Thought Catalog – which seems to be rapidly becoming the go-to site for terrible antifeminist posts – is making a bit of a stir on Reddit with a post bearing the deliberately provocative title “Wait A Second, Did Amy Schumer Rape a Guy?” Spoiler Alert: The anonymous author concludes that yes, she did. The anonymous author is full of shit.
In the Thought Catalog piece, Anonymous takes a look at a speech that Schumer – a comedian with some subversive feminist leanings — recently gave at the Gloria Awards and Gala, hosted by the Ms. Foundation for Women. The centerpiece of Schumer’s speech, a bittersweet celebration of confidence regained, was a long and cringeworthy story about a regrettable sexual encounter she had in her Freshman year of college, when her self-esteem was at an all-time low.
The short version of the story: A guy named Matt, whom Schumer had a giant crush on, called her at 8 AM for a booty call, after he apparently had been turned down by every other woman in his little black book. Amy, thinking she was being invited for an all-day-date, only discovered his real intent when she got to his dorm room and he romantically drunkenly pushed her onto the bed and started fingering her.
After several failed attempts at intercourse, and what she describes as an “ambitious” attempt to go down on her, he finally gave up and fell asleep on top of her. Lying there listening to Sam Cooke, she decided she didn’t want to be “this girl” any more, “waited until the last perfect note floated out, and escaped from under him and out the door.”
Looking back on the incident, she thanks her failed lover for introducing her “to my new self, a girl who got her value from within her.”
But Thought Catalog’s anonymous author, noting the extreme drunkenness of Schumer’s stumbling lover, concludes that “Amy’s actions may have constituted as rape in the eyes of her college, Towson University.” (Or at least according to the school’s current policies.)
Anonymous quotes Towson’s current policy on sexual harassment, which states:
In order to give effective Consent, one must not be mentally or physical incapacitated (e.g., by alcohol or drugs, unconsciousness, mental disability).
And adds:
It’s hard to argue that Matt was not mentally incapacitated. In Amy’s words, he was “wasted.”
Actually, the fact that Matt wasn’t too intoxicated to initiate an assortment of sexual acts with her — or to get up and change the music at her request — suggests that he wasn’t “mentally incapacitated,” at least by the standards used by colleges when investigating alleged sexual assaults. The Association of Title IX Administrators’ Gender-Based and Sexual Misconduct Model Policy (which sets an unofficial standard for college administrators) defines incapacitation as “a state where someone cannot make rational, reasonable decisions because they lack the capacity to give knowing consent (e.g., to understand the ‘who, what, when, where, why or how’ of their sexual interaction).”
In any case, it’s not clear why Anonymous is looking at Towson’s sexual harassment policy, which is designed to deal with “non-consensual Sexual Contact, Sexual Exploitation, or requests for sexual favors that affect educational or employment decisions,” and which clearly doesn’t apply to Schumer’s story.
As for sexual assault, the school’s official web site states:
Sexual assault is defined by Towson University as forcible sexual intercourse, sexual penetration–however slight–of another person’s genital or anal opening with any object, sodomy, or any unwanted touching of an unwilling person’s intimate parts or forcing an unwilling person to touch another’s intimate parts. Under this definition, these acts must be committed either by force, threat, intimidation, or through the use of the victim’s mental or physical helplessness, of which the accuser was or should have been aware. This includes, but is not limited to, victim helplessness resulting from intoxication or from the taking of a so-called “date-rape drug.”
This definition is drawn from the University of Maryland System Policy on Sexual Assault, which classifies sexual assault involving penetration — the traditional definition of rape — as a more serious type of sexual assault (Sexual Assault I) than those forms of sexual assault involving touching (Sexual Assault II). By this standard, assuming we equate Sexual Assault I with rape, Schumer clearly did not rape him.
Anonymous then looks at Maryland’s state laws and concludes:
In the eyes of Maryland state law, things get a bit more complicated. Amy could be guilty of rape or sexual assault depending on whether or not penetration was achieved. According to the state law, a person may not engage in vaginal intercourse with another “if the victim is a mentally defective individual, a mentally incapacitated individual, or a physically helpless individual, and the person performing the act knows or reasonably should know that the victim is a mentally defective individual, a mentally incapacitated individual, or a physically helpless individual.” Legally, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t rape, at least given the details in Amy’s speech.
