The practical result of this is that it puts the onus onto the victim: "You didn't resist enough. Therefore your rape was nonviolent; therefore it was a lesser crime."
Rape is sex against one's consent. Your consent is just as violated whether you resisted a little, a lot, or not at all (perhaps you were incapacitated by the attacker.)
In many scenarios the most prudent thing for a victim to do is not to physically resist; as rape is largely a male-on-female crime the victim is frequently at a physical disadvantage.
My wife is a small woman. If God forbid this ever happens to her, I certainly hope that the situation remains nonviolent. But I certainly don't see how that would make it less of a crime.
Let's say I have a family, many mouths to feed, maybe it's the last job I could possibly get in my small town in the middle of nowhere. I hate the job, it sucks the life out of me, I don't want to do it, but I'm forced to "against my will" every single day because otherwise my family will starve to death. If I lose it, I might never find one again. I'm under duress. Sure, there's no sexual abuse in this specific scenario, but as other posters have mentioned, modern definition of rape makes it not about sex, but about power structures.
Am I being raped, in the scenario above?
Note: I want to stress that I'm simply having a philosophical discussion here, I have no agenda, downvotes are pointless.
Your boss comes into the office to fire you. You really really need your job or you and your family starve. You really really don't want to. In fact you would do anything but stoop to this level. But you have no choice and you know he is into you. Your family is starving. You decide to ask your boss, "I'll fuck you if I keep the job." He agrees.
It's still sex against your will. You're only doing it to get the job, so your children don't starve. Were you raped?
I think the important element is this: did person A attempt to coerce person B into having sex? If yes, then A raped B.
Let's apply that to your scenario. Is the boss trying to coerce the employee into having sex? No, the boss is firing the employ because
* Maybe they're a shitty employee, or
* Perhaps because the company has dwindling resources, or
* Fill in the blank.
In your scenario, the employee came up with a plan to try to sell sex in exchange keeping their job. That's prostitution: "the act of having sex in exchange for money." As a boss, I would decline that offer because, among other things, it would probably look like I was threatening to take away the employees job (i.e. coercion) if I wasn't given sex - even if that was never my intent.
If, on the other hand, the boss implied or suggested that the employee could keep their job in exchange for sex, that's coercion and is therefore rape.
It's not about "not wanting to do something", it's about coercion. If I'm legitimately fired and I offer sex in exchange for my job, that _is_ my will. If someone threatens (express of implied) to take my job away unless I have sex with them, that's their will, they're coercing me to have sex with them, and that's rape.
The word or concept has nothing to do with jurisprudence or the idea of jurisdiction which is what many people here keep referencing. A word still holds it's proper definition in the minds of men and it is prudent to defend them as such irregardless of what goes on within government.
Why is "was she technically correct in saying rape" the most important takeaway from this? Even if I'm wrong, don't you see other things worth fixing?
What if the woman knows that her rural grandparents or great aunt would probably look after the kids while the mom was looking for a job (perhaps living in her car part of the time) ? In that case then what you're talking about is not a threat of violence, what you're talking about is a threat of having to leave the so called middle class lifestyle and fall into a diminished or poverty-stricken lifestyle.
It's a horrible thing to have to contemplate because and the lower you fall in the socio-economic todem pole the more physical dangers you're exposed to during the course of everyday living, but that doesn't mean her situation is the same as rape
Not at all. Feminists are doing it to call attention to the true nature of power, and the fact that power is expressed in many ways -- only one of them is physical violence. When your attacker possesses power and you don't, that means that you don't have options (or that they are severely restricted). If you don't have options because someone else restricts them, well, that's the definition of coercion, and sex under coercion means rape.
The definition hasn't changed; rape has always been sex under coercion. All that's changed is that now the law reflects our better understanding of power.