ABSTRACT
Many women have talked to me about experiences that they didn’t call rape, but which I find difficult to see as just sex. They include stories of situations in which a man applied pressure that fell short of actual or threatened physical force, but which the woman felt unable to resist, as well as encounters where a man was rough and brutish, and the woman described letting sex happen because she felt unable to stop it. They also include stories of situations where a male partner was not directly coercive at all, but where the woman nevertheless found herself going along with sex that was neither desired nor enjoyed because she did not feel it was her right to stop it or because she did not know how to refuse. All of these accounts in different ways point to a complex gray area between what we might think of as mutually consenting sex, on the one hand, and rape or sexual coercion on the other.
