Rape-By-Deception, Ctd

Dana McCourt makes a distinction:

Apparent consent can be invalid is if the person has been deceived.  If a prankster serves you a delicious brownie telling you that it’s made of chocolate, and neglects to tell you about the secret ingredient, it’s fair to say that you didn’t consent to getting high.

In this case, the woman argues that she was deceived, and if she was, her consent would be meaningless.  Lack of consent means rape.

So, I’m still not convinced.  I think that the difference lies in whether we read the deception as warranting the assertion, “Yes, I consented, but I wouldn’t have if I’d known the truth” or “No, I really didn’t consent, because I was deceived in such a way that I couldn’t consent.”   I think that there are two categories, and that this case falls in the former category, and that to hold that this is an instance of rape, it has to be in the latter category.

Dan Savage is less restrained:

When we have consensual sex with strangerswhen we go home (or to "a nearby building") with someone we've only just metwe're not just taking a chance on a person we know very little about. We're taking a chance on our own judgment. With no way to verify the story of the hot strangerhe could be lying about anythingwe're taking a chance on our own bullshit detectors. And no one's bullshit detectors are 100% accurate. So someone who can't bear the thought of accidentally fucking the shit out of an Arab or a Republican or a married man or a guy who makes less than $250,000 a year has no business fucking complete strangers.

But it's the visceral emotional core of this that is so offensive. It's about racism, religion and the risk of miscegenation. It's about the deep disgust of some Israeli Jews toward Arabs, upheld by the courts. It's a variant of the racial sexual panics of the Jim Crow South.