Most rape is not "real rape" according to the rapist. Most rape is date rape; the rapist finds a target who is too intoxicated to meaningfully consent (and wouldn't consent when sober), or the rapist is in a position of power over their target (such as a manager with an employee), or they simply don't take "no" for an answer and their target feels they would be in more danger from fighting than from submitting.

Our justice system is not helpful to most rape victims, because it is not "real rape"; with fighting, injuries, blood, bruises, etc. And, most rape victims choose not to report the crime because it would further harm them to go through the process of being grilled by police and forced to relive the experience for an audience of likely unsympathetic or even overtly hostile people (this is not to say all police officers are unsympathetic or hostile to rape reports, but the fear that they will be is real and valid).

"most of the time there would be physical/tangible proofs attached to it"

Most of the time it is a "he said, she said" situation, and any proof can be interpreted as consensual sex, depending on the person hearing the story.

Not that I'm aware of (and I'm relatively familiar with the feminist activist community and current feminist writing). I read it to mean she was raped by a colleague, not that she was sexually assaulted by a colleague, though either would be inexcusable and should be subject to the person being fired. But, again, in a workplace that is hostile to women, dismissive of women's words, and in which the person doing the raping or sexual assaulting or harassing is in a position of power over the women being raped, assaulted, or harassed, it can go on for a long time before someone is willing to throw away their career to make a public accusation, which is exactly what this article is about and why I think it's valuable.

There are, clearly, a lot of men in our industry who have literally no idea that this stuff is happening. Zero awareness to the point their instinctive response is to deny that it is true, or to attempt to redefine the words to mean something more palatable.

So, let me be clear: You've read an article about someone's experience in the workplace as a woman, and you're first response is effectively to say, "This cannot be true."

The author of this article is not the only woman to discuss these issues or to experience this kind of behavior in the workplace, particularly in tech though it is true in many industries. As long as the response of men in this industry is to read these experiences and immediately deny the words and counter-accuse the woman of lying, exaggerating, or "being dramatic", the problems will never go away.

Maybe some (or many) those "disappointingly common" cases aren't quite the clear-cut misogyny but more similar to what you ran into in this thread?

Yes, there's a dangerous trend towards redefining rape to include unwanted looks, bad vibes, sex while intoxicated, sex that you change your mind about after the fact, sex that was not good enough, etc.

http://imgur.com/KzUmovh

What you would have done sober is completely irrelevant (for both parties). Most states define alcohol related rape as "too drunk to consent." That is all we need to be concerned about.

Someone else brought up the idea of "grey area sex", with the example of two intoxicated parties. This happens enough between willing participants that we can't simply wave it away as "never OK, always rape", but we also can't say that just because a person was too drunk to say no that they can't have been raped (as more than a few people in positions of power have said or implied, even in this decade).

Anyway, my concern with waving away this situation ("they were both drunk") as being not rape (or both parties being in the wrong), is that it can and is used by people who want to victimize others without consequence. I've known a man who used this approach; it eventually came out that he'd used the tactic on a number of occasions to rape several of our mutual friends. His modus operandi was to encourage heavy drinking or drug use, isolate the woman (to "take care of her" or "make sure she gets home OK"), and then have sex with her, whether she was willing or not. When questions were raised by his male friends about stuff like this, he would wave it off with a "I don't really remember, we were both so wasted", and his male friends would shrug and say, "Oh, OK, I guess shit happens." It took an organized effort by women in our social circle to put a stop to it.

I think what makes this hard to grasp for most men is that most men don't want to do this. Most men want to have sex with people who reciprocate the feeling. So, when a woman comes forward and says, "This happened to me. A man did this to me." A lot of men process that first through their lens of, "I would never do that. I can't believe she says men do stuff like that. This can't be true!"

I've rambled way off topic of your comment, I guess. Sorry about that. My mind is kinda a maelstrom of competing thoughts and trying to understand the mindset that leads to some of the comments in this thread, and also trying to figure out how to make my thoughts more clear to people who are so clearly at odds with where my head is at on the issue.

I keep getting down-voted, so, maybe it helps to repeat: I'm not saying that this isn't as bad as "violent rape", but we have to have a common understanding before people start coming up with useful solutions (I, for example, support systems for reporting such incidents being enforced for companies) and we do need useful solutions.

Disclaimer: I'm a guy who found someone he cares about, in such a situation. Going to police was the worst idea, ever.

I asked for suggestions for alternatives not as a challenge, but as a sincere question. I don't think it's the worst idea ever, but I think there is risk involved. The kind of person that would use a phrase like "real rape" s the kind of person that would use the new term to minimize the experience. And, there is also risk in saying that rape that does not include bruises, blood, kicking, screaming, etc. is not violent, which is probably the biggest problem with using terminology like "violent rape" and "not violent rape", because all rape is an act of violence.

