"Not Rape Epidemic": The Modeling Industry Is Anything But Immune

The modeling industry sets up camp at the crossroads of youth & beauty and age & wealth — and moreover, it's an arena where those qualities cleave to the most predictable gender and power divide.

That Dear Abby "My Brother Raped My Wife" Thing Actually Happened (And It Was Legal!?)

Here's a familiar familial tale! Remember the one about the woman who's fast asleep in her room when suddenly a man she thinks is her husband comes in and they have sex only to at some later point realize that it was actually her husband's perverted brother? Yes, Dear Abby got a query about this a few weeks back, and she didn't believe the story, so we got all ragey about that, and then Dan Savage said he, too, disbelieved the story, and we unleashed some lite venom on him, but by that point our faith in our own instincts was somewhat shaken. So imagine how very gratified we are to report to you now that the media has confirmed it: masquerading as your brother to rape her girl is actually a new trend! It happened — basement apartment and all! — to Marissa Lee-Fuentes. More »

How Did "No Means No" Become A Fun Rape Joke?

Hey, look at the T-shirt! It says "No Means No (Well, maybe if I'm drunk.)" Is this an overly, like, Jezebel thing to write a post about? Whatever! It's Friday! Okay, sooooo, "No means no." See the period? Affirmative? Good. After a few drinks and maybe a blow job, you can add another sentence. Such as: "Oh who am I kidding, I have no self-control." Or: "Okay, enough with your dick in my mouth, I changed my mind." Or: "What with the increased bloodflow in the direction of my gonads I am going to have to reconsider that stance." Those and numerous other statements would, in effect, render void and inapplicable the preceding "No." The fact that the word "no" had been uttered prior to the consent, for whatever reason, is moot. And yet! Somehow the often-amusing, eminently human phenomenon that is changing one's mind as to one's amenability to sex with an individual, a process men and women experience with frequency, has been twisted into an excuse for rape. Successfully twisted, we should add: even if the whole "one in four women gets raped in college" is exaggerated, uh...it is one in four. More »

Conservative Critic: College Rape Statistics Are Overinflated

Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, had an essay in yesterday's Los Angeles Times railing against the "phony" rape epidemic on America's college campuses. MacDonald claims that the statistic used by many university rape crisis centers — 20-25% of college women will be sexually victimized — is grossly over-inflated. The statistic, she says, comes from a 1988 study commissioned by Ms., in which a researcher, Mary Koss, classified things as rape that the respondents didn't construe as rape themselves. Writes MacDonald: "One question, for example, asked, 'Have you had sexual intercourse when you didn't want to because a man gave you alcohol or drugs?' — a question that is ambiguous on several fronts, including the woman's degree of incapacitation, the causal relation between being given a drink and having sexual intercourse, and the man's intentions." More »

"Morgan Shaw-Fox Is A Piece Of Shit Rapist"

Blood-boiling-yet-fascinating college rape vigilante justice story time! This time our campus is Monica Lewinsky alma mater Lewis & Clark in Portland, Oregon and the alleged rapist a charismatic aspiring actor and a cappella singer named Morgan "Morgazm" Shaw-Fox. (Words used by various female students to describe him: "magic," "sexual", "hot" and "good at drawing people in." Groan.) Anyway, Helen Hunter had decided a year before that she didn't really want to date him — he had pressured her into cooking Ramen for him, which she did, and giving him head, which she didn't — but one night she drunk-texted him, and despite the warnings of her roommate's boyfriend, she went over. And then

"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. "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.'"

More »

British Politician Says Date Rape Is No Big Whoop

Former Tory Minister of Parliament John Redwood has much of Britain up in arms this week over comments he made about date rape. In a blog post published last Friday, the politician, a crony of Conservative party leader David Cameron, slammed the opposing Labour Party for its "doctrine of equivalence", which treats stranger rape and acquaintance rape in the same fashion. "None of us want men to rape women," Redwood, (shown golfing above), writes, "but there is a difference between a man using unreasonable force to assault a woman on the street, and a disagreement between two lovers over whether there was consent on one particular occasion when the two were spending an evening or night together." More »

Big Brother Contestant On Fingering That Passed Out Housemate: "Well, This Is Africa"

