Date Rape

Lois Pineau, in her essay "Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis," argues that the problem with understanding and defining date rape, in order to prevent it from happening and to make it easier to prosecute successfully if it does occur, is a problem of communication. Essentially, she argues that date rape occurs when the man does not take into consideration the pleasure and enjoyment of the woman. She calls this "communicative sex" (Pineau, ?, 345). She suggests that society and the law need to shift the emphasis from forcing the woman to prove "an episodic act of resistance" (344) to the man having to prove the sexual act was accompanied by an effort to communicate with the woman with respect to her desire to have sex, what she wants or doesn't want in sex, whether she is having her desires met, and so on:

On the old model of aggressive seduction we sought evidence of resistance. But on the new model of communicative sexuality what we want is evidence of an ongoing positive and encouraging response on the part of the plaintiff (Pineau, ?, 344).

Society at this point, says Pineau, views the sexual encounter as one in which the man is by sociobiological imperative aggressively trying to seduce the woman, and the woman by sociobiological imperative resists that seduction. In this scenario, reflected in the law, the woman must prove that she has gone beyond the sociobiological imperative and made it clear to the man that she is not merely playing at resistance but is sincerely ex

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implify the realm of date rape, but in fact she creates new and bewildering complications, both with respect to the sexual act itself and the communication she requires, and with respect to the legal procedures which would follow a charge of date rape. For example, she is hopelessly naive about both human nature and the law when she argues that her new model will make it easier to prosecute date rape. She suggests that the defendant should be asked if he asked the woman what she liked sexually, if she was using contraceptives, what "tone of voice" he used, whether she asked for penetration, whether he asked what position she enjoyed, and so on. Then she writes: Assuming that the defendant does not perjure himself, he would lack satisfactory answers to these questions. But even where the defendant did lie, a skilled cross-examiner . . . could probably establish . . . when the interaction had not been communicative. It is extraordinarily difficult to keep up a consistent story when you are not telling the truth (Pineau, ?, 344). Pineau here fails to consider the sociobiological paradigm which surrounds date rape in the first place and which served as the heart of the first part of her argument. That is, she has portrayed a so

Category: Government - D