Last week, a story broke about an incident between actor, writer and comedian Aziz Ansari and a woman given the pseudonym Grace. While we won’t link to the highly sensationalized, poorly-written story here, the main point of the article was that Grace went on a date with Aziz, and later went back to his apartment. He repeatedly ignored her nonverbal cues that she did not want to have sex with him, and her specific statement that she did not want to “feel forced.” Aziz cont

Last week, the internet exploded with anger over the extremely lenient sentence given to Brock Turner, who was convicted of three felonies related to his assault of an unconscious woman. When letters written by his father and a childhood friend were released, the outrage only grew, as both seemed to dismiss the assault as not really rape. His father went so far as to describe the assault as non-violent and “20 minutes of action.” His friend blamed Turner’s conviction on “po

Last week, several women accused a well-known man of raping them, including an ex-girlfriend and former co-workers. Witnesses to some of these assaults stepped forward and confirmed the accounts. Some of the assaults may even have been captured on camera. Yet many questioned whether these women could even be raped. Why? Because all of the accusers and the alleged perpetrator are adult film stars, leading many to conclude that these women could not have been raped. The acc

Consent has been a hot topic in the world of campus sexual assault recently, or more specifically, a particular type: affirmative consent. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, affirmative consent may seem daunting. Does this mean that there is some sort of checklist to go through before sex? Does it mean that you have to document or record consent? Affirmative consent doesn’t mean any of that — it simply means we have to change how we view consent. Instead of t