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What we seem to have a hard time recognizing is that while consent works fairly well as the demarcation of the legal from the illegal in the realm of sex—nonconsensual sex is rape, assaultive, and criminal, while consensual sex is none of that—at the same time consent is only a necessary, and clear…

Many women and girls, and some men and boys, engage in sex they do not want, desire, welcome, or enjoy for scores of individual or personal reasons. A girl may seek status from her peers, or the attention or affection of a high-status boy; a woman may submit to routinized unwelcome sex because she …

We got rid of the marital line as the marker between licit and illicit sex, and part of what we did when we did that was perhaps to extend ownership rights, albeit in a watered-down form, to men as an amorphous social class. The ownership that a man once had of sexual access to his wife, might now …

[...] Much sex that is unwelcome is the result of coercion, and much of that coercion is the result of financial necessity. But employing financial reward or punishment as a means to obtain unwelcome sex does not meet the legal standard of rape. More generally, sex that you have because if you don’…

[...] Unwelcome sexual advances at work are suffered basically because of economic coercion that pertains to labor: the conditions of harassment are endured because one’s work and paycheck are conditions of survival. But unwelcome sexual advances at home or in the street are suffered because of oth…