What The Hell Is A Nice Guy™, Anyway?

Today, our favorite sex writer tackles the age-old question of Nice Guys™. Specifically, Do they really finish last? To investigate, Laura Sessions Stepp interviews Britney, a woman who spent five months dating a dude who sounds like a drug dealer. More »

Is It Too Soon To Call SexReally The Worst Sex Website Ever?

Imagine the last person you'd ever want to see writing a sex and relationships blog for twenty-something women. Is that individual hook-up propagandist and befuddled old person Laura Sessions Stepp? Then it's your unlucky day. 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 »

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 »

'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 »