Once more, with feeling: There is no such thing as “gray rape”

When I first started writing about the myth of gray rape, a bullshit term made up by slut-shamer Laura Sessions Stepp, I didn’t really think the term would end up being as pervasive as it seems to be. The Cosmo article certainly didn’t help.
And stories like this are why the idea that there are somehow shades of rape is so dangerous. A young woman at Lewis & Clark College was raped–not “gray raped,” because it doesn’t exist–by a fellow student.

[The young woman] calls what happened to her something akin to “gray rape,� a term she learned from an article in Cosmopolitan written by Washington Post journalist Laura Sessions Stepp. Hunter admits she initiated the encounter. But she eventually withdrew her consent, she says. “The whole thing was very confusing to me, and I didn’t know what to do about it for such a long time,� she says.

Rape can be confusing, it doesn’t make it “gray.” Feminists have long fought to dispel the myth that initially consenting to one form of intimacy does not make it okay for someone to force another kind on you. In this case, the young woman was hooking up with her eventual-attacker when he forced her to perform oral sex on him. (Trigger warning for what follows)

[His] mattress was on the floor pushed up against a wall, [she] says. “I’m sitting up against the wall on his mattress, and he’s standing over me,â€? she continues. “It started happening, and then he, like, twisted his fingers around my hair and started pulling it and being just kind of violent. I started choking because he was just, like, pushing my head.… I started gagging and choking, and I couldn’t really breathe.â€?…She says she started pushing on Shaw-Fox’s abdomen to tell him to stop. “And he was like, ‘Yeah, that’s right, choke on it.’â€?

There is nothing “gray” about this. There is nothing “gray” about being violent. There is nothing fucking gray about “choke on it.” There is nothing “gray” about rape. Please, enough already.
Thanks to Jake for the link.
UPDATE: To clarify, I’m not criticizing the victim for using the term “gray rape” to describe her assault. I’m criticizing Sessions Stepp and folks like Cosmo for promoting the false notion to young women that not all rape is equal.