saying the guys were “pantsed.”’
You’d probably see more comments about this at Jezebel if the moderators hadn’t been deleting them or moving them to a filing cabinet in the basement… sorry, the complaints tag. Naturally, they’ve been doing the same to any comments referencing these actions. I only found out about this because there were a couple of comments the moderators haven’t got to yet.
(Still not as bad as their banning of MizJenkins a few months ago, but it certainly doesn’t make me feel that they’re an honest site and that I can trust them.)
I had no idea how hypocritical Jezebel was about being able to take it as well as dish it out. These weren’t trolls; they were regular commenters who pointed out how Jezebel was complicit in violating the mens’ privacy.
I agree with the commenter in the complaints thread (not sure who it was) who said that there’d be an outcry if that much identifying detail had been posted about a man’s female partners. I’m glad some people spoke up there, but dismayed at how the editors/mods handled it.
‘A situation where one partner is blacked out isn’t some “gray” situation. It is not marginal or borderline. It is sexual assault, period.’
This is wrong. “Blacked out’ doesn’t mean unconscious or passed out. What it means is that she was not able to recall the events that happened. This is a phenomenon that occurs sometimes when one drinks excessively. It has happened to me to. For instance, one night at a bar I had some pretty strong drinks and became very drunk, but I was still able to leave the bar unassisted and walk to the train station, get on the train that took me home, and then get off the train and walk to my apartment. The next morning, I knew that I must have done these things since I awoke in my apartment, but I had absolutely no recollection of doing them. They had disappeared from my memory.
Owen’s grammar is bad, so it sounds like she’s talking about being passed out but she clearly was still conscious, otherwise she wouldn’t have been able to crawl into bed with the guy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackout_(alcohol-related_amnesia)
I understand that she wasn’t necessarily unconscious – though she doesn’t remember enough to be sure either way. Point is, someone who’s that drunk is *visibly* highly intoxicated, and thus not mentally competent. As NC law states, it’s a crime if the other person “should reasonably know the other person is mentally disabled, mentally incapacitated, or physically helpless,” yet proceeds to have intercourse anyway. [My emphasis.]
Most states have statues to this effect. Here where I live (Ohio), one legal definition of rape is when “The other person’s ability to resist or consent is substantially impaired because of a mental or physical condition or because of advanced age, and the offender knows or has reasonable cause to believe that the other person’s ability to resist or consent is substantially impaired because of a mental or physical condition or because of advanced age.”
Being a little tipsy isn’t what the law intends. But drunk enough to black out the experience? It’s hard to imagine how a “reasonable person” wouldn’t notice that.
I should have been clearer. Someone can black out without being so drunk as to be mentally incapacitated, so she could have appeared and been perfectly capable of handling herself, and she could have known exactly what she was doing and wanted to do it. The amnesia that occurs after heavy drinking is not in any way an indication of incapacitation. I know this from experience. And, as the Wikipedia article points out, it’s possible to experience memory loss on an occasion when one had much less to drink than on other occasions where there was no memory loss.
If the picture you have of the situation is that she was reduced to some confused, helpless puppet that people could do whatever they want with, then though that might be what happened, it can’t be assumed at all.
Oh my goodness. I am horrified by this on so many levels that it’s not even worth trying to enumerate them.
Why does something like this exist in the world? I wish it didn’t.
(I’m talking about the original document, not about your post. I should probably be clear about that.)
[...] don’t see anything wrong with having sex tipsy, some of the time. I’m not talking about the sort of inebriation that can result in sexual assault charges, just enjoying a drink or two – or at least having a pre-existing agreement, as a couple, [...]