Yesterday, the controversy unfolding over Alex Knepper's sexual assault opinion columns in the American University Eagle hit National Public Radio. The dialogue between Knepper, AU LGBT and feminist activist K. Travis Ballie, and host Michel Martin touched on Knepper's homosexuality, the politics of sex at drunken fraternity parties, and one important policy point—the lack of a victim's advocate on the AU campus. At one point, Martin asks Knepper, "Do you find it at all problematic, Alex, that you don't date women and yet you're judging their conduct in a situation that you are unlikely to be in?" An odd question for a program that's invited two gay men on to debate the topic, no?

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 affecting young women today: Having unprotected sex. Wait, what about the rape part??

Here's Williams' full statement; thanks to commenter sybil for the tip:

Williams writes:

ATTENTION: I am an actress and performer. I have been so since my first role in a television pilot at five years old. I played a character when I was a Cheetah Girl. I am playing a character in the music video for the song Spectacular, as I did in the Cheetah Girl movies.

The fact is, that sometimes women get intoxicated and have unprotected sex. My video puts this issue front and center. It is absurd to infer or suggest that I am condoning this behavior. Are Lady Gaga and Beyonce advocating murder with the Telephone video? Of, course not. Was Rihanna encouraging suicide with Russian Roulette? No. Was Madonna suggesting that young unmarried girls get pregnant with Papa Dont Preach? I dont think so. Is Academy Award winner Monique a proponent of incest because of her portrayal of Mary in the movie Precious. Clearly, the answer is no.

I wrote Spectacular and made the video to bring attention to a serious womens health and safety issue. Dont shoot the messenger.

Actually, the fact is that sometimes women get intoxicated and men rape women. And now, Williams has responded to accusations that she has glorifying rape by . . . clarifying that she just wants an intoxicated young woman to make sure her rapist uses a rubber when he penetrates her while she's unconscious?

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 simply helped to facilitate the sex even happening. Do women get drunk to have better sex or to feel better about having sex? Enter Pop singer Kiely Williams, who is leading the charge in heralding the erotic benefits of blackout intercourse.

A music video has emerged for Williams' ode to extremely memorable sex you won't remember the next day, "Spectacular." (Thanks to commenter KiaJD for the tip). Behold, the eroticization of the drunk girl!

In "Spectacular," Williams sings:

Last I remember I was face down
Ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off
Even though I’m not sure of his name
He could get it again if he wanted
Cause the sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular

In the video, Williams is ass up, clothes off and very much awake as she performs a sexy and fully enthusiastic dance to lyrics about her being asleep while a man she doesn't know has (spectacular) sex with her. In the dance sequence, Williams expresses how being a passed-out recipient of "sex" made her feel—she felt sexy, confident, daring, and in control. Our drunk-sex researchers chalked up a woman's preference for intoxicated sex to body issues. Williams, apparently, just thinks it's hot.

Like it or not, the image of the "drunk girl" occupies an interesting space in popular culture. She's part wild girl, a sexually adventurous young woman in a shy girl's body, who just needs a bit of liquid courage to silence her inhibitions and access her sexual side. She's part Asking For It, an easy target for sexual coercion and rape who deserves to be punished for letting her guard down. Now, she's a fetish, too. The soft-core exhibitionism of Girls Gone Wild has made way for a genre of porn, targeted at heterosexual men, which mines the erotic potential of incoherently drunk women who are alternately sexually aggressive or asleep (Google "drunk sex" to find out what I'm talking about). There is also, of course, the works of Jamie Foxx.

Given Williams' girl power group audience, it looks like the sexiness of passing out is now being sold directly to women, and not to their sex partners. To me, "Spectacular" is the ultimate achievement in projecting a man's desire onto a woman's sexuality. Williams' "spectacular" sex is so centered on her partner's pleasure that she doesn't even inconvenience him by staying awake for it—and when she wakes up, she reassures him that it was the best sex she's ever had. Then again, I suppose Girls Gone Wild set the bar pretty low when it convinced drunk women to provide masturbatory material for thousands of subscribers in exchange for a free hat.

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 of the antis, a reader sent in "Unspoken Request" by Boysetsfire. She also noted that the song is "triggering but amazing."

Relevant Lyrics:

Failed coercion leads to intrusion
and the blood forever runs in her head
into her hand, between her legs
where his mind lies

Power drives him in to murder innocence
on the rack of his devices, vices and designs
she will never scrub the stains from her arms
from her neck, from her legs
dirt will remain as a reminder of his hateful face
reach in rip apart the inner fibers of her soul
boy you'll never know how it feels to fear the shame
feel free to walk down any dark street without fear
without shame no one is going to touch you
and you don't need protection
she shouldn't need protection!

and you can sit there with that stupid smile on your face
and try to convince me that you care
defined by your power, defined by her body
the innocence she feels, everybody else contains
it's lost it's gone, but I guess it doesn't matter anyway

. . . and if he ever cares, maybe he will feel ashamed
for everything he's stolen, for all the trust she gave
possessed and broken, she cries but it's not our problem
pull down your goddamn blinds

he will never think he's wrong
she will never feel quite right
you will never think he's wrong
you will never think you're wrong
she will never feel quite right

About that "Triggering" thing: First of all, it's refreshing to hear guys making music in a male-dominated genre speaking out about a crime that predominantly affects women. This is not simply a political statement. In a scene where artists and fans are predominantly male and sometimes under the influence, sexual assault is a very real possibility (and if you haven't read Jonathan Fischer's CP story about a record label taking a stand against alleged rapists in its ranks, you should). I also love how the song addresses the idea of rape as a larger social concern by directly calling out rape apologists in the audience: "you will never think he's wrong / you will never think you're wrong / she will never feel quite right."

That being said, how do we deal with anti-rape anthems with lyrics—the blood forever runs in her head / into her hand, between her legs / where his mind lies—that are likely to trigger victims of sexual assault? It's not that I require all my anti-rape anthems to be vague, upbeat club tracks—which, it should be noted, can also be disturbing to rape survivors. Several times on this blog, readers have asked me to invoke a "trigger warning" when speaking explicitly about sexual assault, but since rape is a constant topic of discussion on this blog, and every post is a potential trigger to someone, I've decided not to include any explicit warnings. But what about when we exit the world of sexual assault blogs and enter a medium where we don't expect to be bombarded with talk about rape—like, say, the radio? I do think it's worth examining whether some songs written by feminist allies can end up inflicting some unintentional damage on the group for which they're attempting to advocate.

On Nirvana's "Rape Me," commenter Jill wrote, "Cobain, for all of his faults, was very progressive and feminist. That said? I still find the song disturbing and don’t really listen to it, no matter what its intent." Jaded16 wrote, "I somehow never got the whole anti-rape sentiment in this song. Though Curt Cobain was a feminist, this song creeped me out the first (co-incidentally the last) time I heard this song. I intend to keep it that way." And Kripa hypothesized, "It’s kinda like Mad Men, where they showcase all the misogyny of the early 60s and the whole damn point of the show is to let us know how awful things used to be, but still, it creeps me out because I suspect that on a subconscious level, the producers are reveling in all that sexism.
So the song “Rape Me” is good in intent, not so good in execution, I guess?"

I don't think that "Unspoken Request" is reveling in sexism, but it is, to some extent, trading in shock value. Explicit lyrics can help to get the attention of people who don't often think about the problem of sexual assault; they're also likely to reach those people who will never forget their rape.

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 is turned inside out. Still, everything is "gonna be okay"—until Colby O'Donis enters the scene and announces that he intends on doing more than just dancing with Gaga that night. "I'm gonna hit it, I'm gonna hit it and flex and do it until tomorrow," he says. "There's no reason at all why you can't leave here with me." Well, I can think of one.

The bouncy club track doesn't address the disconnect between Gaga's drunken intentions—just dancing—and those of O'Donnis—hitting it. In the recently released track "Monster," that drunken interaction takes a sinister turn, and Gaga finally addresses the negative space left by "Just Dance."

[youtube:v=2Abk1jAONjw]

"I asked my girlfriend if she'd seen you round before," Gaga sings in "Monster." "She mumbled something while we got down on the floor baby / We might've fucked not really sure, don't quite recall / But something tells me that I've seen him, yeah." If the friend's lack of clarity on her fucking history with this guy isn't enough of a red flag, wait for the chorus, where Gaga eliminates all the ambivalence of "Just Dance": "That boy is a monster."

Later in the song, Gaga makes a direct reference to her first single as the club monster turns into a "monster in my bed": "I wanna Just Dance / But he took me home instead / Uh oh, there was a monster in my bed / We french kissed on a subway train / He tore my clothes right off / He ate my heart then he ate my brain." In the background, the robotic voice of the "monster" provides the stalker's perspective: "I love that girl, wanna talk to her, she's hot as hell."

Reader Zoe, who sent in "Monster" as an example of an anti-Date Rape Anthem, says that the song works as a necessary footnote to "the trend . . . of women singing about how awesome it is to get disorientingly drunk, and then going Ke$ha and saying you can slap the guys away when they try to 'touch your junk':"

[youtube:v=iP6XpLQM2Cs]

"I don't think the song is supposed to be a 'lesson' to women about getting drunk," Zoe adds. "It's just connecting those dots, and then condemning the dude as a monster. Hooray!" Like Zoe, I'm glad that pop music has a figure like Lady Gaga, who can convincingly defend the harmless entertainment of drinking in the club, and then release an equally compelling dance track condemning the people who want to deny women that experience—rapists.

In the long history of date rape jams, this blog has yet to tackle the many tunes dedicated to statutory rapes. So let's take a look at a couple of odes to sex with minors—one in the pro-underage-sex camp, and another that's anti.

PRO: "Young Girl," by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, (Thanks to Rooster over at if i raise my voice for the suggestion).

Relevant Lyrics:

Young girl, get out of my mind
My love for you is way out of line
Better run, girl.
You're much too young, girl.

With all the charms of a woman
You've kept the secret of your youth
You led me to believe
You're old enough
To give me Love
And now it hurts to know the truth, Oh,
Beneath your perfume and make-up
You're just a baby in disguise

. . . Get out of here
Before I have the time
To change my mind
'Cause I'm afraid we'll go too far, Oh,
Young girl

[youtube:v=jItz-uNjoZA]

CON: Oingo Boingo's "Little Girls," a cautionary tale about chasing after a girl who is "just to little."

Relevant Lyrics:

I love little girls they make me feel so good
I love little girls they make me feel so bad
When they're around they make me feel
Like I'm the only guy in town
I love little girls they make me feel so good

They don't care if I'm a one way mirror
They're not frightened by my cold exterior

. . . Uh oh take a second take
Uh oh it's a mistake
Uh oh I'm in trouble
Uh oh the little girl was just too little
Too little, too little, too little
Isn't this what life's all about
Isn't this a dream come true
Isn't this a nightmare too...

So, What's It Going to Be?: On the surface, both Gary Puckett and Oingo Boingo express ambivalence about having sex with women who are too young to consent. When Puckett learns that the object of his affections is "too young," and has simply been tricking him into believing she is of age with her "perfume and make-up," he expresses that his continued attraction to the girl is "way out of line." He then cautions her that she "better run, girl" in order to make sure that she doesn't temp him into having sex with her anyway. But though the song is about avoiding statutory rape, Puckett is hardly shy about his true feelings on the subject. "Get out of here," he tells the girl, "before I have the time / to change my mind." Is that a threat? Plus, check the soaring, indulgent tone adopted here—way to romanticize your creepiness, dude.

Oingo Boingo, on the other hand, adopts a disturbing, frantic, totally fucking creepy tone in describing a man who is sexually attracted to little girls. That seems more appropriate, no? Lines like "They don't care if I'm a one way mirror / They're not frightened by my cold exterior" reiterate the idea that Oingo Boingo's narrator is unreliable, not heroic. But even this guy understands that what he's doing is wrong: "Uh oh, I'm in trouble / Uh oh the little girl was just too little."

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."

This time around, let's flip the script to examine what other terrible, no good, very bad things are just like rape. Like health care! The health-care-is-rape argument comes courtesy of WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian. In a piece entitled "Barack Obama and the date-rape of America," he writes:

Good Americans from sea to shining sea are grappling right now with how to mentally process what they're witnessing in Washington, D.C.

The spectacle of a far leftist president literally forcing socialized medicine down the throat of an unwilling center-right America is reminiscent, perhaps more than any other contemporary metaphor, of date rape.

A man determined to have his way with a woman may start off seducing her with lies, flattery and the usual pretense of caring about her. But at a critical moment, when she says, "Stop, I'm not comfortable with this and don't want to go any further," he has a choice: Either do the right thing and back off, or abandon all prior pretensions and take her by force.

As president, Barack Obama courted us with sweet talk, but America grew increasingly uncomfortable with his advances and firmly said, "Stop"—in fact, screamed bloody murder for months. Yet Obama remains obsessed with forcing himself on America.

Kupelian goes on to explain how Obama, much like your undetected date rapist, appears to be an otherwise great guy, until he unsuspectingly rapes America:

How can an apparently decent man like Barack Obama—who undoubtedly loves his daughters and probably reads them bedtime stories, has a good sense of humor, and is highly intelligent and likeable—justify lying and deceiving all the time, pretending to care about Republican input, about transparency, about controlling costs, and so on? Further, how can he justify using such dishonest means to force his will on an unwilling American public? In other words, how can he countenance, in effect, date-raping America?

. . . and how, just like in many date rape scenarios, alcohol is involved:

What we need to understand is that, between his hate-based ideology (Winston Churchill called socialism the "gospel of envy"), extreme narcissism and long-internalized political corruption, Obama and others like him, literally drunk on power, live essentially in a state of delusion: Down is up, truth is cruel and impractical, corruption is just "conducting business," morality is repression, lying is a creative force.

But Kupelian's analogy falls apart when he presents date rape as something that Republicans should actually give a shit about, because for the most part, they really, really don't. If you Google "Republicans date rape," you'll get a lot of hits about Republicans reiterating the idea that bipartisanship amounts to date rape. And Rush Limbaugh equating date rape to extramarital affairs. And Republican Senators refusing to support the right of rape victims to sue their employers. And joking that date rape is like being robbed of expensive jewelry by a beautiful and mysterious woman. Double rape analogy bonus!

Isn't it strange how Republicans seem to only invoke the problem of date rape when they need to use it as a rhetorical tool to transfer sympathy away from real victims of rape and onto themselves? And isn't it odd that when presented with legislation meant to aid real victims of rape, the party refuses to support it? The fact is, Kupelian and his party are far more likely to direct their righteous indignation at people who want everyone to have access to medical care than they are to condemn rapists for raping. So if Kupelian wants us to truly understand how terrible Obama's pursuit of health care is for Republicans, perhaps he should draw comparisons to something that Republicans actually detest. He should also refrain from misusing the term "literally." Twice.

Thankfully for Kupelian, the piece floats several alternate analogies through which Republicans may illustrate their strife. According to Kupelian, Barack Obama is Captain Ahab, and Obamacare is Moby Dick; Barack Obama is a dictator, and America is Zimbabwe; Republicans are "German undercover operatives in the Nazi army plotting to kill Hitler," and Obama is . . . Hitler, presumably.

OK. It's about time these Date Rape Anthems got down to serious business:

Date Rape Anthem: 7 Year Bitch's "Dead Men Don't Rape," another in our anti-rape anthem series, obviously. Thanks to commenter Shannon Drury for the tip.

Relevant Lyrics: Oh hell let's just hear all of them!

