WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK?

[highlyeccentric]

WHAT THE?

Basically, in Tasmania, a judge has reservations about imposing a sentence on a 36 year old guy who had intercourse with a 16 year old girl who was pretending to be asleep, because, if she had said something he would've stopped. BECAUSE HAVING SEX WITH SLEEPING MINORS 
ISN'T BAD ENOUGH?

And in SA, a judge thinks a suspended sentence would be too tough on a guy who had sex with a passed-out woman who had consented to sex prior to passing out. I can't figure this one out, except that it implies a worrying precedent that consent cannot be withdrawn or invalidated after it has been given.

Comments

[niamh-sage.livejournal.com]

Your icon and the subject of your post say it all. My god. 0_0

[celandineb.livejournal.com]

I note that both these judges are men. How would they like it if someone had sex with *them* under similar circumstances?

[highlyeccentric.livejournal.com]

*eyeroll*

[metaphoroflife.livejournal.com]

I'm going to go cry now k.

[simon-stylites.livejournal.com]

I thought, surely the age of consent is 16 in Australia? But apparently only in some places. Apparently (per Wiki) they take an extra year to mature in Tasmania, but I couldn't tell you why.

If it was someone I was going to have sex with anyways, I wouldn't really care if he used me to get off while I was asleep. In fact, this has happened once or twice times. But I don't typically sleep with people who I don't trust, and I typically sleep with people whose getting off makes me happy (whether I'm conscious or not, really) so -- well, it was a little odd the first time, but I thought about it a bit and decided I was fine with it, so long as it didn't become, you know, too much of a habit.

I will say this: It's very easy to be in a situation with someone and think they're consenting to what's happening when they're not, often because of prior events or understandings -- and, in fact, it's easy to be in a situation which is hazy, which at the time seems consensual but turns out to be nothing like what you asked for. "But I didn't agree to *that*." Well, no, but... And it's easy to find yourself in a situation where you've gone past someone's unspoken boundary unexpectedly, because they didn't even realize they had the boundary before they hit it, or because their limits didn't match up with your understanding of what reasonable limits were...

In short, issues of consent are murky, newspapers are sensationalist, and in the actual lived moment all sorts of things can happen that will later be regretted -- this is another annoying part of "the human condition" -- and I worry about applying excess force on someone who ended up badly navigating a grey zone. If they do it serially, sure, but if it happens once? It can happen to anyone unexpectedly.