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Men and women all over were outraged that anyone would find humour in rape, and that two elected male politicians could so gravely misunderstand the meaning of the word.

U.S. President Barack Obama held a surprise press conference to berate Representative Todd Akin. “Rape is rape,” he said. “And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we are talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me.”

Even Mr. Akin’s congressional colleague, Republican vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan — who once co-sponsored a bill to redefine rape as “forcible rape” in abortion legislation — shot down the “legitimate rape” comment. “Rape is rape. Rape is rape, period. End of story,” he said.

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But the “Summer of Rape,” and all the emotionally charged conversations it has sparked in the media, on the blogosphere and at dinner parties, reveals that this might not be the end of the story. It reveals, rather, that there remains deep confusion, in the cultural and moral sense, over what, precisely, constitutes rape as we typically think of it — not so much in the legal world, where different jurisdictions define rape differently, but in the real world, where sexual interactions are nuanced, complex and not often approved with an explicit “yes.”

A world where drunken acquaintances end up between the sheets without establishing clear consent — made worse, even, if one is more intoxicated than the other; where a boyfriend has sex with his girlfriend after she has quite obviously had too much wine; where “If you really want to” or “I guess so” is taken as “yes”; where university professors sleep with their younger, albeit adult, students, despite a power inequity that could be construed as negating consent.