Date Rape: Just "A Disagreement Between Two Lovers"

While I'm categorically averse to terms like gray rape because they essentially serve to tease out some bit of unnecessarily complicated nuance in what is possibly the easiest concept in the history of the world, I'm also not a fan of the term "date rape," either. Its ostensible purpose is admirable—to convey the ideas that rape is not just a masked man jumping out of the bushes forcing a woman at gunpoint to submit to his will, and that not all rape victims look like they've been brutalized. But, functionally, the term tends to instead reinforce the erroneous notion that not all rape is equal.

Case in point [via Samhita]:

Date rape should be treated differently from attacks on women by strangers, John Redwood has said.

The former cabinet minister - now a senior Tory party adviser - suggested rape accusations made by women against their partners should be treated as "disagreements" between lovers.

…"None of us want men to rape women, 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."

Actually, no, there isn't. What defines rape is a lack of consent—not where it happens, nor whether the rapist has a decent haircut and natty fashion sense, nor if he's known to his victim. In fact, given that women are three times more likely to be raped by someone they know than a stranger, and nine times more likely to be raped in their home, the home of someone they know, or anywhere else than being raped on the street, making what we commonly refer to as "date rape" by far the most prevalent "type" of rape, one might suggest that trying to address the epidemic of sexual assault by diminishing the gravity of "date rape" is akin to claiming to have cured cancer simply by renaming it tumory booboo.

Generally, we need to rethink how we talk about rape, so as not to suggest that there are different kinds, or types, or levels, or whatever of rape. A big part of the obstacle to refining the language is that discussions of rape tend to leave out the rapists—although, in truth, the distinction between "date rape" and "stranger rape" is effectively just shorthand to signal our recognition that there are really two different kinds of rapists.

"Date rape" is regarded as the province of, for lack of a better term, opportunistic rapists, who take advantage of women in particular situations, e.g. a borderline or overtly impaired state of consciousness. These are the rapists at whom ideas about enthusiastic consent are directed, because we acknowledge that they are primarily sex-seeking rapists. "Stranger rape," on the other hand, is regarded as the province of sadistic rapists, for whom using rape as a deliberate weapon is central to the act, for whom the lack of a woman's pleasure isn't a bug, but a feature.

But this is wrong. Plenty of "date rapists" fall into this latter category—which is extremely important to acknowledge, given that "date rape" is far commoner than "stranger rape."

Redwood, like many before him, seems to be suffering from the misapprehension that it is only "a man using unreasonable force to assault a woman on the street" who rape specifically to hurt their victims, but "date rapists" are just good boys who made a mistake—nothing that can't be cured by a Feminism 101 class (or a public official redefining rape). Well, no. Sometimes "date rapists" are sadists who use "unreasonable force" because that's what makes rape so much fun.

That you may have started out on a date with a rapist like that is not the important distinction.

The most vicious cases of stalking and repeat rape that women experience almost without exception follow a relationship with the stalker/rapist. Calling that "date rape," just because they knew (and dated, or were married to) their rapists is manifestly useless—except, perhaps, in minimizing the scenario. Not exactly the direction in which we ought to be heading.

Rape needs to be called rape. Not gray rape. Not date rape. Not "a disagreement between two lovers over whether there was consent on one particular occasion." There's really no need for anything fancier when it simply describes after all, in every situation, a terrible act for which there was no consent.