She Was Asking for It
The teenage boy who was accused of rape
was cleared of all charges.
He argued that the girl was asking to be
raped because she wore tight fitting jeans.
The judges decided that because the
jeans were so tight the girl would
have had to help him take them off,
and therefore the act was consensual sex.
Sexual assault is never justified, despite
the myths surrounding it. They are used to
justify rape, such as “she was wearing sexy
clothes so she was asking for it.”
There’s never an excuse and never an invitation to rape.
As college students, most of us drink on occasion
and attend parties. One important message we want to get
across is that a drunken “yes” is still rape.
When a girl is intoxicated it’s implied she can’t
decide to give consent. If you meet someone at a party
who’s been drinking and then have sex with them it’s
considered rape and the aggressor can be convicted.
“Because she was drunk and partying” is not an
excuse for rape. This is a scary reality for
college students, where drinking and partying
is a huge part of the culture of most campuses.
Sex is pretty amazing. It burns calories, blows
off steam and should be a lot of excitement.
But things can get messy. Sticky, sweaty,
but also complicated. Feelings form, social
boundaries change and then there is the
imperative issue of consent.
Consent is much more detailed than just a yes, no
or maybe. It’s the difference between sex and rape.
Being in college, we’re all aware that drunken hook-ups
have become a part of the expected pop culture college
experience, but the typical drunken sexual encounter
can be understood as non-consensual sex.
Legally, you can’t make a formal decision, sign a document,
drive a car or even be in a public place while intoxicated.
Alcohol blurs the line between a yes to sex or no to sex.
A yes consists of active, willing participation based
on equal power and choice.
Rape is not just when the victim says no and the perpetrator
ignores the protests but it can also be the victim giving in
from fear, going along in order to gain approval or being
under 18. Consent is the use of sexual respect and communication.
Rape fantasies are one
of the most common
fantasies for women
Studies attempting to quantify just how common yield
wildly different results, probably because of their
limited sample sizes, varied methodologies, and the
risk of response bias when answering questions about
taboo subjects, such as sex and desire.
Research suggests that up to 62 per cent of women
experience fantasies about some sort of non-consensual
sexual encounter at least once in their lives.
14 per cent of them have these fantasies at least
weekly, and 9 to 14 per cent consider them their
most frequent or favourite fantasies.
