« zone grise »

The “gray area” is the disputed idea that ambiguity around sexual consent can soften responsibility for harm. In Mila Wizman’s account, the phrase does not describe an uncertainty she experienced: she says she was clear that she did not want sex and that she was frightened throughout. Her rejection of the term turns a debate over what happened between her and Alexandre Farel into a challenge to the language used to excuse it.

The phrase in the public dispute

The expression enters the public argument after Jean Farel describes the encounter as “twenty minutes of action,” and journalists circulate his words on social media. The following morning, a major newspaper publishes a manifesto signed by around thirty intellectuals, declaring that rape is not twenty minutes of action but a victim’s destroyed life. The phrase thus becomes part of an argument over whether the episode should be treated as a brief misunderstanding or understood through its consequences for Mila.

Mila answers in a text addressed directly to Alexandre on a blog she has just created. She sets his account against hers: he says she consented and that they had both drunk too much, while his father has used the “gray area” phrase. Mila asks what such a gray area could mean when, as she insists, she never consented. Her question is not an invitation to settle the facts by terminology; it exposes the distance between the language of ambiguity and her own stated experience.

Mila’s counter-argument

Mila describes the “gray area” as a zone invented by men to justify themselves: they can say that matters were unclear, that they thought a woman wanted sex, or that they made a mistake, and then move on without guilt or accountability for the harm done. Her argument focuses on what the phrase permits its users to do. Rather than naming uncertainty as a condition requiring attention, it can turn uncertainty into an alibi.

She places her own account against that general pattern. Since the rise of #MeToo, she says, she has heard women recount harassment and sexual assault, yet men around them seem not to recognize themselves as having harassed or assaulted anyone. She invokes her complaint to the police and the subsequent hospital examinations as evidence of what she endured, not as proof that can be reduced to a slogan. Her recollection includes humiliating questions at the police station, invasive examinations, preventive medication, fear while waiting for test results, and the distress of returning home in tears with her mother. The phrase “gray area,” in this context, stands opposite a detailed account of bodily and emotional aftermath.

A dispute over whose account counts

Mila’s text also challenges the imbalance between Alexandre’s social credentials and her own. She contrasts his polished speech, Stanford education, and publicly known athletic achievement with her having repeated her final year of school and struggling with her weight. In her account, these contrasts help explain how a young man’s prospects can appear more worthy of protection than a woman’s testimony. She counters the prestige of his résumé with the claim that her body spoke for her and that she did not lie.

The expression therefore carries more than a disagreement about whether consent was communicated clearly. It marks a conflict over who has the authority to define the encounter: Alexandre’s account of consent and shared drinking, his father’s phrase, or Mila’s insistence that she did not agree. The text does not make the phrase a substitute for resolving the judicial question; instead, it shows how language can shape public understanding before that question is settled.

Consent rendered as a system

The novel later places the controversy beside a strikingly different use of explicit consent. At a New York investor event, Alexandre presents Loving, an artificial-intelligence start-up offering virtual relationships advertised as intimacy without risks or harm. He then uses another application to arrange a sexual encounter through recorded preferences and a cryptographically stored contract. The system lets participants specify practices, including whether explicit language is acceptable, and states that either person may change their mind at any time.

That scene gives the “gray area” a technological counterpoint, not a simple solution. The application tries to make consent legible through selections, confirmations, and a record; Alexandre changes partners when one woman’s stated boundary excludes the language he wants to use. The contrast underscores the gap between formal agreement and the lived encounter at the center of the case: a protocol can register preferences, but the novel’s public dispute remains about how consent and harm are described, remembered, and judged. The phrase’s force lies in that unresolved gap between a claim of ambiguity and a person’s account of having said no.