The XX Factor: What women really think.

Did Pete Campbell Rape the Neighbors' Au Pair on Mad Men?

Slate's incredibly thorough and compelling Mad Men TV Club has a question I'd like to pose to the Mad Men-watching DoubleXers out there: Was Pete's interlude with the German au pair rape, or was it consensual? ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Why Not Identify the Hoftstra Student Who Recanted Her Rape Story?

On Instapundit, the indomitable Glenn Reynolds says that by not publishing the name of the 18-year-old Hofstra student who falsely cried gang rape, I'm "protecting a perpetrator." Why shield the identity of a woman who sent four men to jail based on a story she then recanted? Let me explain ... (Read more in DoubleX.)

Observe ... and Consent?

Now that my wildly ambivalent review of the disturbing new comedy Observe and Report is up, I can address that little matter of date rape in greater detail here. Is it true that Seth Rogen’s character Ronnie, a bipolar mall security guard, forces himself on drunk and drugged cosmetics clerk Brandi (Anna Faris) against her will? On New York magazine’s Vulture blog yesterday, Dan Kois makes a case for the prosecution. In a New York Times profile of the director Jody Hill, Dave Itzkoff disagrees, noting that before the scene is over Faris’ character “indicates that she had given her consent” (I love the Times-ian delicacy of that paraphrase. What she actually says is “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?” And she says it from the perch of a pillow stained with her own vomit.)

There are a lot of things in Observe and Report to feel morally icky about, but for me, this scene didn’t number among them. In fact, it probably made for the biggest laugh in a movie that often had me staring at the screen in slack-jawed dismay. By the rules of this movie’s crude, vapid and ultraviolent world—a world that the movie is (I think) a not-entirely-successful attempt to satirize—Ronnie’s hesitation when he notices his partner is passed out, and her slurred command for him to keep going, constitute a moment of tenderness between the two of them. And when what looks like a creepy sexual assault suddenly becomes a declaration of female agency (when she tells him to keep going, Ronnie apologizes and deferentially complies), it’s the reversal that makes it funny.

Remember the controversy over the use of the term “retard” in last summer’s far funnier comedy Tropic Thunder? My stance on both gags is the same: When a character in a satire engages in bad behavior, it’s not fair to disregard the satire and condemn the simple fact that said behavior is being represented. I’m hoping a few of you will see the movie this weekend and tell me what you think.

"Gray" Rape Doesn't End When You Start Going Gray

The economy is on life support, yesterday's bloodbath in Bombay has thrust terrorism suddenly back to the forefront of the international agenda, a record number of Americans are on food stamps…well, here is something I for which I am thankful: that I am not Lois Feldman of Carroll, Iowa. Who says she does not recall stumbling drunkenly into the men's room during a football game at the University of Minnesota Metrodome last weekend, having sex with a stranger 12 years her junior in a stall as a crowd assembled to watch and cheer or even being subsequently arrested by the police, to whom she could not even recall her correct middle name, for indecent exposure. "What Lois Feldman, 38, will remember," writes the Des Moines Register, "is the humiliation afterward." She's been prank-called by all manner of trolls and fired from her job as a receptionist, but credits her husband Kelly, who regrets not accompanying her to the bathroom, for being "supportive."

Uhhhh, yeah, maybe he's supportive because it sounds like she was…raped? Not that Feldman is using that term. Nor does she seem like the, er, "type." Nor is it clear just how drunk her partner in misdemeanor crime, Ross Walsh -- who came to the game with his girlfriend, for Chrissakes -- was when Mrs. Feldman showed up in his stall, or however it happened.

But I'll be interested to see how this news plays out on the feminist blogosphere, which does not seem to have yet seized upon it. Because it's possible Feldman was the victim of what Cosmo last year controversially termed gray rape -- a term I halfheartedly endorsed, because I think it captures the fogginess of circumstance that enables people on both sides of an unintentional incident to understand, make sense of and ultimately get past what happened.

It's also possible, of course, that she was the victim of a predatory overgrown frat boy with serious mental issues. I don't know, and I don't have a strong view on this; my inclination is to hope it's the former, and that one day the Feldmans can joke about their Larry Craig incident -- but either way, she doesn't remember. What is true is that it wasn't so much the event that traumatized her: it was the aftermath. And while it is clear that whatever the case, Feldman was the victim of a lot more than her own inebriation, her own employers won't stand by her. It's sickeningly reminiscient of a depressing Modern Love last year written by a woman who'd been publicly date raped by a frat boy her freshman year, only to find herself a pariah in her own sorority, an event she blamed for turning her into a misogynist. Ugh. Well, the bad news is that crap like this doesn't stop happening after one deactivates from one's sorority. The good news is that Feldman, a married mother of three, is courageous enough to tell the media exactly what happened. She has nothing to be ashamed about, of course -- beyond being a lightweight, which I find admirable -- but there a lot of societies that don't see it that way.