[dropcap]P[/dropcap]roponents of “rape culture” dogma are fond of the claim that sexual consent does not exist when a woman voluntarily participates in sex after becoming drunk. The idea as presented is that a woman is incapable of informed consent once she consumes alcohol. A man who has sex with a woman who’s consumed alcohol has – some feminists will claim – commited rape.

This leads to the question; at what blood alcohol level does a woman lose the ability to consent to sex?

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This is a serious question. Serious enough that men who ignore it may find themselves defending against a rape accusation. Whether a man selected for this public vivisection is able to mount an adequate legal defence or not, he will be destroyed. The accusation of rape is special in criminal law because based only on accusation, the family, career, life, reputation, friendships of a man so accused is destroyed.

So we return to the question, at what blood alcohol level does a woman lose the ability to consent to sex? No answer is offered by the ideologues who beat the rape culture drum. In fact – the question itself, provoking as it is of critical thinking is sufficient to get the asker banned from any feminist forum it’s asked on.

This question leads us to others. For example: If a woman, after some as-yet unknown quantity of ethanol ceases to be a self determined adult and reverts to a volition-free ward of the state, then surely, a man 4 beers in is equally no longer a willing or enthusiastic participant to sex, but himself a rape victim as well.

This would be a logical parallel. The reason the question of blood alcohol content comes up is that operating a motor vehicle is also an act of personal volition, which when done under the influence of alcohol, is a criminal offense by the drunk driver. Interestingly, an inebriated driver is equally culpable whether they are male or female.

So when drunk, choosing to drive a car is a crime, alcohol does not eliminate personal accountability. However, when drunk – a woman is not responsible for her choice to participate in sex, and according to some ideologues, cannot even render informed consent.

The logical parallel to this would be that men who participate in sex after 3 or 4 beers are also victims of rape. We can ignore for the moment the absurd dogma that men cannot be raped. One of the dirty secrets of the prison systems is that inmate rape occurs at a rate which doubles the rate of rape against women outside of prisons. How many men are raped in civilian life is unknown, since nobody with access to research funding cares enough to find out, but it’s more than zero.

Returning to the issue of sex, consent and accountability – why, if a drunk driver is criminally accountable for their own decision to consume alcohol then drive, is an otherwise adult human being the reverse of accountable when the choice concerns sex, rather than driving a car?

This standard is logically inconsistent. Some people might argue that criminal accountability exists in both cases and therefore, no inconsistency exists. However, an adult women unable to consent to sex due to inebriation was an adult until she made the informed choice to consume alcohol. Some proponents of “patriarchy theory” will claim that women are so dominated by men that even in sobriety they are manipulated and pressured into consumption of alcohol – which then eliminates the possibility of informed consent, but if that’s the case – women should be regarded legally as children without personal volition. Children, who it is inhumane to burden with adult responsibility such as voting, owning property, or holding anything as serious as a recreational fishing licence.

I don’t actually think women are so divorced from personal volition, or that they should be considered legal children and denied the powers of enfranchised adulthood. Not based solely on their sex, at least.

But if alcoholic intoxication does in fact render an adult woman incapable of the informed consent necessary for sex without it being rape, then we still do have a significant problem. As currently constituted, western laws do not adequately address this problem, and a change is necessary. Women who consent to sex while drunk must be arrested and charged with a crime.