Many college students term their troubling sexual experiences “gray” or do not categorize them at all, which may contribute to emotional trauma and confusion about how to heal. This has prompted numerous scholars to argue for dedichotomization of consent rhetoric. Arguing, instead, that consent binarism expounds the sexually assaultive nature of “gray area” experiences, in this paper, I use affirmative consent standards to examine anecdotes of “gray area” sexual encounters. Through qualitative interviews, college students, mostly female, described their perceptions of invulnerability to campus sexual violence – though many of them would be considered victims of sexual assault within “yes means yes” affirmative consent paradigms and some within federal “no means no” paradigms. Demonstrating interpretations of confusing sexual experiences that allow them to dissociate from stereotypical victims, unacknowledged victims in my study exhibited similar emotional responses as those of acknowledged victims. They also positively identified a third-person account of “gray” sex – one that paralleled many of their own – as assault. Positing that “gray area” rhetoric exists as a euphemism for sexual assault, this research seeks to validate the lived experiences of victims – acknowledged and unacknowledged – while addressing the individual and collective implications of assault acknowledgment.
This paper investigates whether the curricular structure of an Economics course (semester, trimester, or compressed block schedule) has an effect on an undergraduate's subsequent retention of course material. We test separately for theoretical/process comprehension and for graphical construction/interpretation, while separating micro from macro content as well. We use an instrument to address the no stakes testing problem, and our Heckman two-stage estimations present some interesting results for educators and institutional policymakers alike.
