Today is Denim Day, an annual event dedicated to raising awareness about all forms of sexual violence. I love Denim Day's "No Excuses" campaign [PDF], which illustrates a dozen ways that people manage to excuse sexual assault, blame victims, and ignore that the crimes even happen. The effectiveness of the campaign lies in its relentlessness—it [...]

Last month, convicted rapist Daniel Katsnelson administered some advice to the two York University students he raped in 2007. After pleading guilty to entering a campus residence, prowling for open doors, and then raping two students, Katsnelson told his parole officer that he hopes the girls learned something from all this:
Katsnelson indicated he hoped his victims [...]

THE LINE — It Was Cooperative from Nancy Schwartzman on Vimeo.
In 2004, Nancy Schwartzman flew back to Jerusalem to confront the man who raped her. Three years earlier, Schwartzman was living in Jerusalem by way of New York City, working at a cultural institution, and getting plenty of film footage on the side. Then, a [...]

In response to the story about the Howard University student who was denied a rape kit after being allegedly drugged and sexually assaulted at a house party, some troll decided that this particular rape doesn't matter because the victim was wearing stiletto heels on the night of her assault:

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Kiely Williams, whose new song "Spectacular" has her extolling the erotic benefits of guys having totally spectacular "sex" with her while she is passed out, has added a disclaimer to the video on YouTube. In the note, Williams explains that she was simply playing a role in order to raise awareness of a serious issue [...]

For this week's paper, I wrote a cover story on one young woman's crusade to secure a rape kit after she believed she had been drugged and raped at a college party. The D.C. police response to the woman's case illustrates how District rape victims can be dismissed as liars, drunks, or otherwise unworthy of [...]

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Last year, a feminine hygiene company found that 50 percent of British women surveyed prefer having sex while drunk. And 6 percent of respondents have exclusively had sex while drunk. The armchair psychoanalysis employed to interpret these results didn't determine whether women actually enjoy drunk sex better than sober sex, or whether getting drunk [...]

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Anti-Rape Anthem: As of late, The Sexist's Date Rape Anthem series has taken a welcome turn for the feel-good. Over the past few weeks, we've examined series of songs about rape that actually take a stand against the crime, instead of reinforcing the "nonconsensual sex in da club" trend. In order to bolster the list [...]

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In 2008, Lady Gaga dropped her first single, "Just Dance," an ode to dancing while extremely wasted. In the song, Gaga details her level of intoxication: She's lost her keys, she's lost her phone, she can't see straight, she's forgotten the name of the club she's in, and she can't figure out why her shirt [...]

In a spirited diatribe entitled "Dealing With AU's anti-sex brigade" published yesterday in the American University Eagle, AU's resident anti-feminist thinker, Alex Knepper, argues that feminists who rally against rape are turning act of sex into a sorry ritual in which "two amorphous, gender-neutral blobs ask each other 'Is this OK with you?.'” [...]