And on that note: Scotland says it best. [Via PostBourgie].

Mel Gibson was condemned for (allegedly) threatening to burn down his house and force his ex, Oksana Grigorieva, to blow him (presumably after he saved her from being raped by a group he describes with his usual Gibsonian eloquence).

Gibson allegedly said this: "I am going to come and burn the f–king house down . . . but you will blow me first." He added that Grigorieva looks like a "fucking pig in heat" whose clothes will get her "raped by a pack of [racial slur too horrible to repeat]."

This is how the threat of an uncommon form of sexual assault—stranger gang rape—is used to facilitate the more common form of abuse—acquaintance rape. So next time you start to warn someone in your life against wearing "suggestive" clothing outside the house? Keep in mind that this is a tactic rapists use, and that you are actually statistically more likely than any of the lurking strangers out there to commit this offense.

Eligon begins by recounting the woman's assault, and its aftermath:

Elizabeth Pressman recalled sitting in her bedroom last year drinking tea and chatting with an acquaintance of 20 years when he snapped. The man began choking her, trying to force her to perform oral sex and shoving his fist in her mouth, she said.

Somewhat in shock the following evening, Ms. Pressman, 51, said she let the man back into her apartment to pick up belongings he had left there. He attacked her a second time, she said. The next day, she went to a hospital and reported the attacks to the police.

Ms. Pressman, a news researcher who formerly worked for The Times, said the officers who interviewed her at the hospital had told her that because she had invited the man in, it would be a “he said, she said” situation and that she did not have a case.

The matter was referred to a detective, who interrogated her, Ms. Pressman said. After she described what had happened, Ms. Pressman said, the detective told her, “Sounds like rough sex gone awry.”

Manhattan prosecutors eventually determined that there was not enough evidence to proceed, Ms. Pressman said. (The prosecutor’s office declined to comment on her remarks.)

In Eligon's story, we don't learn much about Elizabeth Pressman. We learn her age and gender and that she drinks tea, details which help us place her as a specific character in our minds. We learn that she was raped twice by a longtime acquaintance and that police dismissed these assaults, facts essential to Elgion's story. And we learn that Pressman is a "news researcher who formerly worked for The Times," a disclosure which covers any potential conflict of interest in Elgion's reporting of the story.

But then, Elgion closes the story with this odd kicker:

“If I were to speak to a woman about reporting a rape, I would say: ‘Don’t put yourself through it. Don’t put yourself through the humiliation and the abuse,’ ” said Ms. Pressman, whose father is the veteran television newsman Gabe Pressman. “It’s horrific what the cops do to you. It’s not worth it. Be ready to be raped a second time.”

Why? Why, at the conclusion of a story about a woman's traumatic assault and the humiliating and abusive police response that followed, is it necessary to note her father's name and occupation? Does the Times think Pressman is a more credible rape victim because her father is an accomplished journalist? Was the newspaper worried that we'd walk away from the story of this woman's rape with the nagging suspicion that she is somehow related to a man we've seen on television? Personally, I can't find any appropriate reason for derailing a woman's thoughts about her own assault in order to talk up her dad.

In a recent Sexist thread, a couple of commenters got to arguing a grim set of statistics. The question at hand: Which group experiences more rapes, men in prison or women outside of prison?

In order to resolve this question, one commenter referred to the "Prison Rape" Wikipedia page, which reads: "Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc. statistics indicate that there are more men raped in U.S. prisons than non-incarcerated women similarly assaulted."

I've seen this comparison quoted on other threads, but I've never seen any specific stats to back it up—and the Wiki page doesn't refer to any, either. I'm a big fan of the work of the organization to which the stats are attributed—Just Detention International, formerly Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc.—so I reached out to JDI for some insight. JDI program director Cynthia Totten had this to say:

JDI does not compare numbers of people raped in society vs. prison as a way to show how frequent rape in detention is—doing so would be problematic and troubling on many levels. Rape is devastatingly common both inside and outside prison walls. The best academic research finds that 20 percent of inmates in men’s prisons are assaulted while rates in women’s institutions vary, with one in four inmates raped in the worst facilities. According to recent government studies by the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics, approximately 60,500 inmates reported being sexually abused at their current federal and state prison in the preceding year alone, while 25,000 jail detainees were victimized in just the prior six months; we can realistically say that at least 100,000 inmates are raped in prisons and jails each year, without considering juvenile detention or immigration detention. Add to this the fact that annual jail intakes are 17 times the population in a jail on any given day, and this number likely represents only the tip of the iceberg. Regardless of custody status, rape and sexual assault traumatizes millions of people in the United States every year, and we are committed to putting an end to this violence, no matter where it occurs.

I wholeheartedly agree with Totten: These sorts of comparisons are profoundly unhelpful.

First of all, until a reliable study is undertaken to directly answer this question, it is scientifically unsound to compare studies that employ different methods, definitions, and standards in determining the prevalence of rape in different communities. Second, these comparisons are often employed solely to derail conversations about addressing the problem of rape. Comparing statistics about the prevalence of rape in different communities ignores the fact that rapes are happening, even one is too many, and all rapists need to be stopped. When you say, "You shouldn't be addressing rape against women in society, you should be addressing rape against male prisoners," you stop a productive conversation about ending rape. When you say, "You shouldn't be addressing rape against male prisoners, you should be addressing rape against women in society," you stop a productive conversation about ending rape.

What Totten—a person who has dedicated her career to ending prison rape—is saying is that we should be encouraging conversations about sexual violence against anyone, and supporting all organizations committed to ending this violence everywhere. It's important to note, however, that these conversations won't all be happening at the same time, and addressing one form of rape in no way detracts from the task of ending rape in all its other forms. The work of ending prison rape is going to take a vastly different approach than the work of ending acquaintance rapes, or child molestation, or elder abuse, or the rape of LGBTQ victims, or male victims, or female victims. That's OK—as long as we also understand that the work of encouraging all of these conversations about all different forms of rape will not be accomplished by jostling for position. As one commenter wrote on another rape stats argument: "I can’t believe you all are arguing over this. Some of you are essentially angry for not including everyone, while missing the point: RAPE = BAD. Do we all agree on that point? Okay! Good."

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that Just Detention International has attempted to edit the Prison Rape Wikipedia page with updated information—for one thing, the organization hasn't been called "Stop Prisoner Rape, Inc." for a few years now—but the erroneous and unsourced statement has since been restored to the page.

Photo via amandabhslater, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

In the world of sexual assault prevention, the work of University of Massachusetts psychologist David Lisak has gained some serious traction. Lisak has spent the past 20 years studying men who commit acquaintance rapes. In the past year, that work has been dissected by feminist blogs, employed in an investigative report from the Center for Public Integrity, and integrated into the policies of campus safety nonprofit Security On Campus. Being a bit of a fan girl myself, I was happy to discover more from Liak: This CBS news interview in which the researcher talks about the ways in which non-stranger rapists operate, how they're ignored by the criminal justice system, and why these men tell him about the rapes they've committed. Transcript after the jump.

The most common rape is a non-stranger assault where the victim is picked out by the offender at a party, at a bar. The degree of acquaintance between them is usually very, very incidental. It is really just the perpetrator finding a particular individual who they're going to target. And so if they're in a bar, if you've got a predator in a bar, he's not going to look for the most sober individual in the bar. He's going to look for the most intoxicated individual. In fact, he'll look for the individual who is not only intoxicated but seems to be doing outrageous things.

Somehow all we can do is take the statement from the victim, take the statement from the alleged perpetrator, and then throw up our hands because they're saying conflicting things and we don't know how to resolve this. That's not how we investigate other crimes. You know, in almost any other circumstance, if we have an alleged perpetrator, we begin an investigation. And it doesn't end with asking the alleged perpetrator whether or not they did the crime. Rather than taking the report and investigating the alleged offender—which is what we do in virtually every other crime and certainly in violent crimes, that is our approach—and yet somehow that's not the approach that's taken in non-stranger cases.

The reason that this is such a common part of the scenario—the non-stranger assault—is that we know, and I've interviewed these rapists for 20 years and they have told me explicitly, they are predators. They go after victims in those kinds of circumstances, and they look for potential victims who are already somwhat vulnerable. They're going to get her so intoxicated that she might have blackouts, she may be unconscious, she is much more susceptible to all the manipulations you would use. So for example, you get her completely intoxicated and then you say, "You know what? You really shouldn't drive. I'll drive you home." And then, presto! The rapist has her in his car, and the assault can happen whether in his car, his apartment, or wherever, but she's under his control. And that scenario has been described to me so many different times by these non-stranger rapists.

Predators look for vulnerable people, and they prey on vulnerable peope, and if as a criminal justice system, we're going to essentially turn away from any victim who is drinking or any victim who is in some way vulnearble, we're essentially giving a free pass to sexual predators. A lot of these men, especially the serial rapists, are very very narcissistic, there is nothing they enjoy more than to sit down in a room with a guy like me and impress me with all their sexual exploits. And that's how they view them.

Three recent crimes reported to the George Washington University, and how the university identified their perpetrators to students and staff:

•     Crime No. 1. On Feb. 15, former G.W. mailroom worker James Markley was arrested for making a “non-specific threat” to faculty and students over the telephone. A crime alert was issued to the campus community naming the former employee, circulating his photograph and informing students to immediately inform G.W. police if they spot him on campus.

•    Crime No. 2. On Feb. 14, a G.W. library worker received more than just a threat; while she was assisting a man inside the library, he “put his hands down her pants and up her shirt.” A crime alert was issued describing the suspect, a 35- to 45-year-old black male “wearing a white sweater”; a few weeks later, a follow-up alert notified the campus that the man had been identified through surveillance tape as a current G.W. graduate student. The university declined to release the suspect’s name to the campus at large; the unnamed student was referred to G.W. Student Judicial Services.

•    Crime No. 3. On Jan. 6, an incident of “sex abuse” occurred inside on-campus freshman residence Thurston Hall. It was reported to the university a month and a half after the incident. The case, which remains open, didn’t inspire a crime alert—just a single line in the University Police Department log.

Wondering why crimes like No. 2 and No. 3 don’t inspire a campus response that’s more in line with crime No. 1? So do campus security experts, who are turning their focus to a very common crime that rarely inspires an all-campus alert—acquaintance sexual assault. “As a general rule, institutions are reluctant to put out an alert for any acquaintance sexual assault,” says S. Daniel Carter, director of public policy for campus safety non-profit Security on Campus, Inc. The organization, founded in 1987 by the parents of Jeanne Clery, began advocating against crime on college campuses after Clery, a freshman at Pennsylvania’s Lehigh University, was raped and murdered in her dorm by a fellow student. By 1990, Security on Campus had succeeded in making the Clery Act federal law, requiring most U.S. colleges and universities to report certain crimes that occur on their campuses. If a reported crime poses an ongoing “threat to students and employees,” schools are required to report those crimes quickly, through “timely warnings” that will “aid in the prevention of similar occurrences.” Which crimes rise to the level of an ongoing threat—and what information ought to be aired in the alerts—are decisions largely left up to individual schools.

In 2006, the Department of Education made it clear that institutions covered by the Clery Act must at least consider issuing a timely warning in cases of acquaintance rape. At G.W., the person making that case-by-case call is University Police Department Chief Dolores Stafford, a nationally recognized expert on the Clery Act. Stafford will be leaving G.W. in a couple of weeks to become a consultant on campus security and Clery Act compliance, but for the past 18 years, Stafford has determined which of the dozens of crimes reported to the university each month deserve an all-campus e-mail blast. G.W.’s published crime reporting policy says that campus alerts are “considered on a case-by-case basis, depending on the facts of the case and the information known by GWPD.”

According to Stafford, the “facts of the case” are most difficult to determine in acquaintance rapes, where reluctant victims sometimes report the crime months after the fact and often decline to provide pertinent details—like the identity of the perpetrator—if they report the crime at all. The majority of sexual assault reports that do reach the university are reported not to university police directly but rather to a “designated campus security authority”—like dorm staff, athletic coaches, and deans. These authorities are required to notify the police department when a student reports a rape to them, but they’re under no obligation to squeeze any specific information from the victim. “If we had all the details about every acquaintance rape, we’d probably put out a warning for each of them,” says Stafford, adding that her office has issued timely warnings in acquaintance rapes in the past. “The expectation of a warning is that you’re providing individuals with some information about what occurred and how to protect themselves. If I don’t have that information, it may not result in a warning.”

Still, even if campus authorities do have adequate information about an assault, a campus alert won’t necessarily be activated. According to Stafford, once the university is aware of the identity of a crime’s perpetrator, the university can take steps to “mitigate the threat.” And because the perpetrators of acquaintance rapes are, by definition, known to their victims, victims who report all the details of their assaults can often preempt the need for a timely warning. “If we arrest them, put them through the judicial process, or bar them from campus, we’ve taken some action to mitigate the threat,” says Stafford. Add up all the acquaintance rapes that are never reported to G.W., those that are reported with too little detail, and those that reveal the identity of the perpetrator, and acquaintance rapes are not likely to inspire a G.W. campus alert.

One aspect of G.W.’s timely warning policy [PDF] suggests that its response to acquaintance rapes may not be solely influenced by a lack—or surplus—of information. The policy notes that crimes that arise from “disagreements” between students aren’t generally considered an ongoing threat: “if an assault occurs between two students who have a disagreement, there may be no on-going threat to other GW community members and a Crime Alert would not be distributed.”

But according to Carter, students who victimize other students are likely to pose a threat in the future, and issuing a timely warning can actually serve an instrumental role in mitigating these threats. Students who are jailed can get out on bail, and those that are shuffled through the campus judicial process can still drop in on frat parties while they await a hearing. In the meantime, it can be helpful for students to know who to trust their drinks with and who to avoid in the stacks. Carter’s Clery Act recommendations lean heavily on the work of researchers David Lisak and Paul Miller, who found that a majority of “undetected rapists”—or rapists who haven’t been convicted of any crime—go on to rape again and again [PDF]. In Lisak and Miller’s sample, two-thirds of rapists raped more than once—on average, each was responsible for six rapes. Over 90 percent of rapes are committed by repeat offenders, and the great majority of rapes that occur on college campus are committed by these undetected predators. “At these institutions, there’s the assumption that if the victim and perpetrator are known to each other, it’s not an ongoing threat, and that’s absolutely not true,” says Carter. “In the overwhelming number of cases, acquaintance sexual assaults are likely to indicate a threat to someone else,” he says. “Odds are, if you assume there’s not a threat, you’re going to make a mistake the overwhelming majority of the time.”

Despite the research, Carter says he’s only aware of a “handful” of schools that have responded to acquaintance rapes on campus with alerts—and none that actually named the perpetrator. Some institutions choose to alert students to the general possibility of acquaintance rape on campus, without singling out any particular accused rapist. In 2008, G.W. released a crime alert warning students and staff of the danger of acquaintance rapes on campus after eight sexual assaults were reported in the space of two weeks. The alert didn’t name any of the alleged perpetrators of the assaults, but it did identify one common player in most of the attacks: alcohol. The approach helps to raise awareness of rape on campus, but it also can work to shift the blame off of the perpetrators, who remain nameless. “I think there is a reluctance to believe that someone in their community is capable of this, to label one of their own community members—including a paying student—as a threat,” says Carter. “But I would be hard-pressed to identify how a timely warning of that type could truly be effective without that information,” he says.

Schools that do choose to publish perpetrators’ names may be at risk of losing more than just a student’s tuition. Because the campus alerts are widely distributed, there’s also the possibility that the student named in the alert will sue for defamation. In 2007, Johnson & Wales student Christopher Havlik sued the university for naming him in a campus crime alert. After Havlik was accused of fracturing another student’s skull in an on-campus fist-fight, the university sent out a campus-wide alert that directly named Havlik (and his fraternity). Johnson & Wales chose to air Havlik’s name after determining that the incident presented an ongoing threat to students—the fight was attributed to “fraternity-related animosities,” and Havlik was regarded as “the likely aggressor” in the fight. After being acquitted of his criminal assault charge in court, Havlik decided to make his name even more public by suing Johnson & Wales, and then appealing the decision up to federal District Court—which decided that the school was within its bounds in naming Havlik, as it had a duty under the Clery Act “to inform the university community of a reported crime.”

At G.W., when a former employee makes “non-specific threats” over the phone, he’s named, his photograph is released, and he’s barred from campus; when a current student sexually assaults a worker in the library and runs away, his case is quietly adjudicated within the campus community; when another student suffers “sex abuse” inside her freshman dorm, only the closest readers of the UPD crime log are even aware that the incident occurred. Every university faces significant challenges in persuading victims of acquaintance crimes to come forward. When they do, campus perpetrators should be regarded as just as much of a threat—if not more of one—than the stranger who can be easily isolated from the campus community. After all, students who solve their “disagreements” with violence—or who resolve a disagreement between sex partners with rape—are likely to disagree again.

Photos by Darrow Montgomery

Celibacy is probably not a feasible option for most undergraduates, but students at Duke University may want to consider it anyway.  Duke's new rules governing sexual misconduct and coercion are so vague, subjective, presumptive of guilt, and oblivious to the dynamics of consensual sexual relations that they pose a risk of prosecution even for students engaging in innocent foreplay.  Sexual misconduct at Duke includes "inappropriate (or non-consensual) touching," as well as rape; "inappropriate touching" and "acts of a sexual nature" that require clear consent include ("but are not limited to") touching and "attempted touching" of an "unwilling person's" erogenous zones, "either directly or indirectly."

Kaminer continues by stating, "I don't know what constitutes a non-consensual, indirect, attempted touch, but I wouldn't try it at Duke."

Really? Surely Kaminer, an extremely accomplished lawyer, can manage to understand three different legal concepts at one time. Touching a person in a sexual manner without that person's consent is sexual assault. And if you touch that person sexually with something other than your hand, it's still sexual assault. And if you try to touch that person sexually with something other than your hand, it's attempted sexual assault.

After all, it's not as if Duke just pulled the terms of its "non-consensual touching" rule out of its erogenous zone. The full Duke rule against inappropriate touching defines it as the "touching or attempted touching of an unwilling person's breasts, buttocks, inner thighs, groin, or genitalia, either directly or indirectly." The Duke rule is eerily similar to the standard applied to everyday citizens in jurisdictions across the country. In D.C., for example, "misdemeanor sexual abuse" is defined as engaging "in a sexual act or sexual contact with another person . . .  without that other person's permission," where "sexual contact" is "the touching with any clothed or unclothed body part or any object, either directly or through the clothing, of the genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh, or buttocks of any person."

It's possible that Kaminer, a career legal expert, is unaware that groping exists, and that it is not legal. But I suspect that what's really going on here is that Kaminer is reluctant to recognize this very real, very much illegal form of sexual assault because of where it takes place—college.

In the United States, the cultural narrative surrounding a college student's sexual experience tends to by extremely hypersexualized. It's not just that undergraduates are assumed to be promiscuous—it's also that the sexuality of college students is presented as "out of control" and "gone wild." The subtext here is that when people choose to pursue an undergraduate degree, they must also necessarily abandon their autonomy over their bodies and their right to choose their own sexual experiences. Underlining these assumptions is a deeply warped attitude toward sex: Because many college students choose to have sex—and sometimes, lots of it—we deny them to right to ever choose not to do it.

Because we hypersexualize college students in this way, we tolerate sexual assaults on college campuses that we would never tolerate in other communities—in the workplace, in public spaces, in society at large. As I noted earlier, the non-consensual, indirect, attempted touches that Kaminer is so confused about are illegal in most places. And when those types of crimes are committed within certain communities, they also constitute sexual discrimination. Thanks to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, such discrimination is outlawed in education and employment, respectively. Despite these parallel protections, I suspect that college sexual assault skeptics like Kaminer would be less eager to discredit a workplace sexual harassment policy that prohibits employees from sexually assaulting their co-workers at work functions.

Meanwhile, as long as a sexual assailant attends the same university as his or her victims, Kaminer is fit to explain away illegal groping as "innocent" and "well-meaning," dismiss victims as "self-proclaimed," and determine sexual coercion to be "imagined." Administrators who are interested in protecting college students against sexual assault are ridiculed as "virginal," furthering the idea that college students must either embrace a climate of non-consensual sex or abstain entirely. Kaminer then goes on to argue that college students who prefer their sex to be entirely consensual have no place in the university setting at all: "Intellectual debate cannot thrive, individual liberty cannot survive, and 'healthy sexual relationships' cannot develop in a university that seeks to eradicate 'personal affronts,'" she writes. In short, if you can't stand a little groping, perhaps higher education is not the place for you. If that's not educational discrimination, what is?

Today, Thomas MacAulay Millar at Yes Means Yes! pointed to a recent paper that addresses this myth head-on. The report, "If a girl doesn't say 'no': Young men, rape, and insufficient knowledge" [PDF], identifies the "miscommunication model" as one of the dominant theories informing public thinking about how sexual assault actually happens.

In order to identify how the "miscommunication model" functions in everyday conversation, researchers interviewed two focus groups of college-aged men in the UK Australia about their interpretations of sex and consent.  The young men who participated in the study displayed "sophisticated and nuanced understandings" of different ways people could indicate sexual refusal. But when it came time to talk about non-consensual sex, these same men were startlingly eager to explain away acquaintance rapes as communication failures instead of deliberate assaults.

* "I don’t think I’d ever say ‘no’": First, researches asked the men how they would turn down unwanted sex. The men displayed a marked reluctance to offer a clear "no" to sex, and instead suggested that they would employ euphemism and body language to communicate their refusal. (Note: I've edited the study for style).

Moderator: . . . the next scenario is, you’re back at your house with a girl. It’s looking like sex is on the cards for whatever reason you really don’t want to have sex with her tonight. How do you let her know?

John: You could come up with one of ya, your cliches, like, ‘I don’t think this is a good idea’, or ah, you know, ‘I’m not ready for this’ or you know one of the cliches. As soon as you come out with that cliche, they know. They know what you’re trying to say because it’s used all the time, whereas if you sort of try and dance around the cliches they might not get the point straight away.

. . . James: I’ve got no idea.

George: I know people that will do anything for a root.  If it got to that stage, obviously you’re interested. Well I’d assume that’d be the case so then why would you say no? You always, it’s easier to make an excuse the next day than at the time.

Moderator: Hehe. How do you say no?

James: If it’s a disgusting woman. I mean just a platonic kind of friend but a disgusting woman. You gotta make a face if they’re sort of implying something, then they’ll probably get the picture. . . .  I don’t think I’d, don’t think I’d ever say ‘no’

John: You just say—

James: If they were at my house then it’d be for a reason, so.

John: Oh yeah. ‘This isn’t quite what I expected tonight’ and then they’d say ‘what did you expect.’ ‘Not this, I just thought we’d have a drink and then you’d go home.’ . . .

James: And then they’d start to get the, get the idea.

Andrew: I’d call a cab (inaudible) rather sensitive excuse, I guess.

John: Yeah, you don’t wanna say. You couldn’t say ‘no’, could you. You don’t wanna say ‘No, I don’t like you now.' You know you’d come up with some excuse: ‘You looked good in the soft light at the pub, but now . . . ’

George: ‘I’m sobering up now’

John: Yeah hehehe, ‘And I’m having second thoughts.’ A soft gentle excuse would be the best one.

* "There’s always little hints": Researchers then asked the men how they know when a woman is refusing sex. The men indicated that women also often rely on body language and euphemism to relay their lack of consent. Interestingly, even though the men professed to favoring the exact same tactics, they attributed these devices to the way that "women are":

Moderator: Hmm, great, okay so are there ways of knowing when it’s not on the cards? How would a guy pick up that sex is not on the cards that way?

John: Body language.

James: Yeah (inaudible) body language.

Moderator: What’s that, sorry?

James: It’s all put down as body language. . . . Women are pretty good fakers, teasers, no, but it’s body language all the time.

George: The conversation gets shorter.

James: Mhmm.

George: Very abrupt.

John: Start looking at their watch and you know (inaudible) "It’s getting late."

Andrew: ‘How long does the taxi take to get here,’ that type of thing.

. . . John: "I just remembered I’m working early in the morning," you know there’s always little hints like letting you know that "I’ve just uh changed my mind." Yeah there’s always little hints.

* "The perpetrator could actually really be the victim": But then the young men start talking about rape, and the idea that lack of consent can be clearly communicated through euphemistic or nonverbal cues is quickly abandoned. The researchers note that prior to the rape discussion, the young men never indicated that "the explicit use of the word ‘no’ is necessary for a woman’s refusal of a sexual invitation to be understood as such." Suddenly, even "no" is not enough. Once the idea of rape is raised, these men claim ignorance of understanding when a woman is refusing sex, and go on to say that even when a woman explicitly says "no," she can be making a victim of the perpetrator.

Kyle: Um I just, I just had a thought. When does no mean no, when does yes mean yes, I’m just wondering how this type of information ties into rape and stuff like that. Um, with um, common defences of (inaudible) stuff like that. . . . I’m wondering in those situations, what is the thinking of the perpetrator in terms of these signals they’re interpreting that are coming their way, you know?

. . . Jason: If you don’t give a verbal ‘no’ then you’re up shit creek.

. . . Cam: Then again, well as you said, well, when’s no, no when’s yes yes. The perpetrator could actually really be the victim where they’re going ‘no’ and they’re basically throwing themself on you and go, ‘well, I said ‘‘no.’’’

Kyle: Playing hard to get.

* "So both parties are a problem there": Researchers then directly asked the men what they thought about the "miscommunication theory." They supported it:

Jason: If a girl doesn’t say ‘no’ look you in the eye and say ‘no.' Anything else can be sort of miscommunicated so if she looks you in the eye and goes ‘no’. . . Fine. But if she goes . . .  if she sort of says ‘no,’ and does the whole look away flirty it sort of like leaves you in the lurch.

Moderator: Alright. Any other ideas?

Cam: Basically, well, it can actually happen to a male or female, like, this myth that I’ve heard females say about ‘oh how could a guy get raped.’ Hey, just ‘cause you don’t want it don’t mean it don’t feel good. Um you know, the same goes for females basically. Whichever sex it is has to be clear about ‘look na this has gone past where I want to go I’m not prepared to go any further’ and make it clear. ‘No more.' ‘Stop there.’ Or you know if they want some of the stuff but they don’t wanna do it all. You know they need to go ‘look,' and be clear, ‘I want it to go here, and just here for now.’ . . .  Basically you know otherwise there is misconception and there is, you know miscommunication where one’s going ‘okay well they’re doing this’ and the other’s going, ‘I wish they’d back off a bit.' So unless each is clear then, you know, it will continue. . . .

Moderator: . . . do you think it’s necessary for a women to say ‘no’ clearly and effectively for her to be understood as not wanting to  have sex or are there other ways  of knowing that she doesn’t want to?

Mike: You can always take the physical signs, but like I said before they’re generally really ambiguous, you never know if they are definite. I reckon verbal's probably the best way to get round it. . . . If she says ‘no’ I’ll stop, you know.

. . . Cam: Yep, but they really need to make it clear in both physical and verbal. There’s no point them saying ‘oh no I don’t want it’ and then for you know, they’re basically they’re guiding you in, so to speak. Well, gee, do they really not want it?

. . . Jason: There’s plenty of opportunities for all women to stop it, assuming the boy’s being honourable and stuff but um they can not sort of get into that sort of situation the flirty situation in the first place or they can not go home with you an’ they can not go into the bedroom an’ they can once you’re there they can sort of like go ‘no you’re not allowed to take my clothes off’ and they can—I think it’s what’s that 30 second rule they had in America where the guy was having sex with her, and she goes ‘na this is a bad idea,’ says ‘no,’ he finishes, and she goes ‘oh that was rape’ and sort of like—so there’s plenty of opportunities for a girl to avoid the situation, and um, so, but if a girl looks you in the eye and says ‘no’ then that’s sort of the end of it.

Mike: Um back on that note I think I think things progress I’d say from the age of say maybe eighteen, or maybe even twenty onwards. Generally you find people being more sexually active, generally like they’re sort of coming out of the later stage of adolescence and that the sign is generally that if you go out with someone I think from that age on, you’re, that’s sort of what’s going to happen, that’s pretty much what the plan is, but then to back out, like if it gets to a situation where like, you can end up in a situation where it, like, becomes date rape. Generally you’re given the signs that to that point it is okay, you know, like it depends on the age (inaudible). Probably eighteen onwards I’d say.

Kyle: Um, sorry to interrupt, but I just realized that, um, that statement is kind of putting the blame on women almost. She fails, something she did—

Jason: He misinterprets her—

Kyle: She fails to say ‘no’ clearly. Well, what about the guy?

Cam: Yeah, he’s also, he’s failed to actually interpret what she means, so it’s actually both parties.

Mike: So both parties are a problem there.

. . . Jason: Women often seem to forget that men don’t deal with subtleties. If we want something, we tell you.

. . . Mike: Men deal in yes and no, whereas women deal in a vast array of options, so, yeah. . . . Like I think i-if the situation is ambiguous the male is going to lean towards the positive side of interpretation of it.

Jason: Hehe, of course.

This is where things fall off the rails. Suddenly, men don't deal with "subtleties," even though the men have previously reported that they would turn down sex in the same way they'd expect women to—subtly. Suddenly, a person misinterpreting lack of consent is completely understandable if "she fails to say 'no' clearly," even though the men had previously never invoked direct refusal as a way they know if women don't want to have sex with them.  Suddenly, a woman is required to engage in a very specific behavior—looking her sex partner in the eye and saying "no"—in order to not be responsible for her own rape. And suddenly, in order to neutralize the misogyny a little bit, both men and women are equally as likely to be in a position where they must deter sexual advances with eye contact and a firm "no," even though the men had previously indicated that they could never even conceive of a situation where they would be expected to do such a thing.

As Thomas MacAulay Millar notes, these men are likely not rapists. So why is it so natural for them to make excuses for them? "The gist of it is that these young men evidenced an understanding of and even a preference for nuances and diplomatic communication to refuse sex, but then when discussing rape, reversed course and began to argue that anything the least bit ambiguous was unintelligible," Millar writes. "What gives? Why create a social framework where rape is accidental if they don’t have to cover their own asses?"

I don't have an answer to that, but the study does suggest one way we to address this problem: Show people studies like this. "[I]n presenting this research, and its’ associated transcripts, to young men and women," the study claims, "we have found that by drawing attention to our shared commonsensical knowledge of how everyday refusals are normatively done, and then to how this knowledge is often then patently discounted in favour of the interpretative repertoire of miscommunication . . . young people become engaged in an active discussion of how it is that both sexual consent and sexual refusal are actually negotiated."

Murray lists three "extremely stupid" things she did on the night she was raped: (1) She "had been drinking in the pub" and was "not used to alcohol"; (2) she "went with a group of friends to the home of a much older man"; and (3) she was wearing "what my mother described, disapprovingly, as an extended belt, but what to me was just a fashionable mini skirt."

Each of Murray's "mistakes" fall under the category of normal teenage behavior. But unlike Murray's first two sources of self-blame, wearing a short skirt has little actual connection to a person's personal safety—miniskirts are an entirely socially constructed vulnerability. So let's focus for a minute on that extended belt Murray was sporting.

A good percentage of the study's victim-blamers think Murray should take responsibility for what happened after she stepped out in the mini: Her friends drifted away, the older man began "violently molesting" her, and then, when she gave him a firm "no" and attempted to fight him off, he punched her in the face and raped her. According to the Daily Mail, 24 percent of women aged 18 to 24 believe that "wearing a short skirt, accepting a drink or having a conversation with the rapist made victims partly responsible [for their rapes]."

The study doesn't detail why these people believe that wearing a miniskirt makes you responsible for your own rape. (For those who do hold this belief, feel free to amuse me with your explanations). Murray floats one theory: When Murray's rapist punched her in the face and then raped her, it was just a natural response to Murray's own subliminal messages.

"When a woman says no, she means no. And that's true, even if her clothes are saying the opposite," Murray writes, as if a piece of clothing could provide consent for any sex act with any person. "I believe we all have a right to wear whatever we choose, whether it's a mini skirt or a burka. Sadly, I'm not sure that the highly sexualised society in which we live offers young people much of a choice. Children are lured into 'sexy gear' before they're old enough to be trusted to take a bus on their own. . . . Is it a surprise that in such a society assumptions are made about a woman's availability?"

