The man who has control of a woman, historically her father, guardian or husband, has a case against the man who makes unauthorised use of her. The punishment for cutting your nose off would be less than the punishment for rape, but then you wouldn’t be suspected of having consented to having your nose cut off.Historically, the crime of rape is not an offence against women, but an offence committed against men by other men. If you allow a man to put his penis into your body because otherwise he will cut your nose off, you clearly feel that having your nose cut off is miles worse, but the asinine law does not agree with you. In some cases, what remains in the memory and continues to perturb years after the event are the words a rapist forced his victim to say.If physical assault were not so terrifying to women, most rapes would never happen. The forcing of a penis into a mouth, for example, is not rape but sexual assault, yet a victim may resent it more; likewise forcible buggery, ejaculating on to the face or breasts, and so forth. The notion of rape is the direct expression of male phallocentricity, which women should know better than to accept.If you talk to raped women, they usually resent all the other insults that accompanied the rape more than the unwanted presence of a penis in the vagina. But it is his penis that is to him the symbol and instrument of his potency.

Yet a man can do more harm with his thumb than he can with his thin-skinned penis. The only weapon that counts in rape is the penis, which is conceptualised as devastating. As a piece of evidence, the victim must be interrogated and tested in every possible way, because rape is considered to be so grave, second only to murder.It is not women who have decided that rape is so heinous, but men. The fault lies in the very concept of rape itself.The crime of rape is not committed against the victim, but against the state; the victim is Exhibit A in the case of Regina vs the rapist. Tinkering with it has resulted in a huge expenditure of resources and effort by police forces which have little enough of either, in return for no improvement whatsoever in women’s chances of redress. All he had to say to escape punishment was that he thought, or believed, that her silence was consent.The law of rape is anachronistic, unworkable and should be struck down.

She would have had to relive the rape countless times, before different groups of strangers, retelling the humiliating narrative over and over again, only to see her tormentor finally triumph over her, because it was simply his word against hers. Any halfway decent lawyer could have destroyed her case in cross-examination. The man would say that she eventually consented; she would say that she eventually submitted. There were no witnesses; the child slept through the whole thing.

The fact of intercourse could be proved, provided that she had not washed since the event, as could the identity of the man involved.Thus the whole issue would turn on the question of consent. If she had done, she would probably have been treated with great skill and sympathy, and the people who dealt with her would not have let themselves be seen to doubt her version of events, but there would be little that could be done in the way of redress. The perpetrator knew that he had damaged her and was gratified At work, he behaved as if nothing had happened. Alison gave up her job, took her daughter out of school and left the district.Alison made no complaint to the police. She felt despoiled, used “like a spittoon” and was disgusted with herself The wound to her self-esteem will probably never heal. To all the women, it was obvious that Alison had not consented to sex.The men, however, seemed to think it was a storm in a teacup He hadn’t knocked her about, had he? But of course he had.

The new nomenclature has not produced any new thinking about the nature and gravity of sexual assault. Or the inequality of men and women before the law.When Alison turned up for work the next day she was so pale and withdrawn that her workmates were worried Eventually, one of them managed to find out what was wrong. Judges still give far heavier sentences for attempted male rape than they do for fully consummated female rape. The old crime of forcible buggery has become male rape – as if women, too, could not be forcibly buggered.Once upon a time we knew the difference between the orifices involved, and the possible consequences, but that was then and this is now. That is what rape is: intercourse with a woman against her will. Now, because of some more than usually muddled thinking on the part of legislators, men too may be raped.