The idea of “grey area rape” is bullshit. Rape is rape. But what they don’t tell you is that unraveling that experience is complicated because it cannot be homogenized.

Due process doesn’t really exist. According to RAINN, only 2 out of every 100 rapists spend a single day in prison. This is because those laws the victims and their advocates are supposed to follow so thoroughly make it impossible to prove what happened to them.

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In the aftermath, you lose your best friends, who don’t know if you can talk about normal things, who need you to need them so badly you have to run. Sex is over for many victims, so is trust. The ‘fame’ these bros think we’re aiming for is pages and pages of internet comments so lethal you forget living outside of a cloud of suicide contemplation. That is what due process is.

Trauma: Like this the truth trickles down to you. Slowly you peel back one layer at a time. You built walls in defense but now you live inside a house inside a house inside a house. You live underground. It is safer to be dead but you realize you’re not ready for that. Slowly you unearth your grave.

Let me start this conversation by saying that it’s the last place I want to be. I don’t want to talk about rape. I don’t want to talk about sexual abuse. I don’t want to name the man who raped me because I know that he Googles himself daily and I can assure you his eyes will be one of the first to see this.

Gender violence is a human rights issue, so why is half the population removed from the discussion?

“Once language begins to shift, welcoming more people into the conversation of gender violence, we can begin to restructure our approach to the subject. As with any social change, education is the first step. It’s not enough to warn daughters of the risks of walking home alone, or teach them about date or marital rape. The more sons understand about their mothers’, sisters’, and girlfriends’ experiences as targets for gender violence, the more likely they are to be counted amongst the ambassadors for change. The encouraged dissection of their concepts of gender will result in consistent questioning of their and others’ assumptions and behaviors.”

“No one wants to be raped. The very fact that someone wants to have sex with another person, celebrity or not, means there is attraction and desire, which could result in consent between both parties. This difference is essential to understand: rape is a sexual act forced upon a partner without consent. If two adults consent, then it isn’t rape. There is a distinct difference between domination & submission fantasies and rape, even extreme fantasies where two partners are role-playing a scenario mimicking rape, as long as there is a consensual agreement.”