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I agree with the quote in general.

In my mind, much rests on the issue of consent. Consent requires that both partners be sane and able to judge whether they feel like consenting. I have had some experience of what happens when that's not true, and I think a lot about it still.

For example, what happens if a person wants to be raped? Obviously, consent is being given, so does that mean any sex that follows is consensual? A further issue is that I found the circumstances under which people start want to be raped are easily repeatable and predictable. That means, if you know what you're doing, you can undermine a person's mental health to the point where they will freely consent. What happens if a society has rules that statistically push feminine members into that kind of head-space?

I'm afraid I only have experience of the wanting to be raped side. But this also makes me think about what it would be like to want to rape, because I can see that under similar circumstances, masculine people will break towards wanting to rape. If a society again makes itself amenable to pushing masculine members into that kind of head-space, what then? If you are prepared to help and treat those who want to be raped, why don't those who want to rape get the same sympathy and treatment? What does this say about the responsibility of the leaders of the society to prevent a society breaking in this way?

I suppose that's the route I came to the view in the quote, that if good feminine people can make mistakes and you are prepared to help them, then it must be true that masculine people must make mistakes too and may need help, otherwise there is no equality.

I also remember thinking about the whole issue of what happens after some kind of rape regarding the legal system and how it handles things. A philosopher on law (I forget who) said in a famous statement that the Rule of Law is the Rule of Law. What I understand by that (and what I think he meant by it) is that law cannot be defined through any other way than itself and most certainly not by deriving it from other ideas. This means that law is amoral, and merely a collection of statements about what to do in particular cases (much like a computer program). Therefore, the law will not work very well in any case where easily quantifiable data are not available, meaning very strongly emotional matters.

I agree with the idea that if a feminine person feels that she was pressured, then this constitutes rape. I would go further and say if a feminine person feels she was raped than she was. However, that immediately creates the problem that the legal system is not well designed to deal with this kind of crimeand the justice meted out by the legal system isn't efficient or even necessarily the right thing.

I think that, mostly, any rape victim coming to terms with rape would need counselling and support. However, counselling is hard to get for free and this places many abused people in a catch 22 situation where they can't get help because they haven't got help. Getting a criminal ruling I would imagine frees up all kinds of resources for victims, but that pushes victims to prosecute against a designated victimiser to get any help. In the meantime, the victimiser is looking at serious prison time as punishment, not a useful end if the whole case was misunderstanding.

Going back to consent, there is a really good scene in a sci-fi book called Salt by Adam Roberts where a woman from a hierarchical society gets raped by a man from an individualist society, yet the man from that society cannot be said to be raping her. The reason is that the woman comes from a society where she is not encouraged to disagree with her male superiors. The man comes from a completely individualist society where the women have their own contraceptive patches and the men don't get any say in whether the women use them or not, nor do they have any say about the children. The man is being nice and taking the woman, who was stranded in the individualist society (after her superiors sacrificed her in an ambassadorial visit) back home.

It's a really interesting situation, because it highlights how culture can affect the issue of consent. To the man, she can just say no, and her word would be binding, and she could have gotten contraceptive patches for free from anywhere. To the woman, just being in the situation is already technically consent, but her society would have (under its norms) never left her alone with that person for a minute, in order to protect her consent.