There’s been a good bit of debate over what should and shouldn’t constitute rape, and what should and shouldn’t constitute consent. For example, modern “enthusiastic consent” laws require a woman to not only verbally agree to sex, but to be damn near visibly excited about it, and to provide ongoing verbal affirmations that it is okay to continue during the entire encounter. We often complain that the definition of rape is slowly being expanded to include “sex I regretted,” but that’s not entirely accurate. A more accurate ideal definition of rape to most pro-woman advocates would be: “sex I may have agreed to but didn’t really want and kind of felt coerced into.”

Many pro-woman advocates will tell you that rape is about power, and that’s not entirely false. For women, sex is a source of power. If you take away their ability to choose who to have sex with and who to reject, you make them feel powerless. A large portion of the psychological trauma and damage experienced by rape victims relates to that feeling of being helpless, powerless, and taken against their will. The physical act is bad, sure, but that feeling of complete powerlessness – one minute you’re strong, independent, thinking about what you need to get done at work tomorrow and that silly thing your boyfriend said, and the next minute, some guy much stronger than you are is showing you that everything you are, everything you think, everything you feel – none of that matters. You’re just weak flesh in a caveman-ruled world, and the stronger caveman is taking something by force that you’ve guarded fiercely from unworthy men your entire life.

Changing the subject for a minute: a staggering number of marriages and long-term relationships are unhappy. We’d all be old and dead if we took the time to count and review all of the unsatisfying marriages in the world, where nagging, overweight shrews emasculate their timid, underachieving, out-of-shape husbands on an hourly basis, while grudgingly agreeing to missionary sex once every six weeks just to keep the marriage going and the paychecks coming. You can change a few of the adjectives in that previous sentence here and there, but sadly, that general concept applies to a very large number of marriages and relationships.

One of my good friends from the town where I used to live is in that kind of marriage. We still talk via text and e-mail, and he told me how recently, things came to a head in his marriage. He’s been married seven years now, and has been having once-a-month duty sex the whole time, and true to his blue-blood-beta roots, he finally came unhinged, gave his wife an ultimatum, and thinks he won. Now he’s getting more frequent sex.

So I’m visiting a couple weekends ago, we’re having drinks, and he’s acting all mighty, alluding to sex, smirking, and generally being an awkward ass about things. Later that night, I’m chatting with his wife while he’s out making a beer run, and she says something kind of odd. “It’s hard being more sexual with [husband’s name.]”

I know what she means, but I decide to see if she knows, so I ask her, “What do you mean? What’s so hard about sex?”

“Huh?”

“What. Is. So. Hard. About. Sex.? People do it all the time.”

“I dunno.”

“I mean, it’s physically easy. Not difficult to do at all. It’s not intellectually challenging. It doesn’t take all that much time. It doesn’t cost any money. I don’t see what’s so hard about it.”

“I guess it’s just hard to make myself do it.”

I smile. Because that’s exactly what she meant. She gets it. When she says it’s hard to be more sexual with her husband, what she really means is, “It is very difficult for me to force myself to have sex with my husband. I am viscerally repulsed by the thought of being sexual with him on a level I don’t fully comprehend. I don’t want to. I don’t want to so badly, that it takes all of my emotional strength to push through that and force myself to do it.” The physical acts aren’t hard. But making herself do them when her subconscious is screaming at her not to? That’s hard.

So many women are in marriages like this. They don’t want to have sex with their husbands. They pretend to be asleep. They pretend they’re on their period. They feign illness. They go as long as they can, doling out as little sex as they can. Not because they’re evil hags who delight in denying their husbands enjoyment. They really and truly don’t want to have sex with their husbands. They figure it’s normal for a marriage to cool off like that and eventually turn non-sexual, and about once a month, give or take, they finally give in to their husband’s badgering just to shut him up. And it’s hard for them each time.

I couldn’t find any studies on this, but I’d be willing to bet that women in unhappy marriages that have sex with their husbands, again and again over a long period of time, begin to exhibit the same psychological traumas and damages as rape victims. Because in a sense, these women are being raped. Not legally, obviously. And not really. But it’s not hard to imagine that their psyche may perceive these sexual encounters and process them in the same manner as a rape.

Take my friend. His wife doesn’t want to have sex with him. But there is an implied threat there, even if it’s not overt and at knifepoint, that her marriage may be in jeopardy if she doesn’t have sex. She might lose her financial stability and the financial stability of her children. Her children may lose the stability of his money, a two-parent home, a house zoned to a good school district. He might as well be holding the kids at knifepoint and forcing her to fuck him. When a woman feels like she has to have sex with a man, even though she doesn’t want to, due to some kind of perceived threat, her mind processes that like a rape.

Every wife in an unhappy marriage that has sex with her husband when she doesn’t want to, because she believes she has to in order to keep her financial stability, is a rape victim. She’s essentially being coerced into sex she doesn’t want. And over time, these unwanted sexual acts take a toll.

Often real rape victims will act out sexually. They’ll go on a fucking spree, ride a bunch of random cocks. Therapists call this “reclaiming their sexuality.” They felt so helpless and powerless when they were raped. It was out of their control. So something about having a bunch of stupid, irresponsible sex that they choose to have makes them feel more powerful, like they’re in control of their sexuality once again.

We see this same behavior in unhappy wives. For years, they’ve been trapped, forced into having sex they don’t want, their sexuality and their power taken from them under threat of losing their marriages and financial stability. So they go out on girls’ night and fuck a random cock to reclaim some of that lost power. To feel in control for one night.

Is it any wonder that feminists want to define sex-by-coercion as rape? It’s not enough that a woman says yes and agrees to sex. What if she agreed to it but didn’t really want it, because she felt like she had to for some reason? If your live-in girlfriend fucks you because she knows she’ll be out on the street if you break up, but she doesn’t really want to, your average feminist would consider the lack of her enthusiasm when she consents to be rape.

Take the alpha man pick-up scenario. Our hero Chad saunters into a club and starts chatting up a girl, touching her, escalating, and she really likes him. But she never has sex the night she meets someone. However, during the night, it quickly becomes apparent that Chad wants to fuck her, and that Chad has six other women in the club that want to fuck him. She likes Chad and she wants to see where things go, but if she wants to keep her chance with Chad alive, she needs to fuck him. She doesn’t really want to, but under the perceived threat of losing her chance with Chad, she feels like she has to.

So she has sex that she verbally consents to, but didn’t really want, because she felt coerced. Then Chad doesn’t return any of her texts. Her psyche processes this encounter like a rape. She literally feels raped. Obviously, she wasn’t actually raped, but she feels raped, and in girl world, feelings rule.

If you aren’t building attraction to the point where a woman is begging and pleading you to thrust your cock into her, you’re doing her a disservice. Because to a woman, anything less feels like rape. So hit the gym, be hot, be confident, be successful, social, interesting, and awesome. Be a 12 out of 10 who’s so unrealistically badass that women beg for your dick. Because in a few more years anything less than that will get you 5-10 years in prison, rapist.