You ain't got the right tellin' me I'm uptight
And I'm not obligated to give in cause you're frustrated
No, my revenge is death, cause  you deserve the best
And I'm not turned on by your masculinity
Dead men don't rape

I don't have pity, not a single tear
For those who get joy from a woman's fear
I'd rather get a gun and just blow you away
Then you'll learn firsthand
Dead men don't rape

You're getting sucked into society's sickest
Don't go out alone you might get raped
But not by a dead man 'cuz
Dead men don't rape

You ain't got the right tellin' me I'm uptight
Dead men don't rape

So, What Do We Do With This One? "Dead Men Don't Rape" endorses similar anti-rape tactics to one of our previous date rape anthems, the Raveonettes' "Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Destroyed)": death and destruction for the world's rapists. But there are aesthetic differences. While The Raveonettes' dreamy indie pop serenades listeners with the polite suggestion that boys who rape "should" be destroyed, 7 Year Bitch's rapist-elimination plan takes a more aggressive approach. Because vocalist Selene Vigil intends on shooting rapists dead before they can ever feign sexual "frustration" ever again. DEAD MEN DON'T RAPE.

For comparison:

[youtube:v=6DpulDH89IE]

So, which do you think is a more effective anti-rape message:

(a) The Raveonettes' attempt to lull the listener into rape awareness.

(b)  7 Year Bitch scares-the-living-shit-out-of-you punk approach.

(c) Raveonettes until Memorial Day, 7 Year Bitch until Labor Day

(d) Neither. Violence is never the answer, mmkay?

(e) I don't care about rape! Why am I still reading this blog!

In nearly a year of chronicling songs about rape here on the Sexist, I've yet to profile one of the most well-known songs about rape. Or is it about rape? Either way, this track name-checks the word "rape"  about a bajillion times:

Date Rape Anthem: Nirvana's "Rape Me"

Relevant Lyrics: Let's take a look at all of them, shall we?

Rape me / Rape me, my friend
Rape me / Rape me again

I'm not the only one  (x4)

Hate me / Do it and do it again
Waste me / Rape me, my friend

I'm not the only one (x4)

My favorite inside source
I'll kiss your open sores
I appreciate your concern
You're gonna stink and burn

Rape me / Rape me, my friend
Rape me / Rape me, again

I'm not the only one (x4)

Rape me! (x a lot)

So, What Do We Do With This One: Is "Rape Me" a Randian invitation to rough sex? The cry of a demoralized rock star who felt he had been "raped" by a backstabbing media source? Or a revenge anthem about a rapist getting raped himself? Fans are torn (OK, nobody believes the Ayn Rand thing).

Official sources claim that it is a song about rape—at least on a literal level. According to Wikipedia, Kurt Cobain unpacked the song in Spin Magazine in 1993: "It's like she's saying, 'Rape me, go ahead, rape me, beat me. You'll never kill me. I'll survive this and I'm gonna fucking rape you one of these days and you won't even know it."

Tori Amos provided a similar interpretation of the song to New Musical Express in 1994. "I spoke publicly about that because I thought it was very clear what it was about. It was like 'Go on, hit me! Rape me! You cross this line, motherfucker, and I'll kill you...you'll never break my spirit.' It's a defiant song. But the scariest thing to a rape victim are the words 'rape me'. When I first heard it I broke out in a cold sweat, but when you get over that you realize he's turning it back on people."

So, is it a song about the horrors of rape? Or is it rather about how Cobain's experience with the media is really a lot like the horrors of rape? One of these things is not like the other . . .

Thanks to commenter Keara for suggesting another positive addition to the annals of date rape anthems. Up next:

Date Rape Anthem: "Mother's Day" by Nada Surf, a 2002 track about boys who rape girls on their Star Wars sheets, and why that's unacceptable.

Relevant Lyrics:

What do you see when you look at a girl?
Is she a game you wanna win?
If no one was looking
What would you do to get in?
Do you have friends who would be proud
If you went in for the kill?
Do you have friends who would do it
Even against her will?

. . . On your Star Wars sheets
When you get the scene
Was she seducing you
Or did she want to scream?

It's you versus you versus you
I can't forget that tomorrow's Mother's Day,
I'm talking to you
You know who you are
Going too far
You'll feel good for ten minutes
She'll be screwed up for life
Blue balls and all of that bullshit

Why It's So Anti-Rapey: "Blue balls and all of that bullshit" indeed. The whole song is a pretty damning rejection of excuses made for rape—I'm particularly interested in how Nada Surf criticizes boys who count rapists among their friends—but at it's core, it's about refusing to turn your frustration at sexual rejection into violence against women. The boy in question here is framed as a nerd who has been "laughed at" and "left out" (Star Wars sheets, dude?)—a boy who might feel like he has some power to gain by forcing a woman to submit to him. Proudly nerdy indie rockers Nada Surf are here to tell these boys to cut out the bullshit.

a) Rape is just one big misunderstanding. The proponents of this argument believe that women who wear short skirts are signaling that they are interested in sex. Therefore, rapists will naturally gravitate to these women and proceed to fuck them without their consent, because, hey—the skirt already gave them the go-ahead.

b) Short skirts are just too sexy to resist. According to this view, rapists are well aware that every woman in a miniskirt isn't down to fuck. But they just can't help themselves when they catch sight of those gams, so be a good girl and don't tempt the rapist.

Let's see if we can't address both of these theories at once with the help of star commenter Frankie.

Here's the situation: Frankie was giving her girlfriend a good-night kiss when three men attempted to intercept the PDA. She writes:

After walking [my then-girlfriend] home, three guys who were hanging out around the block of flats where she lived approached . . . I think it was pretty obvious we were a couple, as not only were our arms around each other but they’d just watched us kissing.

"Hey, do you have boyfriends?"

My girlfriend looked confused. "No. I’m a lesbian"

"So you won’t show my friend some love then?"

"No."

They shouted a few sexual comments as we walked off, until I shouted back. "Lesbians means no fucking men. Literally."

Their response? Weirdly, it was, "You’re just chicks with dicks anyway."

Gay couples are not unaccustomed to this particular flavor of street harassment. "After speaking to a few of my friends about this, it seems I'm not alone in having this experience," Frankie writes. "All of us have noticed that if out and about as part of an obvious same sex couple that we seem to attract more attention, and often that this attention is negative. However . . . if both members in the couple are conventionally 'feminine', by which I mean thin, average or short in height and dressed in 'girly' clothing, then that attention is nearly always from men and nearly always sexual in nature."

Adds Frankie, "I think I have had a lot more hassle off guys trying to pick me up when I’ve been out in public with a girlfriend than when I’ve been out with a boyfriend, a group of friends or even on my own."

What can account for this? There's no "misunderstanding" of Frankie's sexual willingness here—Frankie and her girlfriend were clearly demonstrating that they were exclusively interested in each other, not the men. It's not that Frankie's body was just too hot to be resisted—she experiences sexual harassment at a much higher rate when she's clearly coupled up with another lady, and far less when she's out alone (and, we can assume, equally attractive). Of course, Frankie's harassers aren't rapists (as far as we know), but they are exhibiting some analogous behavior—they are attempting to gain verbal sexual dominance over someone who clearly doesn't want it. So, what is it?

Perhaps it's time to float another theory: That some rapists rape because they see women (or gays, or trans people, or other groups who are marginalized) who have autonomy over their sexuality, and they just really, really hate them for that. They seek to return control of that sexuality to its rightful owners—heterosexual men.

The sexual advances Frankie has experienced are clearly hate-motivated. If she's out in a same-sex couple that's perceived as insufficiently feminine, she'll get negative attention. If she's out in a same-sex couple that's perceived as fuckable by the standards of some heterosexual male passerby, she'll get negative sexual attention. And if she dares to reject that negative sexual attention ("lesbians means no fucking men"), her harassers will compound the negative sexual attention with some good old-fashioned homophobia—and labor to place the women back in the "insufficiently feminine" zone ("you're just chicks with dicks anyway").

There is no confusion here; there is only hate. On a recent post, a commenter wrote: "If short skirts signal sexual willingness, then it is reasonable to hypothesize that women who wear short skirts are more likely to be raped." In reality, "sexual willingness" is exactly the opposite of the signal that rapists are looking out for. If rapists zeroed in on sex partners who appeared to be  "sexually willing," then they would abandon their advances when the woman in the short skirt said "no," or struggled to fight him off, or tried to escape. Instead, sexual rejection only fuels the hateful activity. It is the rapist's desire to inflict pain upon people who are sexually unwilling.

That brings me to the third argument against women wearing short skirts that I've heard over and over again over the last couple weeks. It goes like this:

c) Short skirts prevent women from successfully prosecuting cases. These types claim not to believe that a woman who wears a short skirt is "asking for it." However, they know that a lot of their fellow citizens do think this way—citizens who are likely to be sitting in the jury of a rape trial. So: If a woman is raped while wearing a short skirt, no one will believe her, and therefore wearing a short skirt is irresponsible.  Women who want to protect themselves won't wear short skirts.

I wonder what these people might tell someone like Frankie. Don't date women, because it's too dangerous? Date women, but don't flaunt your queerness by kissing or holding hands, because it's too dangerous? Don't reject men's sexual advances, because it's too dangerous?

The reality is that the well-meaning types who propose solutions like (c) are no different from the rape apologists who perpetuate rape myths like (a) and (b). The end result is the same: They accommodate rapists by forcing women to arbitrarily modify perfectly reasonable behaviors (wearing a skirt, kissing other women in public)—and then discrediting rape victims' legal cases by situating those perfectly reasonable behaviors as irresponsible. These attitudes only work to reinforce the rapist's attitude toward his victims—that their sexuality needs to be controlled.

Don't accommodate rapists.

Date Rape Anthem: Juelz Santana's "Back to the Crib," featuring the no. 1 guy who really shouldn't be participating in tributes to sexual assault, Chris Brown. [Thanks to Megan Thomas-Melly for the recommendation].

Relevant Lyrics:

Shorty said she wanna roll with me
I said yeah
She don’t know that we going back to the crib
She know that I’m on her
She don’t know that we going back to the crib
Back to the crib, yeah

She wanna roll with me
She wanna go with with me
But she dont know I'm tryin to take her back home with me

. . . Lil mama we can birthday text
Yes I said text
But I know you know what I really meant (sex).

Why It's So Rapey: Here, Santana and Brown are essentially admitting that they are in the business of luring women back to their caves under false pretenses. Are you under the impression that you and Juelz are going to be engaging in some texting this evening, perhaps after rolling out of the club and on to a public second location? Guess again! You will be sexing this evening, in Juelz's crib. You should have known what he really meant.

But Is It Good? According to the hierarchy of date-rape jams,"Back to the Crib" is one of the most dangerous odes to predatory sexual behavior out there, because goddamn if I can't get the sweet melody of "she don't know we goin' back to the crib" out of my head. "The song is so catchy and of course I love it, I am meant to love it," writes Thomas-Melly. "but the lyrics are basically about raping someone."

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.

Date Rape Anthem: The parade of female-sung Date Rape Jams continues. Kiely Williams' "Spectacular," a song about getting wasted, passing out, and having the most incredible sex of your life!

Relevant Lyrics:

Last I remember I was face down
Ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off
Even though I’m not sure of his name
He could get it again if he wanted
Cause the sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular
The sex was spectacular

Why It's So Rapey: Although Williams insists—several times—that the sex was "spectacular," she also reiterates that she doesn't remember the damn thing. "What was I drinking, I can’t believe I blacked out," she purrs, before getting specific on the sweeping memory loss: "I hope he used a rubber, or I'm a be in trouble, problem is I don't remember, except for (unintelligible)."

From time to time, commenters on this blog will pose the following burning question about consent: So, what if your sex partner was too drunk to consent to sex—she was ass up, clothes off, broke off, dozed off, and blacked out. But what if—what if—when she wakes up the next day, she's totally pumped about what she can't remember happened the night before? [See: The controversy over broke off, dozed off consensual sex at American University last year].

What if, indeed? Well, OK: If the lady in question is heading into the recording studio to sing the praises of the stallion who spectacularly sexed her when she was passed out, that stallion is probably in the clear as far as his legal situation is concerned.

That doesn't put him in the clear as far as my feminist shaming is concerned, however. I understand that the exact moment a potential sex partner becomes too drunk to fuck is not always obvious. But surely, dozing off in the middle of sex is a good indication that you should stop, no matter how spectacular it was when she was actually coherent. You've got to have meaningful consent before and throughout the act, no matter how she feels about it the next day. If your sex partner's kink is being fucked while she's asleep, that's a situation that you've got to set upbeforehand. And even if she ends up telling you the sex was great when she wakes up, that doesn't let you off the hook, either. A commenter on Bossip put it this way: "so she got slipped a roofie, date ra.p.e.d and wrote a song about it. life gives you lemons you make lemonade i guess."

And another thing! How many pieces of popular music have to be written about how pushing booze on women until they vomit all over themselves and ultimately juuuust barely consent to having sex with you is sexy? Because these songs actually glamorize the behavior of rapists. And even if you're the elusive chick who happens to be into that, presenting this situation as "spectacular" is both a) not particularly interesting, as far as pop music is concerned, and b) harmful to all the women who wake up in that same situation and have a much different descriptor for the sex: "rape."

Date Rape Anthem: Last week's Date Rape Anthem, Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah," has inspired some interesting discussion about what happens when women take on the traditionally male anthem. Bitch Magazine says that Ke$ha's music "turns the traditional male-chauvinist, sexist attitude on its head to deploy the same tactics for her own purposes: being the life of the party." But can female rapiness ever be empowering? Let's examine the case of Paradiso Girls' "Patron Tequila," a song that commenter riese hails as the "rapy-est song ever!" Surprise twist: It's sung by ladies!

Relevant Lyrics:

Hey girl, where's your drink?
We can all get fucked up tonight
Hey girl, I got bud
We can all get fucked up tonight
By the end of the night
I'm a have you drunk and throwing up
By the end of the night
I'm a have you so fucked up!

Why It's So Rapey: Serious role reversal, right? Lyrics like "hey girl, where's your drink?" and "I'm a have you drunk and throwing up" are generally reserved for such Date Rape Jam hall-of-famers as Jamie Foxx and T Pain. But the gender reversal is strangely incomplete: In the song, the Girls aren't pushing the booze on the male objects of their affection, but rather on other girls. It's almost as if the record execs took a Foxx B-side, fed it to five ladies, and didn't bother to change the pronouns to conform with the Paradiso Girls' (presumably) heterosexual image. The result? An "empowering" role-reversal, whereby the Paradiso Girls get girls so drunk they vomit—just like the boys do!

Perhaps the music video for the track can explain this interesting new breed of girl power. A-ha: In the video, our five lovely Paradiso Girls are not pushing other women to drink, vomit, and sex it up by their own free will. Their date-rapiness is, in fact, controlled by a random guy's magic sex headphones. Role-reversal: It's still all about male fantasy. That's right, folks! We've finally discovered the elusive Super Meta Date Rape Anthem, in which a set of voodoo headphones forces women to assume the characteristics of date rapists, against their will! Observe:

Yeah. No surprise here: While our friend Ke$ha at least writes her own songs, the music of the Paradiso Girls is the product of some decidedly male influences. The Girls are a pop supergroup designed by Pussycat Girls mogul Jimmy Iovine. And in case you couldn't smoke him out by the trademark crunkness: Lil Jon had a hand in writing this track.

Date Rape Anthem: Up next in our date-rape anthem series: Ke$ha's "Blah Blah Blah," a track about how Ke$ha just wants to fuck you—not fucking listen to you! (Thanks to Heartless Doll for bringing this track to my attention).

Relevant Lyrics:

Coming out your mouth with your "blah blah blah"
Just zip your lips like a padlock
And meet me at the back with the Jack and the jukebox
I don't really care where you live at
Just turn around boy and let me hit that
Don't be a little bitch with your chit chat
Just show me where your dick's at.

.. . .Come meet me in the back with the Jack and the jukebox
So cut to the chase kid
Cuz I know you don't care what my middle name is
I wanna be naked but you're wasted.

Why It's So Rapey: First, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is not unresponsive enough to fuck. Next, Ke$ha is concerned that her sex partner is too drunk to fuck. Mixed signals, Ke$ha! Here's one great thing about sex partners who are allowed to communicate with you: You never have to guess as to whether your sex partner is (a) incapable of consenting to revealing the location of his dick, or (b) simply being coy at your request. Blah, blah, blah: It really helps eliminate the guesswork in that whole date rape thing.

