Rape Culture and the Drunken Boxing Match

Looks like it’s time for Consent Story Hour yet again! Yay! Consent Story Hour!

So imagine you’re at a party with one of your bros (let’s call him “Bro,” just so we all remember). You drink a lot, and Bro drinks a lot, and before you know it, you’re both drunk. I’m not talking a little drunk, either. I’m talking blackout, schwastey-face, Mardi Gras raised to the power of spring break raised to the power of the Kentucky Derby drunk.

You’re also a boxer. And so’s Bro. In fact, the party you’re at? It’s pretty much all boxers. Everyone there likes to box, and a lot of them box with one another. Three or four couples have paired off and gone to a boxing ring to get their fight on with one another already tonight. Because this is a party full of boxers.

As I said, you’re really, really drunk. And because you’re so drunk, you convince yourself that Bro really wants to box with you.

So here’s what you do. You take Bro by the hand, and you pull him over to the nearest boxing ring. He’s too drunk to resist, and he basically stumbles along behind you.

But he’s not actually saying “let’s box” or putting gloves on or anything. He’s sort of standing there, leaning against the ropes, swaying drunkenly. Because he is also really, really drunk.

“Boxers move that way when they’re dodging punches,” you “reason,” interpreting his drunken swaying as a fighting move. So you start punching him.

He doesn’t punch back, but you’ve convinced yourself that he’s participating in the boxing match, because, swaying. So you keep punching. And punching. And punching. In fact, you downright beat the shit out of Bro.

Eventually, two Sweedish grad students happen by, and they see you hitting Bro in the face. So they subdue you, and turn you over to the police.

Congratulations, you’re a legit criminal. Your twenty minutes of drunken “action?" A major felony. Because you weren’t having a boxing match with Bro. You were just beating Bro up.

Bro didn’t agree to participate in a boxing match. Bro was too drunk to agree to participate in a boxing match. That’s why Bro just stood there and swayed. Because he was helpless. Because he was incapacitated by all the booze.

“But,” you might be thinking, “I was just as drunk as Bro was. How come you’re calling me a criminal and not him? If Bro was too drunk to be voluntarily fighting, wasn’t I too drunk too? How come he’s not responsible for the fight but I am?”

But nobody will listen to that defense. It’s a pretty stupid defense. Because you were the one who did the punching. When one person is throwing the punches and the other person is getting punched, it isn’t a situation of “both people were too drunk to consent to the boxing match,” it’s a situation of “one person tried to box another person, but that other person wasn’t boxing at all, they were just getting beaten up.”

So this is a fable about rape, obviously.

I’m starting to suspect that a lot of people, particularly those who associate themselves with “men’s rights activism,” think that rape cases where the victim was “too drunk to consent” are really just cases of mutual drunken sex and regrets afterward.

The story they seem to imagine, and which Stanford rapist Brock Turner’s statement feeds right into, goes something like this:

A man and a woman get really drunk, and have sex. Neither of them particularly has the capacity to make good decisions, because they’re both really drunk, but (thanks to *evil feminists*), the man gets called a rapist and the woman gets called a victim. And that seems wrong and unjust.

But this case that’s occupying all the media is a great illustration of why that story is dead wrong. Turner’s victim wasn’t having sex with him. She wasn’t participating. She was just lying there, unable to resist.

Whether or not he was just as drunk as she was, or whether he or not he was so drunk that he was really capable of deluding himself into thinking that because her hand touched his back she was into it, none of that matters, none of that makes him as innocent as she was, because he was the one carrying out the act.

It goes the other way too. If she had dragged him outside and taken off his underwear and grabbed for his genitals while he was lying there unable to resist, then she would have been the rapist, and he the victim.

That’s how it works. If one drunk person starts “having sex” on an unresisting other drunk person, the one who does the doing is the rapist — drunk, sober, or otherwise. It so happens that this is very often (although not always) a heterosexual cisgendered man sexually imposing himself on a heterosexual cisgendered woman, because it turns out that we have a culture that teaches men that it’s ok to rape.

Being drunk is not an excuse for beating someone up and convincing yourself that it’s a boxing match, and it’s not an excuse for raping someone and convincing yourself that it’s sex. So can we please stop feeling sorry for poor drunk rapists?