How Do We Address Sexual Assault When We Can't Even Agree on What It Is? After weeks of discussing the Cornell case, I've come to realize something. We aren't always arguing about the same thing. People are using the terms sexual assault, rape, coercion, incapacitation, and consent as though everyone agrees on what they mean. We don't. And apparently, neither do all 50 states. Each state has its own criminal statutes, definitions, and standards. I've already discussed consent and incapacitation in previous posts, but two other areas keep coming up. Coercion. I've seen persuasion, pressure, and coercion used almost interchangeably. They're not the same thing. Trying to convince someone to have sex isn't automatically coercion. Neither is expressing disappointment when someone says no. But coercion is different. It involves force, intimidation, threats, or other forms of compulsion that undermine someone's freedom to refuse. So where is the line? If someone asks for sex five times and the other person eventually agrees, is that coercion? What if they ask twice? What if someone says they'll end the relationship if their partner doesn't want to have sex? Is that manipulation? An honest expression of incompatibility? Or a threat intended to compel someone to have sex? There's a difference between someone feeling pressured to say yes and someone reasonably believing they cannot safely say no. And even when behavior is coercive in the broader sense, does it necessarily meet the legal definition of a criminal offense? Sexual touching. Some women want men to initiate physical intimacy based on signals, body language, and mutual attraction. But what happens when a man misinterprets those signals? Is an unwanted advance automatically sexual assault? Or can it simply be a miscommunication? There's a difference between an accidental touch, an unwanted advance that stops when rejected, and someone deliberately violating another person's boundaries. Then there's deception. If a man tells a woman he wants a relationship, they have consensual sex, and he ghosts her afterward, is that sexual assault? I don't believe it is. It may be dishonest, manipulative, and reprehensible, but that doesn't make it criminal. And what about regret, embarrassment, shame, or revenge? Do we acknowledge that some allegations can arise from those motivations? Recognizing that possibility doesn't mean dismissing allegations or assuming those motives are present in any particular case. Here's where I think we're running into a much larger problem. We've blurred the distinctions between behavior that is inappropriate, offensive, manipulative, exploitative, immoral, and criminal. Those things can overlap. They aren't synonymous. I can believe someone behaved reprehensibly without concluding that a crime occurred. I can acknowledge that someone experienced an encounter as traumatic without automatically determining that another person committed a criminal offense. More than one thing can be true. I've watched people discussing the Cornell case reach completely different conclusions based on the same publicly available information. Some are applying criminal law. Others are applying university consent policies. Others are applying their own moral standards. And many don't seem to recognize the distinction. We can debate whether our laws are adequate. We can advocate for changing them. We can disagree about what behaviors society should tolerate. But shouldn't we at least be clear about which standards we're applying? Because I don't see how we can prevent sexual assault when we can't even agree on what constitutes sexual assault.