It was “Got drunk and had sex and then regretted it later-rape”

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It sure as hell wasn’t “rape-rape”.

In Not That Kind of Girl Dunham tells us why denial is simpler, at least in the beginning

The most remarkable part of Lena Dunham’s new memoir Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” begins with a seemingly unremarkable story. Dunham writes a darkly humorous essay about a time she realized in the middle of sex that a condom she thought her partner had put on was hanging from a nearby plant.

“I think…? the condom’s…? In the tree?” I muttered feverishly.

“Oh,” he said, like he was as shocked as I was. He reached for it as if he was going to put it back on, but I was already up, stumbling towards my couch, which was the closest thing to a garment I could find. I told him he should probably go, chucking his hoodie and boots out the door with him. The next morning, I sat in a shallow bath for half an hour like someone in one of those coming-of-age movies.”

It’s an experience similar to a scene you might see on her HBO show Girls: a little disturbing and a little funny with a lot of nudity.

But then Dunham does something interesting: after finishing out the chapter, entitled “Girls & Jerks,” she forces the reader to double back. “I am an unreliable narrator,” she writes. And with those words, we dive back into the story of Barry, the guy who flung the condom into the tree. “[I]n another essay in this book I describe a sexual encounter with a mustachioed campus Republican as the upsetting but educational choice of a girl who was new to sex when, in fact, it didn’t feel like a choice at all.”

Lena Dunham says she was raped, though she didn’t immediately know that it was rape.

Like many college girls, a mix of alcohol, drugs, unspoken expectations and shame may have kept her from using the “r” word to refer to the act until years later. She says that she rewrote history in her head, coming up with many versions (including the one above). The real tale — or what she remembers of it — is much more painful. It begins at a party where Dunham is alone, drunk and high on Xanax and cocaine. It’s in that state that she runs into Barry, who she describes as “creepy,” and who sets off an alarm of “uh-oh” in her head as soon as she sees him.

Barry leads me to the parking lot. I tell him to look away. I pull down my tights to pee, and he jams a few of his fingers inside me, like he’s trying to plug me up. I’m not sure whether I can’t stop it or I don’t want to.

Leaving the parking lot, I see my friend Fred. He spies Barry leading me by the arm toward my apartment (apparently I’ve told him where I live), and he calls out my name. I ignore him. When that doesn’t work, he grabs me. Barry disappears for a minute, so its just Fred and me.

“Don’t do this,” he says.

“You don’t want to walk me home, so just leave me alone,” I slur, expressing some deep hurt I didn’t even know I had. “Just leave me alone.”

He shakes his head. What can he do?

After the two return to her apartment, Dunham does everything she can to convince herself that what’s happening is a choice. “I don’t know how we got here, but I refuse to believe it’s an accident,” she writes. She goes on to describe the event in graphic detail. Once he has forced himself on her, she talks dirty to him, again, to convince herself that she’s making a choice. But she knows she hasn’t given her consent. When she sees the condom in the tree — she definitely did not consent to not using a condom — she struggles away and throws him out.

Dunham — drunk and high — was in no condition to consent according to the new rules being implemented at many campuses across the country. And in Dunham’s second story, the thrown away condom and Barry’s aggressiveness make it clear that he did not care about what Dunham wanted.

It’s her roommate that first tells her the encounter was a rape, though Dunham doesn’t believe her: “Audrey’s pale little face goes blank. She clutches my hand and, in a voice reserved for moms in Lifetime movies, whispers, ‘You were raped.’ I burst out laughing.”

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First of all, does anyone else find it suspicious that this “memoir” containing the story of an alleged rape has been released just weeks before the midterm election? Dunham is an enthusiastic supporter of Obama and the Democrats, who just happen to be pushing a “GOP War on Women” campaign theme.

But wait! There’s more!

“Girls” creator Lena Dunham writes in her new memoir that she was raped as a 19-year-old college student. Over the course of two chapters, she explains that it took her years to come to terms with what happened and to be able to talk about the complexities of her experience in a way that felt truthful to her.

In the chapter “Girls & Jerks,” Dunham recalls an “ill-fated evening of lovemaking” with an infamous on-campus Republican. Describing the lead-up to the incident, she writes: “All I knew when I stumbled home from a party behind him was that he was sullen, thuggish, and a poor loser at poker. How that led to intercourse was a study in the way revulsion can quickly become desire when mixed with the right muscle relaxants.”

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Still think it’s a coincidence?

Okay, lets discuss the actual allegations. After going to a party for an evening of underage drinking and illegal drug use, both of which appear to have been voluntary, Dunham chooses to have sex with a jerk. I’m gonna go out on a limb as say that he had probably been drinking too. That is NOT rape. It’s drunken sex.

I can testify from lots of personal experience that drunk people frequently do stupid shit. Alcohol lowers your inhibitions. Sometimes people have trouble remembering the stupid shit they did when they sober up. That is all part of the appeal of drinking. Part of college culture is drinking, drugs and “hooking up” with other students for sex.

“Under the influence” is not the same thing as “too drunk to consent”. You can be under the influence after a couple drinks, but you are still legally responsible for your choices and actions. Short of being passed out it is hard to define when someone is too drunk to consent to sex. You have to look at the alleged victim’s words and actions to see if you can determine their mental state at the time. But a person can be blacked out and still be conscious, giving the appearance of being in control of themselves.

Rape is a serious crime. There is no such thing as misdemeanor rape. It is a felony, and anyone convicted of rape is required to register as a sex offender for the rest of their lives.

On the other hand, the criminal justice system provides criminal defendants with a presumption of innocence, and requires that the prosecution prove a case beyond reasonable doubt. Rape is defined as nonconsensual sex. That is fairly easy to prove if the defendant broke in thru a window and held a knife to the woman’s throat.

But in the real world of human sexual activity, consent is rarely explicit, especially in the beginning. For years the rule was “No means no” which is a reasonable bright line rule. If a woman says “no” then you must stop.

But what if she never says “no”? What if she voluntarily removes her clothing and then talks dirty? Did she consent? What if she really didn’t want to have sex but she was too embarrassed to say anything? What if she was sexually aggressive/promiscuous while under the influence and then ashamed of what she did when she sobered up?

There has been a recent movement centered around college campuses to change the rule to “Yes means yes” which would require explicit consent when the woman is completely sober. This rule would criminalize a lot of commonplace behavior.

If Lena Dunham had been slipped a roofie and passed out and woke up the next day to discover that someone had sex with her while she was unconscious, that would be rape. But that isn’t what happened. She voluntarily got drunk, voluntarily had sex, and then regretted it later.

That is NOT rape.

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