Lying to Get Sex Is Rape

Medium | Archive.ph

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In a recent post about dating struggles, the author included the following statement:

    And I hate to admit that this is almost exclusively a problem with men; a lot of us lie to get sex.

I responded by explaining that what he’s describing is rape. Rape is defined as “the crime of forcing or compelling someone to have sex without their consent” and you don’t have somebody’s consent if you have to mislead them in order to get it.

And yet there’s something almost whimsical about the way the author says it in the context of his article. And “Oh well” quality that makes it seem more like a minor annoyance than a deliberate act undertaken to gain access to somebody else’s body.

This was in an otherwise very good article where the author listened to voices other than his own and drew conclusions from them. And yet, there’s still a kind of wall between what the sources are saying and how he’s presenting it because sometimes even the most well-intentioned of us need things spelled out.

I can imagine some readers think I’m being dramatic in characterizing the act of lying in order to get sex as rape. I’m not. Rape is a very clearly defined concept and, while there may be specific individual instances where it’s not exactly clear what happened and how much consent was involved, they’re largely the minority.

Rapists know exactly what they’re doing. They just often try to convince themselves that what they’re doing isn’t rape. Take, for instance, a famous survey in which 31.7% of participants noted that they had intentions to force someone to engage in sexual intercourse, whereas only 13.6% said they had intentions to commit rape.

Those are essentially synonymous statements and an example of rape apologia at work: By redefining the concept, they think they can get away with it.

However, even if you want to somehow pretend that “forced sexual intercourse” isn’t technically rape, it’s still a horrible thing to want to do to somebody else...