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^*ladies and gentlemen, the result of the rape culture we live in.
A powerful, older man took advantage of a young, desperate woman, but because he did not physically assault her, it’s not rape.
Rape is about POWER, not sex.
Yup, just because she might have said yes doesn't mean it was ok. The whole situation is just slimy.
While it doesn't make Gaetz not a shitbag, unless the article is wrong he wasn't the person who solicited her, set it up, or paid her. It's also still statutory even if she lied about her age and had a false ID (and we don't know if Gaetz was actually lied to and checked her ID), but I am not sure if this is a good example of rape culture.
100% unequal power dynamics being a rich politician sleeping with an 18 year old escort at a party, but in the case all parties are 18 or older is it sex work or rape?
Joel Greenberg, the one who actually met her and did the soliciting and paid her, was charged and convicted for child sex trafficking and ID fraud/identity theft for this. I am pleasantly surprised he was both charged and convicted given track records on both of those things. If 11 years is a sufficient sentence is another story.
Dude , you are still explaining away an adult man fucking an underaged girl in an extreme power imbalance. He knew what he was doing, he knew she was underaged. That he had people help facilitate the rape does not make it less of one.
A 40 year old who needs to ID the woman he’s paying to have sex with knows EXACTLY what he was doing.
The 40 year old ID-ing the women he has sex with at a party is icky for sleeping with someone half his age (double so if he is specifically looking for 18 year olds), but that is not illegal. Should that be lumped under rape culture though? Should sex work in general be lumped under rape culture?
If she was not 18, regardless of if she had a fake ID, it is still statutory. There is no mens rea required for statutory. It is however harder in such a case to secure prosecution and conviction.
He may very well have known his friend brought an underage girl to sleep with him, or asked him to find probable underage girls advertising as 18 for plausible deniability. He also may have paid his friend to pay for prostitutes for the party. I won't give Gaetz the benefit of the doubt on anything, but the article doesn't indicate any of those things happened.
At least we got a conviction for the person with the least plausible deniability, because we rarely get that unfortunately.
Christ man, you are still lawyering this away.
Yes, the power dynamic of old dude and young women are part of tape culture. Yes, sex work is part of rape culture (it’s nuanced but in this case YES). I’m not anti sex-work, but I am against a system that makes it illegal, and creates a black market like this.
You can come up with all the hypotheticals to make it right, it wasn’t. You are defending rape culture.
Rape culture is a culture that makes excuses for and enables rapists. Look who’s in the government right now. We ALL know gates is creepy as shit yet he still attained a position of extreme power. Look at the president, all his friends falling out of the emails. There is a major problem with this kind of behavior in our culture.
Edit- look, we’re missing each other because I am arguing a larger cultural issue, you are arguing specific laws (why I say you are lawyering). I do not care how legal this might have been and I am not given to charitable interpretations of obvious evil behavior.
That was the only thing I was actually asking about. I especially agree with your points about our government/politicians. It appears that the main disagreement we might have is if rape culture is the normalization/glorification of sexual assault specifically or a wider classification of power dynamics in any form.
I think anyone who commits the crime of rape is a rapist and rightly so, but am just leery about watering down the definition of rape.
I want to be clear that it wasn't legal. Gaetz 100% committed statutory rape under current criminal law. It's a strict accountability law, you don't have to knowingly do it to commit the crime.
The only reason I posted at all was that after reading the article I didn't think the persons comment you replied to was necessarily a great example of rape culture.