Gray Rape

The documentary we watched in class today helped me to deepen my understanding about sexual assault. I had never realized how common it is, or how easily date rape can occur to anyone. I can definitely imagine the scenario the film portrayed happening in real life, because someone's judgement can become impaired when he or she is trying to impress someone else. I think that situations such as these are most likely to occur during the first few months of college, because most students are trying to impress everybody else and become friends with as many people as possible. I learned about how to listen to somebody who has been raped, and that if anybody ever confides in me about being raped, that I should suggest that the person who has been raped tell the police or campus security. The best way to avoid being put into a situation where you are more prone to being raped is to always travel with a buddy, and to avoid becoming intoxicated when you are with people who you barely know, much less trust.

The article in the New York Times discusses an article that was originally published in Cosmopolitan Magazine and is about what may be a new form of date rape: gray rape. The author of the original article thought of gray rape as a sexual encounter between two people in which it is not clear whether it is consensual or should be considered rape. Usually, a sexual encounter is categorized as gray rape when alcohol is involved, as it impairs an individual's judgement, and it can leave a person unable to remember what had happened when he or she was intoxicated the morning after. In cases such as these, it is extremely difficult to determine which of the two parties initiated the sexual encounter, or whether or not both consented to it. Some of the comments from readers on the bottom of the page were very interesting to me, as many condemned the original article about gray rape published in Cosmopolitan. These people who had commented generally thought that the article was undermining the fact that a woman often has the ability to choose, even most of the time when she is drunk, if she desires to have sex. Although I think that, theoretically, a woman should never be subject to rape, no matter what the circumstances are, I also think that women should be held accountable for their actions in which they may knowingly put themselves into dangerous situations. In many cases, a woman can choose whether she wants to go to a party with almost complete strangers, and if she wants to get wasted. If the man is equally wasted, and both the man and the woman decide to have sex, against their better judgement, then both should suffer the consequences, and it should not be assumed that the man raped the woman.