This blog's date-rape anthem series has traditionally been concerned with songs that appear to support rape tactics. The Raveonette's "Boys Who Rape Should All Be Destroyed," as you may have surmised, takes the opposing position.

Date Rape Anthem: The Raveonette's "Boys Who Rape Should All Be Destroyed," an ode to eliminating perpetrators of sexual violence.

Relevant Lyrics:

Three to one girl
How can you win
One horrid night
You hope that it's a bad dream

They rip you to shreds
Make you feel useless
You'll never forget
Those fuckers stay in your head

Boys who rape should all be destroyed
Boys who rape should all be destroyed

Sooo . . . What Do We Do With This One?: On the one hand, we've got a fairly popular rock group singing a song against rape, and that's awesome. Plus, it's catchy! Double bonus: It focuses its shame on the perpetrator's crime, not the victim's actions.

On the other hand, the mass extermination suggested by the titular command is a bit disturbing, no? Particularly when it functions as the the song's refrain (it's repeated eight times). I'm pretty much in agreement with People Working to End Violence Against Women when they write, "Personally, my version would go 'Boys Who Rape (Should All Be Punished Via The Judicial System Then Must Attend Educational Seminars On Gender Violence, Equity And Male Privilege, While Incarcerated).'" In other words, the end goal is that rape, not people, be destroyed. But that's not very catchy, is it?

PWEVAW also points out that the Raveonettes have another song entitled "Love Can Destroy Everything," which adds another confusing layer to the Ravonette's lyrical rapist destruction campaign. I'm not sure exactly how love might work to destroy boys who rape. I'd settle for boys who rape just not hating women, which I'm convinced will eventually just leave us with . . . boys. Ooh, boys!

Lessons learned from 2009’s high-profile rape cases.

This was the year of the armchair rape analyst (ARA). If you’ve never run into such a person, here’s a job description: While men across the globe generate allegations of rape, ARAs are charged with casually dismissing the problem from the comfort of their living rooms. They sit back, stroke the chin, and plant gray where black and white work just fine.

ARAs have a field day when high-profile alleged rapes surface in the media. Though they always concede that “no means no,” in such cases it’s not always clear who said what. The ambiguity allows ARAs to decide matters of consent based on the suspect’s skill on the football field, the victim’s blood alcohol level, or the presence or absence of a rope.

BEN ROETHLISBERGER
Verdict: He could have sex with any woman he wanted.

“Most girls would feel lucky to have sex with someone like Ben Roethlisberger.” That’s what a Harrah’s Lake Tahoe Hotel and Casino rep allegedly told Andrea McNulty, a hotel employee, when she reported that the Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback had raped her in his room.

When McNulty filed a civil suit against Roethlisberger this summer, Big Ben’s fans assumed the armchair position with one foolproof excuse. After all, “He could have sex with any woman he wanted” functions outside the realm of facts.

Fans said that same thing when Kobe Bryant was accused of rape: “Kobe Bryant doesn’t need to rape any woman. They would gladly throw themselves at him,” wrote one supporter. And Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock: “It’s not like he had to make somebody have sex with him,” said Up Records owner Pete Ritchey. “He could have sex with anybody he wanted.” And magician David Copperfield: “I hardly think he needs to rape anyone, surely there is plenty of willing participants out there,” wrote another ARA.

So: Every woman in the world chooses her sex partners based on how far they throw footballs, how many Bukowski references they can work into their indie rock records, or how effectively they can make shit disappear. Actually, simple name recognition is enough to make any woman want to fuck you. And another thing: Men rape women only because they can’t get sex anywhere else.

These assumptions aren’t just wrong. They’re dangerous. Let’s think of another reason why a man might rape a woman: because he assumes that he can have sex with anybody he wants. He has a recognizable name, and every woman wants to fuck him. At that point, why bother to gain consent? He’s famous. The consent is implied.

ROMAN POLANSKI
Verdict: Oh, what could have been!

When Roman Polanksi was finally arrested in Switzerland over his 31-year-old guilty plea in the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, the arguments in Polanski’s defense began to stack up like so much snow in the luxury Alpine village of Gstaad: The 76-year-old Polanski is a victim of America’s puritanical sex laws; having survived both the Holocaust and Charles Manson, the man has suffered enough; he didn’t know she was 13; Polanski is genial and intelligent, nothing like a rapist.

But the most absurd excuses in Polanski’s defense enter a Twilight Zone of rape apology, where the real price for raping a child is not serving time in prison but rather depriving the public of a couple of great movies. These excusers are loath to imagine a world where cinematic geniuses are forced to craft brilliant films without raping anyone along the way. What if, by systematically putting its convicted rapists behind bars for years at a time, the United States has denied the world more Pianists?

I have seen The Pianist. It is not worth raping a child over. Entertainment industry luminaries disagreed. Swiss erotic photographer Otto Weisser had this to say upon Polanski’s arrest: “I am ashamed to be Swiss, that the Swiss is doing such a thing to brilliant fantastic genius, that millions and millions of people love his work,” Weisser said. “He’s a brilliant guy, and he made a little mistake 32 years ago. What a shame for Switzerland.” Hundreds more—including Woody Allen, Natalie Portman, and Pianist star Adrien Brody—added their names to a petition demanding Polanski’s release that painted Polanski as the victim: “Apprehended like a common terrorist Saturday evening, September 26, as he came to receive a prize for his entire body of work, Roman Polanski now sleeps in prison.” After all, if Polanski were forced to serve time over the child he raped, maybe he never would have made the Pianist, Adrien Brody’s career never would have taken off, and the world would have been deprived of Adrien Brody’s turn as “Bloom” in the Brothers Bloom. And that’s the real tragedy.

I am absolutely appalled at your answer to a recent letter from "Victim? In Virginia." This letter was from a college student who got drunk at a frat party and was then raped by a guy she met there. You didn't even seem to care about what happened to this young person. Did it even occur to you that she might have been drugged at this party? You were more focused on blaming her for drinking than answering her question in a responsible way. I am disgusted at your answer and think you owe her an apology.

Dickinson has had a few weeks now to reconsider the advice she gave to a rape victim, and she still doesn't get it. Here is how she starts her response:

To recap, "Victim" asked a very serious question in a very thoughtful way. She said she had gotten drunk at a frat party and went to a bedroom with a guy.

After saying in advance that she didn't want to have sex, she did have sex.

"She did have sex" is not what happened. Rape is what happened. Obviously, the difference between "having sex" and "rape" is lost on Dickinson, which is why she's so unsuited to answer the victim's question—"Was I raped?" The answer is "Yes." Dickinson's answer involved telling the victim she victimized herself, downplaying the guy's role because he was intoxicated, repeatedly referring to the incident as "sex" and providing a definition from RAINN, and telling her to ask her rapist about what happened, but never plainly stating that the victim was raped. This victim came to Dickinson to find out if her experience was rape; Dickinson's advice failed.

Dickinson doesn't see it that way:

In my answer, I told her that "no means no" — before or during sex, sober or drunk (I assume the guy had also been drinking).

I told her that she had been raped, and I included information from the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (rainn.org) to further educate her about this.

I told her to go to her student health center and seek medical and emotional support and counseling and to get advice from professionals at school.

I told her that the perpetrator should be confronted by authorities at school because he might have done this before and might do it again unless he is stopped.

Did we read the same column? Dickinson did not tell her she had been raped. She told her she had "sex that shouldn't happen" . . . after she made clear to the victim that her "own awful judgment" is what led to the sex that shouldn't happen. She did include information about contacting counselors and school authorities about this—which is great—but she did not write that "the perpetrator should be confronted by authorities at school." She wrote that "You must involve the guy in question in order to determine what happened." You. The victim. She told the victim to confront her rapist, not the authorities.

Dickinson then apologizes for "the part of my answer that has enraged readers" (I'd argue that most of the answer enraged readers, but fine):

Unfortunately, I started my answer by expressing frustration at her judgment to get drunk at a frat house, calling it "awful." This is the part of my answer that has enraged readers, who have accused me of "blaming the victim."

As a mother (and stepmother) to five daughters — four in college — I have counseled (and worry about) all of my many daughters because of how vulnerable they are if they choose to drink. Drinking to intoxication poses very serious security issues for our daughters and sons, because being drunk impairs judgment and the ability to discern risk.

Because "Victim" wondered where the line was, I tried to draw it for her. My intent was to urge her (as I often urge readers) to take responsibility for the only thing she could control—her own choices and actions—but I regret how harshly I expressed this.

I certainly didn't intend to offend or blame her for what happened, and I hope she will do everything possible to stay safe in the future.

I'm grateful that she chose to share her question with all of us, because talking about it will help others.

Throwing "daughters and sons" in here obscures the point. Informing women and men about the risks of drinking is a very different task than addressing the problem of rape. Yes, drinking can be dangerous for both men and women—when men and women drink too much, they can make themselves sick, get massive hangovers, sprain ankles on the stairs, lose their wallets, and fall off barstools. These are unfortunate side-effects of drinking which the drinker brings upon him or herself.

But when a woman gets drunk, it's also more likely that a man will rape her. Being raped is not a significant risk for a drunk man at a campus party. This is not an unfortunate side-effect of drinking. It's a product of our sexist society, and one that goes far deeper than telling women they have to lay off the sauce because drinking is too dangerous for them. In some ways, our society is safer for men. But that is not every woman's fault. It is a problem that must be addressed by all of us.

Dickinson wants the victim to know this: "I hope she will do everything possible to stay safe in the future." The effect of that statement is that she hopes the victim won't keep doing what male college students around the country can do without fear—drinking, making friends, going to house parties, being alone with a classmate. I hope she can find the strength to ignore that advice. If we succeed in convincing women that this behavior is dangerous, we will also convince men that only bad girls do these things. How can you be held responsible for victimizing a bad girl? As Dickinson's advice has shown, everyone knows that bad girls victimize themselves.

I agree that "talking about it will help others." I'm just so glad that it's not only Dickinson who is talking about this. Change.org is also hosting a petition to ask Dickinson to revisit her remarks (again).

Amy Dickinson, "Ask Amy" advice columnist for the Chicago Tribune, has declined to publicly respond to criticism of a column she wrote last month in response to advice-seeker "Victim? In Virgina." You know the one: The column informing a rape victim she was a "victim of your own awful judgment," calling the crime "sex" that "shouldn’t happen" instead of rape, and suggesting that the victim "involve the guy in question" in order to determine whether he raped her or not.

Dickinson has declined to print any of the letters criticizing her response to the rape question, but she has responded personally to one concerned reader. "Did you even read my column?" Dickinson shoots back, before criticizing the reader for not being "more educated, careful, respectful and circumspect" in her criticisms of Dickinson's advice. E-mail exchange after the jump.

Reader writes in:

From: [Redacted]
Sent: Saturday, November 28, 2009 2:33 PM
To: ctc-askamy
Subject: Please pass this on to the rape victim you attacked in your Nov. 27 column

Here is the Virginia code's definition of "Rape";

"A. If any person has sexual intercourse with a complaining witness who is not his or her spouse or causes a complaining witness, whether or not his or her spouse, to engage in sexual intercourse with any other person and such act is accomplished (i) against the complaining witness's will, by force, threat or intimidation of or against the complaining witness or another person, or (ii) through the use of the complaining witness's mental incapacity or physical helplessness, or (iii) with a child under age thirteen as the victim, he or she shall be guilty of rape."

If the lady who wrote to you asking for help never gave consent and thus had sex against her will (see 1) OR if she was too incapacitated by alcohol to legally consent (see 2), she most certainly was raped and she should know that the law is on her side, even if you aren't.

Oh, and you're being talked about here:

http://jezebel.com/5414393/ask-amy-to-date-rape-victim-first-you-were-a-victim-of-your-own-awful-judgment

Couldn't happen to a nicer rape apologist.

Dickinson responds:

From: ctc-askamy [mailto:askamy@tribune.com]
Sent: Sat 11/28/2009 3:56 PM
To: [Redacted]
Subject: RE: Please pass this on to the rape victim you attacked in your Nov. 27 column

Did you even read my column? I quoted extensively from the Rape, Incest and Abuse Hotline's definition of rape and suggested that she check her state's laws? Where I said that if she says no at any point, it's rape? I don't know if you didn't bother to read my column or if perhaps it was edited heavily in your paper, but please . . . how dare you call me a "rape apologist."

I see you are a student or affiliated in some way with [law school]? I would expect someone from [law school] to be more educated, careful, respectful and circumspect. I'm not sure why I would expect that, but I'll adjust. Meanwhile, I don't pass inanities along to people who write in to my column. I figure this young person has suffered enough indignity.

Amy Dickinson

Photo via Smithsonian Institution

In an interview on AskMen.com, Tucker Max clung to his dwindling relevance by blaming the failure of the movie I Hope They Serve Beer In Hell on other people, comparing himself favorably to Dane Cook, and touting the film's successes in Tempe, Ariz. Of course that's the last bastion of Tucker Max supporters. Tucker Max was made for Tempe!

Max on his Tempe celebrity:

We had a $10,000 or $15,000 per screen average in New York City. It did great! Then, like, Tempe, $10,000. Then we open it up in a place like Carbondale, and I’m like: "Why are you guys opening in Carbondale? Oh, it’s Southern Illinois — they like you.” They just don’t know the f*cking movies! They don’t get first-run movies, so of course it has, like, a $500 per screen average there and it looks like… F*ck, dude, it was so frustrating on so many levels. [sighs] That’s something I would’ve done different.

So, either the folks of Carbondale, Ill. don't understand "fucking movies," or they don't understand the fucking movies of Tucker Max. How could they? Max's subdued humor is fine-tuned to the delicate aesthetics of Tempe, Ariz., a town that (in addition to being my hometown), hosts Arizona State University. ASU, for the uninitiated, is the state's most prestigious center of higher beer bongs, and the school the Daily Show crowned the "The Harvard of Date Rape."

Coincidence? I think not. That leaves us only to tidy up the film's apparent success in New York City: Here's my theory.

I'm grateful to commenter DJ Ri-Mix, who offers up another date rape jam for our collection: "Shots" by LMFAO and featuring Lil Jon. This one is a doozy, ladies!

Date Rape Anthem: LMFAO's "Shots," an ode to repeatedly ingesting one-ounce doses of liquor. And cock-sucking!

Relevant Lyrics:

Shots shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots
Shots shots shots shots shots

Everybody
The ladies love us / When we pour shots
They need an excuse / To suck our cocks
We came to get crunk / How ‘bout you?
Bottles up / Let’s go round two

Why It’s So Rapey: Hold up—that was round one? We're only at round one, and all the ladies who previously had no intention of sucking LMFAO's cocks have already found an excuse to do so? WTF happens in round two?

The women come around everytime I’m pourin’ shots
Their panties hit the ground everytime I give em shots
So cups in the air, everybody lets take shots.

In-da-club vaginal penetration, I'm guessing.

I kind of get LMFAO: They're a couple of hipster hip-hop boys, so when they do shit like name themselves "LMFAO," and appear on the Kardashian sisters' reality television show, and go to Canada, and rap about receiving oral sex from drunk chicks, their tongues are at least a little bit in-cheek. Still: Proudly proclaiming that women "need an excuse to suck our cocks" and trade their panties for liquor isn't exactly LMFAO-out-loud funny—it's actually been done before, guys, and peppering your babe-a-licious video with some hipster sensibilities doesn't magically transform a Lil Jon song into satire.

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.

As it turns out, I'm not the only one hoping that the widespread media coverage of date rape drugging will die down a bit. A fraternity on the University of Arizona campus has been accused of sabotaging 10,000 campus newspapers in order to cover up a small item in which a woman alleged having been drugged and possibly sexually assaulted at one of the frat's parties.

