 A central element of rape as a terrorist institution, Card claims, is a protection racket in which men, as the group both creating the danger and proposing to deliver women from it, dole out protection—sometimes temporary, sometimes permanent, often illusory—in exchange for women’s service, loyalty, and compliance. In this system, “good” men protect virtuous and deserving women from “bad” men, and part of what defines a woman as deserving protection is her conformity to rules of patriarchal femininity. Women who are not offered protection, or who decline it when offered, are then frequently blamed for being raped. Furthermore, as Card points out, the rules of the institution often grant “protectors”—whether husbands, boyfriends, or pimps—sexual access to the woman or women whom they protect, so that nothing they do to those women is taken to count as rape. The institution thus requires a woman to give up her sexual autonomy in relation to one man, in order to gain his (conditional and unreliable) “protection” from other men.