> And yet Alford demurred when friends later characterized her first experience with JFK as rape. “I don’t see it that way,” she wrote. After all, she hadn’t told him to stop. From her perspective, she added, “Resistance was out of the question.”
How do you consent when the power dynamic is such that you feel like "resistance was out of the question?"
Given the power imbalance between men and women in the US up to the 1970s — remember that women were still being sterilized by court order in the 1970s for having children without having a husband — I feel like the question of consent at the time was pretty dodgy in very many cases that involved people of opposite sexes. Which of course is what feminists of the time were (metaphorically!) lambasted for saying, that all heterosexual sex was a sort of rape, because even if a woman was intentionally saying yes, her ability to say no was always limited. Obviously this goes in spades when we’re talking about JFK and not just your grabby teenage boyfriend.
I think things have gotten considerably better since then.
Things have gotten considerably better. Read that NYT article. As recently as 1994 we were debating whether sex without consent but without use of force was rape or not.