The copies of the Arizona Daily Wildcat containing the offending "Police Beat" item were apparently removed from their racks and strewn on the outskirts of campus shortly after publication on Oct. 8. The Daily Wildcat pinned the sabotage on the fraternity named in the piece, Phi Kappa Psi, after the Spanish homework of members Alex Cornell and Nick Kovaleski surfaced at the site of the discarded newspapers—a revelation the Phoenix New Times astutely notes mirrors a plot point from the 1998 film The Big Lebowski. The New Times phoned Phi Kappa Psi President Keith Peters "to find out if two 'pledges' were really dumb enough to steal 10,000 free newspapers and then leave their homework with the stolen stash." Peters declined to comment.

The student paper later received less hilarious evidence linking Phi Kappa Psi to the crime—e-mails from friends and relatives of fraternity members confirming that the theft was engineered "under the orders of fraternity leadership." Despite the paper's leads, the University of Arizona Police Department closed the case "without questioning any Phi Psi members."

Nevertheless, the prank has directed significant campus attention to the original item, a modest 250-word crime brief. It's clear that Phi Kappa Psi severely miscalculated their damage control over the drugging accusations. Even on a college campus, a straight item on an attempted date rape will hardly cause a stir. An item on a fraternity's elaborate—and absurdly botched—plan to keep that attempted date rape item hush-hush, on the other hand? People actually care about that.

But let's get back to the reason this 10,000 paper cover-up is so offensive in the first place: Apparently, the fraternity really, really, really didn't want people to know that its parties may feature date rape drugs. Below is the original crime report that Phi Kappa Psi was so afraid of getting out there. (Heads up for the future, boys: Newspapers are on the Internet these days). According to the alleged victim's testimony, she experienced symptoms of GHB after attending a Phi Kappa Psi party in September:

The woman claimed that on arrival, a fraternity member she knew gave her a drink. Later, an unidentified man gave her another drink. The woman told police she had assumed both drinks contained vodka, as they were both colorless. The woman reported that at approximately 11:30 p.m., she had begun feeling “overly flirtatious.” The woman also claimed to have experienced a loss of both hearing and bladder control. The woman told officers that her friend had walked her back to her residence at the Arizona-Sonora Residence Hall at approximately 1 a.m. on Sept. 27, at which point she vomited. The woman’s friends later told her that between the hours of 11:30 p.m. on Sept. 26 and 1 a.m. on Sept. 27, she had made out with three different men at the party. The next day, the woman looked up GHB online and believed she had experience its symptoms. She also told police that she had attempted to contact the fraternity president and had left several messages at the fraternity, but had received no replies. She told officers she was reporting the incident to document the event in the hopes of preventing any future sexual assaults.

Photo by kenlund, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

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:

When the action moves to the uncontrolled environment of a car, a park or a private home, the rules blur. When a boy goes "too far", this is date rape. It can be devastating, with the girl feeling betrayed and no longer trusting her own instincts. She may live with the emotional pain of it for years. And all because she believed that it's never too late to say no.

Well, that's an interesting approach. Personally, I would think that telling boys and girls that they must respect their sex partners' stated boundaries, no matter what, would help us all avoid rapes. Remember: Rape is sex without a person's consent. A reasonable person would argue that the problem here is the person who forces a non-consenting person into sex. According to Holmquist, the real problem is the person who refuses to consent to the raping:

The worst advice you could possibly give would be to tell her that she can always say no, even when she is no longer in control. Girls, just like boys, need to be told about the likely consequences of their actions.

To Holmquist, telling girls that they can't say no after they've crossed an arbitrary purity line—after they've gotten into the car, kissed too deeply, wore too short of a skirt, had one too many drinks—will encourage girls to remain completely chaste until they're ready to go all the way. While this theory would do absolutely nothing to prevent rape, it would help reduce reported rapes: If we adopt Holmquist's logic, girls who are sexually violated will no longer recognize their experience as rape, because they've been told that even the most modest of sexual activities—kissing!!—implies consent to the kitchen sink.

Holmquist continues:

This is not to say that "ladies" don't get date-raped. Nor am I saying that girls who behave in a certain way deserve what they get. What I am saying is that girls, if they want to act like boys—getting drunk and being sexually predatory—have to understand that a boy, if he is that way inclined, may take advantage. And boys, for their own protection, need to understand that a drunk girl who he thinks wants sex, may turn around the next day and accuse him of rape. Both are responsible for this tragedy.

Actually, boys can get a valuable heads-up on that rape accusation a lot earlier if "drunk girls" are simply allowed to verbalize their lack of consent before the rape happens. And girls are a lot more likely to escape from an unwanted sexual situation if they're not robbed of the only recourse they've got. As LiveJournal user nacbrie points out, saying "no" is often the only way that victims can "opt out" of a given sexual scenario, on account of the physical and cultural power imbalances that are generally at play in rape. So as long as we're holding girls responsible for their own rapes, can Kathryn Holmquist be held accountable for some tragedy, as well? Because anyone who thinks that the best strategy for reducing rape statistics is to make young girls complicit in their own rapes is a tragic figure indeed.

Earlier this week, we looked at the popular fear of date rape drugs, and how that fear helps distract us from acquaintance rapes that involve willingly ingested substances, like beer. Beer, you say? In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I talk booze—the most common date-rape drug, the cause of a shit ton of other problems, and a pretty fun thing to drink, in moderation. After the jump: we bemoan the double standard of passing out, yearn for a consentalizer test, and check in on how our femininity is holding up—it's tipsy, thanks for asking!

SADY: hello! good evening! it is time to discuss date rape drugging, or so i hear!

AMANDA: it is that allotted time!

SADY: first of all, i have to say that your take on the whole scenario was (AS USUAL!) highly impressive and nuanced.

AMANDA: well—some issues were perhaps underrepresented there. there are A LOT OF ISSUES. with this ISSUE.

SADY: well, this whole report – that date rapes involving date rape drugs are less rare than date rapes involving date drinking—is kind of set to be a highly polarizing thing. like, some people have been like, "see? the floozies are just out getting drunk! and making up accounts of druggedness!" and others are like, "there are, too, date rape drugs!" and what impressed me about your take was that you didn't (a) minimize assault, or (b) discount that date rape drugs might in fact be less common than acquaintance rape without that factor involved.

AMANDA: I saw that Broadsheet had already written a pretty thought out post that discussed why some women might report being drugged when that was not necessarily the case—and obviously, i read the Daily Mail's amazingly stupid take on it which suggested that women are big drunk liars—so i thought i'd focus on the media's focus on date rape drugs. which is so interesting, because even calling them "date rape drugs" is misleading—the narrative really suggests that when this does happen, it's mostly strangers swooping in with these drugs, and not "dates" per se.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and this is a terminology flaw which i myself have fallen victim to: using "date rape" to mean "rape that was not the stranger-jumps-from-bushes-with-gun" sort of rape, rather than "rape by one's date," which is what it should (and does) mean. i mean: i have to tell you. i don't doubt that date rape drugs are used. a friend of mine just told me a story about how she suspects she may have been drugged, and although she was not assaulted, all the details line up.

AMANDA: oh yes! that is a point that i realized after i wrote my piece! it's possible that druggings are more common than they appear in these studies, but they do not lead to assaults. and that can skew the data, and getting drugged is still an awful thing to have happen to you, even if it doesn't end in assault. [Note: Marcella Chester has since counted the ways that the data on drink-spiking can go awry. Read it!].

SADY: right, it's still a violation.

AMANDA: but the whole issue of rape is an issue of skewed data, because reports are so infrequent. but i would THINK—and i dont know this—that reports of drug-assisted rapes are higher than those that don't involve drugs. because the media is pretty clear about reviling dudes who drug women, and less clear about reviling men who rape women who are drunk.

SADY: yeah. exactly. like, if you're drunk, it just means you're a big old mess and/or tramp anyway, and probably you were just drunk enough to "have sex" and "regret it" and etc.

AMANDA: and i think that "reporting" difference is true anecdotally as well—they may not even tell their friends or their boyfriends or what have you, or they will tell them and they'll be discounted. Etc.

SADY: whereas if you were DRUGGED, you can clearly point to an outside agency in getting you to the point where you could not give informed consent.

AMANDA: right. there's a degree of "proof" that society accepts with those rapes.

SADY: yeah, and, i mean, i have to tell you: i like to drink. i'm having a drink as we speak! and i am a lady who's pretty smart about listening to my body, drinks-wise, and not having more than i can handle. but there have been occasions – whether i didn't have enough sleep the night before, or forgot to eat lunch, or whatever – where A Normal Number of Drinks magically became, for that night, One Too Many Drinks, and i ended up in a messy state. and I was always surrounded by people who cared enough for me to point out that i was a mess, and call me a taxi, and whatever. but HOW SHITTY WOULD IT HAVE BEEN, STILL for someone to assault me in that state? i mean, why the fuck are Drinks considered an extra culpability on your part?

AMANDA: i too love drinking! and perhaps that should be disclosed whenever i defend ladies who like to drink against charges of flooziness! so, FULL DISCLOSURE, drinking! but so: the researchers note that drinking can be sometimes unpredictable, and if your diet or sleep or mood is different it can affect how alcohol affects you. so when, a couple weeks ago, my boyfriend told me he "felt like he had been drugged" because his level of hangover way outstripped the number of drinks he had, i thought it was kind of interesting. but i didn't actually think he HAD BEEN DRUGGED. though i suppose that's possible. but i feel like, perhaps, when women are unexpectedly slammed with alcohol—and particularly if they are assaulted while in this state—they may be told over and over again that these experiences are a result of being drugged. i'm not sure if that actually ever happens. but i DO know that if a woman was ever considered unreliable because she reported she was drugged and raped, and it turned out she wasn't actually drugged, then that would be very sad.

SADY: yeah, exactly. and that's the thing: while saying you were drugged can be pointed to as an example of how you didn't exercise agency in the matter (which is important for rape survivors, because as we all know making Bad Decisions means you totally shouldn't have the right to pursue a criminal sentence for someone who had sex with you against your will) it is also a wedge that can be used to destroy your credibility. which is why women i've known who came to the conclusion that there must have been some drugging involved in their assaults have been hesitant to come forward, because they're afraid that would be used against them. which, in that case, what was your crime? having too many drinks? FALLING ASLEEP????? not to be a big old spoiler, but dudes get to have too many drinks and fall asleep all the time! i mean, a gentleman of my personal acquaintance had too many drinks and was wandering around and got – apparently – randomly beaten up by some dudes in his neighborhood, and as far as i know the police did not tsk-tsk him for wandering around all drunk and beatable.

AMANDA: i know. dudes get to have SO MUCH PASSING OUT without the consequences! and young dudes still binge drink a lot more than women do, not that you would realize that given the media attention given to the matter. male drinking tends to be a bit invisible, i think—it's just something men do, so there's no excessive fear about it. even though men are more likely to be victims of violent crime than women are. i mean, there are fears about men drinking, but they are fears about literally drinking too much and dying from drinking too much. not fears about drinking too much and getting raped, or even drinking too much and raping another person.

SADY: which maybe SHOULD be a fear. i think this is an important point: these studies which say women who have been raped frequently have also been drinking? they maybe miss the point that women have been drinking while in an environment where everyone – dudes included – is also drinking. and i genuinely think that, if ladies have these regimens over watching their ladyfriends' drink consumption and making sure they are safe, dudes should also have people watching them to make sure that they don't get to the point where they are legitimately too drunk to even get what consent MEANS.

AMANDA: yeah. and, i mean, it would help if kids knew what consent means before they knew what "body shots" means. i think it should be on the driving test, personally.

SADY: yeah. that's a worrisome statement i just made, because it seems to remove some culpability from the rapist. but i suspect that (a) assholes who drink become bigger assholes, and (b) since we all recognize that a drunk asshole is liable to get in a bar fight or whatever, we should also recognize that a drunk asshole might be an asshole who is even more inclined to rape than he was previously.

AMANDA: yeah. it seems that while society's prescriptions for female drinking include "drinking correctly"—covering your glass, going with friends—male drinking is just defined by "drinking more." which—again—i like drinking. and if my drinking becomes a personal problem, that will be bad for me. but if my drinking becomes a problem for other people—like i end up raping women or hitting my kids when i'm drunk—then that's something that REALLY needs to be addressed by society.

SADY: yeah, precisely. and the reason i think this relates to date rape drugs (ha, remember those? HI, date rape drugs!) is that, you know, they exist. and even if they exist less than rapes which occur while the rapist and/or the victim were drinking, that's still a problem. one incident of someone drugging a person in order to rape them is too many, i would estimate. but the fact that rape occurs more often in proximity to alcohol – well: first of all, i can recall being pressured to drink A Bit Too Much by certain dates, so i think it's reasonable to state that alcohol can also be an agent of coercion. and, (b) people drink. Specifically young people who want to socialize. As an extremely shy person who is far less shy after drinking, I get the reasons for this. And the fact is that if alcohol coincides with rape, this DOES NOT MAGICALLY REMOVE THE FACT THAT RAPE IS BAD from the equation!

AMANDA: exactly. and i think a lot of it comes down to ladies drinking, because drinking is a dude thing, and when ladies drink it means they're, horror of horrors, ACTING LIKE MEN, or taking away dude-time, or revealing that drinking does not actually make you more masculine and / or awesome. but sorry, dudes, i'm not going to stop drinking!

SADY: yeah! i mean: i think the Horror of Drinking is the Horror of Unladylikeness, presented in vaguely medical terms. fact is: yep, when ladies drink a bit, they let down their various guards and DO NOT always behave in the manner in which society has accustomed us to expect from ladies. they get loud. they get a bit rude or wacky, at times. they EVEN make out with people that they would otherwise be constrained from making out with! (and oh, how I know that feeling.) BUT, with all the loud and wacky and unladylike behavior they are engaging in, GUESS WHAT? you still don't get to assault them! because we are not in Ye Medieval Tymes any more, and rape is not just something that happens to Virtuous Women of Goode Renowne. it can happen to ladies who are acting up, too. and, miraculously, it is still a crime. just like you don't get to rob somebody because you think he is a jerk.

AMANDA: yeah. ok, do you wanna break? i think i'm going to go buy some beer

SADY: do it, lady! ENJOY YOUR BEERS. YOUR BEERS OF FREEDOM.

Photo by jbcurio, Creative Commons Attribution License

French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévi is back to explain why Roman Polanski ought to be released from prison already. Add this one to the long list of Polanski defenses: Polanski is a human!

Lévi writes for the Huffington Post:

Time is passing. And Roman Polanski is still in prison, goes to bed and wakes up in prison, sees his wife one hour a week in the visiting room of a prison—all while his 11 and 16-year-old children, when they have the courage to go to school, have to confront the gaze of friends who have heard at home that the dad of the little Polanskis, the man everyone fluttered around vicariously via their children, the parent of a student that they were exhilarated to recognize on TV the night of the Césars, was ultimately a criminal, a rapist, a sodomite, a pedophile.

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bernardhenri-levy/for-roman-polanksi_b_336126.html

Roman Polanski, the argument goes, is just like you and me. He has a life! A wife! Children! A César award! Okay—maybe Roman Polanski isn't the ideal stand-in for the Rapist Everyman. But film accolades aside, Lévi's point is that Polanski has been a very visible and productive member of society in both his professional and personal life. The implication is that happily married men can't simultaneously be criminals, good fathers can't also be rapists, and international award-winners can't find the time to prey on children.

Our tendency to strictly separate the categories of "rapist" and "human" is something we're going to have to deal with again and again once we really start dealing with sexual assaults and the people who commit most of them—people with lives, wives, and children, if not Polanski's fame and fortune. It's not going to be easy to expand our idea of "rapist" to encompass otherwise upstanding members of society, but I think the continued media attention on Polanski's case will help us get there. If the public is willing to believe that one of the most celebrated film directors in the world is capable of rape, maybe they'll also be willing to consider less sensationalized rape cases with an open mind.

