In terms of your boys, seems to me the prudent advice is the same for boys and girls: “Kids, alcohol and trouble go hand-in-hand. Have a couple drinks and get in the car, then you’re looking for trouble. Have a couple drinks and start talking trash with strangers, then you’re looking for trouble. Have a couple drinks and have sex with someone you barely know, then you’re looking for trouble. If you can’t trust yourself to be responsible with alcohol, then don’t touch it. If you’re not sure about the integrity and good will of the people drinking around you, then don’t be around them. Don’t let Hollywood and Madison Avenue sell you a lie, getting drunk and doing something stupid makes people’s lives worse, not better.”

Accordingly, when we go to COURT and the evidence is only one’s word against the other we fall back to innocent until proving guilty beyond a doubt…and the accused goes free.

So, also accordingly, if there is ONLY word against word from activities behind closed doors, why in the blue blazes are we going to trial?

Oh yeah, they made this law that is fair on the surface but will be used to bias the evidence one way or the other. And, we know which way it’s going to work out…all by chance of course…nothing to see here.

In a fair system, the man would be able to have just enough drinks to feel the effects and gin up his courage to proposition women who are doing the same and there would be no crime. That we think it necessary to get some sort of permission-after they have been proven able to give said permission-shows where and why this type of law exists and how screwed up a society we have become.

I’m sorry. While predators are going to be out there and friends or chaperones should look out for the highly intoxicated (especially women), hindsight is no way to run a railroad. Especially when it’s between just the 2 particpants and no witnesses other than prior to the act.

I just don’t see how a woman who is intoxicated and flirtatious leaving with a man who has been acting the same turns into rape because one of them said so. Men have, for years, been talking about “beer goggles”. Are they being raped because they go home with a woman below their standards? Rule 34 would say no..but flip the script and the woman can change her mind because of a law that someone created without thinking.

I can’t wait to have the talk with my boys and how i broach this subject…Wow, just, wow.

Your question includes a normative judgment in it (“fall more heavily”) that assumes facts which render it meaningless as an exercise, and an unnecessary gender restriction. Try this one: when two acquaintances on campus both consume a drink (of weight-adjusted volume, if you please) and have sex, should either party be precluded from bringing disciplinary/criminal charges against the other?

My answer is “no, we do not automatically absolve culpable parties because of their intoxication or the intoxication of another.”

The bottom line being that date rape is a very slippery slope that has no business being ascertained by the student council.

To return to the original question of the post: when a male and a female acquaintance on campus both consume a drink (of weight-adjusted volume, if you please) and have sex, should there be disciplinary/criminal justice consequences and if so, should those consequences fall more heavily on the male than on the female?

Is it so hard to expect men — even intoxicated ones — to think, for a moment, “perhaps I shouldn’t have sex with this intoxicated woman I barely know?” We have no trouble expecting intoxicated men to think, for a moment, “I shouldn’t start a fight with this guy I’ve never met before.”

Damn that Constitution. Always getting in the way. If we just closed the courts and went back to using vendattas to settle wrongs, just think how much simpler it all would be. Wouldn’t even need insurance or lawyers any more.

Then once the numbers approach parity, the DoJ or DoE will step in and complain that since women are not being expelled in the same proportion as men, there must be discrimination against men based on Gender, Right?

Why does the woman being drunk make it the man’s responsibility but not the man being drunk not make it the woman’s?

Thus real crimes need to be turned over to real police not the student council. But that might make it more difficult for the “he’s male therefore he must be guilty of something” set to get the verdict they want, the facts be damned.