The way Motley has proposed to remedy this confusion is to teach women to refuse sex in more direct ways, and teach men to take women's indirect refusals as outright refusal. This hypothesis places less of the blame on the perpetrator, and more of the blame on the victim, who would not have been violated 'if only she had been clearer'. .
While it is true that women can sometimes be unclear at first whether or not they want to have sex with their date, by the time the evening progresses to the actual act of having intercourse, there should be no grey area of consent before the act moves forward. In the article, Navigating Ambivalence, the authors Beres, Senn, and McCaw analyzed narratives of college students in order to either prove or disprove the miscommunication hypothesis. They were specifically focused on whether or not, or how much miscommunication factored into heterosexual encounters where the female had turned down the male's initial advances. Of all the stories collected, 79% reflected the woman at first feeling ambivalent towards having sex (Beres, 769). The study revealed that there were typically six ways in which this ambivalence was resolved: Increased non-sexual conversation, slow increase in physical intimacy, self-reflection, conversation about sex and relationship, increased sexual arousal, and alcohol consumption (Beres, 771). In all of the situations of ambivalence, however, whether the act of sex occurred or not, the females' ambivalence was resolved by both parties before engaging or not engaging in sex. In other words, both parties seemed clear as to whether or not the female wanted to have sex with the male or not. .
In the same study, 10% of the cases studied included the process of coercion by the male (Beres, 771), meaning that the woman never officially consented or changed her mind about the act of having sex, but it happened regardless, whether from full-blown rape, or the woman "giving in" to the man's persistence.