Well, actually, yes it is. And not just legally, but by any reasonable definition of the word “rape.”
Because Schumer, at least by her account, wasn’t “the person performing the act.” He was. She was lying there wondering what had gone wrong with her life.
If you read the speech in its entirety, instead of depending on the selective quotations in the Thought Catalog post, this is abundantly clear. As she describes it, he:
Pushes her down on the bed; as she writes, he does “that sexy maneuver where the guy pushes you on the bed, you know, like, ‘I’m taking the wheel on this one. Now I’m going to blow your mind. …’”
Penetrates her with his fingers; as she writes, “[h]is fingers poked inside me like they had lost their keys in there.”
Tries to have intercourse, though his penis is only half-willing; she describes him as “pushing aggressively into my thigh, and during this failed penetration, I looked around the room to try and distract myself or God willing, disassociate.” Even using the “made to penetrate” standard, she’s not raping him, because she’s not making him do anything; he’s the active one.
Goes down on her.
Attempts intercourse again; this time, “[o]n his fourth thrust, he gave up and fell asleep on my breast.”
At no point in Schumer’s story does she describe herself as initiating anything. Indeed, she spends much of the time thinking to herself how much she wants to leave.
He started to go down on me. That’s ambitious, I think. Is it still considered getting head if the guy falls asleep every three seconds and moves his tongue like an elderly person eating their last oatmeal? … Is it? Yes? It is. I want to scream for myself, “Get out of here, Amy. You are beautiful, you are smart, and worth more than this. This is not where you stay.”
If a woman initiates sex with a man who is too drunk to consent, that’s rape. But a woman lying motionless trying to dissociate while a man tries to penetrate her is not a rapist. Even if he is drunk.
And that’s the case no matter how you switch the genders up.
Of course that’s not how they see things on Reddit, where most of those who’ve commented on the story have been quick to agree with the Thought Catalog author that Schumer raped her partner. Ironically, it’s been those outside the Men’s Rights subreddit who have been the most outspoken on this point. In TwoXChromosomes, a subreddit ostensibly devoted to women but in fact overrun with MRAs and other antifeminists, someone calling herself Shield_Maiden831 has gotten more than 200 net upvotes for a comment concluding that “[i]f you really believe in equality, then it seems to be a clear cut case from her own admission.”
Not everyone agrees. Elsewhere in TwoX , one commenter by the name of critropolitan argues, I think quite cogently, that
Unless the full transcript reveals something that the quotes in the article don’t, it doesn’t seem like Schumer exploited this guys mental state to do something to him that violated his will.
He was the one who called her.
He was the one who acted every step of the way and she went along with it.
Assuming that a person who is drunk is, automatically, in virtue of being drunk, without agency, is a mistake. It is moreover a mistake only made with regard to sex – no one thinks the same with regard to bar fights or the choice to drive. Drunken sex might not be the platonic ideal of sex, but it is not automatically rape in every case regardless of the actual state of minds, wishes, and feelings of the participants. …
There is no suggestion that Amy engaged in any sexual contact with this guy while he was passed out, or that she did something he didn’t want to do but he simply lacked the capacity to effectively resist or communicate non consent. Instead he was drunk enough to show significant signs of drunkeness, but not so drunk that he couldn’t not only communicate effectively but take a sexual initiative.
Rapists can exploit the vulnerability of drunk people, but we must walk back from the bizarre and agency-denying position that all drunk sex is rape. Rape is far too serious a matter for this bullshit.
It is.
But of course the MRAs and antifeminists on Reddit now accusing Schumer of rape aren’t interested in taking rape seriously. Indeed, if we look back on how they regularly talk about rape and issues of consent, it’s clearly they’re interested in taking rape less seriously. Their main interest in this case is as a supposed “gotcha” of a prominent female comedian with feminist leanings. In the process they are slandering her, and trivializing the real issue of rape.
Actually that’s horseshit and one weak ass straw feminist. Either you are only listening to the least articulate feminists you can find or, more likely, you have no interest in understanding what feminists and women in general are actually saying. There is a difference someone drinking and someone being so intoxicated that their reasoning is impaired to the point that they cannot verbally consent. This is all about pointing out that people who take advantage of women who are falling down drunk or passed out are in fact sexual predators.
