At risk of reviving a clusterfuck, I’m going to get into many of the same issues that plagued the Jane’s Addiction thread, regarding a situation that is ambiguous. I’m willing, in the absence of further evidence, to conceded that Brock’s case was _ambiguous_. But that piece was so thoroughly soaking in rape culture tropes that it makes it more suspicious, not less.
-where is the victim/survivor/rapee’s point of view? It is missing. It is alluded to, but never detailed. We only ever read about the disputed sex act through the eyes of the accused, we are only invited to empathise with the alleged perpetrator.
rape is a crime of subjectivity. The people involved are on different scripts. One says it was consensual, the other says it was coercive. To *erase* the subjective view of the person making the allegation is to erase the crime.
-the character of the accused is discussed in detail, presenting him in a favourable light, before the rape charges are ever introduced. He’s a 'Nice Guy' who would previously have joined anti-rape protesters, who is now portrayed as the *victim* of said protesters. The details of his current relationship are considered exonerating, as he is in a committed relationship with a sound and sensible woman. (Ted Bundy was able to charm sound and sensible women into relationships!)
-the details that *are* described about the girl are all ways of presenting her as differing from the 'perfect victim' script. She was 'known within the scene' (she had a Reputation.) She was there for a talk with an ex-boyfriend. (she was not a virgin.) She had been drinking.
-the fact of her drinking is produced as evidence that the event was somehow... *less* rapey and more ambiguous, even though alcohol is the tool most frequently used by rapists. When discussing Perry Farrell, people seemed to recognise that a much older man introducing mind-altering chemicals to a younger woman not legally able to obtain them herself, was something that warped the power dynamics to make it *more* ethically dubious, not less. The girl becoming intoxicated, while drinking at his table, (notice how it is totally elided, who supplied the alcohol?) is supposed to somehow exonerate Brock?
-the offer of accommodation. Here we have the introduction of ambiguity, in the sense of the Crossing of Sexual Scripts. We have a teenage girl, illicitly intoxicated to the point where she is unable to locate her keys, stranded in a dodgy part of town, at odd hours of the night, a situation which most young women would read as dangerous enough to require a companion on the walk home. Women are taught, by Rape Culture, that being alone, intoxicated, in an unfamiliar part of town, late at night, is the single most dangerous situation where one can expect to be raped. She is coming from a place of vulnerability, and looking for a haven.
-the man offers her a place to stay. This *appears* to be an offer of a safe haven, protected from 3AM-Rape-Streets. The sexual scripts here completely differ. Rape Culture teaches men, that if a woman willingly enters your house/apartment/hotel room/tourbus after midnight, she is essentially ~Consenting To Enter The Rape Palace~ and is tacitly agreeing to any and all sexual contact.
We’ve seen, in those stories of Mark K, how abusive men use those 'crossed scripts' of "oh, you need to call an Uber, come back to my hotel, you can do it there" to impose a sexual ~Rape Palace~ script on a woman who believes she is on a Safe Haven script.
-the former housemate is given more of a voice, in the story, than the *victim* is! This housemate sees no apparent connection between the two events they overhear:
a) Brock tells the girl to be quiet or the housemate will hear
b) The girl is quiet, there are no noises indicating any kind of distress, therefore no rape can have taken place
In a safe haven script, 'be quiet so my housemate does not hear' is specific statement indicating, if you make noise, object, protest, you will be in trouble, you will lose the Safe Haven, and be ejected back on the 3AM-Rape-Streets. It is not an indication of consent, it is a quite conceivably a veiled thread.
-The victim is quiet, she does not scream, indicate distress, or try to run away, therefore clearly the sex was consensual.
This is just pure Rape Culture. People are taught that there are only 2 reactions to fear or threat – Fight or Flight. People who study the experiences of rape survivors, repeatedly encounter two different reactions from the point of view of the rapee: freeze, or flop. These are the overwhelming responses described by survivors of rape, to either completely freeze up and become physically petrified and incapable of moving; or to become completely passive and flop about like a dead fish.
In predator theory, these responses are sometimes compared to other prey responses within the natural world. Deer freeze in the headlamps. If you are a creature that has pretty good natural camouflage, facing a predator who works by sight, especially sight which is sensitive to movement, *freeze* is actually a successfully adaptive response to attack. Animals play dead. If what you are facing is not a predator looking to eat you, but a much bigger animal patrolling its territory or its defending its young, an inert, floppy prey which appears to be already dead, is no longer a threat, and will generally be left alone. *Flop* can be a successfully adaptive response to attack.
If you are working from a model that sees 'fight or flight' as the only potential reactions to rape, you will miss the actual 'freeze or flop' reactions that 90% of rape survivors report. That's why so many rape activists are trying to work to change sexual scripts from 'absense of no' to 'enthusistic consent'. The person writing this piece is showing right here, that they have *no fucking idea* what rape is, or how people who are being raped act. And that was the point where I stopped reading.
Without the actual words of the girl (though she is reported as describing the experience as rape) I cannot make that subjective call of 'rape' or 'not rape'. But the way that things are presented in this piece, every angle, every framing, makes it *more* likely to be rape, not less.