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Last week, a court in Sydney, Australia acquitted a man of rape charges because the woman was wearing skinny jeans, and they said that the man couldn’t have removed them without the woman’s help.
From: Amelia Thomas-DeVeaux, at Care2.com
I find it horrifying that this needs to be said more than once, particularly in a court of law, but anything can be removed without a victim's consent, particularly if the victim is drunk or on drugs (something that I don't know about this case, but it's important to point out, too, that it doesn't matter if the victim took off her pants herself - removing clothing is not a substitute for consent).
Needless to say, this is an extremely disturbing precedent. It undermines the idea of active, enthusiastic consent and instead establishes the idea that consent can be as ambiguous as removing clothing.
From: Hortense, at Jezebel.com
Let's go over that again, shall we? Due to the fact that skinny jeans are apparently impossible to remove by just one person (which is why every pair you buy comes with a personal assistant to help you get them on and off, right?), the jury decided that the woman couldn't have possibly have been raped, as skinny jeans aren't the type of thing that can be taken off by force…Perhaps someday juries will remember that the clothes don't fucking talk, women do: it's not the skirt she "shouldn't have been wearing" or the low-cut top she was "asking for it" in or the skinny jeans "she couldn't possibly have had ripped off of her" they need to pay attention to: it's her mouth, which said "no," which is saying, "listen," which is speaking out as loud as it can over the noise made by stupid f**king people who find it easier to spin stories about inanimate objects than to listen to the stories told by actual human beings.
What women wear has been used against them in sexual assault and rape cases for a long time, but I’ve never heard this excuse before. If the sex really had been consensual, there would be no reason for this woman to accuse Nicholas Gonzales of rape. Of the many things that make no logical, rational sense about this case, one of them is why Nicholas Gonzales felt he had the right to have sex with a woman who said no. This shows us that too many people (men and women) need to learn what consent, especially enthusiastic consent, really means. This woman, all women, deserve so much more respect than this. When it comes to sex, what matters is what we want, not what we wear.
~ Samantha
At some point during the conference they did a show-of-hands poll of the audience.
"How many of you have kissed someone and not had sex?"
"How many of you have engaged in foreplay and not had sex?"
"How many of you have been naked with someone and not had sex?"
As you and I could guess, many hands were raised for all the questions, even the last one.
Clearly the court thinks that disrobing is a visual form of consent, but that is not the freaking case. In my opinion if a male/female changes their mind about sex happening at any point during intimacy consent is no longer there.
Argh. Well, who knows, I cannot say whether all rape accusations are valid, but using the type of clothing in support of the defense is a little misogynistic
And if the woman was intoxicated or under the influence of any mind-altering substance, she couldn't actually give consent for sex anyways.
Furthermore, my friends and I all wear skinny jeans and get in and out of our clothes every day on our own with no assistance. We see no reason why a man of average strength couldn't pull a pair of jeans down far enough to access a woman's vagina to rape her.