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I would imagine a fairly large percentage of young men and a fairly large percentage of young women have experienced a situation where the lines of consent were in some way blurred or complicated. I would also imagine that the nature and outcome of those experiences differed greatly according to gender.
I'd go further and suggest that there is statistically likely to be a fairly large percentage of dwellars who have experienced situations where lines of consent were blurred or complicated. And again, I imagine those experiences differ according to gender.
Chances are, if studies over the last quarter of a century are in any way indicative of real patterns of behaviour, that the percentage of women who have experienced such situations is likely to be much higher than the percentage of men: such studies suggest that men who rape usually start very young (teens) and repeat the offence. In particular young men who admitted in surveys to getting a girl drunk to the point of insensibility, or spiking her drink, with a view to having sex with her while she was unable to rebuff them (a depressingly high percentage amongst college students as I recall - that number drops drastrically as soon as the word 'rape' is used - suggesting again that they do not consider it to be rape) also often said that they have done this multiple times and would use the strategy again. Likewise, men convicted of rape and serious sexual assault are often shown to have raped or assaulted multiple times before conviction. The percentage of women who have experienced rape or sexual assault meanwhile is still very high.
The vast majority of men do not rape or sexually assault women. But - enough do to create a really serious problem. We have spent centuries telling women not to get raped. We're still doing it - look at the above comments by Chrissie Hynde. The police are often completely onboard with the notion that some girls are just asking for it - and that boys will be boys. How else did the police in Rocdale and Burnley come to the conclusion that 12 year old girls, groomed and serially raped by a network of middle-aged men, were willing prostitutes? Time and again, talking heads on tv and columnists in newspapers beat out the 'how not to get raped' drum. It's how we dress, it's how we do our hair, it's what streets we walk down and at what time, it's how we may give mixed messages, it's the invitation we somehow stamped on our tits before leaving the house. Ignoring, usually, the fact that the vast majority of rapes are not stranger rapes but committed by people we know. We can take every precaution in the world, but if your rapist is also your lover/husband/father/boss/neighbour/friend - then keeping a curfew and dressing in a burkha won't help us. Case in point: in countries where women cover up and are barely seen on the streets without a male chaperone women still get raped.
A group of lads at a party were faced with the prospect of a schoolfriend passed out from drink and instead of helping her they stripped her, fucked her - with objects in every orifice - filmed it on their mobiles and passed the video around their friends. (I'll try to find the news story but it's from a year or so ago). They didn;t consider what they had done to be rape - because rape is when you jump out of the bushes, knife in hand and force a girl tpo the ground. This wasn;t that - she was just drunk and they were drunk and leery. They used her like a blow-up doll. UIn thatmoment, that girl had no humanity in their eyes. That is scary. That they felt quite happy having that on their fucking phones - with no concept of it being evidence of a crime is scary.
For a few years - a very fucking few years - we've begun to have a conversation about consent. Not rape - consent. Because we have as a culture embraced for a very long time a fairly narrow definition of rape - up until fairly recently, for example, it was not considered possible, in law, for a husband to rape his wife. By marriage she had already given consent. There is still an air about rape that suggests that it isn't really rape unless it is forced sex by a stranger. The boys who passed that girl around like a doll and then happily passed the video of it with their friends have a different notion of what rape is. That is a conversation that needs to be had. It's not one we've been having for very long. Oh sure - we've always had societal and legal sanctions against rapists - and most people, male and female, consider someone who rapes to be beyond the pale - most men subscribe to the idea that rape is wrong. But if we don't know what rape is - if only that kind of rape is wrong, and this other thing that totally dehumanises and brutalises the victim is not rape then what do we do about that?
We teach our children not to bully. We teach them not to hit those who are weaker than them. We teach them all sorts of things about being a good human being. Why not this?
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