This is Rape Culture: “Gray Rape.”

Trigger warning.
Community member cunegonde wrote a blog post recently about her experience being psychologically coerced into having sex with a male peer.
Since we live within a rape culture, and we operate within an unequal social system (patriarchy) that certainly affects and sometimes causes our interpersonal experiences, this happens to women all the time.
To a certain extent, this happened to me twice as a teenager, and cunegonde’s brave post inspired me to open up about the experiences.
Incident #1: I was hanging out at my best friend’s house with a couple friends. We were 17. We were drinking and smoking pot, listening to music, gossiping and laughing those head-thrown-back, invincible teenage girl laughs. She invited an old friend of hers over. She told me he just got back from boot camp and he seemed different, strange. He came over, and so did a couple other boys. We got wasted, like 17/18 year olds do. We started flirting. I gave him a lap dance because he asked me to. I drank and smoked more because he told me to. I was very easy to order around and treat like a doormat at the time.

I went upstairs to the bathroom. He followed. When I got out of the bathroom, he was there, in the hallway. He raced up to me and we started making out. I consented to the kissing, but when his hand went down, I pushed it away. “I’m on my period,” I simpered, but the main reason was I didn’t want him to touch me there. He said, “I don’t care,” and kept shrugging off my hand and shoving his hand down my pants and kissing me, kissing my neck and mouth whenever I protested again: “I’m on my period.”
I struggled with him in the hallway, telling him “I’m on my period, I can’t.” He ended up finger-fucking me for a few minutes while I occasionally pushed at his hand, crying. He eventually said, “All right, Jesus, I’m sorry,” and let go. I stood there, giving him a scandalized, tear-drenched look. He looked at the ground, but it wasn’t a guilty look, it was an awkward one. I went back to the bathroom and threw up. When I got out, he was back downstairs. I went downstairs and took a shot with my best friend. She asked me what’s wrong, I told her I threw up. He left a couple minutes or so after I said that. I told her then that “he kept trying to finger-fuck me,” and she squealed, “Oh my God dude he’s so creepy!” and everyone started gossiping about him.
I never explictly said no. My best friend never invited him over again and that was that.
Incident #2: When I was 18, a male acquaintance and I were making out at the bottom of a staircase, adjacent to a hallway. We were both wasted and my very-recently ex-boyfriend (who was verbally and psychologically abusive) was at the house party too, in the kitchen, at the end of the aforementioned hallway. When he tried to go further I resisted, but I didn’t explicitly say no. “I’m too wasted.” “I wanna go smoke a cigarette.” “Let’s go into the kitchen.” He dragged me upstairs. No one could hear me because of all the music and yelling going on in the kitchen and on the back deck.
He dragged me upstairs by my arms. I didn’t physically resist. He took me into a random bedroom and shut the door, standing in front of it. He began kissing me and I just stood there. I was terrified that he would beat me if I resisted, so I didn’t move. When he pulled my shirt off I began to resist, so he threw me up against a wall.
The most surreal part of it was, when he peeled my shirt off before slamming me against the wall, he looked at my breasts and said, “Oh my God. You’re so beautiful,” and kept repeating it while he pressed me up against the wall with his forearm and yanked my pants down. I squirmed and cried but not too loud because like I said before, I was afraid he would beat me.
I never explicitly said no.
He began to finger-fuck me and started to pull down his pants. I wiggled out from under his arm before he could penetrate me and ran downstairs. I told my ex what the acquaintence had done, only saying “he tried to force himself on me.” He met the acquaintence in the hallway, punched him in the face then dragged him outside. The host of the party told him to never set foot on his property again, and the acquaintence stumbled home. He lived a few blocks away. Then everyone went back to partying. Most of the party-goers thought it was just part of the “drama” of the night, and I could sense they considered me to be mostly responsible for it. While having a cigarette with my ex, he talked shit about the guy then tried to have sex with me. I said no, drove drunk with a couple of equally-drunk friends to one of their houses, and passed out. I felt like a used condom that’s been thrown out of a car window.
Notice that I say “I never explicitly said no,” or something to that effect repetivively because that is what echoes in my mind, and probably millions of other women’s minds all over the country. We are held liable. We are not “real” victims. We were not “really” raped. We are volleyed back and forth, public bodies in the debate but stripped of our humanity. In this rape culture, women’s bodies are seen are eternally available for use, whether one wants to police a woman’s body through legislative control, or one wants to exert their sexual dominance and control.
When someone says, “But she was drunk/stoned/wasted,” or “But she was asking for it,” or “But she was totally flirting with him/making out with him” or “She didn’t explicitly say no/fight back so she wasn’t raped” implies that women’s bodies are available for the masses if they indicate any kind of interest, whether its purposefully or unintentionally, or if they’re drunk/stoned/wasted, or if they are wearing a short skirt.
There’s a laundry list of blames. There’s gray rape, which some might say cundegonde and myself have experienced.
Calling it gray rape does not help anything. Debating about whether someone was “really” raped on not does not help anything. It only further shames and silences the countless millions of people who have been psychologically coerced into a sexual situation they wanted no part of. In cunegonde’s situation, she was afraid that her social world might collapse if she didn’t go forward with her abuser. In my situation, I was afraid that they would beat me if I fought back too much, and I didn’t make “a fuss” about it afterward because I knew what people would say. “She was drunk. She was stoned. She kissed him back. She asked for it.”
I can safely say that I am certain the men who psychologically or otherwise manipulate women into sexual situations know what they are doing. They might not consciously know why, but they know they are taking advantage.
Jenny Scheter, a character from Showtime’s popular show The L Word, spoke of this in the middle of season four. In reference to her published memoirs, which detail her brutal rape as a child, she said that our society tells young boys and men, “The girls are here. The girls are here for raping.” They are taking advantage of their position within this rape culture. They also know that many of the women they meet in a “gray rape” situation will not fight back too much, will not press charges, and many of us won’t even be sure if we were raped or not. That’s what we are socially conditioned to think. They know they can. And this is what we really should be talking about.