Some of the conversations about responsibility seem to be conflating a number of separate acts.

I’ll first say I think Brock Turner was 100% responsible for the rape and the sentence was a tragedy.

Now to the other half of the conversation. How did the involved people get there? Given they attempted to blame alcohol, it’s probably safe to say Brock Turner didn’t take his first drink expecting to wake up in a jail cell. When someone drinks, they’re gambling that the person they become isn’t a monster, will treat their body well, and will stay out of trouble. Once people start, it’s one impaired decision followed by another more impaired decision.

They both started down the path that night the same way: their last sober decisions were to take the first drink. I don’t think anyone here is attempting to deflect attention or victim blame. What’s going on is there was a separate act by both parties before the rape that was irresponsible: the drinking to the point of getting comatose in the first place.

If there wasn’t a person who was responsible for the injury itself, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Had someone drank themselves comatose and run their car off a bridge and died, we’d have said they were 100% responsible for putting themselves there, no questions asked.

We can say she had 0 responsibility for the rape and still acknowledge that she made a poor decision.

Another problem in these conversations, and I think this is simply people agreeing but not figuring out how to communicate, is the apparent assumption that men need to be psychic and know when a woman will wake up and think the sex was a bad idea. How can the man even know if he’s intoxicated himself? He can’t. If both people are intoxicated and they both consented at the time and nobody feels they gained an unfair advantage due to the intoxication, it was just sex, even if they wake up unhappy about it. It’s unreasonable to expect one gender to somehow rise above intoxication and make a sober decision.

I think the situation that‘s most often in question is when one party feels they are getting sex when they wouldn’t otherwise have due to the intoxication. It’s the intent (mens rea) in this case that matters. If someone is saying yes and you believe it’s the booze or the drugs talking, you should stop, and not stopping is then rape. The problem is it’s the thought combined with the action that makes it a crime or not. How do you prove what someone was thinking?

This seems to be a finer point that I think many agree on, but it’s often explained in a way that looks as though the man needs some sort of superior mental faculties while drunk.

I agree our culture encourages bad behaviors. We need to get out of encouraging thinking of women as conquests or notches in our belts. I don’t think all masculinity is the problem, but we are placing a good number of unhealthy expectations on men and boys, and we need to isolate them and change them.

That said, it won’t happen overnight. These incidents should never happen. But, it’s not victim blaming to say the best way to prevent them until needed changes happen is to avoid these situations in the first place.