Good Lord, I hate to break it to you but the guy who runs this website and writes all the posts has been following the MRM for years. The fact that you’re thrilled to have discovered that the MRM’s sketchy claims mirror your pre-existing anti-feminism doesn’t make you a newly minted expert on anything.
Whoops, Ninja’d at length by Sparky.
Also, this thing you mentioned about feminism:
Independence of gender identity is not the determinant of sexism. It does matter to an extent, but a lack of such independence isn’t necessarily indicative of oppression. What determines oppression is a network of power relations that creates a binary opposition wherein one identity is made subject and another identity is made object. (Race, gender and orientation are three salient examples.)
(I’m a little high right now so I’m sorry if I sound like some terrible pretentious ivory tower academic or whatever.)
Plucky’s trying to guilt us for being concerned with women’s issues. **wordless shrug** All women aren’t your mommy, dude. Go do your MRA thing. You want us to beg you to take us seriously, treat us as a demo of human beings with specific problems? Not happening.
He’s kind of like all those misters who come in here and announce they’re going their own way, expecting us to cry — or whatever.
**snicker-snort** Go to it! What are you making a proclamation to us for? I guess the implication is, “See what you selfish bitches made me do? I joined MRM.”
No one cares. You found a bunch of enablers, congrats.
Also, it’s like he read J. Valenti’s “Rape Is Rape” and willfully misinterpeted all the citations and studies inside.
“…I’m a little high right now…”
Man, I wish I was.
Silly question: I’ve heard the phrase ‘swear up and down’ a lot. Every time, I just get a mental image of a potty-mouthed cricket, swearing and jumping, in and out of a gopher hole.
That can’t be what it means.
Any idea where it comes from?
On his issue of male disposability, feminists are actually trying to make it possible to even out the gender averages in dangerous jobs. For the most part, it’s dudes who aren’t in the dangerous jobs who are convinced women can’t handle them.
So, plucky MRA, if you want to whine about male disposability, stop making it difficult for female soldiers, firefighters, police officers, coal miners, EMTs, commercial fishermen, and others.
Don’t protect us from ourselves.
Also, if you want to do something useful for your fellows, start petitioning OSHA to better regulate and inspect dangerous workplaces. Start funding engineers who want to develop safer technologies for those environments.
Start a men’s shelter for Domestic violence. You get it up and started, and I’d donate out of my currently meager income. Call women’s shelters for advice on how to start it. Some might tell you to go to heck, but some would gladly give you advice.
Join a mentor program and ask to be paired with young men so you can show them that emotion is fine to show, so they have someone to listen to other than their peers who tell them to ‘man up’ or that they have to sleep with ‘hot babes’ to be important.
These are the things I haven’t seen many in the MRA even vaugly consider.
These are things that would actually help. Telling a bunch of feminists what your straw feminist thinks (which is directly counter to what most of us he’s have said), isn’t helping your cause.
There are a thousand other things you could do. This was just a sample.
swear up and down
Found this, but it doesn’t really explain much.
It always cracks me up when the MRAs bring up dangerous workplaces. Most of them seem to be of a libertarian bent which means they would be for less workplace safety regulation not more. Of course, they don’t actually give a shit about men working in unsafe environments. They just want more women to die at work.
@Ally S: Don’t worry, you don’t. Your posts were spot-on, as always.
@Plucky_MRA:
Others have given far better replies already, but I wrote this goddamn long post before refreshing the page, so I’m going to use it, goddammit!
Oh, this should be good. Pray tell me, what is this all-important position?
Oh, nutbunnies.
And I’ve seen (far more, I’d wager) MRAs argue that women should be frightened into submission, beaten, enslaved, raped, murdered etc. What’s your point?
See what others have written. What MRAs like to say is that women who get drunk have it coming. They want to make excuses for men who intentionally get women too drunk to consent. They want to blur the issue. At best, it’s about controlling women’s drinking. At worst, it’s about rape apologia. That’s quite a movement you have there, buddy.
Oh, real classy with the ”hallowed saints” comment. Do you perchance also refer to Obama as ”the One”? And no, I’m not American, but that condescending tone seems so familiar.
