ABSTRACT
From an historical perspective so generalized it is nearly wrong, “consent” saved rape law by modernizing it, facilitated the cultural acceptance and legal equality of gay people and other sexual minorities, and politically anchored comprehensive sexual education and other modes of sex-positive activism. In this history, consent is the hero of sexuality, sexual violence, and sex. For most of rape law’s history, a man’s force had to be physical, brutal, and relentless, for it to count as “force.” Meanwhile, determinations of “consent” were heavily controlled by race, chastity, and status. The repeal of the marriage exemption meant a wife’s consent to the marriage was not consent to sex in the marriage. Similarly, evidentiary regulations on the victim’s sexual history implicates that chastity is or should be immaterial to a present consent inquiry. Since at least the 1980s, feminist scholars and critics have launched four criticisms—overlapping and trenchant—of consent as a moral or legal metric for sexual permissibility.
