Okay, let me empty this little bucket of hilarious sarcasm into the appropriate channels, that way we can make sense of what you're saying, what I'm actually saying and what you think I'm saying.
I am not a lawyer. I work in two specific areas of British law, but I am not a lawyer. First up I would suggest you read the Rev Sherri Heller's comment on this article because it gives a wider context.
Onto business...
Okay. So if you're being pestered and you 'relent' and don't indicate whether you've consented or not. If the whole thing comes to court, the defendant will have to prove they took steps to ascertain consent - and if you didn't give it verbally and you were on the record as saying 'no' forty nine times before, then your legal team has a decent chance. An absence of 'no' is not 'yes'- proving guilt even in this instance is still difficult because of the burden of proof beyond reasonable doubt. He said/she said does not favour the plaintiff.
If you're being pestered and you eventually relent and you SAY 'yes' - out of frustration, out of anger, out of any reason at all... the prosecution now has an uphill struggle, because it now has to prove beyond all reasonable doubt that a) you actually meant no when you said yes and b) that the defendant also understood you meant no and carried on regardless. Relenting and consenting under duress are difficult things. In the latter example - pushing for sexual assault via coercion might be a better legal way of securing a conviction.
Okay. The reason I've written this article is because the law deals in absolutes and it deals in black-and-white. If you FEEL like you've been raped, that doesn't matter. The law doesn't care about your feelings. This is where things get tough, because I do care about feelings and I think it's really important that we don't set people up to fail. I think if people pursue legal avenues of recompense on poorly conceived (but well meaning) advice they are going to be retraumatised by the legal procedure. What you're reading as flippant dismissal of feelings is an attempt to say 'this shit is more complicated than it first appears and we would serve vulnerable women well to talk about it in more detail'.
And I mean that. There is a tendency in the modern discourse to simplify everything down into hero and villain. Into black and white. Innocent and guilty. That is particularly popular reading material on platforms like this - but the literal few words change between 'relenting' as the example Ms Tepfenhart was using and her description of 'saying yes' are wildly different legal situations. She did not wish to engage further in the conversation, which I think is a shame. I will happily engage further at all times.
You're obviously a bit angry at me and throwing sass at me - and that's fine, it's a contentious issue... but let's discuss it and work out what we actually think - instead of assuming bad faith from the get-go.
