A few male readers add the factor of unconsciousness to the thread:

I’m reminded of an incident that occurred while I was backpacking in South America in 1995. I was staying at a hostel in Chile with a friend, and went out for the night with a couple of local girls, one of whom lived/stayed at the hostel. We got real drunk. We danced and flirted. We went back to the hostel. I woke up with this girl on top of me, basically having sex with me. And to this day can’t remember what exactly happened – I just know it wasn’t consensual (on my part). I just shrugged it off, but it definitely wasn’t OK. If this was a guy (me?!) doing this to a girl, I think that it would be judged much more harshly. I don’t know what this says other than what you other contributors have said – there are a lot of shades of grey.

Another:

Well, here’s another similar story for the thread. First of all, this was years ago, when I was in college. And I was absolutely not traumatized by it at all. In fact, it was pretty awesome. But it could have been different …

So, this girl and I were just sort of starting to see each other. Not “dating” per se, but we had had sex once or twice before. In other words, a new, not-yet-committed kind of relationship. (Ultimately, it never really went past this stage.) We were at her parent’s house for her birthday party. Her parents let her have the place to celebrate – which was actually pretty cool of them. You know, a safe place to drink, etc. And not a crazy-big party or anything. A lot of her friends from high school, maybe one or two others from college. So she was pretty much the only person I knew there, but I was her (informal) date for the party of course. Anyway, later in the evening I got a pretty bad headache. One of those (thank God) rare ones that makes you not care about anything. So I bowed out and turned in, and assured her nothing was wrong – just a migraine from hell, gotta go to sleep. Sometime later I woke up (no idea how much later) and we were having sex. My headache was completely gone, so – as I mentioned – the sex was awesome. And strange, to wake up in the middle of it like that. So, it was implicit, I guess, that it was okay for her to have sex with me that night. But really what happened was: she was drunk and horny, and just decided to fuck me. Didn’t ask first, didn’t even wake me up; just moved my boxers out of the way, got me hard, and climbed on top. And then I just happened to wake up. (I mean come on, how could I not? But ‘waking me up’ was way down on her priority list.) Reverse the roles and that’s maybe-rape, and maybe just creepy as hell. But your previous reader is right – there are all kinds of shades of grey on this topic. And I think in a situation like this – the difference between “cool” and “creepy” – is also the difference between trauma and no trauma. I mean, how society defines this particular act also influences how we, individually, would define it.

Another story, with a different angle: