When a 38-year-old woman is plastered at a college football game, walks into the men’s restroom, and has sex with an also-drunk 26-year-old stranger in front of a crowd of people, she quite possibly turns the man into a rapist. Or at least becomes the victim of “gray rape,” which is apparently a Cosmo coinage.
If feminists want us to take rape more seriously — and I agree with them that we should, given that the average time served for a rape in the U.S. is a ridiculously low five and a half years — they need to come up with a plausible legal definition that tells men what they’re allowed to do and what they’re not allowed to do. “Obliging a drunk woman, but only when she later decides she regrets sleeping with you, at which point it becomes ‘gray rape’” is not one.
The central problem here is that some feminists think they can have it both ways. Whether or not they plan to do so, they want the right to go out and get drunk with the intent of having casual sex. But if they get drunk without that intention and make a mistake, they want the right to place not only the blame but the legal responsibility for the sexual encounter on the man (even if he got drunk and made a mistake too).
Either drunken consent counts as consent, or it doesn’t. If it does (and I think it should), “gray rape” isn’t rape. If it doesn’t, women must be told not to get drunk and have sex deliberately, because doing so turns men into rapists.