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supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.

Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual

expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when

rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As

soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in

a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an

inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the

relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned

and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no

context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the

woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has

been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force

against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to

force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between

sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to

refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use

have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and

properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual

compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the

society’s commitment to forced sex is real: marriage defines the

normal uses to which women should be put, and marriage institutionalizes forced intercourse. Consent then logically becomes mere passive acquiescence; and passive compliance does become the

standard of female participation in intercourse. Because passive acquiescence is the standard in normal intercourse, it becomes proof of consent in rape. Because force is sanctioned to effect intercourse

in marriage, it becomes common sexual practice, so that its use in

sex does not signify, prove, or even—especially to men—suggest

rape. Forced intercourse in marriage, being both normal and state-

sanctioned, provides the basis for the wider practice of forced sex,

tacitly accepted most of the time. Forced intercourse in marriage as

the norm sanctioned by the state makes it virtually impossible to

identify (male) force or (female) consent; to say what they are so as

to be able to recognize them in discrete instances. The state can

and does make distinctions by category—for instance, sex with little girls is off limits—but no finer kind of distinction can be made because that would require a repudiation of force as a part of normal sex. Since the nearly universal acceptance of forced intercourse in marriage is a kind of universal callousness—an agreement as to

the disposition of married women’s bodies, thereby annihilating

any conception of their civil or sexual rights or any sensitivity to

force in sex as a violation of those women’s rights—it is easy to

extend the callous acceptance of men’s civilly guaranteed right to

use force to get sex to broader categories of women, also to girls,

and this has happened. There is the belief that men use force because they are men. There is the belief that women like force and respond to it sexually. There is the belief that force is intrinsically

sexy. There is the conceit that the married woman is the most

protected of all women: if force is right with her, with whom can it

be wrong? if a man does to another woman what he does to his

wife, it may be adultery but how can it be rape when in fact it is

simply—from his point of view— plain old sex? There is the definition of when a girl becomes a woman: a girl may be considered

adult because she has menstruated (at the age of ten, for instance)

or because she has a so-called provocative quality, which means

that a man wants to fuck her and that therefore she is presumed to

be a woman and to have adult knowledge of what sex is and what a

woman is. There is the definition of the female in terms of her

function, which is to be fucked; so it may be unfortunate that she