driven mad by the flesh

Rape, said feminists in response, is not caused by the the rapist’s weakness and powerlessness before overwhelming sexual desire, as previous masculinist and patriarchal discourses had insisted, but  the opposite: rape is an expression of not only a will to control and dominate but also a capacity to do so. And I don’t mean capacity in terms of physical strength, although that may be a factor (but, because rape is so often not accompanied by physical force, strength may not even enter the picture); I mean that the rapist always implicitly knows, even if they may consciously hold the anti-feminist beliefs described above, that the mechanisms of legal, social, and gendered power are all really at their disposal, not the victim’s. The capacity to rape is a social capacity, a structural capacity, not a capacity inherent to a type of body or a type of person.