Does attending a frat party equate consensual sex?

Most of us would say no, I hope, but some say yes. According to an article on salon.com, Alex Knepper, a 20-year-old columnist for American University’s student newspaper, wrote that “[a]ny woman who heads to [a fraternity] party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK?”

I do not think Knepper is advocating rape, but I do think he is misinformed.

Knepper sees rape as a black-and-white situation. Rape does not come in such black-and-white situations. Date rape is rape committed by someone the victim knows, possibly someone she trusted. The somewhat-misleading name lends to all sorts of gray areas, many of which Knepper seems incapable of distinguishing. Should women be able to change their mind the next morning and say they were raped? Of course not. That’s not what people are talking about when they use the term “date rape.” Date rape is when a woman says no but is ignored, or when she is drugged, or when she is so intoxicated that she is simply taken advantage of when unconscious.

To Knepper, non-consent is the scary stranger who attacks a woman on the sidewalk in the middle of the night. Consent is any other sexual activity in her life. Knepper sees going into a room with someone at a frat house as a contract that sex will occur. He thinks of all these situations turning into drunken consensual sex with regret the next day, and does not allow for any other scenario. He thinks that date rape is simply women changing their minds the next day, instead of realizing that quite a lot of women change their minds or say “oh hey, this isn’t what I was going for when I came in here with you,” during the actual moment. Then the women pushed into a “too late now, you’re having sex with me whether you like it or not” situation, and that is rape. While being suddenly turned down for sex may be unexpected or disappointing, it is not grounds for raping someone.

Going into someone’s room to listen to them play guitar for half an hour does not come with an automatic promise of sex afterward. Knepper needs to understand that a woman can be making out with the man in his room, and then stand up and say, “I’m really drunk, and I don’t feel comfortable with going too far. I’d like to go home now.” It does not make her a tease or a whore. Knepper does not seem to understand that a woman is the only owner of her body. She makes the decisions as to what happens to it. If she wants to get up and go home, she has every right to get up and go home, without being forced to have sex first. It is not because she thinks that men are born eunuchs, it is because she expects men to act like adults and respect the rights and boundaries of other people.

Women would do well to exercise caution in these situations, of course. Going into a room alone with a drunken frat man is not a particularly fantastic or safe idea. But rape is never the victim’s fault; it is always the offender’s fault. If a woman is raped, it is not her fault because she didn’t protect herself well enough against assailants. It is because someone else thought that their desire to have sex was more important than a woman’s right to decide when and with whom she would like to have sex.

Victim-blaming is not right. It complicates the entire issue of rape, it subjects the victims to even more emotional suffering and complications and it discourages other women from coming forward. If someone says, “No, I do not want to have sex,” then that is the end of the story. Any force or manipulation used to overpower the victim does not make it OK. There is never any justification for raping someone. “No” does not mean “yes,” “maybe,” or “if you can make me.” It means “no,” plain and simple. It is time people like Knepper figured that out.