Under Murray's theory, wearing a short skirt signals that a woman is sexually available to anyone who happens to see her wearing the short skirt. The social cue provided by this inanimate object is to be trusted beyond a woman's actual words ("no") or actions (desperate attempts at escape). Furthermore, this sartorial secret code (short skirt = down to fuck anyone) is accepted not only by rapists, but by society at large—including rape victims, police officers, and jurors. And what if a woman who does not want to have sex with any and all bystanders decides to put on a short skirt? Her punishment for breaking the code is getting punched in the face and raped.

So, how do we combat this absurd belief that short hemlines carry the power to override a woman's right to consent to sex? Ridiculously, Murray suggests that the way to cut down on short-skirt-related-rapes is to militantly reinforce the false connection between miniskirts and automatic sexual availability. Murray notes that many, many people who wear short skirts—including little girls heading off to school—are not dressing with any intent to provide preemptive consent to sex. Instead of embracing this as a positive sign, Murray's solution is to force younger generations who do not associate short skirts with a get-out-of-rape-free card to re-code their clothing choices along the victim-blaming spectrum. "If I had a daughter I would be telling her to . . . be aware of the signals she may be giving out that may be read as a licence to take liberties," she writes. "It's not an ideal world, but it is the real world."

Tellingly, Murray doesn't bother to address what sort of anti-rape advice she'd be dishing if she had a son. The next generation of potential rapists will have to receive their social cues by eavesdropping on the advice we're providing to the next generation of potential victims. This is what they're hearing: If she's wearing a short skirt, it's not your fault when you rape her.

The worst of the worst, after the jump.

Women: Nature's victims. According to Valdosta State coppers, women "make easy targets for random acts of violence" for three reasons: (1) they're dumb; (2) they insist on walking around like dainty little ladies; (3) they go places girls aren't allowed.

The three main reasons women make easy targets for random acts of violence are:

* Lack of awareness (you MUST know where you are & what's going on around you.)

* Body language (keep your head up, swing your arms, stand straight up)

* Wrong place, wrong time (DON'T be walking alone in an alley, or driving in a bad neighborhood at night)

One major deficit of female "awareness": Awareness of that serial killer parked next to you.

Some women have a tendency to get into their cars after shopping, eating, working, etc., and just sit (doing their checkbook, or making a list, etc.). DON'T DO THIS! A predator could be watching you, and this is the perfect opportunity for him to get in the passenger side, put a gun to your head, and tell you where to go. AS SOON AS YOU GET INTO YOUR CAR, LOCK THE DOORS AND LEAVE. . . . If you are parked next to a big van, enter your car from the passenger door. A lot of serial killers attack their victims by pulling them into their vans while the women are attempting to get into their cars.

Better just stick on the ground floor, ladies. First rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that "stairwells are horrible places to be alone." Second rule of multi-level buildings: Always remember that elevators are horrible places to be with other people. Ask yourself: Do you really need to get above the lobby today?

Always take the elevator instead of the stairs. (Stairwells are horrible places to be alone.)

* Do not get on an elevator if your instincts tell you that something is wrong (Remember, bad men don't always look bad).

* Do not stand back in the corners of the elevator, be near the front, by the doors, ready to get off.

* If you get on the elevator on the 25th floor, and the Boogie Man gets on the 22nd, get off when he gets on.

Know your predator shooting statistics. Stop freaking out, delicate ladies: "it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ."

If the predator has a gun and you are not under his control, ALWAYS run!

* POLICE only make 4 of 10 shots when they are in range of 3-9 feet. This is due to stress.

* The predator will only hit you (a running target) 4 in 100 times. And even then, it most likely WILL NOT be a vital organ. RUN!

Live in fear of all other humans. If you don't, you may get yourself raped.

Women are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP IT, it may get you raped, or killed.

Ted Bundy, the serial killer, was a good looking, well-educated man, who ALWAYS played on the sympathies of unsuspecting women. He walked with a cane, or a limp, and often asked "for help" into his vehicle or with his vehicle, which is when he abducted his next victim.

If you don't gouge his eyes out, whatever happens to you is all your fault. Yes: It actually says that.

If he's driving, find the right time, and stick your fingers in his eyes. He must watch the road, so choose an unsuspecting time, and gouge him. It maybe your ONLY defense. While he is in shock, GET OUT. (This sounds gross, but the alternative is your fault if you do not act.)

Stepping outside your car at noon on a Monday: Risky business.

BREAKDOWNS: (avoid this by ALWAYS keeping your car in good working order)

* If your car breaks down, you better have a cell phone to call for help, and lock your doors.

* Keep a blanket, and a pair of warm clothes and boots, and a flashlight in your car always for emergencies.

* If you don't have a cell phone, shame on you.

* If it's noon on a business day, you MAY want to put your hazards on and walk to safety.  If it's 2 a.m. and you're close to a populated and well lighted area, go there ASAP. Otherwise, your best bet is to stay in your vehicle.

Do not leave shelter after sundown.

If you are walking alone in the dark (which you shouldn't be) and you find him following/chasing you:

* Try to get to a lighted area, preferably a populated area.

* If he's following you, cross the street. If he follows you, turn around and look at him. He will know that he can now be identified and that he has lost the element of surprise.

* If he chases you, yell for help and run!

* Find an obstacle, such as a parked car, and run around it, like ring around the rosy. This may sound silly, but statistical data shows that this has SAVED LIVES.

I don't know what this one means, but it doesn't sound good.

Never let yourself or anyone that you know be a in any type of business (bar, store, restaurant, gas station).

Make sure to sign up for more great tips, in a class where a police officer will almost surely refer to you and your friends as "ladies," without irony.

Sign up for VSU R.A.D. course. It's a self-defense course for ladies.

And now, for some less sarcastic commentary: Here is what the sexual assault policy gurus at SAFER Campus have to say about these tips:

The University’s Police Department’s website for Sexual Assault Prevention is deeply offensive, misogynist, heterosexist and perpetuates myths about the reality of sexual assault. . . . It is difficult to believe that University endorses such so-called “life-saving” victim-blaming advice, which frames women as naive "easy targets", overly "sympathetic" and illogical. This patriarchal and patronizing advice does nothing to address rape culture on campus, date rape or acquaintance rape. The school is informing students that a violent experience of sexual assault is their fault. No information was found that suggests that a sexual assault victim may be male or transgender.

Thomas looks at a study of 1882 college students who were asked four questions to determine if they had ever raped (or attempted to rape) anyone:

1) Have you ever attempted unsuccessfully to have intercourse with an adult by force or threat of force?

2) Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone who did not want you to because they were too intoxicated to resist?

3) Have you ever had intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

4) Have you ever had oral intercourse with someone by force or threat of force?