And, just in case there is any thought that I am exaggerating about the existence of assholes who would claim rape without obvious violence isn't really ape. An American lawmaker used the term "legitimate rape" a couple of years ago when explaining why a woman shouldn't be able to get an abortion even in the event of rape, because if it was a "legitimate rape" she wouldn't have gotten pregnant. This is a pretty widespread opinion about rape; that a "legitimate rape" is an obviously violent one, with screaming and fighting, and anything else doesn't really deserve to be called rape or treated like rape.

Source on the "legitimate rape" comment: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/08/19/todd-akin-abortion-...

Saying no and resisting is different than convincing someone to have sex with you. The previous is rape. The latter can often just be part of courtship.

At the end of the day, it should be rather obvious if you're raping someone or not.

My reading does not suggest that all rape produces irrefutable physical evidence, nor do I feel confident that reporting rape to our existing justice system would save me from further humiliation and other professional/personal consequences while providing safety. If you have evidence to the contrary, I can't tell you how excited I'd be to hear it.

Has there ever been any evidence that charging a person of power of any crime comes with protection from collateral professional/personal consequences ?

In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal comfort over getting justice. I am also considering that if some place would refuse me a job because I got someone charged for a criminal offence, perhaps that's not a place I'd like to work for in the first place.

I understand that can feel idealistic, and some situations can be a lot more complex than that, especially when a whole industry is mainly filled with assholes in power positions. But I'd believe that making things clear (have a judge validate a claim for instance) can help to get away from overly abusive environments and alleviate the "he/she's just making stuff up" bullshit thrown around the victims.

This kind of language is clearly coming from a place of privilege...someone who has never experienced a workplace that is overtly hostile to your gender, and where the alternatives ("not a place I'd like to work"; most people have to work somewhere) are slim because many workplaces are overtly hostile to your gender.

This is the danger of assuming that we (as males in an industry built by and for males) can actually offer useful advice or provide a path forward that fixes these problems.

This is not the conversation in which you solve women's problems in tech by telling them what you would do in their situation. This is the conversation where we listen to people who have actually experienced it. (And, yes, I'm a male speaking on this subject, offering advice. But, my advice is to listen to women about their real world experiences in our industry.)

Yeah, it's not always on topic to bring up some kind of Privilege Bingo.

But, in this case, gender plays a dominant role and race is almost inconsequential; a few of the highest profile sexual harassment cases of the past couple of years in the tech and startup world have involved men of a variety of ethnicities and backgrounds. So, I corrected it before posting it.

I was trying to convey meaning without making it a fight over semantics or word choice. I genuinely did not intend to cause upset over my word choices; the content of my language I expected would elicit reactionary responses from folks who haven't quite confronted or even acknowledged their privilege.

So, again, I apologize for using the word "male" in a paragraph with "women". It was not intended to be a dog whistle for radical feminists or something, as it seems you believe it is. I was trying to communicate with the community that is a big part of my life, as best I know how.

  > In my personal view, getting raped is enough violence 
  > that I wouldn't prioritise my professional or personal
  > comfort over getting justice.

It costs money to be alive, basically. You need food. You need shelter. You may have other people such as children that are depending on you.

Should a mother let her kids go hungry because she doesn't want to work in a sexually hostile environment?

That's the very real choice that a lot of people make on a daily basis. A lot of women simply deal with the degrading stuff because they need to get by, and/or perhaps because they hope to gradually change the system from within. Will you pay their bills if they take a stand for what's right and fight their employers?

If you can pick and choose your jobs and don't have to worry about any of the above: please understand that very few people enjoy such a luxury.

This is the point. Societies with hierarchical organization will have different rules for favored and unfavored parties. Perhaps tech is worse than most industries, and that probably has something to do with gender ratios. Still, I wouldn't be shocked to hear of harassment in industries with ratios skewed the other way, like education or nursing. If your success is contingent on the approval of your boss, she or he will have a number of ways to injure you with no repercussions. We progress as a culture when we shrink that set of impune actions or shrink the number of interpersonal relations that give rise to such impunity.

Of course I don't imply that gender-based harassment and discrimination in tech is not a serious problem that we should solve. It is a specific and especially problematic subclass of a more general class of human dysfunction.

See her comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9168542

I think this is pretty common and is why many rapes go un-reported. Reporting some criminal stranger on the street who jumps you seems like a no brainer to me, but reporting someone you thought was a friend and who is friends with most of your friends? I bet a lot of people decide it's not worth upending their lives and starting over for.

For instance, a boss asking an employee for sex after a diner, and the employee feels coerced but doesn't say anything.

Effectively it would be rape, the boss should not be considered innocent of profiting from a position of power, but it can be argued that the employee could have legitimely wanted to have sex judging from his/her attitude.

For me that's grey in the sense that while from the employee's point of view it's rape, from a third party point of view it's hard to factually prove so.

To be clear, I don't use 'grey' in the sense that it should not be punishable or anything, it's not a value judgement, just that from a legal point of view it's trickier than violent rape.

Man drunk. Woman drunk. Man woman have sex.

Technically, both of them raped each other. But this is pretty far from what you'd call rape, even if it is legally considered that. This is "grey area sex".

Though some colleges will call it rape.