ABSTRACT
The crime of rape—this is a legal and observed, not a subjective, individual, or feminist definition—is defined around penetration. Rape is defined according to what men think violates women, and that is the same as what they think of as the sine qua non of sex. A common experience of rape victims is to be unable to feel good about anything heterosexual thereafter—or anything sexual at all, or men at all. The minute they start to have sexual feelings or feel sexually touched by a man, or even a woman, they start to relive the rape. The way the analysis of sexual harassment is sometimes expressed now is that it is an abuse of power, not sexuality. Battering is called violence, rather than something sex-specific: this is done to women.
