Gov Belittles Women
Closing the rape ‘loophole’ is a perilous pander
WE are in a pro-woman moment. American women are supposed to have more power than ever before. But the left keeps stripping women of their agency in the name of protecting them.
Take Gov. Cuomo’s latest move to close a “rape loophole” in New York law.
In a statement calling rape an “insidious disease” (which indeed it is), Cuomo claimed that “a loophole in current law allows rapists to walk free and vacate their heinous crimes based on a legal technicality.”
That “technicality” involves the voluntary consumption of alcohol or drugs by accusers, as opposed to involuntary use.
Manhattan DA Cy Vance Jr., among others, has been pushing for legislation that would remove the power to consent from anyone who has had too much to drink or is otherwise impaired. That is, if one partner in a sexual encounter is too drunk, the encounter as such is nonconsensual.
Vance is eager to showcase himself as tough on sex crimes — his office infamously went easy on Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, after all.
While the new rule will theoretically be applied to both men and women who drink too much, the practical matter is that law and society hold men accountable for a woman’s level of drunkenness during sex, and no one is trying to hide that fact.
Writing about the proposed change on The Daily Wire Web site, Ashe Schow laid out how these kinds of rules actually get applied. She brought up Duke University dean Sue Wasiolek, who infamously argued that when both parties are drunk, “assuming it is a male and female, it is the responsibility in the case of the male to gain consent before proceeding with sex.”
Vance made it clear in August that he has women in mind, when he told NBC that “among the most common fact patterns that we have in sex-crime investigations is this situation, where a woman is intoxicated because of her drinking at a party or a bar and then ends up being assaulted sexually by a man.”
But is this really about closing a loophole — or pandering?
As Assemblyman Dan Quart, who is challenging Vance in the DA race in 2021, told The Post, voluntary intoxication is already used to prosecute louts who prey on drunken women.
“It’s not a loophole,” he said. The rape statutes already allow “a prosecutor who wants to prosecute rape cases, to prosecute. Cy Vance just doesn’t want to.”
Beyond political maneuvering, we need to promote equal, not uneven, dignity for the sexes.
While it’s true that some caddish men take advantage of drunken women, to put the sole onus of responsibility for a drunken encounter on one party — the male — is to infantilize women. It also allows women to destroy the lives of men should they come to regret a drunken — but willing — sexual encounter.
That telegraphs a message to women that they are weak and irresponsible — that they can act as imprudently as they wish, and then offload all of the responsibility to the partner they seemed to like a lot more when their bloodalcohol levels were surging the night before.
That’s not to say that we should let creeps go scot-free. And we should, of course, teach boys and men to steer clear of caddish ways. But laws that positively encourage imprudence on the part of women do nothing to keep them safe; if anything, they make bad choices more, not less, likely. Honor and prudence should go hand-in-hand.
Instead, we’ve gotten to a point where we are using legislation to shelter women entirely from their own decision-making.
As we enter the next decade, the best way for women to have equality is for society to actually treat them equally — for better or worse. That means taking rape accusations seriously. More important, it means treating women as grown-ups, capable of making our own mistakes, which will sometimes include drinking too much or sleeping with the wrong people. Just like men.