The Big Brother Africa house played host to a castmate-on-castmate rape, and they're airing it on TV. This is, to say the least, a controversy. It starts with the fact that the assailant, a 24-year-old married Tanzanian film student named Richard Bezuidenhout, did not use his penis but his finger to penetrate his housemate, a 29-year-old Nigerian medical assistant named Ofunneka Molokwu, an offense that, as in most countries, is considered rape in South Africa, where the Big Brother Africa house is located, because South Africa has a much-publicized "rape culture", which is one reason some are advocating the airing of this special moment, and also presumably the reason Bezuidenhout defended his actions to his housemates by saying, "Well, this is Africa." Another charming Bezuidenhout moment: he apparently retreated and was filmed drunkenly sniffing his fingers. More »

Cosmopolitan's Date Rape Panel: There Are No Shades Of "Gray" When Vomit Is Involved

Remember last month when Moe wrote about gray rape after casual sex avenger and Washington Post scribe Laura Sessions Stepp published that inflammatory article about it in Cosmopolitan? Well, this morning at John Jay College, Cosmo invited Ms. Sessions Stepp, along with legal experts, psychology professors and anti-violence activists, to discuss and define the concept of "gray rape." There had initially been calls for a protest by rape activism groups, but as far as we could tell, no one showed up to storm the auditorium. Expertly-coiffed Court TV talking head Ashleigh Banfield moderated the morass. Ostensibly the purpose of the the panel was to ask the question, "Is there ever a gray area between consent and denial?" What the panel actually established was that no should always mean no. Revolutionary! More »

Can Rapists Get You Off? Our Questions About How Serial Rapist Jeffrey Marsalis Got Away With It, Answered

Prolific Match.com rapist Jeffrey Marsalis was sentenced last Friday on the offenses the Philadelphia jury charged him with since they lacked the balls or sanity or whatever to stick him him with rape. And though most rapists who get away with it aren't suspected of raping over a hundred girls, going easy on sex criminals turns out to be a pretty common occurrence in Philadelphia, which is one of the reasons we decided to interview Philadelphia Magazine writer Dan Lee, whose shocking-yet-unsurprising, depressingly riveting tale of Marsalis's string of victims we blogged about last week. After the jump, we ask Dan — who is, full disclosure, someone with whom we have shared beers/margaritas/embittered rants on the state of the existence-particularly-ours before, about why men don't understand why women try to date their rapists, and whether Marsalis was any good in bed. More »

'Cosmo' Tells Me I Was 'Gray Raped'; Feministing Says It Was Rape. Are We Really Arguing About This?

Language is a powerful thing. Like: when the Zionists first began settling in the holy city I just visited they named their newspaper the "Palestine Post", after the same group of people who would eventually gain fame for producing the deluded group of destructive (and yes, murderous) radicals Fox News would eventually dub the "homicide bombers." There is something spooky and perverse when a group of otherwise enlightened, democracy-loving people invests so much energy in the effort to control language, and while I'm on the subject, the same goes for people who insist on refer to anti-abortionists as "antichoice," thus removing from them any and all motivations, however misinformed or hypocritical, for coming to that particular political persuasion other than THEY'RE JUST PLAIN EVIL. Which brings us to this issue at hand: rape, and whether it should be legal or kosher or whatever to characterize it as "gray." I believe it should. Like most bloggers, for one, I am a fan of inventing words. "Celebutard" and "emosogynist" are not just fun to say, they neatly encapsulate social ills unique to this era, a category into which we would also classify the increasingly common modern-day problem that is this thing they're now calling "gray rape." More »

'Cosmo' Wonders: Is It Rape If You Had Too Many Jaeger Shots To Remember It Anyway?

True story that I wrote in three minutes because that's exactly how much time I felt like dwelling on it: this one time about nine years ago I got locked out of my house and went home with some vaguely smarmy hair-product using type from my ex-boyfriend's frat. I had slept with maybe two or three guys prior to that — it was the summer between sophomore and junior year of college — so when he, after about a half hour of fooling around, put on a condom I was like, "Whooooah, what are you doing?" But I'd had two forties and I kept drifting in and out of consciousness — my tolerance, obviously, wasn't what it is today — and I woke up to find him sticking it in. I'd said 'no' a bunch of times and when I came to I just froze, stopped, turned over and slept. In the morning I chewed him out (by informing him I wasn't putting him on "my list" — oh no she didn't!) and after that he kissed my ass so liberally I thought he might have learned from it. More »