ABSTRACT
Historically, rape laws have had blatant sexist assumptions and standards that raise serious questions about the law's objectivity or fairness. This chapter gives a brief history of rape laws, particularly focusing on the 20th century, and then to introduce the reforms that were meant to solve certain problems and examine how and why they failed to do so. Rape laws protected the value of female chastity for their men rather than women's sexual autonomy or even their physical well-being. In the 1950s the American Law Institute proposed reforms to state criminal codes, including rape laws, prompted by worries about the extremely low conviction rate for rape. In the 1970s feminists such as Susan Brownmiller and Susan Griffin exposed many of the problems with the laws and the criminal justice system's treatment of rape victims. Rape cases finding insufficient evidence of force reveal that acceptable sex, in the legal perspective, can entail a lot of force.
