 Recent scholarship includes some novel approaches to the legal definition of rape. MacKinnon, for instance, has recommended that a broadened understanding of force (as including hierarchies of power) should be supplemented not by a nonconsent requirement, but by a standard of “welcomeness.” A consent standard, she observes, incorporates gender hierarchy by assuming that men initiate sexual contact which women then either accept or refuse, whereas a welcomeness standard suggests the centrality of “choice, mutuality, and desire” (2005, 243). She explains her approach as follows: