By David Futrelle
If you want to know how Men’s Rights Activists are adjusting to the #MeToo era, well, over on A Voice for Men they’re currently getting mad about a ten-year-old Scottish law that makes it illegal to rape someone when they’re asleep.
In a post originally published on Rebel Priest — a reactionary British site filled with denunciations of such things as “transgenderism,” diversity,and “Cultural Marxism” — UK commercial law professor and former UKIP candidate Andrew Tettenborn laments that in 2009 the “oh so woke” Scottish government passed a rape law that forbid men and women from having sex with someone unable to give consent — including (as one might imagine) people who are literally asleep.
“If you want to have sex with your wife,” Tettenborn complains, “you must always thoroughly wake her up first.”
The editors at AVFM see this law as so self-evidently outrageous that they used this bit of his post as a pull quote:
As Tettenborn sees it, this law — and a recent appeals court decision upholding the whole no-sex-with-sleeping-people part of it — basically
licenses the law in Scotland to poke its nose into what one might reasonably think were the entirely unobjectionable bedroom practices of a fair number of people up and down North Britain.
Not only does he see literally penetrating someone who’s asleep to not be rape; he also seems to think it’s sort of sweet and romantic.
Imagine a long-standing and loving couple in bed: as often happens, she wakes up in the middle of the night with him (again putting matters delicately) inside her, and thereafter both take pleasure in the whole event.
Well, yes, it’s possible that the woman in question might enjoy it. It’s also possible that she will feel completely violated by someone literally penetrating her body in her sleep. The point of the law is that there’s no way to know if she consents because PEOPLE WHO ARE ASLEEP CANNOT BY DEFINITION GIVE CONSENT. BECAUSE THEY ARE ASLEEP.
When you literally cannot know if someone wants to have sex or not, it’s always a good idea to err on the side of NOT RAPING THEM.
It’s also against the law to get people to sign legal documents in their sleep by putting a pen in their hand and moving it around with your hand.
But in Tettenborn’s view, the rights of a man who wants to penetrate his sleeping wife because, hey, she might be into it, outweighs the right of a woman to not have someone put penises or anything else in her while she’s asleep.
Tettenborn is also worried that these terrible women who don’t want to be penetrated in their sleep — or when they’re blackout drunk — could turn around and “blackmail” their husbands or boyfriends by … reporting a rape as a rape.
The possibilities it opens up for blackmail by a jilted or dissatisfied partner are frightening: however much both parties may have previously enjoyed somnolent or drunken sex, she can now put entirely unfair pressure on him and say that if he doesn’t do as she wants she will make a rape complaint, with all the official sympathy and credulousness of the feminist movement behind her, and correspondingly painful consequences for him.
Scotland has a population of 5.4 million. There were 107 rape convictions in 2017-2018. Less than half of all rape cases brought to court in Scotland lead to conviction; this is the lowest conviction rate for any crime. (The average acquittal rate for all crimes in Scotland is 6%.)
So yes, clearly the most pressing rape issue in Scotland today is “blackmail” by some capricious women who suddenly decides she doesn’t like her husband sticking his dick in her while she’s asleep.
Naturally, the comments on AVFM were as bad as the post itself.
“I suppose that Scottish men should stop sleeping in the same bed with their wives,” whined someone called 2cyer.
they probably sexually assault them several times a night by accident, under the definitions that feminists come up with, ipso facto.
“These expanded definitions and all encompassing laws only ever serve to control men interestingly,” complained Andrew0007. “As if the aim of feminism is a totalitarian state where men are strictly and rigidly controlled by … women.”
Andrew literally could not be more wrong. In fact, the 2009 law that outlawed sleep sex was also the first law in Scotland to recognize that men can be victims of rape.
Men’s Rights activists claim to care about the rights of male rape victims. But on AVFM, at least, they’re apparently much more concerned about the rights of men who somehow find it impossible to wait until a woman is awake before they try to have sex with her.
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