He Had Magic. Lovely, Lovely Rapin' Magic.

Shaker Tasha just emailed me this story about a 21-year-old male Lewis & Clark College student who was suspended for a semester after "forc[ing a 19-year-old female student] to perform oral sex on him"—or, as we around here call it, raping her.

There are a lot of upsetting things about the incident itself, the rapist's punishment, and the response to the rape—including the fact that the victim "calls what happened to her something akin to 'gray rape,' a term she learned from an article in Cosmopolitan written by Washington Post journalist Laura Sessions Stepp." That poor girl. Gray rape, of course, does not exist, and it's a term whose only purpose is to diminish the gravity of any rape which fails to conform to some imaginary archetypical stranger rape.

Cara gets into a lot of detail here, Marcella examines the Real Violence Behind So-Called Gray Rape, and Jessica reiterates "once more, with feeling: There is no such thing as 'gray rape'."

I don't have much to add to all of the above, although I'd like to point out one quick thing with regard to the reporting at the first link. After the first 767 words of this 3,000+ word story, this is what I knew about the rapist, Morgan Shaw-Fox:

He is "a scholarship student from Boulder, Colo." He "was a well-known student, a charismatic 21-year-old junior with ambitions of becoming an actor. A beat-boxer and singer, Shaw-Fox had created Lewis & Clark’s first a cappella group." He "does apparently have a degree of appeal." He has "this kind of magic." He has "a very sexual and hot vibe coming from him." His "nickname for himself on his MySpace page is 'Morgazm'.”

And this is what I knew about his victim, Helen Hunter:

She is a sophomore at Lewis & Clark. She's 19.

In a world where journalists have to pack as much information as possible into the first sentence, because most people don't read more than two paragraphs of any story, I had to read nearly 800 words before I found out anything about this rapist aside from what an awesome fucking dude he is (except, ya know, for the whole raping thing), or anything that humanized his victim in the same way he had been humanized.

Huh.