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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Superbad: Glorifying Date Rape?

Over on Hollywood Elsewhere, there’s a truly fascinating discussion going on in the comments of Jeff Wells’ post labeling people who enjoy slash-and-gore horror films as morons. Wells writes about one horror flick I DO want very much to see, Swedish teen-vampire flick Let the Right One In, but that’s gotten largely lost in the discussion on the post, which somehow wends its way from whether horror fans are morons, to the merits of the Saw films, to defining torture porn to … Superbad really being about date rape?
Wait, Superbad‘s really about date rape? Really? Well, yes, according to commenter Hunter (who, actually, earlier in the discussion offered up the single most astute and compelling analysis of the first Saw film I’ve ever read), because the geeks in the film are on a quest to acquire alcohol so that, presumably, they can get the girls drunk enough to have sex with. Then someone else fired back that the whole thing is about the guys agreeing to get the girls beer so they can get into a party they would otherwise not be invited to, not about non-consensual sex. And so on. Now, I never got around to seeing Superbad, myself (I know, I know), but this is the first time I’ve ever heard anyone allege that Superbad is about date rape.
I found this whole discussion intriguing, but I hesitated about whether to write about it, because my views on the subject of date rape are complicated, in that it’s not a black and white issue for me. And I know, as a feminist, I’m not even supposed to say such a thing — the mantra is, no always means no, right? — but then my whole obsession for personal responsibility for one’s own actions rears its head. And to a certain extent, I see the argument about what is and is not “date rape” as, in and of itself, somewhat disempowering to women. Don’t start throwing things, yet, stay with me for a second.


For the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that we’re talking here about young girls and women over the age of sexual consent, whatever that may be where you live. And let’s assume also, for the sake of argument, that we are not talking about men who illicitly drug women for the purpose of having non-consensual sex with them (THAT is rape, period, not “date rape”), but situations where (usually) young women go to parties or out with a group of friends, have way too much to drink, end up, perhaps, messing around with a guy (could be someone they just met or started dating, could be a male friend they’ve known awhile) and end up having sex with that guy, which they later maybe regret. Which is basically the argument Hunter is making about Superbad really being a date rape movie.
So, Hunter wants to equate some guys buying alcohol for girls in the hopes that the end of the night might see them getting laid with a group of guys trying to score some roofies. The difference, though, is in whether the girls willingly drink the alcohol, versus being drugged without their knowledge or consent, is it not? If I make a choice to drink, knowing that drinking is likely to lower my inhibitions, and put myself in a situation where I’m around guys who are also drunk and uninhibited, I’m taking a risk that I’d better be prepared to accept, and I, as a woman, have some level of responsibility for myself.
See, here’s the thing about the feminist argument that the above scenario constitutes a form of date rape: It’s the same kind of double-standard that a lot of women accuse men of making, but in reverse. This argument assumes:
1) that the drinking of alcohol has rendered the woman largely incapable of making a rational decision about whether to have sex with this guy;
2, that the guy, who in this scenario has probably also been drinking, is doing so for the express intent of coercing the woman to have sex she doesn’t really want to have;
3) that a woman who’s had too much to drink is somehow not responsible if her getting drunk results in her having sex;
4) that a guy who’s had too much to drink IS somehow responsible for ensuring that the drunk woman does not have sex with him unless he’s completely certain that she really, really wants to; and
5) that women have no personal responsibility for putting themselves into a situation of drinking too much to begin with, in a circumstance where they’re also around a guy (or group of people) who have also had too much to drink.
This entire argument puts all the responsibility for a woman not having sex with someone she doesn’t really want to have sex with on the man, and not the woman, and by doing so, it detracts from the argument that women are intelligent enough to be expected to take personal responsibility for the decision to drink too much to begin with — and then calls such a scenario “date rape” when, in fact, it’s just a situation of having too much to drink, said drinking impacting the woman’s judgment, and then her regretting having had sex while in an inebriated state. This whole thing reminded me of Jason Reitman’s short film Consent, which I consider one of best critiques of the intricacies of social dating and sexual relationships ever made on film. (And if you’ve never seen Consent, go watch it now. It’s hilarious, but sadly accurate.)
I have three daughters and two sons. When my oldest daughter hit her teenage years, that scary time (for parents anyhow) when I knew she was likely to be experimenting with alcohol, drugs and sexuality, I sat her down for a talk about drinking and sex. We talked about date rape, and what I said to her then (and will say to my younger daughters when they get older) is that she, as a young woman, had a personal responsibility to herself to be careful of the situations into which she puts herself. I talked to her openly about my own experiences in high school and college, drinking and sex.
I told her, among other things, that no matter who the guy was, how much she trusted him, the reality is that as a woman, SHE is the one who can get pregnant through having unprotected sex, not the guy, and that while I do believe men also have a responsibility to ensure an unplanned pregnancy (or spreading of STDs) doesn’t happen, as a woman, she needed to be responsible and focus on protecting herself by both using a reliable form of birth control to prevent pregnancy and a condom to protect against STDs. And I cautioned her strongly against putting herself in a situation where she would ever be drinking so heavily as to become uninhibited and end up having sex with someone she might regret by light of day.
Yes, no means no — or it should. But the question is, if I put myself in a situation where I’m drinking too much, and I end up in some guy’s apartment or hotel room getting down with kissing and heavy petting, at what point can I say “no” and realistically expect that the guy is going to think that “no” means “no?” The feminist argument is that “no means no” at any point in this scenario, up to and including the point of actual intercourse. But the reality is, as a woman, if you choose to get drunk, and then to be alone with a guy who’s also, perhaps, been drinking, and you engage in making out, heavy petting, oral foreplay (sorry if I’m getting too graphic here), is it not reasonable to expect that the guy you’re doing this with might expect that you’ve sent out heavy smoke signals that the evening is going to end with sex?
So the questions at hand are:
1) What actually constitutes “date rape?” Does “no” always mean “no?”, and
2) Does Superbad promote and glorify the idea of date rape — does it encourage the idea that it’s okay for guys to score alcohol in order to get young women drunk and have sex with them?

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14 Responses to “Superbad: Glorifying Date Rape?”

  1. christian says:

    “because my views on the subject of date rape are complicated, in that it’s not a black and white issue for me.”
    Really Kim? I know one can differ between a couple getting loosey goosey with booze, but the term “date rape” is not that loose. It still means sex against your will.

  2. leahnz says:

    kim, i don’t really give two farts in the wind about ‘superbad’ (a scene from that movie does comes to mind in which the boy says to a girl (paraphrasing), ‘if i have sex with her when she’s wasted, isn’t that immoral? and the girl says, ‘not if you’re both hammered!’), but i found your comments somewhat disturbing, so two things:
    first, re: your final paragraph, are you kidding me, kim? if a man and a woman have drunken sex the woman regrets the day after, that is certainly not date rape. but if at any time during foreplay – drunken or not – the woman says no (in seriousness) and the man persists, it certainly is rape.
    to suggest otherwise is to pander to that dangerous, antiquated patriarchal notion that men have a ‘right’ to intercourse, especially past some indefinable point of foreplay when they ‘expect’ it, because they can’t control themselves and aren’t responsible, and it’s the woman’s fault for making out with a guy and changing her mind. the issue is one of male entitlement: a woman has sent out ‘smoke signals’, there’s heavy petting and the man expects the encounter will end in sex, so it’s unreasonable to expect him to cease and desist. even you, as a woman and a feminist, appear swayed by this outmoded, misogynist notion.
    so what’s the worst that can happen if a man is denied sex? disfigurement and death? no…blue-balls and frustration, not exactly the end of the world. just because a man has been lead to think it’s going to happen and even expects it does NOT mean he has a right to, come on now! wow.
    secondly, what about the personal responsibility of men? i don’t know if your boys have reached puberty (mine’s only 9) but i hope you’ve had/will have that same talk with them about sex, safety, responsibility, and entitlement; so much onus is placed on girls to be safe and responsible, and yet boys are often left to it with the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude so pervasive in society. the problem is deeply rooted and complex, but if all boys were taught early on that they are never ‘entitled’ to sex and that women have every right to autonomy and to say no under any circumstance, the problem would be largely nipped in the bud.

  3. Mark Bell says:

    I don’t think “Superbad” is about date rape. The two guys are just trying to get in the girls’ good graces by bringing the alcohol they requested, which in turn will get them access to the party, where they will then be able to hang out with said girls.
    The argument may have arisen because the Seth character, played by Jonah Hill, is convinced that the only way his woman of choice would ever be interested in him is if she were drunk, but I always saw that as ridiculously low self-esteem, not as a malicious interest in getting someone drunk to then rape them. It’s more sad that he thinks that there’s no way he could be appealing to a sober person.
    On top of that, the Evan character, played by Michael Cera, actually finds himself in the exact situation wherein his lady of interest IS drunk and does want to have sex and… he doesn’t. Not under those circumstances. Kind of refutes the whole “planning to date rape” argument right there…

  4. Kim Voynar says:

    christian wrote: “Really Kim? I know one can differ between a couple getting loosey goosey with booze, but the term “date rape” is not that loose. It still means sex against your will.”
    Yes, really — in the context that started this discussion, which was Hunter’s assertion over on HE that Superbad glorifies date rape because the guys in the film are intent on scoring alcohol, not just for the purpose of getting into the party, but in the hopes of having sex, and, further in the context that the girls in that situation provided the money for the alcohol and asked the guys to get it for them.
    Hunter equated the context of the film with a pack of guys trying to score roofies with which to drug girls and then have non-consensual sex with them, and my argument is that the two scenarios are not the same thing.
    In the latter case, we’re talking about drugging a young woman without her consent in order to render her unable to fight off (or even be aware of) the guy wanting to have sex with her. In the former, we’re talking about young girls consensually getting drunk, and the guys hoping that, perhaps, they might end up having sex with them at the end of the night — not about guys forcing the women to become inebriated to begin with.
    I’m just saying, the line between the two is the choice of the woman as to whether to get inebriated to begin with, as opposed to being drugged against their will.

  5. Kim Voynar says:

    leah wrote: “first, re: your final paragraph, are you kidding me, kim? if a man and a woman have drunken sex the woman regrets the day after, that is certainly not date rape. but if at any time during foreplay – drunken or not – the woman says no (in seriousness) and the man persists, it certainly is rape.
    to suggest otherwise is to pander to that dangerous, antiquated patriarchal notion that men have a ‘right’ to intercourse, especially past some indefinable point of foreplay when they ‘expect’ it, because they can’t control themselves and aren’t responsible, and it’s the woman’s fault for making out with a guy and changing her mind. the issue is one of male entitlement: a woman has sent out ‘smoke signals’, there’s heavy petting and the man expects the encounter will end in sex, so it’s unreasonable to expect him to cease and desist. even you, as a woman and a feminist, appear swayed by this outmoded, misogynist notion.”
    I see your point, Leah, and on an intellectual level, I absolutely agree with you. But on a practical level, as a woman, I also consider that I have a personal responsibility to *myself* not to put myself into inherently dangerous situations to begin with. Which is not to say that a woman who’s raped is *responsible* for that happening to her, but that woman do sometimes put themselves into situations where there is a greater likelihood of that happening, and what I do want my daughters to understand is that, while on a moral level, “no” should always mean “no,” and they always have a *right* to say “cease and desist,” the *reality* is that men, especially when their own judgment has been impaired by drugs or alcohol, do not always process “no” as “stop.”
    I’m not saying that’s right, I’m saying that’s reality, and I want my daughters to be smart and aware and not put themselves into a potentially dangerous situation.
    For instance: when I was in college, I partied, a lot. I frequently attended frat parties where there was a lot of drinking (and, subsequently, a lot of sex) involved. I never wanted to be in a situation where some dumb-ass drunken frat boy would have me alone in a room, with my own judgment impaired to the point that I would end up in a sexual situation I didn’t want to be in. So I had a group of girlfriends who protected each other from making stupid mistakes by having one of us be the designated non-drinker for the night, who would be there to pull aside a friend who was about to do something stupid like go off to an upstairs room with a guy. Or more than one guy.
    I’m married, and I don’t do fest hookups, but even if that wasn’t the case, I wouldn’t get drunk and then go off to some random guy’s condo or hotel room unless I intended to have sex with him. Because yes, no should mean no, but I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’d maybe say no, and mean it, but have to fight off some drunken lout to convince him that I really mean stop, now.
    Does that mean that if I was in such a situation, and the guy didn’t stop, that it’s not rape? No, of course not. But I do consider that I, as a smart woman, also have a responsibility (to myself, not the guy) to not put myself in such a situation to begin with.
    I also don’t go out by myself late at night in parts of town where I’d be putting myself at personal risk by being there alone — i.e, the downtown bus stop where I have to catch a bus back if I go to an evening screening is not a safe place for a woman to be at alone, so I only take the bus there if my husband is going along. If I’m going alone, or even with my mom, we take the car and park in the lighted garage, in a place where we have a clear view of the car walking up to it.
    If I go out to a bar to hear my brother’s band play, even if I’m going with my husband, I don’t wear clothing that sends signals that I’m out looking to be picked up. Does this mean I think it’s a woman’s fault if she gets assaulted or raped just because she’s out late at night or wearing revealing clothes? No, it isn’t — but neither do I go out of my way to make choices that put me at a higher risk of unwanted sexual advances to begin with.
    I agree with you, absolutely, that it’s an antiquated and misogynistic notion, but in the practical, real-world terms of a woman protecting herself, women need to also be smart and think proactively to begin with before they find themselves in a situation they don’t want to be in.
    “secondly, what about the personal responsibility of men? i don’t know if your boys have reached puberty (mine’s only 9) but i hope you’ve had/will have that same talk with them about sex, safety, responsibility, and entitlement; so much onus is placed on girls to be safe and responsible, and yet boys are often left to it with the ‘boys will be boys’ attitude so pervasive in society. the problem is deeply rooted and complex, but if all boys were taught early on that they are never ‘entitled’ to sex and that women have every right to autonomy and to say no under any circumstance, the problem would be largely nipped in the bud.”
    My oldest son is 8, about to turn 9, and the younger is 5, so we’ve not yet had those conversations with them, but we certainly will. If one of my sons got a girl pregnant, whether he was drunk or not, for instance, I would expect him to be responsible for his part in creating the situation, for supporting the girl in whatever decision she made regarding the pregnancy and, if she decided to go through with it, for paying child support and being a father to his child. Whether he intended the pregnancy or not is irrelevant to me; every choice to have sex is a choice to take the risk of an unplanned pregnancy, even if you’re using birth control, and you’d better be prepared to deal with the consequences of that choice before you go down that path.
    And yes, we will also teach our sons that no means no, but I can’t trust that every male my daughters will encounter in potentially dangerous situations will have been raised with those values; in fact, I think it’s more likely that the guys they’ll encounter will NOT have been raised to believe that no means no. So I also teach them how to be responsible for protecting themselves.
    I used to tell my oldest daughter, when she’d bitch and moan about me being overprotective, that it wasn’t that I didn’t trust her, it’s that I didn’t trust everyone she might encounter out in real-life situations. That’s the reality of being a woman — we have to be smart and proactive and protect ourselves, we can’t expect that every man we encounter is going to share our values and respect boundaries, just because they *should* respect them. What people should do, and what they do, are very often not the same thing.

  6. LexG says:

    I want to add to this conversation but I don’t think I’m quite bright enough to articulate my points, so I will have to make them in Lexian shorthand:
    DRIKING OWNS. Getting laid OWNS but it’s, like, really fucking hard. That’s why if they weren’t potentially riddled with disease, Hookers and Escorts would be AWESOME, because you get what you want and you get what you pay for and it’s an adult transaction of supply and demand.
    On the flip side, those dudes who act like they’re ENTITLED to sex and complete fucking assholes with no self-awareness. Like, FUCK those assholes. This is why I have very few male friends… surprising as it might be given my frat-guy-asshole beliefs, that whole jockish, I-get-what-I-want vibe of entitlement is pure assholedom. Like, do thugs and jocks not even KNOW you can punch the clown? They’re always all, “I got to nut, bitch!” and have this sense that if they’re horny that day, come hell or high water they’re going to be doing some chick by night’s end. You see this of course in college assholes but especially on reality shows, and it’s something completely bizarre and unsettling.
    Then again they’re out clubbing and fucking chicks, and I’m usually at home guzzling vodka and posting on the Internet.

  7. jeffmcm says:

    Over on that HE thread, Hunter (who thankfully is not Hunter Tremayne) has some good points but they get lost in his general academic indignation. The Saw films are not redeemed by being more plot-heavy than other horror movies – rather, the convolutions of the plots make those movies rather tediously pretentious, and clearly disingenuous, and Iron Man isn’t nearly as ‘offensive’ as he thinks it is.
    Good points on date rape, though, because it isn’t a clean-cut issue.

  8. leahnz says:

    kim, perhaps we don’t see eye to eye completely on the issue but i get you. i was a WILD CHILD as young woman but i hold my liquor well, and i was always very conscious not to put myself in situations that could get out of hand (and to look after my homegirls in the same way; we’re like the marines: six go in, six come out, no woman is left behind). anyway, it’s amazing what a knee to the groin can do if a guy is being an asswipe.
    lex, you’re an enigma wrapped in a sausage

  9. Jules says:

    “In the latter case, we’re talking about drugging a young woman without her consent in order to render her unable to fight off (or even be aware of) the guy wanting to have sex with her. In the former, we’re talking about young girls consensually getting drunk, and the guys hoping that, perhaps, they might end up having sex with them at the end of the night — not about guys forcing the women to become inebriated to begin with.”
    From a legal point of view you’re wrong. These are two different, independent crimes. Drugging someone without their consent/knowledge with the intention of committing a violent crime (regardless of whether you committ this crime), can earn you up to 20 years in prison (at least in CA.)
    Raping someone can get you another few decades, independently of whether any drugging took place.
    Legally the Superbad characters wouldn’t be off the hook for hypothetically sleeping with these girls while their ability to consent are severely compromised just because the girls consented to getting so drunk.
    For the law there is no difference between raping someone who got inebriated on their on own and who got inebriated against their will. The only difference it makes is whether the criminal is guilty of yet another felony.
    And if the Law doesn’t make a difference between these two types of rapes I won’t make one either. The state of the victim should and does not make no difference for the crime.

  10. Kim Voynar says:

    Jules,
    Perhaps I wasn’t clear enough here. In the case of a young woman drinking too much and the guys hoping they might get laid, I wasn’t talking about a guy raping a drunk woman who’s passed out, I’m talking about a situation where two people drink too much and end up having sex together, which they may or may not regret in the morning ( ie the drunken night of sex in Knocked Up). I’m NOT talking about the woman being forced to have sex.
    These, though, are the kinds of situations I’m talking about where the label “date rape” gets grey for me. Here’s an example of this kind of situation: Back in my college days, I was at a party once with a group of friends who all knew each other very well. A very good male friend of mine (the host of the party) invited as his date a young woman he’d dated casually a couple of times, but not had sex with yet.
    At the party, this woman drank very heavily all night, and was all over my friend throughout the night. They ended up having sex at the end of the night, and thankfully for him, there were other people there, because she left the next morning, and by that evening the police were on his doorstep. She was alleging that he’d raped her when she was drunk and passed out. Fortunately for him, there were several people there — male and female — who were able to tell the police that was not the case. She led him to the bedroom herself, the walls of the apartment were very thin, and everyone there could hear that the sex going on was certainly not rape. She may have been too drunk to remember what actually happened, but the rest of us were not.
    This is what I’m talking about here. This young woman chose to drink excessively all night. No one drugged her against her will, no one forced or coerced her into downing tequila shooters, no one dragged her into the bedroom, and my friend certainly didn’t force himself on her.
    But she cried rape the next day, and had a group of people not been present to witness as to what actually happened, my friend could have gone to jail. These are the situations where the label “date rape” gets fuzzy to me.

  11. leahnz says:

    kim, that’s because it wasn’t date rape at all, it was a false accusation and the two issues are completely separate. just because she accused your mate of date rape doesn’t make date rape a fuzzy issue, it makes false accusations a fuzzy issue. if that particular incident is colouring your view of rape, perhaps you need to refocus your consternation on false accusations instead.

  12. Kim Voynar says:

    Leah, I think you’re missing the point, and I don’t believe this one particular case has clouded my judgment of the issue at all; on the contrary, I think there are a probably more than a few cases of alleged date rape where scenarios like this are actually the case, which is why the label “date rape” is a fuzzy label.
    I’m not saying that you personally are using it in a fuzzy way, I’m saying that, more broadly speaking, the term is used to describe cases like this one, where the young woman is just too inebriated to even know what she’s doing, and there’s an expectation that the man “should have known better.”
    You could argue that my friend should have known she wasn’t in a state to make a decision to have sex, but how realistic is that, really? They’d been dating, she wasn’t passed out cold, she was instigating sexual contact, she certainly didn’t tell him no or try to fight him off in the bedroom — but her memory of what happened, to her, was still “rape.”
    I believe in this case that this young woman genuinely believed she had been date raped. I don’t think she thought she was making a false accusation, I think she had so much to drink that she honestly did not remember what had happened, other than waking up naked the next morning in bed.
    I’m the mother of sons as well as daughters, and I want my sons to be protected from false accusations of unwanted sexual contact as much as I want my daughters to not be sexually assaulted. I’m just saying, it works both ways, and men are not always the instigators or the bad guys.

  13. leahnz says:

    no, of course not. most men are bonza, and i do hear what you’re saying, but you seem to be making broad generalisations about ‘date rape’ based on a specific event or a specific type of circumstance, and ‘date rape’ (which any rape crisis councillor – and my good friend was one for many years – will tell you is a misnomer; rape is rape is rape whether committed by a stranger, date or a spouse) is a term that covers more than just drunken misunderstanding. it seems odd to accuse someone of rape simply for getting hammered and waking up with the guy the next morning not remembering much of what had happened (goodness knows that happens most every night all over the world), but who knows what this woman your friend was involved with was thinking. at least common sense prevailed.

  14. leahnz says:

    oh i just read my comment over and i should probably say bonza = great, it’s a good thing

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

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