Essentially yes.  Rape is not a &quot;strict liability&quot; crime, which means that intent is an element of the crime.  By definition, &quot;the perspective of the alleged perpetrator&quot; is a key element of the crime, just as it is with murder, assault, robbery, and a host of other crimes.  You can&#x27;t just say &quot;Alice killed Bob, Alice is a murderer!&quot;, you have to stop and ask what Alice was thinking or intending.  It might not even be a crime, it might be negligence, manslaughter, etc.<p>(Well, sort of.  Technically it&#x27;s the perspective of &quot;reasonable person&quot; in the alleged perpetrator&#x27;s position, which is a well-defined legal fiction.  As Wikipedia notes correctly but unhelpfully, &quot;the &#x27;reasonable person&#x27; is not an average person or a typical person&quot;.)<p>The author is correct:  Rape cases, by their nature, do tend to revolve around discussions of what the accused reasonably believed about the other parties consent.  The mistake is in suggesting that there&#x27;s anything we could (or should) do to change it.