 Feminists have long claimed that, in patriarchal cultures, rape is not anomalous but paradigmatic—that it enacts and reinforces, rather than contradicting, widely shared cultural views about gender and sexuality. As Dworkin puts it, “rape is not committed by psychopaths or deviants from our social norms—rape is committed by exemplars of our social norms …. Rape is no excess, no aberration, no accident, no mistake—it embodies sexuality as the culture defines it” (1976, 45–46). A core dynamic of patriarchal sexuality, on this view, is the normalizing and sexualizing of male (or masculine) control and dominance over females (or the feminine). This dynamic finds expression in a number of beliefs about what is natural, acceptable, and even desirable in male-female sexual interaction: that the male will be persistent and aggressive, the female often reluctant and passive; that the male is invulnerable, powerful, hard, and commanding, and that women desire such behavior from men; that “real men” are able to get sexual access to women when, where, and how they want it; that sexual intercourse is an act of male conquest; that women are men’s sexual objects or possessions; and that men “need” and are entitled to sex.