ABSTRACT
Male domination over women may be appear to be natural, but this is not the case. Men have to actively maintain and perpetuate their power over women. This takes place, as in the maintenance of
any social order, by pressure to consent, including force, the threat of force and ideological pressures. But the system of male domination over women is uniquely different from other systems of power because it relies on the eroticisation of inequality between men and women, and enforces control of women by the use, as well as threat, of male sexual violence against women. Feminists have documented how male sexual violence has the effect of controlling women’s lives socially, and serves, furthermore, to construct men as more powerful than women.
