Amy Schumer told Oprah why she calls her first sexual experience a "gray-area rape"
Trigger warning: The below content may be triggering for sexual abuse and assault survivors.
Amy Schumer has previously talked about her first sexual experience, in which she lost her virginity while she was asleep. In the past, she never labeled that interaction a sexual assault or rape, but in a new interview with Oprah during an April 26th, 2018 episode of Super Soul Conversations, Schumer described that encounter as “gray-area rape.”
"When we hear about rape when we’re children, and we’re being warned about it, it’s about a guy popping out from a bush...and some villain," Schumer revealed. "They don’t say it’s probably gonna be a guy you know really well. It could be your husband. It could be your friend. And so you think, when that happens you, you say, ‘OK, this isn’t someone I want to see rotting in a jail cell, but what he did to me was wrong, and I didn’t consent.’ And for me, I lost my virginity while I was asleep. And that’s not OK."
Schumer revealed that she awoke to find that her then-boyfriend had penetrated her, but she ended up comforting him, a choice she resents to this day.
"I also felt really angry," she admitted. "It’s like a rage that has stayed with me. I don’t think you lose that. You know, as women we’re really trained not to get angry because that makes people dismiss you right away. There’s sort of no place for that anger. But I felt I wanted to comfort him because he felt so bad and he was so worried. And I just tried to push my anger down.”
Schumer has worked the story of this experience into her stand-up set (she calls “gray-area rape” “grape”) in the hopes that she can “make people laugh while they learned.”
“So, in my standup I would say, ‘If she’s asleep, that’s a no,'” Schumer continued. “Just hoping that a couple guys would see that and it would be met in that moment, like, ‘This is a no. I heard that somewhere.’”
By the end of the conversation, Oprah asked her if she still describes her virginity loss as a “gray-area” issue.
"I personally feel like I lost my virginity through rape. I didn’t consent. We hadn’t discussed it. We weren’t there in our relationship. We weren’t at that moment.”
You can watch Schumer’s conversation above, and see more from her Super Soul Conversations episode here.
