Google Genealogy
Wednesday, September 19, 2007 by Rachel McKinney
Feminist Philosophers has this month's Carnival of Feminists (n0. 45), which is packed full of interesting reads. Two posts that really struck me were this and this from abyss2hope about an article running in this month's Cosmopolitan on "the phenomenon of 'gray rape.'"
I'm trying to sort out exactly what it is about the Cosmo article that I find so troubling. One frustration is the way the article introduces the term gray rape as if it were in some sense conceptually parallel to the term date rape -- indeed, as if the "phenomenon" of grey rape was a new strain of an already-identified systemic problem.
The worry here is that the article seems to suggest that the term has much more currency in linguistic communities than it actually does -- in reading this, you'd think you were learning something about how young women use language to deal with sexual assault.
Now, the term's use is an empirical question, and I'm no lexicographer or linguist. However, I am within Cosmo's target demographic (female, early-20s, white, American, pop-culture-addled), I'm a competent language user with lots of similarly-demographically-positioned competent-language-user-friends, and I have three years of experience as a victim advocate with a sexual assault crisis group. I've certainly never heard this word used, and a little Google-genealogy turns up that of the 598 results for "grey rape" and 24,400 for "gray rape," virtually all are responses to or citations of Laura Session Stepp's Cosmo article, with two notable exceptions:
(1) An October 3, 2005 article in the GW Hatchet, the student newspaper at George Washington University. The article opens with a narrative offered from a male student expressing his feelings of being taken advantage of upon waking to find himself in bed with a girl he didn't know. The GW Hatchet article introduces "gray rape" as a term that unnamed "advocacy groups" have coined to refer to situations "where consent or denial is unclear," and goes on to waffle about two different sets of sexual assault statistics, one (1 in 14?) I've certainly never seen before.
(2) The DoubleTongued.org database turned me to an entry that cites a Charlotte Observer article from May 12, 2007, but the link seems to be dead.
I'm tempted to think that the Cosmo article has artificially inflated people's use of the term grey rape, and this troubles me. Reconstructing an event "the morning after" is, I think, a genuine epistemic challenge: the experience of trying to reconstruct a series of events in order to make sense not just of one's feelings, perceptions and judgments at the time, and not just of one's outward behavior (explicit and implicit) at the time, but also of how that behavior was interpreted by someone else is a difficult task. It's critical that one has the appropriate conceptual tools for making sense of these experiences. This isn't just about what counts as rape -- that is, the scope of the term -- but also about the epistemology behind the term's ascription.
One of the things that the introduction of the term date rape accomplished was to take experiences of sexual violence that were in some sense under our conceptual radar and make them explicit. The term itself is a conceptual tool to help us recognize, identify and get clear on occurrences of genuine sexual assault that have been previously absent from traditional understandings of the term. Lois Pineau's classic paper "Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis," and Eric Reitan's more recent "Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept" both give excellent examinations of the theoretical issues at stake in disagreements about the extension of the term, and how the concept of date rape has served an important role in discourse -- public, legal and otherwise.
So: grey rape? Grey rape doesn't seem to help us get clear on anything. It's not breaking new conceptual ground and helping us recognize something we've been overlooking. It's not helping us pick out a property of events, or describe them in a more accurate or more morally insightful way. It's not even a term that people seem to actually use. I say commit it to the flames.
I'm trying to sort out exactly what it is about the Cosmo article that I find so troubling. One frustration is the way the article introduces the term gray rape as if it were in some sense conceptually parallel to the term date rape -- indeed, as if the "phenomenon" of grey rape was a new strain of an already-identified systemic problem.
The worry here is that the article seems to suggest that the term has much more currency in linguistic communities than it actually does -- in reading this, you'd think you were learning something about how young women use language to deal with sexual assault.
Now, the term's use is an empirical question, and I'm no lexicographer or linguist. However, I am within Cosmo's target demographic (female, early-20s, white, American, pop-culture-addled), I'm a competent language user with lots of similarly-demographically-positioned competent-language-user-friends, and I have three years of experience as a victim advocate with a sexual assault crisis group. I've certainly never heard this word used, and a little Google-genealogy turns up that of the 598 results for "grey rape" and 24,400 for "gray rape," virtually all are responses to or citations of Laura Session Stepp's Cosmo article, with two notable exceptions:
(1) An October 3, 2005 article in the GW Hatchet, the student newspaper at George Washington University. The article opens with a narrative offered from a male student expressing his feelings of being taken advantage of upon waking to find himself in bed with a girl he didn't know. The GW Hatchet article introduces "gray rape" as a term that unnamed "advocacy groups" have coined to refer to situations "where consent or denial is unclear," and goes on to waffle about two different sets of sexual assault statistics, one (1 in 14?) I've certainly never seen before.
(2) The DoubleTongued.org database turned me to an entry that cites a Charlotte Observer article from May 12, 2007, but the link seems to be dead.
I'm tempted to think that the Cosmo article has artificially inflated people's use of the term grey rape, and this troubles me. Reconstructing an event "the morning after" is, I think, a genuine epistemic challenge: the experience of trying to reconstruct a series of events in order to make sense not just of one's feelings, perceptions and judgments at the time, and not just of one's outward behavior (explicit and implicit) at the time, but also of how that behavior was interpreted by someone else is a difficult task. It's critical that one has the appropriate conceptual tools for making sense of these experiences. This isn't just about what counts as rape -- that is, the scope of the term -- but also about the epistemology behind the term's ascription.
One of the things that the introduction of the term date rape accomplished was to take experiences of sexual violence that were in some sense under our conceptual radar and make them explicit. The term itself is a conceptual tool to help us recognize, identify and get clear on occurrences of genuine sexual assault that have been previously absent from traditional understandings of the term. Lois Pineau's classic paper "Date Rape: A Feminist Analysis," and Eric Reitan's more recent "Rape as an Essentially Contested Concept" both give excellent examinations of the theoretical issues at stake in disagreements about the extension of the term, and how the concept of date rape has served an important role in discourse -- public, legal and otherwise.
So: grey rape? Grey rape doesn't seem to help us get clear on anything. It's not breaking new conceptual ground and helping us recognize something we've been overlooking. It's not helping us pick out a property of events, or describe them in a more accurate or more morally insightful way. It's not even a term that people seem to actually use. I say commit it to the flames.
It's hard to suppress the suspicion that this neologism, with its echoes of the familiar "gray area," has been invented in order to give men accused of rape (or more accurately their lawyers) another way to create reasonable doubt in the minds of judges and juries. If rape is "gray," and guilt must be proved beyond reasonable doubt, then a certain number of non-consensual sex acts are going to go unpunished (and, as we know, even more will go unreported.) Can the coiners of the term really not have foreseen this?
Really interesting, thoughtful post. Nice points about epistemology and how words can help/hinder one. Many thanks for writing it. I wish it wasn't post-carnival!