Marcia Baron - I Thought She Consented

In Marcia Baron’s article I Thought She Consented, she talked about how some rapist said the reason why they did it was that they though the victim consented. Marcia Baron suggested that this excuse should not be a defense that helps the rapist get away with the charger. The author also believed that only under some situations that the whole “I thought she consented” mistake can be understood and should exculpate.

I completely agree with Marcia Baron, and I think her opinion is completely right when the male is the rapist and the female is the victim. Rape is considered a mens rea issue, which means it contains more mental element. First of all, why do people rape? I believe that it is because of the social stereotype that saying yes during sex is considered “sluttish” in many cultures, so that large amount of men just assuming when women says “no”, it means “yes” because women are shy to admit their feeling about sex. But at the same time, even when women say “yes”, they may think different in their mind. People sometimes use this bad stereotype as their defense of the terrible things they have done. In my opinion, this kind people should not be forgiven.

It is possible that a woman agreed on the sex at first because she thought she loves him and she need do everything he wants, and later she feel otherwise. I remember from my sexuality class that this usually happens among people that are dating. Sometimes the situation can get serious where one partner forces the other to have sex by saying things like “we are dating, and you love me, so you need to have sex with me”. One partner in this kind of relationship is literality raping the other, but they get forgiven because they were dating with the victom. One example I have is about one of my Chinese friends. She was dating another Chinese student here, and she did not say no when sleeping with her boyfriend, but she also did not say yes. She just listened to her boyfriend that this is the right thing to do when people are dating. Her boyfriend then just did it. But after, my friend felt her feeling towards her boyfriend was not strong enough for sex. She did not think this is considered rape because that was her boyfriend, but she was not happy about this for a long time and they later broke up. I do not see this as rape because my friend did not say “no”, or anything else. I also think she did not consented because she also did not say “yes”. Even though different culture have different common ideas about sex and dating, it is fair to say dating does not always come together with having sex. I believe it would be better for women we to be honest with our “partner” and ourselves. If we do not want to have sex with that person, we should just say no.