Yeah, actually, the "no-means-no" campaign has some problems with it too, because it ignores that for the most part, people
don't just flat-out say no when they don't want something. I read a paper in a Language and Power course that actually did a linguistic analysis of how people phrased refusals in everyday situations and the word "no" comes up in a vanishingly small percentage of cases.
So that has two implications: one, "no means no" is expecting women to act against years and years of social conditioning in order to avoid rape, and if they don't it's their fault they got raped because they weren't "clear" enough; and two, it implies that men are somehow able to understand polite, indirect refusals in every other aspect of their lives but suddenly become bone-stupid about it as soon as sex enters the picture. Which a lot of people really do seem to think, and that "boys will be boys" attitude is one of the major factors feeding into the aforementioned rape culture.
The paper brought up "yes means yes" as a better campaign, although I can't recall if that's actually been used or if it was just a theoretical suggestion.
deflective, I'm not positive I understand your argument. You're saying girls feeling pressured into sex by boyfriends who hold a breakup over their heads as a threat is
not an incredibly bad thing? Rape. Culture. That's part of it too. And I did not say the survey asked that question. Frankly, claiming that we're "overusing" the word rape is misrepresenting the actual situation. In the
actual situation, courts will go out of their way delving into women's personal lives just to prove that what happened to them was not "actually" rape.
An Italian said that a woman could not have been raped
because she was wearing jeans. A British court said a woman could not have been gang-raped because
she had at one point fantasized about group sex. If anything the cultural definition of rape needs
broadening. Most people, whether they realize it or not, have a very narrow, "innocent-virgin-attacked-by-vile-strangers" definition of it and that's impossibly damaging in so many ways.