What’s the “smeary line”? Writing on the situation at Hofstra this week — where a female student accused five men of raping her on campus, and then recanted within three days of bringing the charges — Emily Bazelon offers this as a way to make sense of things, maybe?

Some feminist voices began to admit that, yes, the hookup culture and dating in general had blurred into a charcoal smear their own line between consenting and being sexually assaulted.

Feminists may be working out their own rape doctrines, but these are still likely to be useless for police and prosecutors. Nonconsensual sex between two people who know each other, whatever you call it, is a terribly awkward fit for our adversarial criminal justice system.

This is an incredibly painful and tough case, especially as it fits into a long and drawn-out fight within feminism around how we address rape in the context of casual dating and hooking up. But the line around consent, I don’t think that’s all that smeary — it’s the way we talk about consent that’s almost always messy.