Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
Gray Anatomy
Grief, originally uploaded by poppinsgarden.
From the GW Hatchet:
Senior James Daley woke up one morning naked and drunk in an unfamiliar apartment with condoms strewn about the room. A girl next to him rolled over and introduced herself.
“My first thought was, where am I?” Daley said. “My second was that I have to get out of here as fast as possible.”
A friend filled Daley in about how he met the girl later that day.
“I guess she bought me a lot of drinks that night,” Daley said. “And then when a friend tried to take me home she said ‘no, I think I’ll take him home.'”
Daley said he felt taken advantage of and would not have hooked up with her if he had not been so drunk.
Was this rape? Sexual assault?
. . . . (snip) . . . .Yet many students such as Daley consider such encounters a part of college life, however unfortunate they may sometimes be. Advocacy groups have begun calling situations where consent or denial is unclear “gray rape.” Students say it occurs every weekend in places including dorm rooms, bars and fraternity houses.
I’m not so naive as to think this didn’t happen when I was in college. But does gray rape really exist, and if it does, is it becoming more prevalent? Drug abuse and alcoholic binges are on the rise, and the resultant impaired judgment is likely a key factor in rape, gray or otherwise. That’s not the whole story, however.
From the article A New Kind of Date Rape, by Laura Sessions Stepp (Cosmo, September 2007):
Anthony Moniello, 24, a radio personality for ESPN, says, “I’ve had girls tell me ‘I don’t have sex on the first night.’ And I say, ‘That’s fine, I respect that. Mind if I play with you a little bit?’ A girl will say no, she doesn’t mind, then she’ll get so hot, she’ll say, ‘Let’s do it.’ That’s the scariest part. Is it then my responsibility to say no?“
. . . . (snip) . . . .
Another senior at GW expressed his confusion like this: “Sometimes I’ll feel like a girl isn’t sure, but then she’ll say yes and I’ll think she’s just being coy. If you regret it or she regrets it, does that make it assault?”
There are two separate issues here. First, the legal question. Is gray rape . . . rape?
Ah! Leave it to Shakes to make it all clear. Yes, she and I agree:
There’s no such thing as gray rape. Period.
1. Waking up “to find him sticking it in” after having said no “a bunch of times” is rape. It is not “fuck[ing] that guy you didn’t really want to fuck.” It is not “gray rape.” It is rape, which is defined by a lack of consent.
At least, we agree on the definition of rape. But perhaps we disagree on one thing. Maybe there is something to the concept of “gray rape” — some subset of sexual encounters which are consensual yet still emotionally malignant.
Here’s what I’m getting at. In my day . . . oh, wait, I think this requires a visual aid.
In my day, we (meaning: me and the folks I hung with) didn’t “hook up.” Sex was the pleasant perq of a serious relationship. You wouldn’t have intercourse unless you thought this woman might be The One. And if you were sure she wasn’t The One and had sex with her anyway, then you were Scum, and you were not me or any of the folks I hung with.
I’m not saying we abjured premarital sex. I’m not even saying we had to be engaged first. I’m only saying that sex was a big deal and we treated it as such. By the time a relationship got to that point, both parties were sure they wanted this to happen.
There. Voila. No ambiguity, no gray area.
Sure, you might still get your heart broken, and maybe it wouldn’t have hurt so much if you both hadn’t let it go so far, but such is the danger of young romance. There will be pain aplenty, but at least neither lover will claim rape.
So let’s break down “gray rape” and see if it has any right to exist in the lexicon.
There’s the case of one (or both) parties being intoxicated. One person takes advantage of the other’s incapacity. This isn’t gray rape, it’s RAPE. End of story. And despite Cosmo’s and The Hatchet’s examples to the contrary, I think we all know the sex of the victim here, 99% of the time.
Then there’s the case of both parties being of sound mind. Some miscommunication occurs, the two have sex, and one party feels hurt afterwards. Was consent given? Then it’s not rape. But this is intimacy we’re talking about, and no matter how much some folks might think they view sex as no more than a recreational pastime — water skiing, yeah, that’s a good analogy — it really is an alchemical process. No, it really isn’t even as mysterious as alchemy. Play with emotional fire, get burned.
Do we call this gray rape? I suspect its victims may feel many of the same emotions as those who have been raped. But “gray rape” is an unfortunate term, since it mucks up the definition of a crime, a definition which needs to remain crystal clear.
What do I tell my son, when the time comes? I think you know the answer to that. But hey, who’s going to listen to an old fuddy-duddy?
D.
I think there is something on the edge of rape…at least twice in my life I’ve experienced something like this. Not rape, but not what I wanted. Back then I didn’t have the personality to make a scene. I would have screamed and yelled if I thought my life was in danger, maybe. Or maybe if I thought something important was at stake.
