In Kalifornien gilt stiller Sex jetzt als Vergewaltigung

Das Magazin "New York" beschäftigt sich aktuell mit der veränderten Gesetzeslage in Kalifornien, was die Grenze zwischen einvernehmlichem Sex und sexueller Gewalt angeht:

(...) Governor Jerry Brown has recently signed an "affirmative consent law," which requires all sexual activity among college students to obtain "affirmative, conscious, and voluntary agreement" and requires such consent be "ongoing throughout a sexual activity." It is a massive broadening of the legal definition of rape, and a new blow in the culture wars that will likely reverberate in ways liberals have barely begun to contemplate.

Critics like Michelle Goldberg, Batya Ungar-Sargon, and Cathy Young have questioned the practicality of this new standard. "Do moans count as consent?" writes Goldberg, "How about a nod, or a smile, or meaningful eye contact? If a woman performs oral sex on a man without asking him first, and if he simply lies back and lets her, has she, by the law’s definition, assaulted him?" (...) What percentage of the last decade worth of Hollywood sex scenes, if acted out between college students in California, would technically constitute rape? A majority? Ninety percent?

(...) Indeed, the law’s advocates don’t uniformly believe its written standards will actually be followed at all. This defense by Amanda Marcotte is telling: "The law has no bearing on the vast majority of sexual encounters. It only applies when a student files a sexual assault complaint." So the law will not come into play because nobody will actually try to enforce it. Instead, it will technically deem a large proportion of sexual encounters to be rape, but prosecutors will only enforce it if there is an accusation. And since most, and possibly nearly all, sexual encounters will legally be rape, then accusation will almost automatically result in conviction.

Indeed, this may be the point. Culp-Ressler dismisses concerns about convictions of innocent people. ("In reality, false rape allegations are very rare, comprising about two to eight percent of all reports.") Two to 8 percent seems like a fairly high number of innocent people to convict as rapists, and of course that proportion could well rise quite a bit under a legal regime that expands the definition of rape in ways that are both extremely broad and extremely confusing.

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