Citation needed.
I’ve read your frickin’ Bible, WTF’s The Myth of Male Power. It’ a disturbing, disgusting book that oozes male entitlement. Yes, WTF does question some gender roles, but only insofar as they apply to men. Women are still to be treated like inferior, but in WTF’s vision, men should not be held accountable for the bad things they do to women because gender roles (assigned largely by other men in history) make teh poor menz confused, and awful things like rape are just silly little misunderstandings that nobody should get worked up about. I feel sick just writing that, but that is what WTF and many MRAs actually believe.
That said, try not to cherry-pick MRM talking points. Traditionalists and conservatives make up for the majority of your movement, and they’d be all too happy to throw men who don’t conform to gender roles (like me) under the bus if it meant women would suffer.
Umm… no, they don’t. They hate feminism because it teaches women (and men) that women are people, just like men. They hate feminism because in their mind, it makes “uppity” women “forget their place”. They’re called the Abusers’ Lobby for a reason.
What the actual fuck? ”[D]eemed less of a man by women”? ”[F]emale approval”? Again, it’s mostly men who like to hold on to the toxic image of masculinity. Not women, and most certainly not feminists.
I’m a very emotional man, and I’ve never, ever received any flack for it by women. I’m in a long-term relationship with a woman who finds my sensitivity an endearing quality. The only ones who have ever criticized, ridiculed and bullied me for expressing my feelings openly are other men. Seeing a pattern here? As with all MRAs, you’re barking at the wrong tree.
Believe it or not, I first discovered feminism through a DV case where the man was the victim, and was ridiculed for ”not keeping his woman in line”. Not surprisingly, the best MRA types could do was to blame feminists, even though the man was belittled not by women (who were being mostly sympathetic towards the man), but by other men. Instead of making stupid, inaccurate claims like the MRAs do, I started wondering what really drove men to be so mean to each other. Following that thought, I eventually found feminism offering the most logical solution: toxic masculinity and misogynistic views regarding gender roles. The bread and butter of the MRM.
Keep fighting those straw feminists. Once again, feminists have never tried to make me feel like I’m not enough of a man because I don’t fit into your typical gender role. Feminists don’t like traditional gender roles. Your movement must be so proud of your willful stupidity.
No, you don’t. If you did, you’d be doing something about it. Instead, you do your best to try to discredit feminists’ work in making society more equal.
Also, women work too, asshole.
And seriously, stop comparing circumcision to FGM. They’re not the same thing. I agree that a man should get to choose whether or not he wants it done to him or not, but the operation is not designed to permanently deprive men of their ability to enjoy sex. One of these things is not like the other.
Umm… You do know that it’s called feminism because it deals primarily with women’s issues, right? Women are disadvantaged in society. Men, as a class, are not. We have it pretty easy. The only time the patriarchy comes back to bite us is when we don’t conform to gender roles, that is, when we ”lower ourselves to the level of women”, and even then, we get more leeway than women do. Try understanding what feminists mean by patriarchy before criticizing the concept.
In any case, by working to end problems such as prison rape and more generally by dismantling the patriarchy and traditional gender roles, feminists have done more for men than the MRM ever will. The MRM is a hate group. Nothing more, nothing less.
I can’t deal with your bullshit. Go bother bedbugs or something.
Seriously? “Drunk sex isn’t rape” is the core of your political beliefs? That’s the most important issue around which all other issues revolve, to you?
Dude, priorities. How about working on the suicide issue first or something?
Yeah, I always side-eye people who are most concerned with the “Drunk sex isn’t rape” thing. Like, what, you wanna make sure your never convicted if you try?
Ally,
Your writing is just fine.
This is off topic, but I for one would love to get high with you and have the snootiest of tea parties. I already have the perfect hat. We could speak only in purple prose and be the most snobbishly elite of the snobby elitists, until we laughed tea out of our noses.
Instead, I’m having iced coffee and listening to Night Vale. It’s a fairly good time, but a snooty “high” tea with you sounds better. 🙂
Not to mention their ability to not be a dick? I mean, it’s just basic courtesy not to press someone into agreeing to something drunk that they wouldn’t do sober. I wouldn’t make a drunk person have sex with me for the same reason I wouldn’t make them marry me or sign over ownership of their house or let me drive their precious Camaro on salted roads. I wouldn’t even hold someone to a bet or promise they made while very drunk, and anyone who would is a dick.