Photo via Film Servis Festival Karlovy Vary, Wikipedia Commons

I, for one, am celebrating. First: the research suggests that women aren't regularly being drugged on their night out—wonderful news! But it also means that we may finally retire all the media scare-tactics, the girls-night-out drink protection strategies, and mercifully, every single absurd product that has arisen out of society's inflated concern of drink spiking—and has dangerously distracted the rape conversation from addressing the real experiences of victims.

Confession: I have always been a roofie skeptic. This is not to say that I'm an all-out Date Rape Drug Denier: I do think that these drugs exist, and I do believe that some women have been drugged by men who intend to rape them. I just think that this happens about as often as the classic stranger-rapist-in-the-bushes scenario—in terms of real rape statistics, hardly ever. A 2006 study of 120 date rape cases in the United Kingdom revealed that 119 of the cases involved alcohol, but only two involved the date rape drug GHB. Of course, those two cases are not insignificant, and the experiences of women who have been drugged should not be discounted. That being said, these numbers just don't support the widespread fear that girls' nights out are being sabotaged by amateur druggists.

But despite my reservations about the actual risk of "date rape drugs," I have completely assimilated to the behavior modifications required by the "date rape drug" myth. When I step away from my beer, I'll tell a friend to watch over my glass. When I'm sitting at the bar, I'll nurse my drink close to my body. I will go so far as to take my beverage along to the bathroom while I'm having a piss. And I'm not alone. According to a study in UK's More magazine, "77 per cent of women claimed to keep hold of their drink even when they go to the toilet."

I blame the date-rape-drug-industrial-complex for forcing me to squat over a dingy bar toilet with a pint in one hand and a wad of toilet paper in the other. According to the study, the constant reminder that date rape drugs are a real danger to women has significantly altered our behavior patterns, even though law enforcement sources have found that the drugs pose a "very limited threat." As the researchers note, "routinized DFSA is improbable as a widespread crime; it involves a stranger extracting an individual from her social group unnoticed, administering a substance undetected, precisely controlling drug effect, and reliably erasing memory of the experience."

Importantly, this "date rape drug" narrative does not describe a date rape; it describes another form of stranger rape. This time, the rapist isn't jumping out of the bushes—he's jumping out from below the bar-stool to sprinkle odorless powder in your drink before dragging you to an undisclosed location. As the study notes, "the media tend to represent drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) as a significant and widespread problem, to the extent that newspapers have appropriated the phrase 'date rape' to refer to this crime." This is the most dangerous aspect of the frenzy over "date rape drugs"—the way the myth has managed to completely co-opt the conversation about acquaintance rape. Instead of concerning ourselves with the disconcerting fact that most rapists are known to the victim, the public has been told to turn its attentions to yet another outlandish crime scenario that does not pose a significant threat to women.

How has the "date rape drug" myth gained so much traction in the public consciousness? The study floats a theory: The worry over "date rape drugs" helps "give shape to otherwise nebulous threats," in turn"allowing us to displace worry about other, less manageable threats." We drum up concern over the risk of "date rape drugs"—then devise strategies for managing that risk—because it's easier than actually doing the business of preventing rape. It's easier to keep your thumb over your bottle than it is to stop your boyfriend from raping you. It's easier to take your drink to the bathroom than to understand why a person you trust would assault you. It's easier to tell grown women what to do than to teach our children not to grow up to be rapists. And it is a whole lot easier to avoid a crime that rarely happens than to prevent the type of sexual assaults that occur every single day.

This is why the "date rape drug" myth arose hand-in-hand with public awareness of acquaintance rape. While society has begun to recognize rapes against wives, girlfriends, friends, and co-workers as serious crimes, it has failed to embrace the idea that husbands, boyfriends, trusted friends, the guys in your office, and other seemingly normal men can be rapists. We're still much more comfortable thinking of rapists as men who lurk in the shadows, guys who only emerge in polite society in order to secure another rape victim. The news that most rapists aren't easily-identifiable as villains—men hunch-backed from crouching in the bushes, their hands caked with sedatives—has failed to inspire solutions aimed at preventing men from raping.

The public is similarly slow to accept that most victims don't fit the storybook stereotype of a buttoned-up virgin sipping on hot cocoa. Thankfully, the requirement that victims be the model of chastity has eroded a bit in recent years. Now, society is ready to accept that a rape victim is still a rape victim if she goes out to a bar with her girlfriends and has a few drinks—as long as her intoxication is capped off with a surprise roofie. The more likely scenario—that a rape victim goes out to a bar with her girlfriends, willingly ingests alcohol, and then is raped—is more difficult for the public to swallow.

As the idea of "acquaintance rape" and the myth of the "date rape drug" rose, so did another trend society wasn't ready for—women who drink like men. Female drinking has increased rapidly in recent years (though we're still far outstripped by the boys)—in 2006, 15 percent of women engaged in binge-drinking, compared to 30 percent of males. As the study notes, society has failed to process its discomfort with girls who drink: "Despite greater gender equality when it comes to public drinking, there is no clear language through which the female experience can be discussed, let alone celebrated in the manner that remains central to masculinity. . . . female drinking is widely seen as challenging gender norms, either as a deviant subversion of ideals of femininity or as part of a broader project of female emancipation."

The idea that women who drink are an affront to the "ideals of femininity" has contributed to the widespread perception that drunk women are less-than-perfect rape victims. The perception that female drinking is a conscious sexual subversion on the part of women is problematic on a number of levels. First, it tells women who drink that they're asking for it; that if they are raped, they are somehow responsible for the crime committed against them; that it is their deviant decisions that caused them to be raped. Second, it tells rapists that women who drink are not valued by society; that they are considered "lesser" women; that everyone knows drunk girls are down for sex, and no one will believe they can be raped. In other words, it points out exactly who rapists ought to target in order to avoid the consequences of their crimes. This is how rapists have historically gotten away with raping their wives, and raping prostitutes, and raping fat women, and raping promiscuous women—because society has told them over and over again that these women cannot be raped.

I hope that our culture's outlandish fears over "date rape drugs" go away for a very, very long time. And I hope we replace the fears over drink spiking with educational solutions aimed at teaching men and women how to recognize consent, respect each other's bodies, and really, truly prevent rape. Consider the testimony of one inventor of "date rape drug" detectors: "I knew somebody who was date raped, and I couldn't believe nobody had a product to stop it," he told the press. The problem of date rape can't be solved with roofie-sensitive drink coasters. It can only be remedied by changing attitudes.

Monday, Sept. 28, was a good day for the sexual assault euphemism.

Discussing the Roman Polanski case with the ladies of The View, Whoopi Goldberg mitigated accusations that Polanski drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl by insisting that the crime wasn’t “rape-rape.” In a statement to the United Nations that same day, Vatican rep Archbishop Silvano Tomasi spun the public outcry over sexual abuse in the Catholic Church by clarifying that the priests “involved in the abuses” are not pedophiles but “ebophiles,” a “sexual orientation minority which is sexually engaged with adolescent boys between the ages of 11 and 17.”

Both Goldberg and Tomasi were criticized for employing wordplay that minimized sexual assault. “Look, sex with underage boys is an area where you don’t want to be displaying your connoisseurship and nitpicking about aesthetic distinctions,” the Economist chided Tomasi. The blog Jezebel called Goldberg’s repetition a product of the actor’s “fantastical moral universe.” In that universe, anything less terrifying than the most barbaric form of rape doesn’t deserve to live under the same terminological roof.

How did we get to a place where “rape” needed to be repeated to mean anything?

In ancient law, rape was seen as an affront to female chastity as opposed to a violation of the human body. Raping a married woman robbed her husband of his property; raping an unmarried virgin robbed the woman’s family of her future value in marriage. Rape inside marriage was impossible, as a man could not rob what was already his. Similarly, a woman’s premarital sexual activity in effect nullified the crime of rape—women who chose to have sex outside of marriage had already devalued themselves and had no chastity left to steal.

Modern models of sexual assault have evolved to view rape as a crime against a victim as opposed to a victim’s male relatives. But these outmoded conceptions still invade our thinking about sexual assault. Spousal rape has been illegal throughout the United States since 1993, but many states still view the crime as a lesser offense than rape by a stranger. In many jurisdictions, only vaginal penetration by a penis is considered “rape” because of the potential of the act to produce offspring—and a cuckolded husband. The FBI manages to ignore an entire class of rape victims: men. According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system, “Forcible rape…is the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will.” In the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS), a mechanism the Justice Department employs to track crime rates, males can be considered victims of rape, but same-sex assaults are entirely obscured: “at least one offender must be of a different sex than the victim for the event to be classified as a forcible rape.”

Part of the trouble over the modern definition of “rape” originates from the term “statutory rape,” used to describe sex between an adult and a minor deemed too young to consent to the activity. Initially, the motivation behind statutory rape law was indistinguishable from that of ancient rape law: guard the chastity of the unmarried women. Defenders of “age of consent” laws have since adopted a more compelling rationale for the legislation: protect young people from sexual coercion and abuse. According to a Guttmacher Institute study, women “who become sexually active at an early age are especially likely to have experienced coercive sex: Seventy-four percent of women who had intercourse before age 14 and 60 percent of those who had sex before age 15 report having had a forced sexual experience.”

Because a lack of consent is so difficult to prove in rape cases, modern statutory rape law arose to address the frequency of sexual abuse against minors by turning lack of consent into an irrefutable
fact. But while “statutory rape” persists to protect youth against rape, it also punishes autonomous teens who are told that, just like in the olden times, young women aren’t allowed to choose sex. The
term’s conflation of sex partner and rape victim has resulted in some troubling cultural perceptions—from Goldberg’s assertion that statutory rapes are necessarily not “real” rapes, to the idea that
women who choose to have sex before turning 18 are necessarily victims.

These highly restrictive and often arbitrary legal definitions of rape have also failed victims struggling to effectively describe their own experiences. In the 1980s, the term “date rape” arose in order to
address rapes committed by friends, partners, or acquaintances of the victim. The term gave voice to victims who had been told that pursuing relationships outside of marriage qualified as a compromise of that ancient chastity requirement. Today, “date rape” scenarios constitute 90 percent of rape cases. The vast majority of the time, rape is date rape. But there remains a reluctance to drop the “date” qualifier from the equation. By emphasizing the circumstances surrounding the sexual assault—circumstances that the victim helped create by agreeing to the date, making friends, or having sex—the term can still imply that a “date rape” is somehow less than a “real” rape.

In 2005, Pulitzer Prize–winning sex writer Laura Sessions Stepp heard the term “gray rape” for the first time. She was teaching a journalism class at George Washington University when a group of students told her that they used the term to describe sexual experiences marked by drunkenness, memory loss, and questionable consent. “I remember coming home to my husband after that class and saying, ‘Oh my God—you’ll never believe what they’re calling this,’” says Stepp.

While the term helped Stepp’s students to discuss an underreported experience on college campuses, it also carved out a convenient space for self-blaming. Victims who are traditionally ignored and devalued by the legal system—intoxicated, promiscuous, or male victims—may latch on to the term “gray rape” in order to describe their experiences without faulting their assailants. In 2005, the GW Hatchet entered “gray rape” into the public record for the first time this decade. In the story, GW student James Daley says he “woke up one morning naked and drunk in an unfamiliar apartment with condoms strewn about the room,” and later deduced that a girl had bought him “a lot of drinks”and led Daley to her room. Daley told the Hatchet “he felt taken advantage of and would not have hooked up with her if he had not been so drunk,” feelings that might prompt a sexual assault investigation—if “gray rape” weren’t there to imply this kind of thing happens to everyone.

In 2008, D.C.-area writer Latoya Peterson coined the term “not-rape” to describe experiences that fell outside the limited legal and cultural definitions of sexual assault. “The language surrounding rape is so strict, any experience which does not reach this very high level of scrutiny is completely disregarded,” says Peterson. To Peterson, “not-rape” is an attempt to give a voice to assaults that are
self-repressed, unreported, or silenced. “In our culture, the word can have even more power than the action,” she says. “We’re so invested in not accusing someone of rape, we completely lose sight of all these terrible things that happen to women and girls.”

Terms like “date rape,” “gray rape,” and “not-rape” help reveal serious offenses that are nevertheless denied recognition as legitimate “rapes.” They also represent a challenge to a definition of
rape that is finely tuned to ignore the majority of victims, sensationalize the least likely offenses, and shame those who would call their experiences what they know them to be: rape.

Illustration by Bonnie Kennedy

The Line, a new documentary film about sex and consent, hit the American University campus last week. Today, The Line's blog addressed the recent controversy at AU over student newspaper the Eagle's anonymous sex column, which presented a drunk, hazy, and painful sexual experience as a normal college hook-up:

It’s three in the morning. You have it inside you right now. It kind of hurts. You’ve had one too many cups of jungle juice. You think his name is Andrew, but you’re not really sure. You thought you would never be that girl, but there you are, in your drunken haze.

Some members of the campus community were outraged that the newspaper would normalize a possible date rape scenario. But the Line video also pointed to another controversial section of the Eagle's column: "You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else."

What the hell is "something else"?

Some students who responded to the column online proved perturbed by both the column's rape associations and its overly vague description of the morning-after olfactory bouquet. Axe Body Spray has repeatedly been accused of "smelling like date rape." It would make sense for the morning after your drunken sexual experience to smell like booze. But what else does painful drunk sex smell like? And why does the Eagle think the third smell is so obvious that they don't even have to spell it out for campus readers?

Mike Johnson first criticized the column's "date rape" overtones before expressing frustration with the use of "something else":

Oh and what does he smell like? B.O.? Ribbed Trojans? I’m not sure what the deal is on that one.

Disco Stick took a stab at it:

What does “well, something else” mean? I’m interpreting it as “your pussy” or “jizz.” I’m having a little trouble deciding which one though. Could it be both? Please let me know asap.

The imprecise descriptor was further complicated by the column's irregular sentence structure. The sentence, "You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else," is, I believe, attempting to convey the experience of a woman who wakes up to two things:

a) an unfamiliar ceiling;

b) a man who smells like booze, AXE body spray and (whatever).

As the sentence reads, however, it has the woman waking up to:

a) an unfamiliar ceiling;

b) some guy who smells like booze;

c) AXE body spray;

d) "something else."

Taken in that context, the possibilities of this "something else" extend far beyond body odor, condoms, pussy, or jizz. The woman in question could have awoken to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and an albatross. Given the context of the story, she also could have woken up to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and an STD. For feminists on campus upset with the Eagle's casual treatment of date rape in the column, the grammatical error could also lead to a happier ending: Personally, I'd like to see this girl wake up to a ceiling, a dude, body spray, and a copy of Yes Means Yes!

It’s three in the morning. You have it inside you right now. It kind of hurts. You’ve had one too many cups of jungle juice. You think his name is Andrew, but you’re not really sure. You thought you would never be that girl, but there you are, in your drunken haze.

You wake up the day after to an unfamiliar ceiling, some guy who smells like booze, AXE body spray and, well, something else. He wants to cuddle and you’re starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up [ ________ ].

Reader: How did the AU Eagle complete that sentence?

a. You're starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up was rape.

b. You're starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up was a product of society's shaming of female sexuality, which encourages women to resort to dangerous, heavily intoxicated, and painful sex with strangers instead of openly pursuing empowered, respectful, and satisfying sexual experiences with desired sexual partners.

c. You're starting to think maybe this drunken hook-up could turn into something.

If you picked choice C, congratulations. That's right: The Eagle chose to use a woman's hazy, drunk, and painful sexual experience in order to illustrate the serious on-campus problem of . . . drunk women wanting boyfriends!

"A lot of people think that their first sexual experience in college is something meaningful," the column continued. "We can tell you that it is not. " The columnists then informed AU females some strategies they should try next time, instead of painful drunk sex: "lets face it girls, more often then not you’ll have to slow the guy down. That’s more than okay—it adds to your 'mystique.' Flirt with them, step in a little bit closer, laugh at all his jokes, flip your hair, basically everything you see in the movies without the sex. I said without the sex."

