On top of everything you said, which I agree with, I’d also like to see less of these kinds of posts on Hacker News...
At least read the article before being dismissive.
Imagine being 20, getting raped, and having randoms on the internet completely invalidate how traumatic it was because they think you're just meming. Like damn and we wonder why women struggle in tech.
Don't write a viral public post about it, ahead of the court case, invite others to comment on it, then blame the women struggle in tech on others who don't agree on the very strong, and damaging, qualifier of rape.
Rape is when you agree to have protected sex, but the man removes the condom sneakily, or the woman punctures the condom. What happened here was consensual sex without a condom, and one party regretting that after the fact (and being unspoken uncomfortable about it during).
Imagine having unprotected two-night stands years back, and suddenly your name is in a widely distributed article, charging you with rape. Like damn, and we wonder in a few years why the overreaction and demonization of the Scala community damaged its growth and inclusion.
Alcohol lowers your inhibition and makes you do stupid stuff. When age limit is 16, you do that stupid stuff when you are 17, and know your own limit by the time you are 21 and dating.
If you are a girl at a house party, you drink beyond your limit, go upstairs, and sit on a bed with some boys, you are not responsible for any assault that happens, but you do have your own choices and a will to avoid such risks. For:
> Regardless of how drunk or incapacitated a person may be, it is never their fault that they were assaulted.
does not count for the attackers, who may be very drunk as well, and sitting on a bed with a pretty girl.
Anyway, those rules are more for having students not act out, and have the rich parents of a cheerleader sue the university, when she somehow ended up drunk in the basement of a frat house, completely unable to consent.
Such sexual assault does exist in adult life (under police, not campus - supervision), but is of the degree of completely intoxicating a person, then dragging them home. Not: I drank wine, don't know how much, could have been drunk, then he made an advance on me. Like, she had to remove her clothes herself... it is not like she was passed out on the couch and he forced herself on her.
It was not even "rape" in her own mind, because they had sex another time.
Sex has always had aggressive and domination elements. Some women even request you slap them during.
Convenient to leave out the rape in the next sentence, and the other rape in the next paragraph:
> I felt being taken advantage of that he had unprotected sex with me when I was intoxicated. Nothing felt right. I remember panicking and crying.
> There was another time that he insisted on having intercourse regardless of me saying I didn’t want to.
Sorry you don't like to think about that.
I don't know any woman who does not want to have unprotected sex, but just let it happen like that. Then come back for seconds, even though she is not in the mood.
Are there naive young women who lack self-authority and self-esteem to say no, to an older man who needs those women to get their fix and wants to make up for their unpopular youth? Yes. And that awkward dance of nature takes two to tango. Panicking and crying during or after sex does not a "rape" make (but the definition depends on jurisdiction anyway, and we haven't even let a court in the right jurisdiction look if it qualifies, so I'd like to avoid that term).
Unless you want to claim openly that a named person is now a serial rapist. I'd like to think it takes more than a Medium post for you to do that.
Why are you making up this story that she couldn't say no? She says she said no.
You are going to lengths to imagine a way she is at fault.
Never mind how ridiculous a suggestion that is. Do you think maybe she made the rational decision not to risk her safety or even her life by escalating a fight she likely couldn't win?
That's blaming the victim. You can say you don't think she's at fault, but picking at her choices with no consideration of the situation she actually faced isn't "feeling for her."
Every suggestion you're making here is premised on priors from your experience as a man that do not hold true for many or most women.
You say she should get out and call her dad or a friend. Yet your own reaction is one of questioning her experience and shaming her for "a long chain of bad decisions to end up drunk on your own wine, in a foreign country, in the apartment of a stranger you met on the internet." Do you imagine that a woman friend of yours reading your comment would trust that she should call you?
This is laughable and just reinforces what I'm saying: you need to listen to more of the women in your life about their actual experiences, not what you imagine them to be. I am not invoking my experience as a man. I am invoking the experiences of the vast majority of women I know. Their experiences are not even close to equal to mine, when it comes to their ease of moving about the world, not to mention their physical safety.
Any person, placed in a situation where they are in danger, can react in a way that isn't necessarily a matter of deciding in the first place. I was pointing out that even where there is a decision to made, it doesn't obviously favor fighting. But your confidence that a victim can fight back ignores what we know about rapes and the fight/flight/freeze stress response. Not reacting is entirely natural and very common, particularly when the situation isn't one that you've trained a habitual response to.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2015/06/2...
"Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead."
If people would follow that simple rule, hellfires would die before they spread. Please don't contribute to spreading them by feeding them.