So except in the case of casual sex amongst college students, it isn't too common. I'm so glad to read that casual sex on campus isn't that big of a thing.
Huh?? Nothing I said implies your twisted conclusion. First, nothing about rape hinges on the sex being "casual". The exact same factors that make sex rape, make it rape whether between a stranger hookup or a married couple. So, the only thing that matters here is the instances where any sex of any kind co-occurs with drinking or drugs.
What I was saying is the both occur and co-occur millions of times a day, whether on campuses or elsewhere. Only in a tiny % of their co-occurrences is there any rational, objective, scientifically grounded notion of consent "muddied" due to the level of intoxication required for it to be muddied beyond the level of objective muddying caused by emotional undermining of rational decision making that is not viewed as rape by any widely accepted law or ideology.
If legal consent requires rational choice making, then almost no sex is consensual.
IF you didn't misinterpret the prior sentence, you wouldn't be confused. Sexual decisions are typically driven by emotions that inherently undermine rational choice making. So, either almost all sex is "rape" or being in a state due to deliberately taken drugs that falls short of rational choice making is far from sufficient to undermine consent. A much higher bar is needed, something closer to being in a state where one is not capable of basic awareness that sex is occurring or who it is with.
IOW,most "drinking" itself is neither neccessary nor close to sufficient to muddy consent, and it is an activity that is so common that it is bound to overlap with sex frequently. Both the law and common sense ethics need to incorporate that reality.
We aren't talking about drinking, we are talking about being drunk. Being drunk implies that people have problems making decisions, or even remembering them.
You're talking about a highly vague and subjective state of "drunk" that is not defined in any way meaningful for it to be a useful as advice or a basis for any law.
Sober people have problems making decisions all the time, and failure to recall a decision can easily occur due to a state reached after the decision and the act occurred. Failure to recall happens only the next day or later and is only weakly predicted by intoxication at the moment of the decision, and varies by person, etc.. Also, recall is a completely separate variable (empirically and neurologically) from awareness during the event. Memory consolidation occurs during sleep. A person well aware of a decision and act may fail to recall it later if afterwards drug levels impede their sleep cycles. The delayed effects of drugs further impedes any valid inference from later inability to recall to whether the act occurred before drinking, after "drinking" but before "drunk or during only moderate "drunk", versus after extreme "drunk" that disqualifies valid consent.
Two people have a drink at a party, then hook up in the bathroom, then drink the rest of the night. Their recall of the sex and deciding to have it is "fuzzy" but their consent was no more muddy than if they had hooked up in the bathroom before their first drink at the party.
In sum, your "drinking" versus "drunk" distinction is pragmatically and legally meaningless. It must specify that nature of the mental states and the visible signs that reliably signal it at the time in order to distinguish the 99 acts that are legal and moral from the 1 that isn't.
