Jarimir said:
minuialear said:
Really? Someone who isn't sloppy drunk can't still be too drunk to make that decision?
Really, that is what I am saying. That is what the law in my state, several other states, your country, and several other countries supports.
The law doesn't specify how drunk someone must be, other than that the alcohol must affect their ability to consent (and if you disagree, please point out the exact line that specifies what behavioral qualifications must be met while drunk in order to be considered too drunk for consent). Just because, perhaps in your case, that doesn't occur until you are tripping-over-yourself-drunk, doesn't mean this isn't the case for everyone else.
Also, in order to tie this into your next point, the reason the law mentions drunkenness at all, is to point out that people act differently while drunk than they would while sober (and similarly while intoxicated with drugs, etc). The idea is, if someone agrees to have sex with five people one night while sober, (s)he can't call it rape, because (s)he was not under any drug-related influence and therefore was (in the eyes of the law) in full control of his/her faculties and was capable of giving lawful consent to sex.
If, however, a person is intoxicated (i.e., affected by some substance), then (s)he is not in full control of his/her faculties, in the eyes of the law, and therefore is incapable of giving lawful consent.
Cant consent != might not consent
One represents an abject inability, the other represents potential regret.
If someone can't consent (i.e., they're too out of it to give lawful consent), how do you know that they would if they were in control of their faculties? The very fact that they can't consent necessitates the possibility that, were they able to consent, there is a possibility that they would choose not to.
Put another way: let's say some chick gets drunk and her cousin (who she knows), who happens to be at the party and happens to have a thing for her, asks her for sex. At this point she's so drunk she can't really process who he is, but she's not sloppy drunk (e.g., she's not tripping over herself, slurring her words, or talking louder than normal). If she has sex with him (ignoring incest laws, if they apply), this would be considered rape. It's rape because she was so intoxicated that she couldn't think clearly to the point where it affected her ability to refuse sex (which, we'll specify, would have been the obvious decision for her if she had been sober and realized she was about to have sex with a cousin).
Doesn't matter if the cousin (as an active party) thought that she wasn't that drunk and was willingly choosing to sleep with him. Doesn't matter that she wasn't falling out of her chair or doing other crazy stuff. Not everyone becomes a sloppy drunk when they get to the point where their thinking abilities get impaired, for one, so it's a pretty strange metric to go by. It's about as effective as assuming it takes three shots to get a woman drunk.
Plus I'd also point out that the NZ law also states:
A person does not consent to an act of sexual activity if he or she allows the act because he or she is mistaken about its nature and quality.
Meaning a person has to be made fully aware of what the sex entails, before (s)he has consented to it. For example, if some chick tells a guy that she's on birth control and therefore that he doesn't need a condom, and he finds out later that she's preggers with his baby, and that she had lied to him in order to get pregnant, that qualifies as the guy not giving consent. Because as stated before, consent's not a one-time, "You said yes so you can't say you didn't!" thing. Now, if someone's pretty drunk and has trouble processing basic stuff as it is (and again, that person doesn't necessarily have to be sloppy drunk to be at this point), how would you argue that they are also capable of being fully aware of what the sexual activity will entail?
