"Handing over money at knife point, or dipping into one's wallet to assuage a weaponless but menacing figure on a dark, deserted street, may be financially painful or emotionally distressing, but it hardly compares to the massive insult to one's self-determination that is sustained during a sexual assault.

In a sexual assault, physical harm is much more than a threat; it is a reality because violence is an integral part of the act. Yet, the nature of the crime as it is practiced does bear robbery a close resemblance, because the sexual goal for the rapist resembles the monetary goal of the robber.

Under the rules of law, victims of robbery and assault are not required to prove they resisted, or that they didn't consent, or that the act was accomplished with sufficient force, or sufficient threat of force, to overcome their will, because the law presumes it highly unlikely that a person willingly gives away money, except to a charity or to a favorite cause, and the law presumes that no person willingly submits to a brutal beating and the infliction of bodily harm and permanent damage. But victims of rape and other forms of sexual assault do need to prove these evidentiary requirements - that they resisted, that they didn't consent, that their will was overcome by overwhelming force and fear - because the law has never been able to satisfactorily distinguish an act of mutually desired sexual union from an act of forced, criminal sexual aggression.

The real reason for the law's everlasting confusion as to what constitutes an act of rape and what constitutes an act of mutual intercourse is the underlying cultural assumption that it is the natural masculine role to proceed aggressively toward the stated goal, while the natural feminine role is to "resist" or "submit." And so to protect male interests, the law seeks to gauge the victim's behavior during the offending act in the belief that force or the threat of force is not conclusive in and of itself.

Since terror is a psychological reaction and not an objective standard that can be read on a behavior meter six months later in court, current employed standards of resistance or threat of force have neve been able to accurately gauge a victim's terror. For this reason, feminists have argued that the burden of proof that devolves on a rape victim, that she resisted "within reason," that her eventual compliance was no indication of tacit "consent," is unfair, since such standards are not applied in court to the behavior of victims in other kinds of violent crime.

A jury should be permitted to weigh the word of a victimized complainant at face value, no more or less a right that is granted to other victims under the law."

-Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape