BYOB – The Weekend To Come
Kim Voynar’s column this week gets into the O&R date rape muck again…. well worth reading.
My perspective remains pretty much the same, even after a two-day edit/discussion with Kim on her column. I think both sides of the discussion tend to overreach the scene itself. It can be argued that it is or is not a date rape. The content of the film does not offer real answers, only moments that can be interpreted as one chooses to interpret them.
Kim gets to the bigger issue, which is whether discussions about things that are on that line of political correctness are allowed by The Dogmatics. I would argue that the same is true for those on the side of political incorrectness. Far too many people are dismissing arguments that it is a date rape as hysterical or “not getting it.” And I find that on both sides use the examples of filmmaker comments, etc, that best make their side of the argument and avoid those things that suggest they are wrong. Not cool. As much as saying that it absolutely could not have been consensual on some ugly, but real, level, claiming that it absolutely could not qualify as date rape is an extremist position.
My personal argument comes back to the filmmaker. Did Jody Hill develop this scene to spur debate… or was he just using sex and drug abuse to create a shock punch line? The former would have be kinda brilliant… the latter, to me, given the content of the scene, inexcusable. But that’s just me…
That’s classy, calling a post about date rape “The Weekend To Come”…
Watched Doubt last night and thought it was fantastic and certainly not what I was expecting. Anyone else see Streep’s nun to be a not too distant cousin of Tracey Flick?
I figured Kim would pull out “two sides to date rape” card. Reminds me of a line in the original BEDAZZLED from the pious police captain: “I’ve always ‘ad mixed feelings about rape.”
Still love ya Kim!
Watched Marley & Me. Suprisingly enough, it did peg some of the conflict that arises in the husband-in-the-doldrums + the overwhelmed child rearer dynamic. And darn it if the ending didn’t get me. Otherwise, it was mildly diverting.
Does watching movies on airplanes give you permission to talk about them in a critical way? Because I watched a whole bunch of movies on my recent trip, but I feel strange talking about them because it’s obviously the worst possible way to view a movie. Although I now realise how a lot of Academy members must see a lot of the movies.
On the flights I watched:
Frost/Nixon, 7/10 – decent, but average.
Bolt, 6.5 – yet another movie is clearly anti-feline.
Elegy, 9/10 – i really want to see this in better quality because I thought it was utterly fantastic. Cruz is astonishingly good and it’s a good rebound for Coixet after the dire My Life Without Me.
Easy Virtue, 7/10 – Jessica Biel is a big surprise here.
Twilight, 2/10 – So awful. On the 13(or so) hour flight from Melbourne to Los Angeles I only slept 30 minutes and those 30 minutes were during Twilight. Truly dreadful claptrap from start to end.
Last Chance Harvey, 7.5 – Charming. Emma Thompson is excellent, as usual, and I even liked Dustin Hoffman (rare).
There was another in there that I can’t remember. Oh well. I decided I best not watch Synechdoche, New York though, as surprised as I was at it’s viewing option.
JESSICA BIEL IS CHARMING.
For the fourth consecutive week, I will register my impotent complaint that the Keira/Sienna lesbo flick is playing in one theater in America… IN ST. LOUIS.
What the fuck, are they driving one print around America in a horse and buggy like it’s 1927 or something? Didn’t Lionsgate make a big production about how they wanted to make CLASSY MOVIES and thus they buried THE MEAT TRAIN to focus on tony shit like EDGE OF LOVE?
So… why open it one theater at a time in out-of-the-way arthouses?
Also, Education of Charlie Banks is gone from everywhere. There’s still XMas movies playing in discount houses to empty seats, and not one of Los Angeles’s 300,000 rooms could book Durst for a second week. Total bullshit, I really wanted to see that and couldn’t make it the ONE WEEKEND it played.
Signed, Chucky in Los Angeles.
“What the fuck, are they driving one print around America in a horse and buggy like it’s 1927 or something?”
They’re probably just hiding the fact that it isn’t a “lesbo flick”. If they do only have one print, you’ll be storming the projectionist’s booth and tearing it to guitar picks in outraged disappointment.
Hopefully not with your fly open.
“I figured Kim would pull out “two sides to date rape” card.”
