What is "gray rape"

n. An unclear case of alleged rape, for instance when the victim cannot demonstrate non-consent.

Gray rape is sex for which consent is unclear. The term was popularized by Laura Sessions Stepp in her 2007 Cosmopolitan article "A New Kind of Date Rape", which says gray rape is "somewhere between consent and denial and is even more confusing than date rape because often both parties are unsure of who wanted what". The term has been criticized. Lisa Jervis, founder of Bitch magazine, argued that gray rape and date rape "are the same thing", and that the popularization of gray rape constituted a backlash against women's sexual empowerment and risked rolling back the gains women had made in having rape taken seriously. Former Manhattan chief of sex crimes Linda Fairstein states that "in the criminal justice system there’s no such thing as gray rape". ConsentEd, a Canadian nonprofit sexual education foundation, dismisses the idea of gray rape, stating that in rape, perpetrators know exactly what they are doing; rape is not an accident.