I was such a weenie and the sad part is I knew many women–no girls. We were GIRLS–like me. I don’t think females are as passive or badly educated now, thank god. The first time hurt like crazy and maybe a week later it occurred to me that I felt horrible and depressed because it was maybe, kind of, a bit like rape.
It wasn’t searing psychologically, I think because sex wasn’t considered a big deal pre-AIDS and because I hadn’t seen myself as a victim or even victimized. I didn’t know then and I still don’t.
And it’s difficult enough to manage these things when we have the experience and wisdom of full adulthood. I wonder: do our parents fail us by not talking more openly about sex? Or does everyone have to make their mistakes before they learn?
I know I was never talked to about sex, manipulative people and repercussions of the end results. Which is why I have plenty of talks lined up for when the kids are old enough. I’m in mental practice. To spot the charmer, the drinking vs. drunk rules and if you have to ask “Will he still love me tomorrow?” then you’re not ready for this.
But is what happened “gray rape”? I’m going with a flaccid no. I think it’s a learning experience. Don’t let your friends go home with strangers when drunk. Don’t get so drunk you can’t remember what happened the night before. This one chalks up to personal responsibility. When you leave yourself vulnerable, someone will take advantage.
If she drugged him then it’s a different story.
Call me right wing, but IMHO if as an adult you specifically (and perhaps even only eventually) agree to something and you’re not being coerced (as opposed to being enticed) – and you haven’t without your consent been drugged (and I include alcohol here), then you pretty much have to take responsibility for the consequences of your own decisions.
If you choose to impair your judgement through self medication, then that is also a responsibility you must bear.
I seem to remember this whole argument around ‘date rape’, which, if you remember, got a ton of airplay maybe ten or fifteen years ago.
I think that the watering down of the term ‘rape’ is harmful. Rape has a specific, powerful meaning, involving force or the threat of force. Cosmo’s examples are specious, and to equate them, or some of the many examples of ‘date rape’ that were bandied about (in which one of the parties woke up the next morning and regretted what she had done) with real rape does a disservice to real victims.
Have we come so far that some college dude who has a few too many beers and bangs a girl he wouldn’t have otherwise can claim rape? That is absurd. Due to matters of anatomy, rape is largely a male crime: if you’re too inebriated or drugged to give consent, you’re almost certainly too drugged to perform.
In the Cosmo article, the woman they interviewed told the man “no,” but when he kept on going she “froze up.” No force, but no consent, either. I know the courts have had a checkered past in such cases — the woman is impugned for not fighting back, not screaming, not making a big stink. But no consent is no consent.
Where it gets messy, in my opinion, is the woman or girl who through inexperience or immaturity or poor self esteem manages to get herself into a nasty situation. Again, if she says “no,” if she denies consent, then there’s no debate. But I can imagine some of these women/girls talking themselves out of a protest or talking themselves into a mistake. Yeah, chalk it up to learning, but these situations wouldn’t happen in the first place if people took a less casual attitude towards sex. That’s the point Grandpa in his rocking chair was trying to make 🙂
“the woman or girl who through inexperience or immaturity or poor self esteem manages to get herself into a nasty situation.”
That was me, several times, unfortunately. Since I lost my virginity through actual date rape [nothing ‘gray’ about it], afterward, I was often too afraid to say “No” even though I wanted to.
I knew from experience that sometimes screaming and crying and making a big stink didn’t work, so some part of my brain thought that a simple ‘no’ wouldn’t work, either.
Any time I was with a guy just making out, if he started trying to go farther, I’d let him. Sex was always painful because I couldn’t relax, so the whole thing was kind of a nightmare.
But it’s not like I was with bad guys. Their intent was certainly never to rape me, and because I never said ‘no’ out loud, it wasn’t a crime, but I reacted to it as if it was.
I agree that what happened to me [after the first time] was not a crime, but I can totally understand how a girl can get herself into nasty situations and wish like hell she’d avoided even kissing the guy, let alone having sex.
All that’s to say that I agree with you, Doug. A casual attitude toward sex is not healthy, especially for young people who don’t yet have the ability to think out the consequences of their actions.
What I put myself through was stupid, and if I hadn’t decided that sex ‘wasn’t that big of a deal,’ I probably would have waited the two years until I met Steve. I would have avoided a whole lot of physical and emotional pain.
Of course, 18 year old Shelbi would have thought 33 year old Shelbi was a kind, but deluded individual, and that what happened to 33y/o Shelbi would never happen to her. Because I was invincible when I was 18. heh.
I’m glad things worked out for you, even though it was a bumpy road the whole way.
I wish our society could find a middle way between the religious right’s unrealistic abstinence doctrine and the too liberal (seems to me, anyway) hooking-up culture.