So, women who want to get laid on the AU campus can either a) endure drunk and painful stranger fucking, or b) laugh at jokes that aren't funny, and . . . not have sex. What the fuck? And these are the paper's sex columnists!

Some readers and on-campus groups agreed that the Eagle's sexual scenario posed more pressing questions than "Why can't the drunk girl find a boyfriend?" Like, "Was that hypothetical girl just hypothetically raped?"

Many members of the campus community argued that she was. AU Students For Choice penned an e-mail to its members calling the piece "alarming," and describing the opening scene as “an explicit rape.” And in a letter to the Eagle, campus group Women’s Initiative wrote, "This is called rape . . . Not only does the column normalize sexual assault as a drunken hook-up that happens to everyone, but it places the responsibility of stopping sexual assault on women by telling them to 'slow the guy down.'”

Readers also chimed in on the consent issue. "Next time you write a sex article don’t write it like a date rape story," wrote one commenter. Wrote another: "If it hurts, and you’re so wasted you don’t know what’s going on, then that is rape. And that’s not okay or normal."

But others came to the Eagle's defense. "How the hell is that rape?" wrote one. "I hear of this kind of stuff happening all the time. We’ve all been there at one time or another when you have drunk sex, so what? Its the people who end up trying to build a relationship off of that who are stupid."

In its own response to the campus outcry, the Eagle defended the piece as "provocative" and called the outrage "confusing." "For better or worse, many drunken hook-ups on this campus are completely consensual. Women’s Initiative knows it. AU Students For Choice knows it. Sometimes, people get drunk intending to hook-up!" The Eagle then attempted to shame all members of the campus community who voiced concern about the Eagle's strange sex advice. "Baseless charges and unwarranted outrage make these groups look silly," the retort read. "On issues as serious as rape and sexual assault, they should know better than to cry wolf."

The students crying "rape!" and the students crying "completely consensual!" will probably have to agree to disagree—if there's one thing I've learned from sex blogging, it's that arguments over whether theoretical scenarios constitute rape are rarely resolved. But that doesn't mean the two camps can't find a mutually productive discussion somewhere in this mess.

The groups who claim that the Eagle piece "normalized sexual assault," and those who claim that drunk sex "happens all the time" and that "people get drunk intending to hook up!" aren't talking past one another—even though they refuse to agree on rape, they're still voicing different perspectives on the same problem. If the Eagle finds the question "is this rape?" silly and baseless, why not ask them some alternate questions: Why is it considered normal for women on campus to choose disappointing, painful, hazy sex? Why is it a campus trend for women not to just unexpectedly wake up in a stranger's bed, but to get drunk with the intention of waking up there? And since when is declaring painful sex "normal" a valid excuse for perpetuating it?

Pandagon's Amanda Marcotte has got some pretty good answers to these questions. In a post on the Hofstra false rape accusation, Marcotte explains how slut-shaming can lead women to resort to dangerous, heavily intoxicated, and painful sex with strangers—instead of openly pursuing empowered, respectful, and satisfying sexual experiences with desired sexual partners. She writes:

There is nothing wrong with you if you want to have group sex. Now, I wouldn’t recommend that you go about it as this young woman did. Like it or not, but a single woman in a group sex situation with a bunch of men she barely knows that have been drinking heavily is something that could turn to rape, or even if it doesn’t, it could seem menacing once you’re into it, and therefore you may not feel safe changing your mind if it gets weird. A lot of young men have really mixed-up, fucked-up attitudes about this sort of thing, because the homoerotic element is going to turn them on and then they’re going to get upset about that, and they might get more aggressive to demonstrate that they’re Not Gay. There’s a serious amount of danger there. That said, it’s foolish to assume that some young women aren’t going to have group sex fantasies, and the sheer amount of shame that is placed on them for wanting to act those out will push a lot of them to make really, really bad choices under the influence of inhibition-lowering drugs like alcohol.

The only cure for this is to stop shaming women for being sexual. Without the shame driving people to make rash, dangerous, and foolish choices, you’re going to have a lot more planning of group sex that involves vetting partners and getting consent and creating safe words and all that. And then, you own your choice and take responsibility for it. Which makes you not inclined to say it was rape if the word gets out that you did this. If your reputation isn’t in danger, then you have no cause to do bad things in an attempt to save it.

I don't mind that the Eagle's semester-opening sex column presented rash, drunk, awful sex as a normal college experience—it can be. But instead of examining why college women have sex they don't like, or telling college women that they deserve to have better sex, the Eagle told AU's female population that good girls don't give it up. That attitude isn't going to make sex on AU's campus any better, but it will help to keep it drunk. Hey—at least it will be "normal," right?

Have you always wanted to blame your casual sexual encounters on the Goose, but the words just never came out right? Put another way: Do you have a bunch of date-rapey sentiments to unload upon the general public, but don't want to have to use your recognizable, human voice? The "I Am T-Pain" iPhone application is here to help.

According to Pitchfork's review of T-Pain's new democratization of the Auto-Tune, the function "can make anyone's voice sound like that of a sex-addicted robot. I just tried it; it works." T-Pain has plenty of sketchy drunk sex jams to choose from, but the sketchiest is his lasting contribution to Jamie Foxx's Blame It (On the Alcohol). Give your $2.99 to T-Pain, and let's review:

Girl I know you feel good, just like you look
Couple more shots you open up like a book
I ain´t trippin (cause ima read ya)
Shawty I ain´t trippin  (I jus wanna please ya)
I'mma take a shot of Nuvo, shawty then you know
What's goin' down we can go and kick it like judo.

Ya know what I mean:
Shawty got drunk and thought it all was a dream,
So I made her say I, I, I, I!
Now she got her hand on my leg
And got my seats all wet in my ride (all wet in my ride)
All over my ride (all over my ride),
She look me dead in the eye (eye, eye, eye)
Then my pants got bigga and she already knew what to figga
Had her looking at her boyfriend like, fuck that nigga!

That's right, ladies: When T-Pain opens you up like a book in his ride, but you are so drunk you think you are sleeping, don't worry! You are allowed to wake up the next morning and blame it on the Goose (alternately, you may blame it on the 'Tron). What are we not to blame it on? You guessed it: T-Pain.

Shit, now I'm expected to increase my own intelligence while I'm avoiding getting raped? What exactly does being a "smart" rape avoider entail anyway? Flashcards?

I'm thinking I better start off with "How to be dumb and avoid date rape" before I move on to this multitasking shit. After all, preventing yourself from becoming a full-fledged dumb rape victim requires some pretty advanced instruction:

The Catholic University of America (CUA) this summer revised its student rules to clarify that the school condemns sexual assault more strongly than consensual sex. The change to the policy, which became official July 27, comes in the aftermath of litigation questioning the propriety and effectiveness of the university’s longtime regulations.

Prior to the change, the CUA campus code performed an awkward lumping operation when it came to sex: Its sexual misconduct clause outlawed “physical conduct of a sexual nature that is unwanted by either party and/or that is disruptive to the university community, such as any sexual expression that is inconsistent with the teaching and moral values of the Catholic church.”

The new rules are all about distinctions. The university has tossed the “Sexual Misconduct” clause in favor of one that clearly differentiates between consensual “Sexual Relationships,” which it calls “inconsistent” with the religious nature of the university, and “Sexual Assault,” which is “unacceptable behavior, will not be tolerated, and will be adjudicated to the fullest extent afforded to the university.” According to CUA’s new policy, prohibited “sexual relationships” include “sexual acts of any kind outside the confines of marriage.” (Less genitally-inclined displays of disruption, like men kissing, are still undefined.) Prohibited “sexual assault” is defined more progressively: “sexual contact without meaningful, explicit, ongoing consent.”

The school’s administration quietly published the revision in its online Code of Student Conduct last month, noting only that its “sexual offenses section [was] strengthened to clearly articulate unacceptable behavior.” CUA did not return a request for comment.

Why has CUA struggled to nail the wording on its sexual assault policy? While other schools strive to protect their students from predators and themselves from lawsuits, CUA has to juggle a third consideration: protecting its relationship with the Vatican.

As the national university of the Roman Catholic Church, CUA earns points with the Pope by outlawing sex among its students, on-campus and off. Keeping undergraduates’ hands to themselves is easier said than done, but the Holy See doesn’t come knocking for evidence of enforcement. Fucking in CUA dorm rooms is common, but the infraction rarely—if ever—rises to administrative review. During the 2006-2007 school year—the only year the university has reported figures on the infraction—CUA recorded zero violations.

Enforcing a “sexual assault” policy, on the other hand, is required under U.S. law. According to university watchdog group Security on Campus, Title IX “prohibits sexual harassment of college and university students whether the harasser is an employee or another student,” as sexual assault is considered “an extreme form of sexual harassment”—and qualifies as gender discrimination.

By creating a clear distinction between the two infractions—sex, which is unenforceable, and sexual assault, which must be strictly enforced—CUA may begin to move past the legal and moral mess that has marked its sex policies for years.

The controversy over those policies came to a head earlier this year, when two students involved in a contested sexual assault incident on the CUA campus later sued the university (Screw U, 5/7/09). The incident involved a female CUA student, a male CUA student, and three of his high school buddies, all of whom engaged in one very visible violation of the sexual misconduct policy in the spring of 2008: a late-night, open-door, thoroughly witnessed group-sex session in a CUA dormitory. The female student later reported the incident as a sexual assault; the male student, who was expelled, maintained that the incident was consensual. Both students cited Title IX in their complaints against the university. The female student alleged the university acted with “deliberate indifference” to her sexual assault claim; the male student claimed that the sex policy was administered inconsistently. (Both suits have since been settled out of court.)

Here’s where the university’s former sex policies failed. The boy’s suit claims that the university failed to give him a “fair and impartial disciplinary hearing” to make his case that the incident was consensual. As a result, the suit alleged, CUA effectively expelled him over a couple of lesser infractions—engaging in oral sex and consuming alcohol—while his female accuser received no punishment for the same offenses. In order to prove that he was unduly punished for his maleness, the boy’s lawyers invoked a CUA celebrity: Antonella Barba, a pop singer who made national news when she competed in the sixth season of American Idol in 2007.

At the height of her American Idol exposure, Barba was a CUA undergraduate. During the course of the competition, photographs of Barba in various stages of Catholic shame surfaced on the Internet. Most of the photos—like the one of her posing in a wet T-shirt and thong next to the World War II Memorial—are fit for Maxim but not necessarily prohibited by catechism. One photo, however, allegedly shows Barba—or a look-alike—performing oral sex on a man. CUA’s response to the matter amounted to an expression of sympathy for Barba and her family. She graduated from the university in 2008.

Even though the boy was expelled over a much more serious offense—allegedly engaging in oral sex without his sex partner’s consent—his lawsuit still built his discrimination case upon CUA’s failure to enforce the campus’s many consensual sexual infractions. The boy’s lawyers demanded that CUA deliver “all documents relating to any investigation, determination, discussions, complaints discipline, or the like concerning Antonella Barba, including, but not limited to, all documents relating to your decision not to expel her.” In most sexual assault policies, the differences between the boy’s case and Barba’s would be glaring. At CUA, the infractions were hardly discrete. According to the old policy, both instances of sexual misconduct were outlawed in the very same sentence, and no further definition of consent was provided.

CUA’s revised sexual assault policy helps to clarify the importance of that little nuance between the cases—consent. The university’s new sexual assault policy still prohibits premarital sex, but it also clearly acknowledges the importance of consent in these forbidden relationships. The separation of sex and assault will help the university prove that it is not “deliberately indifferent” to the possibility of on-campus assault—even as it deliberately avoids policing the consensual stuff. Previously, CUA prefaced its sexual assault policy with the following proposed strategy, which urged both victim and perpetrator to remain chaste: “The optimal approach and most appropriate solution to this issue is for all persons to develop and live by a value system that respects other persons’ bodily integrity and the sacredness of human sexuality.”

By eliminating that “solution,” CUA has opened its sexual assault policy to those victims who may have strayed from the catechism, consensually, in the past. The definition will both help the university discipline sexual assault offenders and confine its judgment on consensual dorm-fuckers to the religious realm.

Illustration by Doug Boehm

Lea Haben, "relationship coach," wants to warn her clients about the dangers of on-line dating:

Haben said, "I've had clients that experienced full-on date rape* and I've had clients that have come very, very close to date rape. " . . . Haben said look closely and you'll find warning signs right there on a person's profile page. "He's not even wearing a shirt. His interests are snuggling, his favorite thing is skin to skin contact. Notice the profile if it's very vague or you don't get a good sense, ask for more information."

Snuggling. Sure, it may sound sensitive, but we all know what snuggling really means: danger. It's the number one dangerous interest! And beware: Plenty of local online daters are sneaking this secret code-word into their otherwise innocuous personals ads (emphasis mine):

Available, no fakes no spam be for real writes:

"Not having my old friends around is getting rather tiresome and I am sick of being alone, so I am looking for someone to enjoy dining out, movies, video games, going to the museums, cooking, or just "snuggling". I am easy going and down to earth once you get me to open up, I can be a little reserved at first."

SWM searching for SWF for LTR writes:

"I'm not a huge bar scene person, I'll go occasionally but it's not something my life revolves around. I'm more content staying in with someone special "snuggling" and watching a movie or on the weekends going to out to try or see something new."

Carbon Leaf this Friday? writes:

"I enjoy all out door activities. All things wine. Trying new restaurants, movies, dancing, concerts, plays, walks, "snuggling" at home etc."

Are you There? writes:

"I'm a 27 y/o single mom. I'm 5'7, a "thick" girl,. I'm a romantic. I like reading, watching movies, "snuggling" on the couch, holding hands taking a walk."

Disgusting. With all the snugglers out there, how will an online dater ever find true love? Now, now, not everyone can be into snuggling. Let's try searching for a different code word. Like "rape":

Do you want to be punished? Spanked? (Nw DC do you have a rape fantasy) writes:

"Warning this is not for every girl. This is for the kinkiest woman using craig's list. this is for the woman who wants and needs to be punnished, the woman who was a cutter in tenth grade, the kind of woman who wants and needs to be dirty with a man who doesn't know her and won't judge her for acting out what she wants. this add is for the woman who hates herself and wants to be left tied to the toilet dripping my cum from her pussy, wondering what to name the bastard child I am not ever going to see."

your fantasy writes:

"tell me if you have a rape fantasy. i would like to hear it. it gets me off when reading them."

Daddy seeks a submissive slut writes:

- You being a COMPLETE SUBMISSIVE in the bedroom and doing ANYTHING DADDY tells you to!
- Being a submissive SLAVE.
- You like pain and crying.
- Hard, heavy anal sex
- Bare hand spanking, wooden paddle, leather belt, leg spreaders!
- Forced deep throating, cock choking, and skull fucking.
- Slapping your pussy, rough fingering fisting and handling, (generally, I want your lips and asshole red, and swollen before I am ready to fuck)
- Tie you down and force fuck you in all your holes.
- Make you suck me off in a semi-public situations, as well as fingering your ass and
pussy when ever I please.
- Degradation / Verbal Abuse.
- DP fuck you with my toys.
- Force rape you when I want! And let my friends fuck you as well.
- Golden showers.
- Incest talk…

I can tone it down or up depending on your level of comfort.

Well, it's nice to know that even in this day and age, not every online dater is a monstrous, shirtless snuggler. There are also those singles looking for the one girl who hates herself, is willing to provide him with free erotica, and is open to being forced raped by a stranger and his closest friends whenever he wants. Now get back out there, champ!

* On a side note, what the fuck is "full-on" date rape? A more committed, all-systems-go version of regular old date rape?

Photo by d70focus

These rape prevention tips, like all trustworthy advice, came to me courtesy of a friend's ex-roommate's mom's yoga instructor. Some of the ideas here, culled from interviews with imprisoned rapists, are helpful enough—"be aware of your surroundings"; "go for the groin"; "if you are ever thrown into the trunk of a car, kick out the back tail lights and stick your arm out the hole and start waving like crazy." Others—don't wear clothes you can remove, stop helping babies, never ever drive anywhere—are more likely to keep women dependent than protected.