Questions like these are bound to lead to underreporting—what guy is going to admit to forcing a girl to give him head? As it turns out, a lot of guys will admit to this, 120 to be exact: That's six percent of the survey's respondents who copped to either rape or attempted rape. Importantly, Thomas notes, the survey does not actually ask these guys if they've ever exactly "raped" anyone:

If a survey asks men, for example, if they ever “had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated (on alcohol or drugs) to resist your sexual advances,” some of them will say yes, as long as the questions don’t use the “R” word.

And they didn't just admit to raping—they admitted to raping repeatedly (as long as it's not really "rape," of course!) According to the study, a small percentage of men are responsible for committing a large portion of sexual assaults—that's a whole lot of "accidents," "misreadings," and "gray areas":

Of the 120 rapists in the sample, 44 reported only one assault. The remaining 76 were repeat offenders. These 76 men, 63% of the rapists, committed 439 rapes or attempted rapes, an average of 5.8 each (median of 3, so there were some super-repeat offenders in this group). Just 4% of the men surveyed committed over 400 attempted or completed rapes.

What does this mean about our "accidental" rapists?

a) The vast majority of acquaintance rapes are committed by the same people;

b) These people don't see themselves as "rapists";

c) They are, however, able recognize that they regularly threat, force, and intoxicate women in order to have sex with them.

Oops! There's no "accident" here—these guys just deny, evade punishment, and repeat.

So, what do we do to stop these guys? Well, here's a start: Let's call them rapists. It's not just rapists who fail to recognize these behaviors—threatening, forcing, incapacitating—as "real" rape. We all have to stop making excuses for calling a rapist a rapist—and doubting, minimizing, or lashing out against the people who do use that word. Women need to know that they can call their experiences "rape" and report them as crimes. They need to know that they can call their rapists "rapists," even if the rapist is also someone's "friend," "acquaintance," "co-worker," "fraternity brother," or "respected member of our community." As Thomas says:

The men in your lives will tell you what they do. As long as the R word doesn’t get attached, rapists do self-report. The guy who says he sees a woman too drunk to know where she is as an opportunity is not joking. He’s telling you how he sees it. The guy who says, “bros before hos”, is asking you to make a pact.

The Pact. The social structure that allows the predators to hide in plain sight, to sit at the bar at the same table with everyone, take a target home, rape her, and stay in the same social circle because she can’t or won’t tell anyone, or because nobody does anything if she does. The pact to make excuses, to look for mitigation, to patch things over—to believe that what happens to our friends—what our friends do to our friends—is not (using Whoopi Goldberg’s pathetic apologetics) “rape-rape.”

. . . The rapists can’t be your friends, and if you are loyal to them even when faced with the evidence of what they do, you are complicit.

That last point is an important one. People who excuse rapists usually see that equation from the other end: "He's my friend, so he can't be a rapist." We need to reverse that equation—"He's a rapist, so he can't be my friend." Perhaps them we could begin addressing why the dictionary definition of rape is overlooked—threatening, forcing, and incapacitating for sex—in our to avoid applying the word—"rapist"—to anyone we know.

Debunked, after the jump:

- "Yes means yes" is dangerous in a world where "no means no"
- Women exploit rape laws to criminalize consensual sex they later regret
- Some rapes just happen on accident

By the by—if you're in need of a primer, here's the relevant reading material:

Verbal assault: The abuse and debasement of "rape"
Drunk girls deserve to get raped
Writer to rape victims: sometimes it's too late to say no
On the difficulty of saying no

Now, on to the theories:

Not everybody accepts the "yes means yes" standard of consent, so we have to stick to "no means no" [Source].

I've heard this argument time and again: Telling people that consent ought to be based on "yes" instead of "no" is dangerous, because the nation's sex partners (and courtrooms) just don't agree with that standard. According to this theory, if a woman expects a man to respect her bodily autonomy implicitly, she's gonna get raped and there's nothing she can do about it.

Well: Of course not everyone agrees with it. That's why feminists devote books and blogs and documentaries to critiquing current models of consent—necause we believe by changing attitudes and changing laws, we can make lives (not to mention sex!) better. That being said: "yes means yes" is actually consistent with the legal standard in many jurisdictions, and if rapists go around assuming that "no means no," they may be in for an unpleasant surprise.

I'm most familiar with rape laws in Washington, D.C., so I'm going to stick to D.C. code here. In D.C., there is no crime called "rape"—instead, sexual assaults are categorized as various degrees of "sexual abuse."

In D.C., you could be charged with first degree sexual abuse if you cause a person to submit to a sex act using any of the following tactics: by physically forcing them; by threatening them; by rendering them unconscious; or by drugging them. This crime can be punished with up to life in prison. You could be charged with second degree sexual abuse if you have sex with someone when you have reason to know that they are incapable of knowing what's going on, incapable of saying no, or incapable of "communicating unwillingness" to have sex. This crime can be punished with up to 20 years in prison. In these crimes, the rapist is aware that their victim does not want to participate in the sex act, and does it anyway ("no means no"), or is aware that their victim cannot consent, and does it anyway ("passed out means no").

Misdemeanor sexual abuse requires a less stringent standard of consent. Under D.C. law, the misdemeanor charge applies to "whoever engages in a sexual act or sexual contact with another person and who should have knowledge or reason to know that the act was committed without that other person's permission." This crime can be punished with up to six months in prison.

Here, the standard does not require force, threat, or incapacitation. It doesn't even require penetration—it covers all "sexual contact." The misdemeanor charge only requires the absence of consent. In this crime, the rapist is not aware that the victim is powerless to say no—he is only aware that the victim has not offered a "yes." In D.C., you can go to prison for six months for having sex with someone without gaining their permission—even if the victim did not explicitly say "no."

"Yes means yes" is more than just pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking of bloggers living in a feminist dreamworld. For everyone who engages in sex, not abiding by "yes means yes" can also mean very real jail time.

—

Rape laws are invalid because they're based on how the victim "feels" the next morning. [Source].

Again, in D.C., the severity of a sex abuse charge depends entirely upon the actions of the perpetrator, and not at all on the feelings of the victim. The legal system does not care how traumatized the victim is, whether the victim has changed her mind about how she feels about her sexual assault since it happened, or whether the victim wants to press charges. Let's recap: According to the law, the only things that matter are: (a) whether the perpetrator had reason to know that the victim did not consent, (b) whether the perpetrator had reason to know that the victim could not consent, and (c) whether the rapist used force. D.C. law is only concerned with the severity of the rapist's actions—not whether the victim "secretly liked it," "totally wanted it," or "only regretted it later."

