Introduction
What Is Grey Sex?

In between good sex and sexual violence lies a grey area: a range of experiences that are both ordinary and hard to understand. In this grey area, women who have sex with men find it difficult, if not impossible, to act in ways that honestly reflect what they - we - want. We, women, say yes when we want to say no, we hide our ambivalence, we perform false enthusiasm, we lose sight of our own desires, or we never discover those desires. For some of us, sex in this grey area may be so commonplace as to be unremarkable; to others it may feel unsettling or infuriating. It may be tempting for some to consider grey sex as an issue for the therapist's couch or for self-care: a problem that individual women should address within ourselves, perhaps by working to be more confident and assertive, or more in touch with our own desires. Alternatively, it may be tempting to fold grey experiences in with unambiguously unethical acts and crimes and to place blame squarely on men's shoulders. Both approaches are sometimes appropriate; some people really do need therapy and some people really are rapists. However, both approaches treat grey sex as an individual problem: a problem with individual women who fail to assert ourselves, or with individual men who rape or coerce women. Both avoid considering the complexity of the power dynamics of a very common heterosexual experience, and therefore leave it only partially understood.

This binary tendency played out in the wake of Babe magazine's publication of the story of "Grace," a photographer who went on a date with comedian Aziz Ansari. Grace told journalist Katie Way that the evening turned into "the worst night of [her] life" and that Ansari's persistent sexual pressure constituted assault (Way 2018). While there was some thoughtful commentary by journalists and social media users at the time, the professional punditry tended to polarize around two competing interpretations: on one, Ansari's excessive pressure was in fact sexual assault; or the other, Grace simply failed to assert herself. With exceptional lucidity, journalist Julianne Escobedo Shepherd (2018) pointed out that "we are having arguments about bad faith thinkpieces and grotesque attempts to belittle Grace's experience, rather than actually talking about the socially ingrained cultural and political disparity that shows itself in dating scenarios." Put another way, we weren't thinking about power.

This book aims to do just that. Focusing specifically on heterosexual experiences and engaging women's interpretations of those experiences, it treats grey sex as a gendered political problem, linked to a system of domination that is an intersectional matrix (Collins 2009). To claim that grey sex is gendered is to say that grey sex appears most commonly as an experience in which women acquiesce to men and men benefit from that acquiescence, whether or not they actively elicit it (often they do). Grey sex appears to be endemic in heterosexual experience, and its costs and benefits are not evenly or randomly distributed among women and men. To say that it's political is to point to a link between grey sex and a larger structure of domination, including rape culture, which both produces instances of grey sex and is reproduced by them. The term domination denotes an unjust form of power that arbitrarily positions men and women unequally, while intersecting with hierarchies that position racialized groups and classes unequally. In cases of literal violence against women, domination takes a brutal, interpersonal form, but this isn't its only form. When we understand domination as also denoting a particular kind of power hierarchy, which enacts relations of symbolic violence as well as relations of literal violence, we can begin to see linkages between everyday, seemingly uneventful or petty experiences and a larger, unjust structure. Seeing domination as systemic or structural and intersectional enables us to move away both from a crude, binary understanding of all men as powerful and all women as powerless and from a tendency to focus only on individuals.

To understand the linkages between specific experiences and structures of power, we need to examine instances of grey sex carefully. In heterosexual grey sex, women and men encounter each other in embodied moments, and what we do in those moments matters. If we want to understand the power at play in grey sex, women's stories also matter, but it's potentially uncomfortable to listen closely to stories such as Grace's. It may feel better to fall back on guilt-innocence binaries, which restore an appearance of agency to individuals, simplify questions of responsibility, and allow us to direct our bad feelings toward tangible targets. Finding someone to blame may allow us to replace feelings of vulnerability or confusion with anger or fierce self-discipline, as we either target specific men or blame ourselves but resolve to be smarter and more assertive in the future.

Let's attend more closely to Grace's original account instead, including its ambiguities. Journalistic controversies aside, the Babe article makes clear that Grace felt uncomfortable at the mismatch between her desires and Ansari's: he was moving way too fast, was too persistent, and was unable to hear her messages to slow down. If we respond only to Grace's feelings, we may find ourselves furious with Ansari: he seems selfish, entitled, and willfully impervious to clear social cues. However, she is also transparent that her communication was not as direct as it might have been: "Most of my discomfort was expressed in me pulling away and mumbling." When he asked, "where do you want me to fuck you," she "found the question tough to answer because . she didn't want to fuck him at all" (Way 2018). It seems, however, that it felt impossible to Grace to simply say, "I don't want to fuck you at all." The tension between what Grace felt and what she did - far from being evidence of insufficient assertiveness (cf. Flanagan 2018, Weiss 2018) - is indicative of the working of a kind of power that feminists need to be able to articulate. Why was Grace unable to be more direct? Why do women who consciously reject the notion that we should be pleasing and submissive to men find it so difficult in the moment to say the very words that seem so obvious in retrospect?

"Grey sex" is a shorthand description for situations like the one Grace found herself in. It's a deliberately loose category, a starting point for thinking about a wide range of possible experiences, including sex that's hard to explain (even to ourselves), sex that was easier than saying no, sex we thought we should want (but didn't), and sex we had in order to be "nice." Each one of us gets to tell her own story, including revising that story over time. So any of us may, at one point, use "grey sex" to label something that doesn't quite feel like rape; over time, however, she may change her mind and decide that it was rape after all. A person could also use "grey sex" for an event that a third party - a friend, a therapist, a scholar - would call rape, but that she herself hesitates to call rape for any number of reasons. At the same time, "grey sex" functions to label experiences that no one could define as rape, but that still feel unsettling or violating. We might even use it for experiences that fall short of being sex but that have a sexual element. Grey sex includes heterosexual experiences under conditions of sexual and gendered inequality, in which the woman feels there was some involuntary quality, some lack of meaningful sexual freedom, some feeling of belittlement of her, or entitlement on the part of the man.

"Grey sex" is a pragmatic label intended to draw attention to a continuum of experiences for which feminists currently have no widely shared language; it is not an attempt to soften injustice by implying ethical ambiguity where there is none. Temporarily at least, the phrase may describe events that are not ethically grey at all but that are perfectly legal, as well as events that I consider unethical but that might seem normal to others. My purpose is not to categorize specific kinds of events or distinguish "good sex" from "bad sex," so much as to analyze ambiguous experiences under conditions of inequality and structural domination - what many feminists simply call "patriarchy." Curiously, even researchers in the field of sexual violence have tended to turn away from terms such as "patriarchy" when talking about structural power dynamics that disadvantage women (particularly in the United States; see DeKeseredy 2021). However, the approach of this book is solidly within continuum frameworks - such as the one articulated by Liz Kelly (1988; Kelly and Westmarland 2016) - which aim to connect the horrific to the everyday, and clear "incidents" to patterns of gendered power. So, while I treat "grey sex" as a provisional label for a continuum of experiences, I also use the term "domination" to understand a range of experiences of power that, collectively, position women as subordinate in a gendered structure. This structure is inextricably interconnected to patterns of racial domination,...