As we've seen before, targeting rape prevention advice at women can start off as empowering, and slowly descend into crippling—or worse, preemptive victim blaming. I don't know—maybe it's because I hesitate to take the advice of convicted rapists. But something tells me that it might be more worthwhile focus our efforts on the rapists who rape people, instead of burdening every woman with paranoia, hairstyle advice, and unnecessary umbrellas.

TIP #1: DON'T GROW OUT YOUR HAIR.

The first thing men look for in a potential victim is hairstyle.. They are most likely to go after a woman with a ponytail, bun, braid or other hairstyle that can easily be grabbed. They are also likely to go after a woman
with long hair. Women with short hair are not common targets.

Yes: rapists are administering hairstyle advice now. As a woman with short hair—I told my stylist to give me the 'Ol Rape-Proof Cut w/ Blow Dry—I find this tidbit a bit counter-intuitive (and vaguely insulting). I'm sure some potential rapists must consider us short-hairs too masculine, sexless, or gay to bother to grab. On the other hand, there are those rapists who think that a good forced entry is all we need to become real women. So, I don't know—wear a hat?

—

TIP #2: DON'T WEAR ANYTHING THAT CAN BE CUT BY A SCISSOR.

The second thing men look for is clothing. They will look for women who's clothing is easy to remove quickly. Many of them carry scissors around specifically to cut clothing.

Good thing I invested in a full wardrobe of rubber overalls this year. Sure, only wearing clothes that cannot be cut off—much less manually removed!—from your body may make you more resistant to heat stroke and/or drowning. Ask yourself: Do I really need to be leaving the house today?

—

TIP #3: DON'T STAY OUT LATE (DON'T WAKE UP EARLY, EITHER).

Men are most likely to attack & rape in the early morning, between 5:00 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.

So you should probably drop out of high school.

—

TIP #4: DON'T EAT. DON'T WORK. DON'T PISS.

The number one place women are abducted from/attacked is grocery store parking lots. The number two: office parking lots/garages. Number three: public restrooms.

Don't have a man to protect you? Think twice about performing every daily human function. Bonus: Fearing the grocery store doubles as a cost-effective diet.

—

TIP #5: DON'T LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT A LARGE, PHALLIC OBJECT.

These men said they would not pick on women who have umbrellas, or other similar objects that can be used from a distance, in their hands.

Not raining? Try carying around a "similar object" everywhere you go—like a big lead pole, or a decorative cane. You know the old saying: better off carrying a useless decorative cane than sorry.

—

TIP #6: DON'T CARE SO MUCH ABOUT BABIES.

Someone just told me that her friend heard a crying baby on her porch the night before last, and she called the police because it was lat e and she thought it was weird. The police told her 'Whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.' The lady then said that it sounded like the baby had crawled near a window, and she was worried that it would crawl to the street and get run over. The policeman said, 'We already have a unit on the way, whatever you do, DO NOT open the door.' He told her that they think a serial killer has a baby's cry recorded and uses it to coax women out of their homes thinking that someone dropped off a baby. He said they have not verified it, but have had several calls by women saying that they hear baby's cries outside their doors when they're home alone at night. Please pass this on and DO NOT open the door for a crying baby.

What?

—

TIP #7: DON'T BE SO COMFORTABLE LIVING YOUR LIFE.

IT IS ALWAYS BETTER TO BE SAFE THAN SORRY. (And better paranoid than dead.)

Paranoid or Dead: The modern woman's dilemma.

—

TIP #8: DON'T BE SUCH A WOMAN.

As women, we are always trying to be sympathetic: STOP! 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.

Our tipster tells us to stop being "sympathetic," but the real message here is, "stop being so fucking stupid." (Oh, and the old useless decorative cane trick? We invented that shit). It's not difficult to parse the real message in this advice—If you don't want to get raped, stop being a woman. And if you can't do that, live a life in complete fear of who you are. Stop growing your hair out—you tempt the rapists. Stop wearing skirts—you tempt the rapists. And then a little curveball: Stop doing anything too manly, either, like leaving the house without a man—you tempt the rapists. Just stop having a vagina to tempt the rapists already. Instead, live your life paralyzed by a fear of rape, because, as one tip says, it's "better than having them find your body in a remote location." Because, as women, that's our only choice: hate our lives, or die horrifically. Even the vagina spaceship sounds better than this.

1976: "This invention relates to inserts for use within the vagina of a woman for the harming of a man who may insert a penis into the vagina of the woman. This invention represents improvements in such inserts and it provides more efficient means to lock on the penis and to lacerate the locked on penis."

Pros: Claims to be an improvement on previous penis weapons stored within the vagina.

Cons: Improves upon penis weapons stored within the vagina by locking onto the penis you don't want inside you.

—

1977: "An anti-rape device adapted to be inserted into the vaginal cavity of a human female, comprising a base member, elongated penis penetrating means attached to the base member to project outwardly toward the mouth of the vaginal cavity when the device is operationally positioned within the vaginal cavity of a human female, and retractable means normally surrounding said elongated penis penetrating means to protect the walls of the vaginal cavity from contacting said penis penetrating means, said retractable means being adapted to be retracted upon penetration of the vaginal cavity by a male penis to permit penetration of the penis by said penis penetrating means."

Pros: At least attempts to "protect the walls of the vaginal cavity" from the penis weapon.

Cons: Where does the tampon go? What if I have to pee? How do I explain this to my consensual sex partner? "Will you excuse my while I slip into something less likely to elongate from my vaginal opening to irreversibly damage your genitalia?"

—

1978: "An anti-rape defensive weapon is provided comprising a barbed shank similar to a fish-hook barb carried in a barrel like hand grip arranged to expose the barbed shank when the device is pressed against the flesh of an assailant."

Pros: Does not go into your vagina; "is not illegal to carry because it does not meet the description of a lethal weapon."

Cons: So, this anti-rape device works by not stuffing a barbed shank inside a vagina? I'm . . . not exactly following.

—

1979: "An anti-rape device having a hollow housing adapted to be worn within a human vagina. The housing has a front opening and contains a hypodermic syringe having a volume of rape-deterring fluid and a needle facing and aligned with the front opening."

Pros: It's . . . elaborate.

Cons: Seriously, what woman would consent to putting a hypodermic needle inside her vagina? Is her dad making her do this? If so, she should tell a trusted friend, because she should not have to be doing this. Also, couldn't we put this rape-deterring fluid technology to use somewhere else? Like in a handbag?

—

1983: "An anti-rape device is adapted to be worn in the vaginal cavity of a female. The device comprises a hollow housing with adhesive means on the interior of the housing to adhere to any rapist and an irritant-containing pouch positioned within the housing which ruptures upon forceful contact with the rapist. The adhesive means ensures the device will adhere to the rapist thereby causing continued discomfort."

Pros: It's like a science experiment in your vagina!

Cons: I'm no scientist.

—

1993: "A rape prevention device including a belt adapted to encircle the waist of a wearer and a shield portion extending through the legs and crotch of the wearer from a rear region of the belt to a front region of the belt. The shield portion includes a plurality of shield segments adapted to cover the genitalia of the wearer."

Pros: Again, not technically insode the vagina.

Cons: Just a chastity belt.

—

1997: "A female security device placed within a vaginal cavity to protect and minimize physical damage caused by physical sexual intercourse. The female security device includes a cylindrical housing including a first open end and a second closed end. The second closed end is inserted deeper within the vaginal cavity than the first open end and an inner surface of the cylindrical housing is able to absorb any fluid dispensed therein. Pressure sensors are positioned there- around for sensing contractions in walls of the vaginal cavity and a pressure sensor is positioned therein for sensing pressure caused by insertion of an object into the cylindrical cavity. A needle is positioned to extend into the cylindrical cavity for contacting the object inserted therein and retaining a tissue sample of the object. A microcomputer is connected to the external and internal sensors for determining when an object has been inserted therein and a reservoir is connected for releasing an identification dye to discolor the object upon making such a determination. Furthermore, the needle is able to inject a tissue irritant into the object upon contact therewith and thus cause an irritation to form. An auditory recorder may also be connected to the microcomputer and activated upon a determination that an object has been inserted therein for recording all sounds occurring during the sexual intercourse and a vibrating ring may be activated at that time to notify the user that the device has been activated."

Pros: Pressure sensors? Check. Microcomputer? Check. Airbag? Check. Tissue irritant? Check. Auditory recorder? Check. Vibrating ring which alerts you that your vagina has  been breached, in case you didn't notice? Check.

Cons: Not for the woman unequipped to land a spaceship into her vagina.

What's the rapiest song you could choose to sing at your local watering hole's karaoke night? Three out of three random Internet commenters agree: Sublime's "Date Rape" will never get you laid. Readers, please: Don't be Date Rape Karaoke Guy this weekend!

This guy, who calls himself "SINNED," probably does the best karaoke rendition of "Date Rape"  you could hope for—that low grovel! that strained falsetto!—and it's still unimaginably creepy.

You know how I know SINNED puts the "date rape" in "Date Rape"? Because even through this masterful camera phone recording, you may observe how SINNED masterfully changes the "Date Rape" lyrics from "If it wasn't for date rape I'd never get laid" to "If it wasn't for date rape SINNED would never get laid."

That's right—he chose to refer to his rapiness in the third person instead of using the standard "I." That's how rapey he is.

Later in the song, as you will know if you attended Middle School, the rapist becomes the rape victim. This only serves to enhance the grodiness of Date Rape Karaoke Guy, who first identifies with the vaginal rapist, then reveals that he considers anal rape to be hilarious.

I don't care how easy the melody is, dudes: Never, ever, ever be Date Rape Karaoke Guy.

But don't take my word for it! Three out of three random Internet commentators agree that "Date Rape" is the rapiest song you could ever choose to sing, in public, to a fake ska back-up band. With reverb.

Kiki of Seattle writes of her recent run-in with the Date Rape Karaoke Guy:

Unfortunately, Stacy was unable to hear a word I sang as some creepy guy kept talking to her throught my entire song. He asked her to dance repeatedly and would not take a hint. At one he told her that he was doing her a favor in asking her to dance. Once I had finished, I sat down and that creepy guy (we'll refer to him as Perve) started talking to me. I just wanted to drink my diet coke and enjoy our girl time in peace. Perve wanted me to dance with him. I did not want to dance with Perve, and I told him that I would not be dancing.

A couple songs later, Stacy gave a lovely performance of "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac. A few songs after that, it was Perve's time to shine. His song of choice? "Date Rape" by Sublime. Considering that this particular venue prides itself on its 12,000+ song book, I don't understand why that would be the song he chose. It did, however, fit him perfectly.

Karaoke Queen "Sonya," meanwhile, doles out some advice on how to avoid becoming Date Rape Karaoke Gay: Don't sing Sublime's "Date Rape." It's that easy:

"Date Rape.” Like, really? Why would you pick that? I mean, you’re at a bar, probably trying to get laid, and you’re gonna sing Date Rape? Really?

Also, don't sing Sublime's "Santeria."

But the most damning evidence comes from the guy with the camera phone who took the initiative to videotape Date Rape Karaoke Guy and post the footage on YouTube:

SINNED has done this song 120 times now and still can't get laid! Poor bastard!

Michael Jackson's death at 50 from cardiac arrest has inspired the entire world to revisit the King of Pop's body of work. And though I'm a huge MJ fan, I'd be remiss in my role as Pop Culture Fun Killer if I didn't point out some defining characteristics of Jackson's music videos: rapey, stalkey, and victim-blamey.

Off-screen, Jackson's sex life was notoriously tortured—rumors in the press pegged Jackson alternately as a lifelong virgin, a pedophile, and a freak. In his music videos, we saw Jackson play with sexual violence and physical domination in order to portray the image of complete sexual control.

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: "The Way You Make Me Feel"

Relevant Lyrics:

The way you make me feel
You really turn me on
You knock me off of my feet
My lonely days are gone

Why It's So Rapey: Here, Michael Jackson presents an interesting contribution to the Date Rape Canon—one that defies lyrical explanation. The words to "The Way You Make Me Feel" only convey that the object of Jackson's affection "really turns [him] on." The song's undertones of sexual violence all come courtesy Jackson's notoriously specific body language. The music video makes clear the way the woman makes Jackson feel—like stalking, verbally harassing, and physically intimidating her into loving him.

Meanwhile, Jackson's female victim repeatedly fails to verbally dissuade Jackson from terrorizing her. The woman in the video, who attempts to evade Jackson's advances through the darkened night streets, remains silent throughout. The disconnect between Jackson's physical and verbal messages, and the woman's inability to articulate opposition, mirror the unspoken nature of much sexual violence, which often goes unidentified and unreported. But it's not the only MJ jam to play on the stalking theme:

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: "Billie Jean"

Relevant Lyrics:

For forty days and for forty nights
The law was on her side
But who can stand when she's in demand
Her schemes and plans
'Cause we danced on the floor in the round
So take my strong advice, just remember to always think twice

Why It's So Rapey: In the "Billie Jean" video, a rogue Michael Jackson sneaks into a woman's bed at night as he's chased by a band of police. The woman, obscured beneath the covers, shows no sign of being awake, or in fact registering Jackson's presence at all! The sheets nevertheless erupt into a metaphorical flash of light, signifying doin' it. Then, Jackson vanishes into thin air, underlining the song's assertion that Billie Jean is totally lying about all of this. Tragically for MJ, charges of sexual assault weren't relegated to the fictional sphere: Jackson was acquitted of sex abuse allegations in 2005.

Michael Jackson Date Rape Anthem: "Thriller"

Relevant Lyrics:

They're out to get you, there's demons closing in on every side
They will possess you unless you change that number on your dial
Now is the time for you and I to cuddle close together, yeah
All through the night I'll save you from the terror on the screen
I'll make you see

That this is thriller, thriller night
'Cause I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try
Thriller, thriller night
So let me hold you tight and share a
Killer, diller, chiller, thriller here tonight

Why It's So Rapey: In "Thriller," a young man attempts to scare his date by taunting herwith horror film phantoms—and insisting that she needs to come home with him to avoid them.

There's a domestic violence lesson to be learned here: The guy who insists that you need his protection in return for sexual favors (implied) is actually much more dangerous than any of the shit he's claiming to protect you from. (" I can thrill you more than any ghost would ever dare try.") In the case of "Thriller," the bogeyman keeping the girl close to Jackson takes the form of ghouls, blood-seeking creatures, and "the thing with forty eyes." In real life, the phantom dangers abusive men use to make women stay include "never being able to find a guy like me again," "being unhappy forever," and/or "doing it for the kids."

It was just seven months ago that local blogger M@ joined the District haters over at Why I Hate D.C. In that time, M@'s very first post on the blog—which detailed a fantasy jog, rape, and murder on the Memorial Bridge—has inspired hundreds of anonymous comments threatening M@'s rape and death.

Last night, M@ was finally taken out of his misery. In a blog post published at 9:51 p.m., site administrator Dave Stroup wrote, "Due to a variety of reasons, I must report that M@ is no longer a contributor at why.i.hate.dc." He made one of those reasons clear: "the moment that this site becomes associated with rape fantasy and all of the other bizarre circumstances surrounding some posts, is the moment something has to be done."

M@ was the first to comment on the post.

"Well, Dave, it was time for me to quit this blog anyhow since I'm currently trying to leave the city," he wrote. "I find it interesting that now would be the time for you to object to any content after seven months of vitriolic posting and commenting—but I'm OK with it. I'm literally moving on...."

In a post on his personal blog titled "M@: In His Own Words," M@ added: "Though the administrator says he can no longer be associated with my brand of writing, I really think it's best that I no longer associate myself with hack posts about the things that so many moronic 'D.C. Bloggers' seem to care about." He also took issue with Stroup's main rationale for dumping him: "I do not fantasize about rape," M@ wrote.

M@ isn't the only Why I Hate D.C. contributor to move on in recent days. Marissa, who blogs at The Anti DC, recently recused herself from her Why I Hate D.C. duties, citing "out of control obnoxious comments." In an e-mail, Stroup explained that M@'s work on the blog had been the source of distraction for the blog's other contributors:

The mission of Why I Hate DC is to provide insightful, humorous and often subversive commentary on life in the District of Columbia. M@'s posts had strayed from this mission and as such he is no longer affiliated with the blog. This fiasco has already caused enough trouble, and distracted me from getting back to writing about Mayor Fenty and the Metro.

Back on Why I Hate D.C., other commenters bid M@ farewell:

"long overdue," wrote heather.

"Total freakshow," Anonymous added.

"The Lazy Iguana" chimed in with commentary on the entirety of Why I Hate D.C., comparing the Web site to this "Happy Days" clip:

[youtube:v=MpraJYnbVtE]

In an e-mail, which he also posted as a "RELEASE" on the blog, M@ had this to say about his parting of ways with Why I Hate D.C.:

Though greatly saddened by Dave Stroup’s decision to remove me as a contributor to “Why I Hate D.C.,” I welcome the chance to pursue new challenges and opportunities.

For the most part, the readership suffers from average intelligence, incapable of understanding not only irony but nuance beyond commentary on the city’s subway system or phenomena they refer to as “douchebaggery.” My work there seems akin to hiring an M Street attorney to negotiate the sale of an ice cream cone—way too much horsepower.

Daniel Hoffman Gill, my friend, puts its best: “I find [Dave Stroup’s] 'sacking' of you to be totally bizarre and flawed–clearly he’s jealous–but one thing is true, he has done you a favour; that blog was a shithole of mongbats.”

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

I have a confession to make: I love Dude Comedies. Any film where Two to Five Douchey Guys Shirk Their Societal Obligations to Embark on a Night They'll Never Forget can probably coax ten bucks out of me. I'll even watch the Dude Comedies where all female characters are relegated to the Fun-Hating-Wife or Slutty-Sex-Object category, as long as it allows for maximum high jinks. Superbad: Loved it! Old School: Great! 40 Year Old Virgin: Totally convinced me to overlook the whole chastity message! Talladega Nights: Watched it!

I understand these movies are literred with sexism and homophobia and penises; I am simply immune to it. My condition has become so severe that this is looking pretty good to me, honestly.

But no Dude Comedy can draw me in as douchily as the Judd Apatow Dude Comedy. I am powerless to it. I have a theory: Paul Rudd is often one of the dudes. But even a Clueless pedigree can't justify my apparent obsession with man-children, marijuana-fueled Lord of the Rings fantasies, and underlying date-rape themes.

Help me.

In this week's Sexist Beatdown, Sady of Tiger Beatdown tries. We laughed, we cried, we had a shmashmortion.

SADY: hello there lady. are you prepared – prepared, that is, to debate the fine points of dude comedy?

AMANDA: i can't say i'm as prepared as you are, sady. but i am willing to confess: i believe that i enjoyed nearly all the films you profiled in your apatow series. when i saw them. in the theater.

SADY: yes, it's true: apatow has become my great white whale. he is basically all i think about these days. i dream in Apatowvision. well: i enjoyed some of them too! (shhhhhh.) I enjoyed "Knocked Up" immensely, for example.

AMANDA: i CRIED at the end of knocked up. i was on a really bad date, which may have had something to do with it.

SADY: OH GOD. YOU SHARE MY TERRIBLE SECRET. i cried too. also, broke up with the dude i saw it with?

AMANDA: same. well i'm glad we've cleared the air.

[youtube:v=lVam-fshUgw]
Judd Apatow craftily inserted this song into the film's end credits in order to make me cry.

SADY: yeah. my reactions to "knocked up" kind of define my relationship to the Apatow canon. I was totally digging Leslie Mann's character – oh, that poor lady! She is totally at the end of her rope! – and then left the theater, and discussed it with people, and realized that YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE ROOTING FOR PAUL RUDD. In that particular sub-plot.

AMANDA: i think i had the same reaction as you did, honestly. i thought she was sympathetic, but totally pathetic. all of apatow's male characters are pathetic, too, but they seem to ease out of that gracefully without having to think about it too much.

SADY: right – plus, they are pathetic in a totally fun way! they get to hang out and do bong hits and fart on each others' pillows and such! so, by the end, where it's like, "sadly, we realize that procreative monogamy with one of these strange 'woman' creatures is necessary to maturation" you kind of get their sadness at giving up the pillow farts and lightbub battles. whereas women are just grown-ass-adults by the time they hit puberty, apparently. or at least they're scripted that way.

AMANDA: yeah, so the women are just haggard at the end. one thing your reviews always touch on are these coiteries of man-children that apatow scripts. and you mention the rejoinder from defenders of the movie that 'you're not supposed to LIKE or IDENTIFY with them.' and i do think that you are supposed to like these characters, and even like them for (and not despite of) their date rape punch-lines. but they're still in a context, i think, where they're there to provide a contrast to the hero of the story. their douchiness must be overcome, basically.

SADY: yeah, exactly. they're given such loving attention, and their little world of date-rape jokes and vague bromosocial lady-avoidance is presented as so much fun. so you forgive them for being immature in order to forgive your own immaturity, like, "well, my wife may be at home sobbing but i can't help it! i'm a regular bro!" and then you get a Valuable Life Lesson that sticks for maybe ten to fifteen minutes.

AMANDA: ... but they're funny!

SADY: it's true! sometimes they really really are! I subconsciously repeat Jonah Hill's pronunciation of "abortion" as "shmushmortion" at least once a week! and then i realize it's a joke about making a lady have an abortion because obviously her fetus is YOUR decision!

AMANDA: yeah. and apatow's versions of women i cannot excuse. they are either bitches or whores. but caricatures of douchebags, even lovable ones, i cannot resist. see: paul rudd in wet hot american summer. i think it's just possible to love the character and not the character if they were a real person / your boyfriend.

[youtube:v=ND7yJ7sMosk]

SADY: exactly. question: where the lady douchebags at? where are the stoned ladies that can't get it together to have an actual apartment, and get jobs that require nothing of them because they're afraid real jobs would be too much of a commitment, and pretend to be gandalf or some business when no-one's looking? the ladies who would rather watch "the muppet show," again, than do anything useful with their lives? WHERE ARE THOSE LADIES? Because I want movies about them! They exist! So I am told in a way that has nothing to do with my own personal life, at all.

AMANDA: i know, which is why I desperately want Apatow to write a movie for them. partly because i think his brain might explode, but also because i think it would be funny.

[youtube:v=V4QVGcnjZeM]

SADY: exactly. like, writing a movie about a lady that is not a sexy/stupid harlot or a knife-tongued scold would be fantastic. because the closest we've got to an Apatowomany character, right now, is Juno. I DON'T WANT JUNO.

AMANDA: sometimes i look at popular culture and i think of the female characters who have had abortions and i get really sad that like carrie bradshaw is the only one i can think of. but that's a tangent.

SADY: yes, well, my forthcoming feature movie film, "50 First Abortions," will be an exciting new direction for film, i think.

AMANDA: indeed. I think we should start a letter campaign that mirrors the request of Pixar to make a film with a heroine who is not a princess.

SADY: but, you know? i think that women have all the same maturity/commitment/not-being-an-idiot problems that these dudes have. PLUS, what with all the work we have to do to make our bodies presentable, there are many more occasions for gross jokes about our inherent schlubbiness. HUMOROUS BIKINI WAXING SCENE? I think so!

This week, comments got heated on Who Can Make a Rape Joke?, inspiring a forthcoming piece, "Who Can Write An Article About Who Can Make A Rape Joke?"

Art says:

To say that Foxx’s Blame It has a “date rape theme” is a misinterpretation of the song at best and disingenuous at worst.

Amanda Hess says:

@Art: Can I entice you to change your mind with the following lyrical sample from Blame It (On the Alcohol) Remix?

T Pain:

Shawty didn’t you know? / it’s going down, we can go and kick it like judo / You know what I mean / Shawty got drunk, thought it all was a dream / So I made her say ahh, ah aaa

So, Shawty was so passed out she thought she was dreaming, so T Pain confirmed she could consent by forcing her to say “ahh.” AAHHHH! It must be real hard to get that noise out of a passed out drunk woman that T. Pain is fucking.

Joe says:

There’s no chance that Tribe Called Quest would ever EVER be considered a gangsta rap group or a group capable of making a gangsta rap song. Do you personally know any black person’s middle name? Because if you did that would probably mean that you were comfortable with hip hop and could distinguish between the genres. You do an excellent job of identifying misogny in everyday life, you just happen to be dead wrong in this regard.

Ryan says:

I agree with Joe. A Tribe Called Quest is as close to gangsta rap as the Beastie Boys are. Actually, I think the Beastie Boys are a bit closer to gangsta rap than Tribe.

Amanda Hess says:

Joe & Ryan -

I would not describe A Tribe Called Quest as gangsta rap, and I’m sorry if that wasn’t made clear.

My point about Tribe is this:

When “The Infamous Date Rape” was released, reviewers called it “just plain misogynistic.” Since then, however—”fifteen years of gangsta rap later”—reviewers have been forced to parse the misogyny of many, many rap songs that are (unlike Tribe) straight-up, unapologetically misogynistic. So through the lens of gangsta rap’s mainstream popularity over the past 20 years, the song now looks pretty positive to women.

Art says:

Amanda H., I still say you’re reaching. I will certainly admit that the T-Pain verse you quoted is disgusting and describes what I would consider date rape. No argument from me there. If you want to call T-Pain out for the verse…fine. If you want to call Foxx out for allowing the verse on his single…fine. BUT, I still say your assertion that Blame It has a “date-rape theme” is either either misguided or disingenuous. One verse does not a theme make. Further you wrote, “The song is, essentially, an attempted date rape by a movie star [Foxx] and a dude who sounds like a robot [Pain]“. The problem is there are no lyrics from Foxx that describe date-rape. In fact, other than the Pain verse you quoted, there are no others period.

Photo by fabbio

Date Rape Anthem: Vakill's "Worst Fears Confirmed"

Relevant Lyrics:

It's alright to show the late greats love
But some of y'all are riding dicks and don't know it like a date-rape drug
Catch me with your little niece on the couch
Kick her out the house with no blouse, Capris on slouch
I ain't fuck I just poked at her throat like a Capri sun pouch
Point blank I'm a fucking problem capech I'm out
And there it is

Why It's So Rapey: Well, this is interesting. Vakill, born Donald Mason, is "known for his literate, witty, punch line-filled lyricism." As far as date-rape jokes go, Vakill's isn't terribly offensive: He encourages listeners to rethink their idols by comparing blind hip-hop worship to being drugged and raped.

But this is a song called "Worst Fears Confirmed," and Vakill isn't going to let us off that easy. Vakill waits until after the date-rape joke to roll out the offensive rapiness. He goes on to outline a scenario where he puts his penis down the throat of a topless "little niece," an action he compares to a straw poking "at her throat like a Capri sun pouch." Recall that a straw must actually tear all the way through the skin of a Capri sun pouch in order to suck out the delicious liquid! Which is not a model of oral sex I can support for anyone, much less a sex partner as creepily described as the "your little niece" we have here.

Well, all fears confirmed now! I'd say Vakill's work here is done.

So, R. Kelly has pulled the vocoder out of the closet and recorded a remix to Lil' Wayne's "Every Girl." The original track declares, "I wish I could fuck every girl in the world." Wayne doesn't get into the logistics, but that's gotta be a scenario that involves some nonconsensual sex. The original song, at least, sidesteps outright rape by inserting "in about 3 years" before the line "holla at me, Miley Cyrus."

But now that the lyrics have been taken from Wayne's mouth and into the hands of noted teen enthusiast R. Kelly, the use of the world "girl" seems a whole lot fuckin' creepier. Let's recap:

1995: R. Kelly, 27, marries 15-year-old Aaliyah while working with her on her debut album titled, strangely enough, "Age Ain't Nothing But A Number."

2002: R. Kelly, 35, is "indicted on 21 counts of having sexual intercourse with a minor." He is later acquitted.

2008: R. Kelly, 41, tells BET:

BET: Let me ask you something real that millions of Americans are thinking about and wondering about you. Do you like teenage girls?

Kelly: When you say teenage, how old are we talking?

BET: Girls who are teenagers.

Kelly: 19?

BET: 19 and younger.

Kelly: I have some 19-year-old friends, but I don’t like anybody illegal if that’s what we’re talking about, underage.

2009: R. Kelly, 42, releases a song in which he declares, "I want to fuck every girl in the world." Among them: a girl, her friend, her sister, her cousin, her mom, and "the Statue of Liberty."

I suppose this song could be good PR for R. Kelly. See, he likes older women too—the Statue of Liberty is like over 100 years old! But I have to believe that the repetition, over and over, of wanting to fuck girls  can't be doing him any favors. Add to that the fact that this song is absolutely terrible, and we might havethe—but can it be true? Hath the Gods of Nonconsensual Sex Tracks finally revealed to us the most worthless date rape jam ever: A song that sounds completely terribly, and is also super sexually creepy? I think we've got him!

The lawsuit alleges that "two basketball players raped [the student] at a May 2008 party at Townhouses, campus housing on Pershing Avenue, and that a third player came into the room where she was and assaulted her as the first two players were leaving."

Pacific spokesman Richard Rojo isn't denying that the incident occurred. But he is denying that it was rape, saying: "We would call it date rape."

You know what date rape is? I'll give you a hint: It's right there in the name! It's RAPE. Not to Rojo, RecordNet reports:

Rojo said the university considers "outright rape" and date rape to be different, in that date rape does not involve "a rapist jumping out of bushes and attacking people randomly."

It's great to hear that rape is now a completely random crime that occurs only in proximity to a particular type of flora (bushes). Since 80 percent of rapists are known to the victim, this new development should severely cut down on rapes! Unfortunately, it also means that a lot more men are going to be getting raped, since victims are chosen entirely at random. I say, burn the bushes! Burn them! Then, when Richard Rojo has no more on-campus rapes to report, he can write his own dictionary or something. I'd buy it!

When I first described Jamie Foxx's "Blame It (On the Alcohol)" as a date rape jam, I lamented that the song didn't allow Foxx's female target on the dance floor any input into the situation. "But what about the woman in the song?" I asked. "Of course, no holla back joint has dropped from Foxx’s fictional honey, so we can’t tell what she’s really thinking."

But I think I've found her! And she is Lady Gaga. In extreme boozin' song "Just Dance," Gaga declares:

"I've had a little bit too much, much."

"Where are my keys? I lost my phone."

"What's going on on the floor?"

"I can't see straight anymore."

"What's the name of this club?"

"How'd I turn my shirt inside out?"

Anyway, Lady Gaga is wasted. So what does she want to do now?:

Just dance, gonna be okay, da da doo-doo-mmm
Just dance, spin that record babe, da da doo-doo-mmm

Cool, whatever. Just dance, Lady. But goddamnit, here comes up-and-coming R&B artist Colby O'Donis:

Shawty I can see that you got so much energy
The way you're twirlin' up them hips 'round and 'round
And now there's no reason at all why you can't leave here with me
In the meantime stay and let me watch you break it down

Typical. Gaga just wants to dance! "Just," as in "only the dancing," is even in the title of the song. Colby O wants her to dance into his pants—and there's "no reason at all" why that shouldn't happen. Here's one reason: She can't figure out how her shirt got turned inside out.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out how this one ends because the lyrics then descend into incomprehensibility. Most agree that Gaga is saying "Spend the last dough / In your pocko" in the end there, but one interpretation offers a much more chilling ending: "It's been molesto / I got it / And your popped coll."

Molesto . . . Popped collar . . . AHHHHHHHHHH!