Word: consent
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Others are willing to concede that date rape sometimes occurs, that sometimes a man goes too far on a date without a woman's consent. But this infraction, they say, is not as ghastly a crime as street rape, and it should not be taken as seriously. The New York Post, alarmed by the Willy Smith case, wrote in a recent editorial, "If the sexual encounter, forced or not, has been preceded by a series of consensual activities -- drinking, a trip to the man's home, a walk on a deserted beach at 3 in the morning -- the charge that...
...thought it was my fault. I felt so filthy, I washed myself over and over in hot water. Did he rape me?, I kept asking myself. I didn't consent. But who's gonna believe me? I had a man in my hotel room after midnight." More than a year later, she still can't tell the story without a visible struggle to maintain her composure. Police referred the case to the state attorney's office in Tampa, but without more evidence it decided not to prosecute. Although her attacker has admitted that he heard her say no, maintains...
...here, of course, is the heart of the debate. If rape is sex without consent, how exactly should consent be defined and communicated, when and by whom? Those who view rape through a political lens tend to place all responsibility on men to make sure that their partners are consenting at every point of a sexual encounter. At the extreme, sexual relations come to resemble major surgery, requiring a signed consent form. Clinical psychologist Mary P. Koss of the University of Arizona in Tucson, who is a leading scholar on the issue, puts it rather bluntly...
...think that the only way you can have passion and excitement and sex is if there are miscommunications, and one person is forced to do something he or she doesn't want to do." The very pleasures of sexual encounters should lie in the fact of mutual comfort and consent: "You can hang from the ceiling, you can use fruit, you can go crazy and have really wonderful sensual erotic sex, if both parties are consenting...
...everyone shares such scruples. Rap is rife with riffs sampled from other musicians without their consent, most notably James Brown. (The Godfather of Soul says he has counted 134 examples.) Producer-performer Lenny Kravitz borrowed a drum track from the rap group Public Enemy for the thrusting beat of Madonna's hit Justify My Love...