President Roth, Rape is Rape. It is Not “Having Sex.”
Dear President Roth,
I write regarding your recent guest essay in the New York Times titled “The Obvious Step That Could Mean Fewer Fraternity Sexual Assaults.” In this essay you make an argument for fraternities going co-ed. I do not write to engage with the larger content of your essay, but merely to ask a focused question about your choice of phrase in one sentence.
You write that “one young man’s Snapchat invitation to a chain of buddies to have sex with an intoxicated woman was like-minded bro culture at its worst.” I wonder about your framing of this as an “invitation” to “have sex with an intoxicated woman.” Have sex with? This was an invitation to rape.
Consider an alternate scenario, in which a fraternity staged torture sessions in which they gathered as a gang to physically beat and assault a drugged man. Would you then write that a fraternity man posted an “invitation” to “box with an intoxicated man?”
Rape is rape. And calling it “having sex” is bro culture at its worst.
Jessica Wolpaw Reyes
Willard Long Thorp Professor of Economics, Amherst College
Amherst College Class of 1994
Under NYS law, having sex with an intoxicated person is not legally considered rape if the reported victim willfully consumed alcohol or drugs to a point of intoxication on their own volution or with consent. Only if the reported victim was drugged unknowingly (e.g., roofied) or if they were unconscious meaning they could not speak, is this considered rape under the law. This is not the case in most US states, including Massachusetts but it is in CT.
President Roth is correct. Drunk sex with a willfully intoxicated woman is just that in NYS. Maybe it is time to change the law.
Liberal progressive universities spent decades teaching decent men to fear the consequences of defending others while teaching bullies and predators they could get away with anything.
Feminists spent 30 years demonizing masculinity, condemning physical confrontation, and building a legal minefield around the very men we expect to protect us. Intervene, and you could face arrest, lawsuits, bankruptcy, or prison. Stand there recording the assault on your phone, and you’re safe.
Look at Louisiana pastor Tony Spell. According to reports, a 20-year-old threatened to murder him and rape his wife and grandchildren. Spell confronted him physically. Police charged the pastor with battery.
And there’s your upside-down Feminist, Gender and Sexuality studies in action.
In their oppressed/oppressor narrative, our universities cultivated a campus hive-mind where vicious threats inspire endless concern about the aggressor’s rights, while the man who refuses to tolerate them gets hauled into the criminal justice system, legal fees bankrupting him if he escapes jail.
Then the same sanctimonious actors who spent decades treating traditional masculinity like a disease have the nerve to lament the disappearance of chivalry.
What did they expect?
You cannot systematically punish courage, reward intimidation, strip ordinary people of the ability to enforce boundaries, and then act bewildered when public decency collapses.
Every bully learns the same lesson: decent people have something to lose. Their jobs. Their homes. Their families. Their freedom.
And the system makes darn sure they remember it.
That’s the betrayal at the heart of this entire rotten arrangement.
We have made courage a financial and legal liability while turning intimidation into an increasingly low-risk occupation. Cherry on the top: the call to condemn patriarchy – the very system that allows womens rights to exist.
A civilization that makes its protectors afraid and its predators comfortable has already decided who gets to run the place.