Feminists want us to define these ugly sexual encounters as rape. Don’t let them.

Article here. Excerpt:

'There was the time when, 19 and naive, I was guilt-tripped into entirely unwanted physical intimacies with a much older married man. And the time, three or four years later, when I went to visit an on-and-off long-distance boyfriend and quickly realized that it was over for me — but he assumed we were still on, and I didn’t have the nerve to say no. And the time I told a man, “Look, I’m not going to sleep with you,” and it was taken as, “Try again in a couple of hours.” He did, and it worked.

When they happened, my views of these encounters ranged from “it was a mistake” to “it’s complicated.” They still do — even though, these days, we are encouraged to reinterpret such experiences as sexual violations. To many feminists, stories like these are evidence of a pervasive, misogynistic rape culture. “Kids see movies where there’s an aggressor who gets pushed away, but keeps trying until the girl relents,” advocate, author and filmmaker Kelly Kend writes. “. . . This is a rape dynamic that has been played off countless times as just how it works.” Canadian feminist author Anne Thériault laments “the still-pervasive and very flawed idea that if she doesn’t say no, it’s not rape” — clearly referring not just to attacks involving violence or incapacitation (for which few would demand a verbal “no” as proof of rape), but encounters in which a woman yields to unwanted overtures, like I did.

This isn’t just feminist theory; it’s having an impact in the real world. Consent-education programs on college campuses, fromColumbia University to the University of Texas at Austin, are increasingly adoptingthe “yes means yes” approach. But this crusade against “rape culture” oversimplifies the vast complexity of human sexual interaction, conflating criminal sexual acts such as coercion by physical force, threat or incapacitation — which should obviously be prosecuted and punished — with bad behavior.

Was I a victim? Even in the first incident, in which the man knowingly pressured me into something I didn’t want, I could have safely said no to him. Despicable behavior is not always criminal, just like getting guilt-tripped into giving money to a freeloading friend is not robbery.'