If you don’t trust yourself to know when someone is too drunk to consent, then err on the side of caution and don’t have sex with them. I don’t know why this is so upsetting for some people (or maybe I do).
“Mangina”.
YES, and the constant insistence that we instead talk about the “grey areas” and wanting to know exactly when it becomes rape is both a derail and a really good way to identify oneself as someone I never want to be alone with.
Self-interest and sexism.
If you’re response to “Don’t rape drunk women.” is, “How close to rape can I get without it being called rape?” you should stay the hell away from women. You’re just looking for plausible deniability, not how to avoid being a rapist.
Crystal clear consent or nothing isn’t too high a standard.
@Lea
I’m down! ^_^
Sometimes I’m high when I’m arguing with trolls here, and it makes dealing with them a lot less unpleasant.
Holy hell. How far into the echo chamber do you have to be to actually believe that the MRM is about ANYTHING but men’s rights? The MRM isn’t about suppressing women, or denying women’s rights. It’s not even about denying feminism, really. All it’s about is dealing with men’s issues.
I tried dealing with men’s issues on the feminist side, but I got pretty damn tired of being told by feminists to sit down, shut up, and let them handle men’s issues they only barely acknowledged needed working on at all. If feminism just wanted to be the face of women’s rights, that’d be awesome. But the second feminists start claiming that their movement will solve men’s issues, or that it’s even made an honest attempt, there will be conflict.
Feminism’s ideology and worldview is fundamentally incompatible with promoting men’s rights. It pisses me off that an activist group claiming that men have both consciously and subconsciously oppressed women since the dawn of time thinks it can be remotely unbiased enough to be the sole representative of equal rights for both sexes, when it’s so clearly full of bigotry itself.
Not only does it display a fundamental belief that men are inherently controlling and misogynistic, it’s the ultimate denial of female agency. I mean where do feminists think women were throughout history? Did 50% of the sum population of humanity just not participate in the creation of society’s rules? Were they so helpless against the so-called patriarchy’s oppression that they didn’t contribute to the development of gender roles AT ALL? Agency comes with a responsibility for how you use it, and pretending that men are the sole sex responsible for the way society works is basic intellectual dishonesty.
Experience tells me that anything I say will only be further twisted to suit the narrative critics of the MRM want to show. For the sake of clarity, the MRM’s position is this:
Both sexes have issues. No movement that concerns itself primarily with the inequalities facing only one of them can have a reasonable or unbiased position with regards to the rights of the other. It’s simply a conflict of interest. So the MRM will fight the feminist claim that they do, have, or ever will competently and without bias challenge the inequalities facing men. We will make no effort to involve ourselves in discussing what rights a woman should have, so long as those rights do not intersect with those of men. We will be open to conversation when intersection of rights does occur, because we acknowledge that neither side has a perfect understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and lived experiences of the other. Should feminist theory continue to be fundamentally biased against men in our view, we will say so. Loudly. Should feminists continue to shout us down as misogynists on the principle that we disagree with those biased positions, we will consider our movement even more necessary to the advocacy of men’s rights.
Maybe I’m naive, but I believe both movements can exist together despite the current climate of hostility between the two. In fact, I believe it’s necessary for both movements to co-exist until a movement without fundamental bias in its view of gender relations. If either side could stop for a few moments, stop their fringe elements from spewing obscenities and hurling accusations, and have a reasonable discussion things might be resolved sanely. I sorely wish they would, because all this name calling isn’t helping anyone on either side.
…Meh, I don’t feel like reading that.
Has anyone here ever worn plus fours? I bet Pecunium has, probably with argyle socks.
Feminism isn’t about addressing men’s issues, as far as I know.
But then, neither is the MRA.
Touche, Robert. Touche.
Plucky_MRA
My turn to feed the Blockquote Mammoth!
@katz, No, but I’ve worn knickers with argyle socks.
I’m not proud of it.
…Which meaning of knickers? I know you’re not British, but walking around in underwear and argyle socks would indeed be a suspect fashion choice.