What was the right thing for me to do in this situation? Laura, La Jolla, Calif.

Was she too drunk, you wonder, to give consent? There are people who say that consent can be given in any state short of incapacitation, which is, indeed, the law in many states. (“Incapacitation” suggests that you’re drifting in and out of consciousness; that you don’t know what’s happening, whom you’re with, how you got there.) There are people who say that sex under the influence of alcohol is always wrong. Neither is a plausible position.

Memoirs about drinking, as it happens, are one place where you find people thinking hard about alcohol and agency. “Many yeses on Friday night would have been noes on Saturday morning,” Sarah Hepola wrote in her powerful book “Blackout.” Were those yeses therefore less than consensual? Not in her view. She chafes against the notion that the bad actor who provides you with drinks got you drunk, as she wrote in Texas Monthly, and insists, “I’d gotten myself drunk.” One reason the issue of sex under the influence is complicated is that people often imbibe for its expected consequences — they seek a lessening of inhibition.

“We found sex compelling and terrifying and foreign, and drank to deal with it,” Caroline Knapp recalled in her own memoir, “Drinking: A Love Story.” She wrote: “A naturally inhibited person, someone who grew up feeling mystified and insecure about what it meant to feel sexual, I turned to liquor the way a dancer turns toward music: It felt central to the process, central to my ability to shut down the voices of self-criticism in my own head and simply let go.”

These are authors who struggled with alcoholism; they were hardly commending their decisions, or the way they turned to booze or what booze provided them. But they were clear that going home with someone you wouldn’t have otherwise gone home with doesn’t mean you’ve been assaulted. “The reason I liked getting drunk,” Hepola wrote, “was because it altered my consent: It changed what I would say yes to.”

Somewhere in the gradient of intoxication, between the glass or two of wine at dinner to outright incapacitation, consent becomes attenuated. Yet there’s little agreement about when. Our ideas of consent derive from our ideas of autonomy — and those ideas become complicated when we take steps that we know will affect our decision making. That happens in benign contexts: You go out to a karaoke night knowing you’d never sing karaoke without a couple of beers in you. And it happens in more consequential ones.