If the story of Polanski's victim has taught us anything, it's that rape laws are not about the victim. They're about the perpetrator. The American justice system has been continually criticized for failing to serve sexual assault victims. Rape trials don't exist to make victims feel better—they exist to help prevent future rapes. And so, even though reporting rape, pressing charges, and enduring a trial is a notoriously difficult process for victims of sexual assault, victims are still encouraged to step forward in the hopes that others will not become victims.

From a legal perspective, it makes perfect sense that rape laws would be centered exclusively on the perpetrator's actions and not at all on the victim's feelings. If a person routinely has sex with people without their consent, he may catch a few victims who "secretly liked it." That's not the point. The point is that that behavior is reckless, dangerous to the public, and unacceptable.

That being said, locking someone up for a few months doesn't strike me as a very effective rape avoidance tactic. It would be much more productive if we focused our efforts on prevent rapists from believing that behavior was acceptable in the first place.

—

Some rapes happen on accident [Source].

As Thomas notes on the Yes Means Yes! blog, the dominant analogy used to address rape likens it to a terrible and unpreventable disaster. Under this model, rape is like a hurricane. Everyone agrees that hurricanes are devastating. Hurricanes cannot be prevented—they can only be predicted, planned for, and vigilantly avoided. Because no one can be blamed for causing a hurricane, the onus is on the victims to make sure they stay out of the disaster's path.

Similarly, because many people are convinced that nothing can stop a rapist from raping, women are encouraged to conform to a series of disaster-avoidance behaviors: stay indoors, wear longer skirts, quit drinking, travel in packs, and avoid trusting men.

Of course, rapes have a pretty obvious culprit: rapists. Still, some people continue to cast date rape scenarios in particular as unavoidable accidents. Since acquaintance rapes are absent of any obvious malicious intent, they are considered a product of an unfortunate miscommunication. These rapists did not intend to rape anyone. In a way, they too are victims—victims of the problematic gray area of sexual consent.

This focus on some rapes as "accidents" suffers from a misapplication of the term "accident." I often find analogies misleading in discussion of sexual assault (see: that hurricane bullshit), but I'm going to use an analogy in this instance because I think it may be helpful. What if we thought about rape in terms of another type of accident—a car accident?

In the United States, driving a car is a privilege. In order to be cleared to drive, you must pass tests, register your information with the government, have enough money to buy a vehicle, and secure insurance in case you get into a wreck. For some people, the privilege of stepping behind the wheel inspires a certain amount of hubris. These people believe that because they are driving a car, they can take certain liberties on the road—including cutting others off in order to save time, running red lights, shirking stop signs, and generally being a gigantic asshole. Their concern lies only in getting where they want to go as fast as they can, and not at all with all the other humans on the road they have an obligation to protect.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend was hit by a car when he was in a crosswalk (he's fine, thanks for asking). In D.C., of course, pedestrians legally hold the right of way in a crosswalk. But my boyfriend did not share the privilege of the driver—he was a pedestrian, and so he was forced to wait patiently at the very wide, very well-marked, very busy crosswalk until one of the big privileged cars deigned to stop for him. If a pedestrian decides to step out into the street as oncoming traffic approaches, he has to hope that his legal right to cross—not to mention his human life—outweighs the driver's sense of privilege to keep on trucking. Asserting your rights, of course, comes with a certain amount of danger. But pedestrians have no choice but to cross busy streets. And sometimes, they get hit.

Now, the driver who hit him did not set out with the intention of running into a human with her car. She didn't mean to hurt anybody. But she also knew full well that cars are required to stop for pedestrians in crosswalks. She was simply so accustomed to her driving privilege that she never dreamed that this could actually happen—and that she would ever be held responsible for her habitual disregard for the law. After all, a lot of motorists act this way, and most pedestrians just stay out of their way. When a pedestrian is hit in a crosswalk, it's not an accident. It's the result of the motorist who has normalized her dangerous actions.

When rapists engage in sex acts without bothering to gain their sex partner's consent, they are not "accidentally" raping someone. Rapes don't come from miscommunication. They are not isolated, unpreventable incidents. They are a product of institutionalized, reinforced, life-long privilege. They are the symptoms of a flaw in the rapist's entire worldview. They are the product of the way the rapist has habitually devalued women, laid claim to the bodies of others, pursued what he wants no matter what—and never thought anything of it because he has never been called on it. That's not an accident. That's a system.

Kathryn Holmquist's little piece of horrific sex advice—sometimes, girls, it's "too late to say no”—has evolved into a more advanced discussion on this blog. The question: Why should women be required to say "no" in the first place?

The "no means no" mantra that Holmquist is railing against is itself pretty old-school. "No means no" operates on the outdated assumption that men are the "scorers," women are the "gatekeepers," and the goal of every sexual encounter is for men to sneak past a woman's line of defense and get her to not say no. In this model, the default setting of women's bodies is "available." Only by verbalizing a "no" can a woman signal that her body is not up for grabs. In recent years, that bullshit has been replaced by more progressive models which focus on raising the consent bar from "absence of no" to "enthusiastic yes."

On the other hand, "no" is still a really helpful tool for women to use when they must quite urgently communicate to a person that, actually, he does not own her body. Mrs. D lays it out:

“no” should be said, clearly, when the first unwanted interaction occurs. A guy starts to get handsy, you push his hand away, and say “no, stop it.” You’re making out with a guy, and he wants more, you stop what you’re doing and verbally make it clear you’re not interested in more. Most women won’t do this…they’ll do a fully choreographed routine to get away from him without directly telling him no. That is social conditioning imposed on women that needs to change.

She makes a good point: Because women are consistently told that their bodies are public property, it can be a pretty transgressive, frightening, and even dangerous move to tell a man "no." Saying "no" communicates to a man that he does not own you, and if you're dealing with a rapist, he may not take too kindly to that suggestion. This power gives "no" its effectiveness, but it also makes the word sometimes difficult to verbalize. (At this point, I'd like to stop and administer another big fuck-you to Kathryn Holmquist for making saying "no" even harder).

When is it difficult to say "no"? Obviously, if a person is passed out drunk, it can be impossible to verbalize a no. It can also be difficult to say "no" when there is a physical and social power dynamic encouraging you to stay silent—when your sex partner is stronger than you, older than you, more respected than you, more confident than you, 0r simply maler than you (remember the part about everyone just assuming that men have a claim on a woman's body?) In other words, it can be difficult to say "no" when you find yourself in a rape scenario.

But acquaintance rapes present a peculiar barrier to saying "no." In an acquaintance rape, the power dynamic is a little bit different—you may be hanging out with someone who is bigger, stronger, and maler than you are, but you know them and you trust them. You're friends. That implicit power imbalance doesn't even enter your brain. A couple of comments left on a Daily Kos piece on rape discuss how that sense of security can make "no" a lot more difficult: