YES, AND?

How consent can—and cannot—help us have better sex.

- BY S. C. CORNELL

Consent is a crucial legal framework. But, as feminists have long argued, it can be both too permissive and too punitive.

In 1978, Greta Hibbard was twenty-two and living in rural Oregon. She had a two-year-old daughter, a minimum-wage job, and an unemployed husband. She was, she would later say, “living on peanut butter sandwiches.” She and her husband, John Rideout, often fought; sometimes he hit her or demanded sex. On the afternoon of October 10th, when he did just that, Hibbard fled to a neighbor's house. Rideout followed her, cornered her in a park, and took her home. Once inside, she said, he punched her several times in the face and pulled down her pants. Their toddler, who was watching, went into her bedroom and wailed as her father penetrated her mother.

That this might be rape, legally speaking, was a brand-new idea. Until the mid-seventies, much of the sex in the United States was regulated not by the theory of consent but by that of property: a husband could no more be arrested for raping his wife than for breaking into his own house. In 1977, Oregon became one of the first states to make spousal rape illegal, and even then some politicians thought the law should apply only to couples living apart or in the process of divorcing. A California state senator summed up the prevailing attitude: "If you can't rape your wife, who can you rape?"