“Date-rape drugs are largely an urban myth used as an excuse by women who booze themselves into a stupor, it has been claimed.”

That’s the first line from an article in today’s Daily Mail, about a new study out of the University of Kent that suggests many women mistake being drunk for being drugged. Of course, there’s more to this story than the “journalists” at the Daily Mail would have you believe. For starters, it’s not that women are using “I was drugged!” as a way of excusing bad drunken behavior, but rather than they may be confusing the side effects of being intoxicated—nausea, dizziness, etc.—with those associated with being roofied. Additionally, a far more comprehensive article in the Telegraph quotes Adam Burgess, of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research, as saying, “Young women appear to be displacing their anxieties about the consequences of consuming what is in the bottle on to rumors of what could be put there by someone else.”

I just found out that my rapist is dead. Not only is he dead, but he ended up killing a lot of women. I always wondered if he would rape again, but I never thought he would graduate to murder.

OK, we know the following characterization is NOT 100 percent representative of all fraternities in this country.

But still, the stats about sexual assault and tales of misogynistic behavior in the essay, “Bros Before Hos,” published by history and gender studies professor Nicholas L. Syrett on the National Sexuality Resource Center’s web site, are beyond scary.

You’ll have to read the essay yourself for his particularly eloquent argument about how the closeness of men in frats fosters misogynistic behavior and a fear of homosexuality—it’s worth a read for anyone who has known or loved a frat boy. Synett’s certainly not arguing frat boys are worse than other men, but they do live in a unique environment that has an affect on them. Frat boys don’t sound like they’ve ever not had a weird relationship with sex, masculinity and power.

Six scary things we learned about frat boys from reading his essay, after the jump…

I thought losing weight was to blame for Seth Rogen’s fall from funny. But maybe we never had the same sense of humor to begin with. How else to explain his starring role in “Observe and Report,” which opens today, the extended trailer for which shows his character, Ronnie, a mall cop, having sex with a woman (Brandi, played by Anna Faris) who’s passed out drunk, covered in vomit? This scene has caused quite a bit of controversy, with everyone from The New York Times to Salon’s Broadsheet weighing in on whether the scenario classifies as date rape. (The scene, FYI, is embedded in the trailer, after the jump. Warning: the language in the trailer makes it NSFW.) Rogen says it is not.

“You can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the f**k are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? ... And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay.”

That one thing? When Rogen stop manically pumping away, Brandi, vomit oozing out of her mouth, comes to, and says, “Why are you stopping motherf**ker?” The Times agrees that this is her giving “permission,” writing in their review, “He forces himself on a makeup-counter saleswoman after a date of heavy drinking and drug use. (Before the scene is over she indicates that she had given her consent.)”

An interesting, if disturbing question has been posed to Cary Tennis at Salon. “Want Him To Know” writes:

“Recently while I was on Facebook, the man who date-raped me in college showed up as ‘people you might know.’... I never filed charges, never told people for years afterward, and didn’t even think of it as rape until five years ago. But now that I think about it, it infuriates me that he was able to victimize me without consequences. I don’t want to bring legal action, or shame him publicly, but I do want him to understand what he did was wrong. I’d like an apology…. Should I attempt to contact him, or just let bygones be bygones? Honestly, I could take it or leave it. My only worry is that he will think date rape is OK.”

Tennis’ advice is lacking, despite being nearly 300 words long—see a rape counselor! Probably wise, but it doesn’t really address her desire to know that the person who date raped her doesn’t do it again. So what do you guys think? Should “Want Him To Know” get in touch with the person in question? Should she move on? Or do you think that any response he gives her wouldn’t give her the peace she desires? Tell us your thoughts in the comments! Maybe she reads The Frisky…

Last night’s “Mad Men” had an all-too-rare subplot involving Joan and her betrothed, The Handsome Doctor . In a previous episode, Doc’s abusive, douche-tastic tendencies were barely hinted at—“Didn’t you say you were getting me a drink?!”—but this episode confirmed it for any doubters. In one of the most disturbing scenes to have been featured on “Mad Men”, the good doctor forces Joan to have sex with him on the floor of Don Draper’s office despite her repeated protests and attempts to physically dissuade him. Perhaps the saddest and most resonant part of all is when she stops fighting and turns her head to stare fixedly at Don’s coffee table, resigned to her fate.

One of the sites I read quite frequently is Jezebel. I wrote for them for a little while before I launched The Frisky and really respect them as a cool and smart site for women. Many of their posts I find to be laugh-out-loud funny and others make me think deeply about and even reconsider positions I have taken on issues. But lately there’s been some controversy on the site in regards to the issue of rape and I thought I would bring them up here to see what Frisky readers think. In particular, I wanted to discuss the question of whether a rape victim has a moral obligation to report her attack(er) to authorities.

Um, wow. Color us stupified. This t-shirt is currently for sale on Amazon.com and comes in TWELVE different styles. Appalled? Head on over to Jezebel to get the contact info for Amazon in order to complain your anti-date rape ass off.

There’s a lecture and book signing on November 13 in Washington, D.C., featuring a few noted authors and journalists discussing how “hook-up” culture on campus has led to rising numbers of sexual assaults, date rapes, and sexually transmitted infections. Included on the panel is Washington Post scribe Laura Sessions Stapp who coined the term “gray rape” to describe sexual encounters that are not quite consensual but not totally denied either. Her theory was discussed in further detail in an article in September’s Cosmopolitan, which garnered loads of debate on sites like Jezebel and Feministing. Suffice it to say, we’re not sure we’d take the thoughts of someone who thinks having sex with someone while they’re passed out drunk is “gray” rape all that seriously.