That’s interesting and rather more insightful than a lot of folks, Christian, whether you intended it that way or not. I rather expected most of the folks who know me these days would be surprised that I wasn’t coming out on the side of outrage over date rape. But this is an argument I’ve been making since my college debate days … I’m very pro-personal responsibility when it comes to issues around sexuality.
As an aside, though, calling it a “two sides to date rape card” implies that it’s not a real issue, or that you think it’s more black-and-white that I do. I’d be interested in seeing you flesh out your own opinion on the subject a bit more.
If the same scenario had involved a pair of homosexual men instead of a man and woman, would there still be a controversy?
“I rather expected most of the folks who know me these days would be surprised that I wasn’t coming out on the side of outrage over date rape.”
I don’t think we’re debating whether date rape is worthy of outrage here. I think we’re debating what exactly is or isn’t date rape. The definition of the name has been pulled like taffy in all kinds of ridiculous directions by some people (e.g, it’s date rape if your partner has been drinking, whether they initiated the sex themselves and stayed conscious during the entire act or not).
“If the same scenario had involved a pair of homosexual men instead of a man and woman, would there still be a controversy?”
That’s an excellent question, Hallick. I actually pondered while writing the column how folks would have responded to the scene if it had been a couple of gay guys, or a couple of lesbians, instead of a hetero scene.
If it was two gay guys, and one was as intoxicated as Brandi, would that be date rape? How about if one guy was gay and the other wasn’t (or thought he wasn’t, but agreed drunkenly to sex anyhow?)
‘If it was two gay guys, and one was as intoxicated as Brandi, would that be date rape?’
um, yeah. why would there be different standards for rape for gays & lesbians? i find that notion quite offensive – and i’m not trying to get into an argument about it, goodness knows i’ve done enough arguing about stupid shit around here lately to last me several lifetimes
(and i do wish people would stop referring to it as ‘date rape’ – and insidious term coined to imply complicity – there is no such thing. there’s rape – ‘sex without consent’ – or there isn’t)
That’s like saying there’s no such thing as ‘alley rape’.
“and i do wish people would stop referring to it as ‘date rape’ – and insidious term coined to imply complicity – there is no such thing. there’s rape – ‘sex without consent’ – or there isn’t”
That’s interesting since I’ve never thought of the word “date” in the phrase as an lessening agent. I always considered it a situational adjective, much like “wife beating” or “elder abuse”.
I do remember the time when the phrase first started gaining prominence in the culture, and there were some neanderthals who couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea that if a girl changes her mind in the course of a date that was leading up to a sexual encounter then it was a crime to force it on her anyway. The whole “teases were asking for it” logic.
well, i’m glad you brought that up, jeff and hallick, allow me to explain a bit further:
there is no such thing as ‘date’ rape, or ‘alley’ rape, or ‘marriage’ rape, or ‘stranger’ rape, or ‘friend’ rape; or ‘cousin’ rape, or ‘uncle’ rape; under the law, it’s all sexual assault – referred to in most countries as either ‘forcible’ or ‘statutory’ rape, in which the victim is under the age of consent. of course rape happens under a myriad of different circumstances and conditions, but the fact is people are most comfortable with the idea of ‘stranger’ rape, some faceless man dragging an innocent woman out for a walk into an ally and then raping here, because this is so cut-and-dried and doesn’t confront our prejudices or involve the typical male defences of complicity or provocation or consent.
the fact is, the VAST majority of women are raped by people they know, not strangers lurking in the dark; this is an indisputable, cross-cultural/regional fact. the term ‘date rape’ is insidious because it implies complicity of the woman, who has likely willingly engaged in some form of intimacy with her rapist prior to the act; the term is dismissive and by very nature deems to lessen the severity of the crime. (i have a good friend who is a lawyer, now a prosecutor, who worked in rape crisis for many years, so i’ve learned much of this from her in a legal/social context)
I respectfully disagree with the dismissal of the term, Leah. The reason I think that “date rape” is still worth discussing, semantically and otherwise, is that it not only implies that the rapist is an acquaintance, but that circumstances are not those we associate historically with rape, including rape inside of families.
I take the issue of consent very seriously and am pretty black and white on it. I believe that every man has the responsibility of being able to honestly make the case that some form of consent, by action or words, was made.
If a woman who you are not intimate with agrees to a slow dance, it would be unreasonable for her not to expect that your hand or arm might graze her breast or buttocks. But a hand closing on a body part is clearly a different thing. And that is, to my eye, where the issue of acquaintance rape/date rape lives. It is as simple and as complex as The Golden Rule.
Is the term insidious? I am sure it can be. But the nature of a woman consenting to one thing and ending up with another in a circumstance where the “one thing” often leads to the “other” needs to be discussed openly and if we can’t get past the semantics, it will not be. As a result, I fear that more women will be raped and feel like they did something to deserve having a man do that to them.
I believe that defining everything as “rape” or “not rape” and no other classifications actually allows the rationalizations about what is known as date rape. There was no knife, no drugging, no punching, no threat… so it can’t be “rape,” because she wasn’t dragged into an alley.
And I am not sure that regret on the woman’s part is a key component in making the case for rape either. Legally, I believe that the regret of the woman has to be the first standard. But morally, just because someone doesn’t see what’s happening to them as abusive does not make it anything less than abusive.
This is where I diverge a bit from Kim, as she lets the male off the hook too much, in my opinion, so as not to remove responsibility from the woman. I feel both are responsible for their choices… period. One person’s bad choice to do something stupid to make themselves vulnerable does not make abusing the circumstance okay. Nor does it make the person being abused free of blame.
In other words, just because choosing to smoke in an era where the dangers are clear is somewhat suicidal, that doesn’t mean that the tobacco companies are not also doing the wrong thing by trying to hide the truth or to trick the uninformed, etc.
We all make choices every day about how we interact… and what we can or cannot get away with. And for most people, every day, we makes choices not to do some bad things we could get away with. Sometimes we cross that line. Sometimes we get caught. Etc. But the fantasy of blamelessness is a human weakness.
Bottom line for me… we all need to be more aware more of the time of other people who are under our physical or emotional influence.
AND – The question asked above about whether the same scene with two gay men would be controversial is a bit of a farce… as we would never see that in a mainstream film at all… asked and answered. But conversely, if a straight man woke up to another man pumping away in his ass, to which he gave a drunken response like “why’d you stop?,” that would be most controversial movie of any year. But again… we would never, ever see that in a studio release. Not a chance… as we still wait on a Jim Carrey/Ewan McGregor/Leslie Mann comedy about a gay man to get a US distributor.
David, just to get a better read on what you yourself define as date rape, are you of the belief that having sex with a person who is drunk, whether she started having sex conscious and willing and THEN began to black out or not, is rape?
‘I respectfully disagree with the dismissal of the term, Leah. The reason I think that “date rape” is still worth discussing, semantically and otherwise, is that it not only implies that the rapist is an acquaintance, but that circumstances are not those we associate historically with rape, including rape inside of families.’
i understand what you’re saying, dp, but my problem with that is, why should it matter that the rapist is an acquaintance or even someone with whom a woman is romantically involved? like i said, it’s a statistical fact that most women who are raped are assaulted by people they know, including family members, friends, acquaintances and ‘dates’ (rape by a stranger is by far the lowest statistical group).
so what are these circumstance we don’t historically associate with rape, exactly, women being assaulted by men with whom they have gone out with willingly? this may in fact be one of the most typical, common types of rape dating back to year dot (and also the least reported). why does this need a separate, defining term?
one must ask: why is it that rape by a man with whom a woman willingly goes out with in a romantic context, why is this the only type of rape to have its own unofficial title: DATE RAPE. why set it apart from all other circumstances of rape? why don’t we commonly use other titles like, ‘family rape’? or ‘marriage rape? or ‘friend rape’? or ‘acquaintance rape?.
the only explanation is that the term ‘date rape’ has a connotation that inherently implies a degree of complicity by the victim: she was at the very least stupid enough to go out with this man or engage in some form of intimacy with him, therefore it’s not quite ‘the same’ as other rapes…
‘jane was raped last night’ – ‘oh how awful’
by a guy she willingly went home with after having one too many glasses of wine and then changed her mind about sex at the last minute because she decided she wasn’t ready/didn’t want to/he was too clingy/needy/creepy/stinky/what have you; he says she consented, she says he forced himself on her’
ah, ‘date rape’. that much harder to prosecute, because the complicity of the victim is, by very nature of the ‘date, questionable.
but thankfully in the eyes of the law, there is no official term ‘date rape’, rape is rape is rape, whether by husband, stranger, casual acquaintance or date.
apologies for my bizarre and rather appalling punctuation there, my only excuse is that i wrote that very quickly and sort of edited it half-way through and didn’t bother to proofread it properly when i finished, yikes
When did this place because The Rape Blog?
Damn, a little 80-minute Seth Rogen movie has turned not one but two blog of MCN into a Take Back the Night series in the Berkeley campus newsletter.
Maybe Jennifer Connelly can take Kristy Swanson to a rally in tomorrow’s edition while Cole Hauser and Michael Rappapot start issuing beatdowns while wearing full regalia in the student union.
replace rappaport with josh lucas and matthew mcconaughhowyouspellit, so that the ‘cole, josh and matthew trio’ confuses the hell out of the people they’re harassing by being weirdly similar and interchangeable
Leah, I think I get what’s frustrating you about the “date rape” label. In the times when a woman goes out with a man that ends up killing her, nobody’s out there referring to the homicide as a “date murder”. It’s just murder.
So to you, if there’s a date that turns into a rape, your mind doesn’t compute it as a “date rape”. It’s just plain rape.
Then again, in the Jennifer Levin “Preppie Murder” case in New York City in the 80’s, Robert Chambers’ lawyer pretty much mounted a “date murder” defense for his client.
hallick, you so get me (and you managed to say it in like two sentences with decent punctuation, kudos). i hope the ‘date murder’ defence didn’t work…but i guess after the success of ‘the twinkie defence’, all bets are off
The defence half-worked, but his karma (and some real ham-fisted drug dealing) put him back in the slammer after his release earlier this decade.
Lex, go away. Adults talking.
Good dialogue all. As for me, Leahnz said it far more eloquent and specific.
Plus, the term “date rape” implies that two people were going out and that maybe the woman initiated things or maybe the woman lead the man on. As if adding the “date” part puts some of the responsibility onto the woman – ’cause all dem bitches are just cock teases anyway AM I RIGHT FELLAS etc – and giving the man some sort of lame justification for it.
Or ya know…
Leah, I understand your point, but when the term ‘date rape’ was originated, it wasn’t as a way to say “here are some rapes that weren’t so bad, because they were actually dates”, it was “here are some dates that were really terrible, because they were actually rapes”. Maybe idiots have redefined it as a way to justify the rape, but that’s not what it really meant or means – it’s a subcategory of rapes that, in the past, people didn’t believe could exist until the term was invented to include it.
As far as the origin of the term “date rape” goes, jeffmcm is right. It was promoted during the 80’s as a category in order to bring attention to the fact that women could be and were being raped by acquaintances in the middle of otherwise civilized social outings; and this was something that was hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around since “rape” to them still meant a stranger with a knife in a dark alley or parking garage somewhere.
It’s amazing to realize just how recently that progress began to be made in the prosecution of this crime. LexG can chortle at the “Take Back The Night” crowd all he wants, but on this issue their kind really helped pull society out of the stone ages. This isn’t to say that highly debatable grey area situations don’t exist, or that there aren’t people using the system to their own selfish ends.
“Damn, a little 80-minute Seth Rogen movie has turned not one but two blog of MCN into a Take Back the Night series in the Berkeley campus newsletter.”
Seeing as how there’s an actual debate in these blogs instead of the radical feminist echo chamber one might expect from the aforementioned newsletter, your reaction is kind of hysterical.
jeff & hallick (and i think dp was alluding to this very thing as well), you are entirely correct, i see the ‘date rape’ term was coined in the 70’s (my legal site said the ’70s anyway) as an offshoot of the woman’s movement as a way to define acquaintance rapes that no one would previously prosecute, because if the woman willingly went out with a man in a social/romantic context and then claimed she was raped, she was considered to have brought in on herself/been asking for it/lead him on and he couldn’t help himself, it was her word against his and therefore rape couldn’t be proven.
thankfully, things have changed a great deal since then, woman are considered autonomous individuals with the right to say no in a social setting and men are held responsible and accountable for their actions, so the term ‘date rape’ is now archaic and has far outlived its ‘use by’ date. perhaps more importantly, the term has now turned on its head and taken on negative connotations in both a legal and cultural sense, as rather eloquently demonstrated by kam’s comment. it’s time for ‘date rape’ to go. what was once a tool for change is now insidious and dismissive.
sadly, as much as things have changed, acquaintance rape is still hugely under-reported to the police (10% is the legal estimate here), even fewer are brought to trial and conviction rates are about 1% (which might explain that 10% reportage stat).
Hallick sees the light and the whole sequence at Kim’s, from hostage to mother connection to borderline un-heated action. (It would still be borderline, but less iffy if Brandi told Ronnie he was a lousy fuck the next day, and that set Ronnie off against her.)
I think there’s new ground to be broken that equates porn with rape, regardless of who signs what consent. Good documentary subject.
“I think there’s new ground to be broken that equates porn with rape, regardless of who signs what consent. Good documentary subject.”
Not exactly new ground, since its a position that’s been associated with people like Andrea Dworkin for decades now, verging on equating any sexual contact at all with rape.
If porn were rape, things like the bikini competition in the Miss America pageant, or the pose down in a bodybuilder’s contest, would have to qualify as molestation. How do you criminalize voyeurism and exhibitionism? Probably with the same level of success seen in the days of Prohibition.
Old man, I said new ground for a doc, not a law.
What would be the point of a documentary about an outdated and spurious-when-it-was-current idea?
To continue Hallick’s thought, it would be like making a modern documentary about the evils of the demon Liquor.
I’m sure if you had Sasha Gray’s intelligence and experience you could rate porn films on the degree of rape involved.
Like how much money she takes to perform in them and the contract she signs? What are you even talking about?
I’m saying she could be an expert talking head and rate what you watch, asswipe.
Hey, if it’s one of those videos where a guy is getting screwed by five women, can he say they overpowered him?
“Old man, I said new ground for a doc, not a law.”
No – first you said,”I think there’s new ground to be broken that equates porn with rape, regardless of who signs what consent.”, and then you said,”Good documentary subject”. Two separate sentences, no connective tissue like “which would make for a good documentary subject”, or “I think there’s new ground to be broken in filmmaker”. My misunderstanding was not my fault.
Okay, now that I’ve seen the movie and scene in question, I’d have to say that it really feels like a mountain/molehill situation here. It’s a scene in which a delusional, bipolar loser is having sex with an alcoholic, pill-popping skank. How about we agree they’re both terrible people and neither are providing a healthy model of sexuality or how to build a relationship and call it a day?
Where was this discussion when The Reader – a movie in which the first third is about statutory rape – came out? Or the scene in Step Brothers in which an obviously mentally incapable John C. Reilly was taken advantage of in a restroom?
Ridiculous? Exactly.
“It’s a scene in which a delusional, bipolar loser is having sex with an alcoholic, pill-popping skank. How about we agree they’re both terrible people and neither are providing a healthy model of sexuality or how to build a relationship and call it a day?”
I don’t know, ROGEN’S CHARACTER OWNED and I was kinda rooting for him the whole movie, like THIS DUDE RULES. And FARIS IS HOT AS HELL and drunk, pill-popping skanks are my IDEAL WOMAN.
I LIKE CHICKS WHO KNOW HOW TO PARTY. All I ever meet in real life are educated, smart, witty chicks, and they’re cool but they don’t bring the sexiness.
DUMB AND LIKES TO PARTY = HOTT.
It’s unfortunate I’m too mediocre looking and too smart/self-aware to ever truly pull party chicks. Instead I’m stuck associating with educated women. BORRRRRRRRRRRRRRRING.
Also that coffee chick was awesome as hell and I wish I worked near some enthusiastic, fun chick who was all into me like that chick was.
I hope Rogen’s character taxed that shit like George Segal. Her being a virgin was kind of a downer, but that broad seemed awesome.
Basically I just wish I had some impressionable chick thinking I was COOL instead of FUNNY.
Yeah, I act like a dick here, but in the real world my downfall is I’m that NONTHREATENING “FUNNY” friend guy.
Short of paying for it, since I come in contact with ZERO AVAILABLE WOMEN in my daily sausage fest workplace travails, I am looking at absolute sexlessness for the next eight billion years.
I’m at the point now when I’m in Ralph’s at midnight buying my CASE and some summery LA chick waltzes down the aisle in booty shorts little top, I actively put my head down in SHAME because I know I AM NOT WORTHY.
If I could just get famous or get rich.
Why is it that you seem to worship at the altar of guys who act like dickheads, but then I act like a dickhead here and you act like I kicked you in the vagina?