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.
Top that off with a scented fucking candle a purry kitteh and I’d be a happy camper. 🙂
Want to borrow mine? She’s following me around like a duckling right now.
Not GWW, I’m pretty sure.
But when I read that piece, I knew that a lot of MRAs were going to take it seriously (and they did), so I treated the argument seriously.
And in any case, the thought catalog piece wasn’t “satire,” it was raising an issue (I think misleadingly, but that’s what it was doing).
I wasn’t all that seriously thinking this one was GWW – it was twit-level nonsense rather than spewing poison – but I was amused by the name being the same.
@Karen:
Okay, this just hit too close to home. I wasn’t going to share this story since it’s a little too personal, but I’ve been in a few situations where the genders were reversed, and frankly, you and the MRAs are full of shit.
Personal story time. May involve TMI (note: I’m a straight cis man):
When our relationship was fresh and I didn’t yet drink alcohol, my significant other would often come home from the bar very drunk and very horny, climb into bed and try to seduce me. She was very insistent, and it made me very uncomfortable. I usually tried to convince her to go to sleep, but it didn’t always work out. I was unsure of what to do or say since our relationship was new and she was my first (and only) sexual partner, and even back then, before I learned about class and gender privilege through feminism, I had this strange feeling that by outright telling her she was too drunk to have sex with me, I would be patronizing and make her feel like a lesser person.
It didn’t even occur to me to tell her how the situation made me feel, since, for reasons way too complicated and personal to go into here, I have always felt that my feelings don’t really matter. It didn’t help that back then, we both believed in the toxic notion about a man always being willing to have sex. I mean, I didn’t want to have sex, but surely I did, since I was a man? Can’t argue with that logic.
So yeah, sometimes, I did what was described in the speech in the OP – I just lied there and let her do sexual things to me until she was satisfied or realized she was too tired and decided to go to sleep. I don’t think she grasped just how very uncomfortable the whole situation made me, since I didn’t know how to phrase it properly. We were both young, stupid and suffered from low self-esteem, so things were all kinds of screwed up back then. We got better.
Karen, I don’t think any feminist would have cried rape. Unlike MRAs, feminists are usually quite rational and can analyze a situation and its proper context instead of desperately hunting for fringe cases and ‘gotchas’. I wasn’t the one who got my SO drunk and followed her home, hell, I was home sleeping. I wasn’t the one doing the sexual stuff, I tried to convince her to go to sleep. I was the one trying to get away from the situation. Where the hell do you get that idea that feminists would change their minds just because this stuff happened to a man? Oh right.
Please stop hailing the MRM as some kind of a progressive movement. It’s not. All your precious movement fights against is straw feminists, and that’s getting old. That and the intense hatred of women and their agency. Get a fucking clue.
Also, please do note that a lot of the inconvenience for me in that story was due to me not fitting into the traditional mould of masculinity that MRAs applaud (strong, in control, assertive, puts himself before others, emotionally detached, always willing to have sex, etc.). But what do I know, I’m just a fucking betamangina white knight loser.
Anarchonist, I’m so sorry that happened to you. Thank you for sharing it.
(Hugs Anarchonist)
And yeah, MRAs are useless in terms of helping men who’re struggling with this stuff. All they do is reinforce toxic ideas about sex and masculinity. If you don’t aspire to be a super macho dude who bosses his wife around and rapes her if he damn well feels like it, they have nothing to offer you.
Anarchonist – hugs to you if you want them, and so glad it has got better for you.
I get the impression the MRAs really don’t like men very much either.
Karen, fuck off with your disingenuous bullshit. No one thinks all drunk sex is rape.
:: offers hugs to Anarchonist ::
Karen: stop hiding behind “satire.”
If all of your “satire” endorses the message that women are lying harridans who deserve to be beaten and raped (and it isn’t “really” rape anyway, because they were drinking and flirting and they knew the guy), and this message is one you actually believe … it isn’t actually satire.
:: more hugs on offer for Anarchonist ::
Anarchonist, thanks for sharing such a personal story. My hugs are in the barrel too whenever you want them.
cassandrakitty:
Awwwww. 🙂
Anachoronist, I’m so sorry you were placed in that situation.
We know. And we still disagree. And we had a very detailed discussion of drunkenness and rape and a meta-discussion of the discussion, all conveniently accessible in the comments to this post, if you’d care to read them before spewing your utterly unnecessary “correction”. Thanks for assuming we’re all idiots, though.
Anarchonist, thank you for sharing. *adds hugs to the barrel*
Thanks for all the hugs. Greatly appreciated. This is not something I like to talk about very much.
Now that I read my previous comment again, I just want to stress one thing so that no one gets the wrong impression: My SO is a wonderful person. None of what she did back when we were young and ignorant was due to a sense of entitlement, but due to her low self-esteem and confusion of sex and love, and due to my personal issues and fucked-up beliefs. She wanted me to be having fun too, but I was too much of an insecure mess to speak up, and the fact that alcohol dulled her ability to read body language really didn’t help. When I eventually understood (very much thanks to my discovery of feminism) that it was competely okay for me to refuse to have sex if I didn’t want to, our relationship started getting much better (after much reassuring my SO that there was nothing wrong with her, sometimes I just felt like cuddling).
I’m not sure if I’m making any sense right now. I’m getting seriously drunk once again, which admittedly might not be the proper response to the emotional can of worms I just opened. Maybe I’ll just go out and buy some chocolate instead. Thanks again.
I vote for chocolate. I always vote for chocolate.
As an old friend of mine once said when I was going through a hard time – what you need right now is love, hugs, and chocolate fudge cake.
Lol, that’s a pretty cool quote.
I’m astonished, but I guess I shouldn’t be. I’m a newly minted member of the the MRM (I’ve been following the movement for about six months now), and from what I’ve seen, the movement has been arguing my position since before I held it. That position is that drunk sex is not fundamentally rape. I’ve seen members of the movement shouted down and belittled for having that position. I’ve seen countless self identified feminists swear up and down that in order to be a good feminist, you have to acknowledge that consent can’t occur when alcohol has been imbibed. They’ve said over and over that the only reasonable response to being come-on-to by a drunk person is to turn them away, because their agency vanishes when they’re drunk. So when people here say nobody (much less the hallowed saints of feminism) says that, I have to respectfully ask you what the fuck you’re talking about. Hell, the oh so popular ‘one in four college age women have been raped’ study adheres to that principle in order to get its numbers that high.
Also, MRAs do NOT hold that traditional gender roles for men must be adhered to. Anyone who has read even a small amount of MRM literature would know that. MRAs believe that the best thing feminism ever did was give women a gender identity independent of men. We believe that the very least the MRM can do is give men an identity wholly separate of women. An identity that doesn’t revolve around providing for, protecting, and dying for women. An identity that makes it okay not to hide one’s emotions for fear of being deemed less of a man by women. An identity that says they don’t have to sacrifice their dreams to take on back-breaking labor and work themselves into an early grave, all to satisfy their need for female approval.
Ignoring its flaws for the purpose of this discussion, Feminism gave women a degree of self-awareness that sparked a thirst to be more than what society ordained to be correct for them. The main goal of the MRM is to do this for men, preferably without being slandered by sloppy activists from across the aisle. Hell, the MRM wouldn’t have any problem with feminism if feminists could stop dictating to men who they need to be, and what they’re allowed to do, in order to be deemed ‘real men’.
The MRM wants to empower men to not be the disposable work force that suffers to keep the lights on and the water running. We want the suicide rate among men to not be so goddamn high, we want the workplace mortality rate down, we want male genital mutilation to be taken as seriously as it is when it happens to women. Most of all we want feminists to stop pretending men’s rights has a home in that tent. The only time a feminist wants to talk about men’s issues is when those issues can be bent to serve the cause of advancing women’s rights as well, and a movement with patriarchy theory at its core certainly can’t claim to treat men and women equally and without bias.
::sigh:: Allright, I’ll bite:
Plucky_MRA:
So much wrong, but I’ll try to hit a few points:
If all these feminists are saying this, then you should have no problem linki g to a few, right? And you do know that feminism isn’t a monolith, right? That feminists do disagree with each other about things, right?
NOPE.
The whole issue here is ability to consent. The question is not whether or not alcohol or drugs were involved, but whether the person was so intoxicated as to be unable to consent.
You’ll notice that this doesn’t inflate the numbers, but that, yes, plying women with alcohol and/or drugs until they are completely incapacitated and then sexually assaulting them when they are completely incapacitated is a strategy predators use and that a depressingly large number of women have experienced.
Source
You probably didn’t notice this, but this blog is about exposing the misogyny of the MRM. David, the blog owner, and the regular commentators here have read lots and lots and lots of shit from the MRM. And your assertion that the MRM doesn’t uphold toxic masculinity is pure bullshit. But, if there’s so much challenging of traditional gender roles I the MRM, you’ll have no problem finding a few examples and linking them here, right?
