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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My DD is 23.  Most of her friends have been raped.  She herself has been assaulted twice, forced to have sex by someone she was alone with willingly.  Both times she was drunk.

What has your young adult's experience been?

[/quote]

DD 23 - Many of her friends with similar experiences. DD is supportive of them, but also shared this info. DD was thinking about going on a date with a guy in one of her classes senior year. Her roommate told her that someone she knew had ‘hooked up’ with him freshmen year. DD reached out to her to get some intel and see if she was okay with DD going out with him (they weren’t close friends but knew one another thru roommate). The girl said yes - told her it was just a drunk hookup, one time, several years prior and he/she never actually dated. DD and the guy hit it off and became serious. After a couple months the roommate’s friend told DD that she was uncomfortable being around DD because she was with the BF and he had raped her freshmen year. She said she was thinking about going to file a title IX complaint.

DD asked her why she didn’t share that info when DD had asked her about the guy prior to dating him. Instead she had urged DD to respond to the guy’s texts and encouraged DD to go out with him. The girl told DD she hadn’t thought about it for several years but when DD asked her about him, it made her re-analyze what had happened and now she felt it had been non-consensual sex.

DD felt horrible. The BF felt even worse. He talked through his recollection of that evening with DD when she shared this new info with him and was trying to figure out what could’ve led to her feeling that it had been non-consensual.

DD says if a girl says it’s rape then it’s rape. But she also doesn’t believe that her BF is a rapist. I don’t understand how both statements can be true.[/quote]

I think there are a lot of older women who, upon re-evaluating their previous experiences, are able to identify experiences that were not truly consensual. Situations where 18/19yo have a confusing sexual encounter are really common. It's entirely possible that your daughter's BF made another young woman feel really uncomfortable several years ago. False allegations are nowhere near as common as apologists like to make it seem.[/quote]

I'm in my 40s now and, looking back, can say that I enthusiastically consented to almost none of the sex I had in my twenties and thirties. [/quote]I agree with most PPs, but need to say that it's not fair to men if a woman can think sex was consensual at the time, but then decide years later that it wasn't.[/quote]

Um, she's not saying that her "consent" changed. But what we view as consent -not to mention outright double standard of sexism and how that affects things (i.e., she dressed like a slut so she asked for it)- has become clear over time. We should not have accepted some things 20, 30 or however many years ago. Some things were clearly assault (or worse) and men got away with it. Some are probably less clear, and while that may mean there is no legal culpability, it doesn't mean it was right.

I don't care if that's "not fair to men."[/quote]

Exactly this! And this is why we talk about enthusiastic consent now. I graduated college in 2012 so experienced the peak of hookup culture. Casual sex was common and accepted and slut shaming was bad BUT we didn’t have a good understanding of the dynamics around consent and agency. So many women (and men, I’m sure! but as a woman I am more familiar with that side of the experience) ended up in situations where they were having sex they didn’t want to have because they were drunk, didn’t know how to express their own limits, were afraid of provoking a confrontation, etc. I had those experiences myself and I look back and wish they had gone differently - I wish I’d had more agency and confidence in myself to be comfortable speaking up and setting boundaries. I wish the men I was with had been more proactive about checking in and making sure I was comfortable and wanted to keep going.

I don’t look back and view those men as horrible rapists. They were young and inexperienced and didn’t know any better the same way I didn’t know better. But that also doesn’t mean that those encounters were consensual and that I should not have any trauma associated with them. And it definitely doesn’t mean that I think women who have the same experiences today should just shut up and deal with it because I did.

We have a much better understanding of these dynamics now and language to talk about boundaries and limits and enthusiastic consent. So the dynamics we experienced 10-20 years ago shouldn’t fly today. We need to make sure our sons and daughters are conscious of how alcohol and social pressure impact one’s ability to consent, and emphasize that it’s always better to to play it safe. If you aren’t sure someone is able to consent, if you aren’t sure they really want to have sex with you and aren’t just going along to get along, don’t have sex! If they truly like you they’ll still like you when they’re sober and you’ll both have more fun then. And I’ve been really happy to see this come through in the Gen Z experience where both men and women seem to be more proactive about checking that their partner is comfortable and excited, and voicing when they aren’t.

To be clear, there are more clear cut experiences of assault in my past that I don’t look back on with the same level of compassion for the man. I can recognize the difference between those assaults and the more grey-area nonconsensual encounters, but the fact that some experiences were clearly worse doesn’t mean the grey area experiences were good or fine. [/quote]

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