I have a question

And it’s about rape, so this is the warning.

Specifically, it’s about drinking and rape. Recently, I had begun watching the first season of Veronica Mars. For those of you who don’t know it, it’s about a girl named Veronica Mars in high school whose best friend died a year before the show starts and she tries to figure out who murdered her. Veronica is quite a strong character and I like her a lot.

From the beginning, Veronica has recounted the story of how she lost her virginity – she was drugged and raped at a party. She’s always very clear on this point, that she was raped. She never calls it anything else, never blames the drugs she was slipped or herself for being stupid. (Though she does regret going to the party.) The point is that she remembers nothing after a certain point at the party until the next morning when she wakes up alone and raped. 

But then (SPOILER ALERT)

Then, she finds out what happened – her ex-boyfriend, who was just as completely wasted as she was, (made clear by the show) walks into a bedroom where she had been left by other members of the party. When he sits on the bed next to her, she rouses from her drugged slumber and initiates sexual intercourse. 

After that, she stops calling it rape. 

Rape occurs when someone is too drunk, too drugged, too anything-other-than-sober, to give consent. But Veronica stopped calling it rape after she found out her ex, Duncan, had been just as out of it as she had been and that she had started it and never told him to stop.

My question is: Is it still rape if both people are not in their right mind to give consent? Or is rape (in some circumstances) only what you make of it, like Veronica Mars did when she suddenly changed her mind on what to call it? 

I’m hoping for a real discussion on this because I think that rape has a lot of fuzzy areas. It’s not always cut and dry. I feel like, as feminists, we’ve begun to delve into the mythology of rape (mythologies such as the idea that the common rapist is a stranger on the street, that silence is consent, that anyone deserves to be raped, etc) but that there are many different scenarios to consider. 

Personally, I’m still upset that she stopped calling it rape, but I’m not exactly sure how I feel about the ex-boyfriend, seeing as he was also too drunk to legally give consent and that she initiated and never gave any indication that she didn’t want to continue. It’s a very confusing scenario and the show pretty much doesn’t go any deeper than that after the dynamics are suddenly complicated to such an extreme degree – she just stops calling it rape. Which implies that rape is subjective and I don’t accept that.