ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book develops a two-pronged argument about sex and sexual coercion that is about social construction in two quite distinct senses. The author's emphasis in this book is certainly more on what she perceive to be shared cultural patterns, rather than on the more local and particular instantiations or rejections of these. The book reviews the dramatic changes that took place in our understandings of rape from the 1970s to the turn of the century. Foucault's work is relevant to this book because of the ways it shows how sexuality is shaped by culture. While it is not this particular use of a social constructionist approach that that author wants to emphasize here, she briefly addresses the distinction in light of controversies around evolutionary psychology claims about gender, sexuality and rape. In the case of the coital imperative, the author proposes that it is clearly problematic.
