 Assuming for the moment that, in sexual encounters, rape exists where consent is lacking, the question then becomes what counts as consent. Women’s sexual consent has in many instances been understood quite expansively, as simply the absence of refusal or resistance; feminists have criticized this approach on the grounds that, among its other untoward implications, it regards even unconscious women as consenting (MacKinnon 1989b, 340; Archard 1998, 85). Furthermore, it has too often been assumed that a woman’s appearance, attire, status, location, prior sexual history, or relationship to the man in question either function as stand-ins for consent (that is, as “asking for it”) or render her consent irrelevant or unnecessary. A vital task on the feminist agenda has been to challenge and discredit such ideas—to deny that what a woman wears, where she goes and with whom, or what sexual choices she has made in the past have any relevance to whether she should be seen as having consented to sex on a particular occasion.