andrewducker | Well that was interesting

It seems to me that part of the reason why discussions of sexual assault, get very heated very quickly is that some people view "assault" as a great big thing. If someone was assaulted then _something very bad happened_. This means that when something happens that they don't see as being that awful, then they object to the word "assault", because it doesn't emotionally resonate with them as feeling similar to the act that occurred. What happened wasn't assault because it wasn't that bad (someone got kissed when they didn't want to be, it was just a hug, etc.).

At the extreme end you end up with things like Whoopi Goldberg's defence of Roman Polanski because what he did wasn't "rape rape" - because that would make Roman Polanski evil, which would make her a bad person for liking him. At the milder end you have people arguing that kissing someone against their will isn't assault, because if it is then it means that people can be charged for drunkenly snogging someone they fancied in the pub without checking first.

In any case it means I end up with 70-odd comments while I'm away at a meeting on the other side of town, which I wasn't really expecting.

Threaded | Flat

I think you may have a very valid point here and wonder if it might justify the idea of different "degrees" of assault. When one, unqualified, phrase can cover everything from a drunken inappropriate snog up to everything bar actual rape we tar an awful lot of people, who've done a lot of very different things, with the same brush.

"Sexual assault" is a black-and-white phrase and it's not a black-and-white world.

Isn't the problem that different people have different definitions of both "assault" and "sexual assault". There may be a single legal definition, but what is considered acceptable varies from person to person.

Had the genders been reversed in that scene from Dr Who, I suspect we would have a very different response about the acceptability (or not) of what was depicted.

Really? You didn't expect that to happen? I read the blog post you linked to and expected there to be volcanos of reaction from both sides (well, the various sides).

If the word assault doesn't seem to work very well for something in the opinion of the majority of people then maybe assault isn't the right word. Words only really have a meaning in as much as they represent what the majority of people understand them to mean afterall.

"rape rape"

Now i'm trying to work out what metarape is.

Wow. I hadn't actually bothered to absorb the polanski thing, and assumed it was americans doing their puritanical shtick (sex offender for pissing against a tree, etc) and conflating rape and "statutory rape", but if wikipedia's to be believed...

What's wrong with liking bad people? Everyone's grey. Mind you, given how much trouble I have remembering that, I imagine most people *really* struggle.

From what I read of the conversation, it looks like people agree on everything except whether it should be called 'assault' or not.

Somehow, I'm reminded of the Level/L-E-V-E-L/Level edition of OOTS.

Hiya.

I tend to think it's a very privileged sort of viewpoint that can term what happened in F&S "not serious" and say "I don't see why people are using this word, that word should be saved for something terrible." There are many people who have gone through a type of assault like what happened in the scene, and maybe they should be the ones to say "this is serious" or "this is not serious," or "this is violent" or "this is not violent." I was trying to say in the post that yes, the word "sexual assault" should only apply to very bad things, and what Amy did was very bad! The fact is that what happened is all there is to sexual assault. I'm repeating myself by now, hah. But a lot of people all over the interbutts seem to have missed it!

Anyway, thanks for the linklove.

I believe Whoopi Goldberg said that because she believed Polanski was guilty of statutory but not forcible rape (which of course is mistaken, according to the uncontradicted testimony of the complainant).

Yes, slapping someone across the face and punching them repeatedly in the face until they pass out are both forms of physical assault, but the first is much less serious.

Louis CK has a joke about going out with a girl. They head back to the hotel room, and start making out. He's about to go further, but can't read her signals.

Next day, she says he totally should have gone for it and not care about what she wanted.

“What are you out of your fucking mind?! You think I’m just going to rape you on the off chance that hopefully you’re into that shit?! … Oh, I’m getting kind of a rapey vibe from this girl, I dunno…”

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