Blaming the Victim for Rape. Again
January-February 2009
by Staff, Utne Reader
A recent cover of Cosmopolitan (Sept. 2007) inaugurated “a new kind of date rape you must know about.” Inside was a story about gray rape, defined as sex that “falls somewhere between consent and denial.” The anecdotal evidence for this phenomenon was a woman still worried that she uttered her second round of no “too softly” to her college-acquaintance assailant. The actual culprit behind this new “gray area,” Cosmo explains, is women’s increased sexual independence in today’s “equal-opportunity hookup culture.”
RELATED CONTENT
Review of God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeney’s)....
Tiny a.k.a. Lisa Gray Garcia Cofounder, POOR MagazineUtne Reader visionaryNovember December 2009by ...
Deep Impact Shades of Gray Series October 14, 2002 Issue By Sara V. Buckwitz Deep Impact Shades of...
There's just one problem: It's not at all clear that individual soul searching, much less company p...
Lisa Jervis, cofounder of the feisty feminist rag Bitch, rails against this bogus idiom in Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & a World Without Rape (Seal Press, 2009). It’s the same old oppressive line, Jervis says, wrapped in a slick magazine cover promising the latest in man-pleasing sex tips: “Your sexual desire is dangerous. You can stifle it or you can be a slut who lives in fear and gets what she deserves,” she writes.