Tuesday, September 2, 2014

Why is rape often called "non-consensual sex"? Part 2: CeeLo Edition

From Billboard.com:
The musician/TV personality [CeeLo Green] has since deleted the tweets in which he implied that women can only be raped if they are conscious. He also compared rape to a home invasion. "If someone is passed out they're not even WITH you consciously! So WITH implies consent," Green wrote. "People who have really been raped REMEMBER!!!" he added.
Do this man's tweets not highlight the complications, as I wrote about last month, of mainstream culture defining rape as "sex, but without consent"? It seems to me that Green clearly operates on the widespread notion that both the rapist and the one being raped participates in the act. If rape were defined as what it is, i.e. the act of using another person for masturbation, could Green really assert that an unconscious woman can not be raped?

I recognize that my own thoughts on the definition are vague and such a definition could have consequences I'm not considering. I don't know of any feminists who have advanced the claim that rape is masturbation as a response to the "non-consensual sex" meme, but I'm not very well-read either.

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