And shit, there’s no such thing as male disposability. Men run society and they are the vast majority of legislative positions and wealth. Yes, there are poor and working class men who suffer, but their suffering comes from economic inequality, not gender. Most feminists I know do want to lower the suicide rate, and ensure that people (all people) have resources available for when they need help.
Because how dare women discuss women’s issues without first fixing all men’s problems!
Because, the idea that men shouldn’t have special privileges and power because of their gender is treating men unequally and with bias.
An identity that doesn’t revolve around providing for THE PATRIARCHY MANDATED NUCLEAR FAMILY, protecting, and dying for PEOPLE IN THE EVENT OF AN EMERGENCY. An identity that makes it okay not to hide one’s emotions for fear of being deemed less of a man by OTHER MEN. An identity that says they don’t have to sacrifice their dreams to take on back-breaking labor and work themselves into an early grave, all to satisfy their need for FOOD, SHELTER AND ECONOMIC SECURITY IN A DEEPLY CLASSIST CAPITALIST SOCIETY.
FTFY
And, while it’s on my mind.
What is it about sex that makes people’s innate understanding of consent fly out the window?
Seriously?!
If you went out with a friend and bought an appetizer to share, when they decided to not eat much (or any) of it to save room for dinner you wouldn’t make a huge fuss.
You wouldn’t guilt trip or manipulate them into eating the appetizer.
You wouldn’t violently force them to eat the appetizer.
You wouldn’t wait until they were too drunk to resist you shoving the appetizer down their throat.
How is consent involving sex any more complicated?
Freshly minted indeed. This one is vomiting up talking points completely undigested.
@Plucky_MRA
Given how much you and your kind distort the hell out of what feminists actually say, I don’t believe you. However, I have noticed that not a single feminist I know literally believes that consent is impossible between drunk people. Instead, they emphasize the fact that a certain level of intoxication renders consent impossible – something that quite a few MRAs seem to deny.
The truth is, the authors of that study tested the alcohol/drug-facilitated rape question in the original study alongside a revised version of the question, and the more accurate question yielded a report rate that was insignificantly larger than the rate derived from the so-called methodologically flawed original question. Look it up yourself if you want.
I have read a small amount of MRM literature – enough to know that you’re dead wrong. MRAs, failing to ever critique the gender binary and the category of biological sex, defend a system that constructs men and women as identities within itself. Sex and gender are both social constructs, and all MRAs (yes, all of them) fail to recognize this. In other words, by upholding those concepts and regarding them as a priori and as existing outside of gender discourse, they are shooting themselves in the feet.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, really. MRAs also support various harmful cultural notions about rape (such as the surprisingly common belief that marital rape is acceptable), victim-blame, victim-shame (example: MRAs telling rape victims that they are obligated to get their rapists in jail and accusing them of enabling their own rapists by not reporting them), and even deride the very male victims they claim to support. Moreover, MRAs are known to have no issues whatsoever with bigoted humor, especially rape-related humor, deride people for being “politically correct” (one of the cornerstones of trad-con discourse), and often they even support violent retribution, terrorism, and threats of violence (credible or otherwise). All of these behaviors reflect an inadvertent or otherwise attempt to reinforce the status quo.
I don’t believe it. I constantly notice feminists condemning the notion of hegemonic masculinity, which is what produces discourses about “real men”. Such a critique is vital in order to maintain the analytic scope that allows them to observe male aggression as systematic violence rather than products of aberrant men who aren’t “real” enough to be considered men by some people. Hell, the first criticisms I’ve ever heard directed at the concept of the “real man” were by feminists and womanists, not MRAs.
Also, when feminists and womanists call out certain male behavior, they’re not doing it to establish power or ownership of men. They’re doing it because they perceive shitty patriarchal behavior and they want you to not do it. They aren’t saying that all men have to have six pack abs, that all men need to have had sex with at least 10 women in order to be considered a man, etc.
You’re acting as though we’re literally twisting men’s issues for our own purposes. First of all, feminists and womanists don’t consider men’s issues to be their primary focus – in fact, most of them don’t even focus on men’s issues at all. And that’s just fine because feminism/womanism is about women, not men. What feminists are doing whenever they do bring up male gender issues is simply point out that these issues arise from the side-effects of a system in which men oppress women. It’s so unfortunate that you are now a devoted MRA. It’s not a label I’d ever want to use with pride.