The Moral Tortures of Hooking Up

Connecticut College’s policy on rape and sexual harassment is a very progressive one, and it is one that has a very strict definition of sexual misconduct, making it much more inclusive than common perceptions. Our own student handbook reads:

Connecticut College defines “sexual misconduct” as any sexual contact or activity that occurs without the informed consent of any individual involved. According to Connecticut College policy, “consent” implies words and/or actions that demonstrate a voluntary agreement to engage in mutually agreed-upon sexual activity.  For consent:

1. Both partners must clearly communicate their willingness and permission.  Consent is not the absence of the word “no.”  Failure to resist sexual advances, silence, and/or prior relationship does not constitute consent.

2. Both partners need to be fully conscious and aware of their actions.  A person is unable to give consent if they are asleep, drugged, intoxicated, unconscious, a minor, mentally impaired or incapacitated.  Signs that a person is intoxicated, incapacitated, or otherwise unable to give consent include but are not limited to:  slurred speech, loss of coordination, passing out for any period of time, vomiting, and a verbalized feeling of being nauseous.

3. Both partners must be equally free to act.  The decision to be sexually intimate must be made without coercion and both partners have the right to revoke their consent at any time during sexual activity by actively (verbally or non-verbally) communicating their desire to stop the activity. A verbal “no” (no matter how indecisive) or resistance (no matter how passive) constitutes a lack of consent.

Note that this policy concludes that if you are intoxicated in any way, you cannot give consent. Also, sex with a girlfriend after a night of drinking may be considered ‘misconduct.’ Sound extreme? Well, parts of it start to, but the policy has a great deal of validity to it.

Let’s use a thought experiment, inspired and very loosely based on one created by philosopher Lois Pineau. John and Jane are enjoying themselves at a party. Both have been drinking, and both are flirting with each other. John asks Jane to have sex with him, and Jane, embarrassed and apologetic, turns him down. John presses the issue, and Jane becomes annoyed, but feels flustered and socially pressured. She doesn’t want to ruin their friendship, nor does she want him to speak ill of her, so she eventually gives in, and they have sex. John is happily satisfied with his night and his ‘smooth moves,’ but Jane feels unhappy and regrets the whole experience. Was it sexual misconduct? According to Conn policy, yes.

If being intoxicated takes away consent, then some of us have been toeing (or just jumping over) the line on our Thursday and Saturday nights. This is made all the more prevalent by the fact that being intoxicated also takes away judgment (hence the lack of consent), and ‘the morning after’ can be filled with anything from regret to satisfaction to joy to outright embarrassment.

I’m not saying that all hook-ups are bad. But here at Conn, students place an implicit trust in one another. That trust is what forms the honor code, and it plays a crucial role in our party scene.

The deep philosophical issue here is the extreme difficulty of knowing what someone else really wants to do. This seems to be near impossible at times, especially if you don’t know the person in question.

Some men have been known to claim that ‘she wanted it’ when referring to a hook-up, especially if the hook-up is called into question. This is quite similar to men saying that they know when women fake their orgasms. Doubtful.

Yet in the case of being in a prior relationship, you do know the person and it thus more likely that you know what your significant other wants. But this does not give a free pass or absolute knowledge, for there is still such a thing as marital rape.

Just as you cannot easily know level of consent, you cannot easily know level of intoxication – which even applies to your own degree of intoxication. Does feeling tipsy off of a glass of wine nullify consent? I don’t believe so, but being too drunk to walk or speak clearly? I think that one does.

But if there is consent present, what’s the problem? Well, here’s the moral principle: we should treat people how they want to be treated, and not do anything to them that they don’t really want.

Was the thought experiment above a form of rape, or date rape? It might be if you use this definition: rape is having sex with someone who doesn’t really want to have sex with you. If you accept that definition, then the situation given is morally problematic at least.

I still vividly remember a conversation that I had with one of my former classmates from Professor Feldman’s course Feminist Philosophy. We expressed our mutual feelings about how much the class pushed social comforts, and how much we gained from it, especially in retrospect.

When the subject of rape and date rape came up, my classmate expressed his feelings about it: to him, it was crazy that rape has such a wide definition. He recalled how he was tortured briefly by the thought that he had – without direct intent – pressured a girl into having sex. He expressed the fact that he couldn’t hook up with anyone for months after that. But then he laughed and said that he got over it, and was out on the hook-up scene once more. My fellow peers and I laughed about it, but I was deeply intrigued and more than a little bit disturbed. Could it really be that easy for some to ignore the moral implications?

My thanks to Professor Feldman for his assistance in the development of this article.