I'm tired of reading that it is. It's fine to criticise men who stay sober while getting someone drunk intentionally - that's weird and legally dubious, sure. But two drunk people so long as they communicate is extremely normal and has no moral faults. Especially early in a relationship, including before sex for the first time it's natural and age-old to use alcohol to rid the nerves when you want to get laid, for both men and women. If you are conscious enough to give enthusiastic consent, then you are conscious enough to have made the decision to have sex. Enthusiastic consent is still key, as usual.

Further to that but possibly more debatable - if a woman probably wouldn't have had sex with a man while sober and wasn't planning on having sex with him, but agrees to go out with him for a drink, drinks the same amount as him, is somehow seduced by him and she gives enthusiastic consent, there's still nothing morally wrong. Even if she regrets it in the morning, there was enthusiastic consent and if you know you're prone to make bad indulgent decisions while drunk then that's on you.

You can't get a chargeback if you get moderately drunk and buy 5 thousand dollars worth of funkopops. But my decision-making was impaired! You are responsible for the things you enthusiastically choose to do while voluntarily under the influence of something. Being drunk isn't an excuse for choosing to drive your car under the influence and killing a family of four.

In sex, you can revoke consent at any time, but not after the act, 'it was a mistake', 'i had a lapse in judgement' is your problem not his.

I say this all after an incident that happened to me a couple years ago. I'd hooked up with girls off dating apps a dozen and a half times. Normally we'd exchange messages, sometimes they were sexual, sometimes they weren't. I'd invite her for a drink, she'd agree. We both end up having three or four drinks. Things get flirtier. I invite her back to my flat. Sometimes I'd get lucky and she'd invite me back to hers before I got the chance. I'd make a move, and the vast majority of the time if they were in my flat it's because they intended to have sex with me. In a couple of cases she backs out - consent revoked, that's fine, we'd just cuddle and go to bed and maybe give it another shot in the morning (in one case consent was revoked but i woke up to her grabbing my cock at 5am and whispering lustful invitations in my ear. in another case we never had sex, because i'm not a rapist and can take an L). Some girls said they intended to have sex with me since before the date, or otherwise revealed it by commenting on their lavish underwear or "good thing i shaved just in case". Some girls would tell me in the morning that they didn't expect to have sex that night, but otherwise seemed positively content with the experience. In one case the hookup lead to a short-term relationship and she confessed to me later on that after our first-date hookup she temporarily felt regret because it's unusual for her to be promiscuous. That's not rape.

And the last case was a police case. We exchanged sexual messages. She invited me straight to her flat for drinks. She drank more than me because I literally could not keep up. I figured I must be a rebound, or it's her first time hooking up or something. Figured she'd nearly finished her second before I'd finished my first because she very much intended to have sex with me but needed courage. I suggested slowing down as she poured another and she made the very forward comment 'no it will make me better in bed'. She is actively getting drunk because she wants to be drunk to have sex. I take it as my cue to lie down with her and kiss her. I move my hand into her underwear. She pulls my hand away. Okay. Consent revoked. We go back to talking. She takes frequent and large sips of her drink, clearly trying to get more drunk with intent. A few minutes later we kiss again and this time she puts her hand on my dick and starts fondling it. It seems like a reasonable invitation to try again. I go to put my hand down her underwear again. She pulls my hand away again. Confused, I just ask "what do you want?" and she says that she hasn't shaved. I say I don't mind. She dodges the proposition by leaning in to kiss me again. I guess she's insecure about her vagina? She grabs my cock again. I stress "what do you want?" and she says fairly seductively looking into my eyes "I want you to fuck me". Ok, no fingers, no oral, she just wants me to fuck her.

This is a first for my career and seems off. I consider just getting up and leaving due to the vibes, but figure that doing so after she literally just told me to fuck her after building up to it all evening would be extremely rude and hurtful. She takes off her jeans and underwear under the covers. Seems like extreme body insecurity, she wants to hide herself. I'm empathetic and consider that rejecting her now would practically be evil. She's a pretty girl and I'm hard, and she's explicitly verbally inviting me to do what I came here to do. I go to get a condom from my jacket and she says "you don't need that, i'm on birth control". Another piece of enthusiastic consent, though I'm not going to rawdog a girl who won't let me see her pussy. I tell her I'd rather use it to be safe. She wasn't very active during sex but she gave all the signs of an inexperienced, nervous girl taking pleasure, soft moans and continuing to actively kiss me. She said she didn't want to change position so it was about ten minutes of missionary. I told her I was going to cum and she said to cum inside her.

After sex she gets extremely clingy, about 5x the affection that is normal from a girl after sex, doing performative kisses on my cheek, seeking validation "was i good?" and other nonsense, looked into my eyes like i was a deity, got extremely hyper. I decide then and there that I will never have sex with her again. Her insecurity and childlike affection (she was 20, me 23 at the time) is repulsive. I start to feel my own regret. I make up an excuse of having work in the morning and not being able to sleep easily around strangers (true, but normally on a hookup i would stay the night if permitted anyway because cuddling is nice) so I could leave. In the morning she texted me, the vibe of her texts indicated subtly but not overtly that she considered 'us' to be a 'thing'. Oh god I regret it, but it is what it is, I will softly let her down. And so I did. A month later I get a call from the police. Her claim is that she was intoxicated, could not remember anything asides from flashes of me penetrating her (i doubt this strongly, she wasn't even slurring) and could not consent. I think she decided she was raped as some backwards way to protect her ego from rejection. I did nothing wrong, but these people who believe drunk sex is rape would consider my actions reprehensible, as well as every other drunken hookup i've had. If you told those girls that they were raped by me they'd probably laugh at you.

It mentally fucked me up for a while (spotify autoplay decided to play 'rape me' by nirvana during first time sex and i had to hide a mild anxiety attack while laughing it off and changing the song), but I have since then continued to have mutually happy consensual drunk sex.

It's not rape.