THE ENIGMA OF RAPE: PHYSICS, CHEMISTRY, AND CONCEPTUALIZATION

Rape offenses are broken. Vast scholarship points out diverse problems in rape law: gaps, flaws, dissonances, and contradictions. Unfortunately, academic discourse tends to focus on one form of rape or even on a small element of one form, and it is getting harder to see the forest for the trees. This Article examines the trees and the forest, observing the diverse doctrines of rape and systematically exposing the normative incoherence of rape law. It presents an innovative dichotomy, analytically dividing the perpetrator-victim interaction into three significant facets: the physics of rape, the chemistry of rape, and the legal conceptualization of rape. After a thorough analytic journey, identifying major normative dissonances in current rape doctrines, this Article concludes that the rape offense is normatively shattered. It therefore proposes to abolish the rape designation entirely and start anew, categorically dividing sexual offenses into sexual coercion and sexual abuse, offering subcategories and critical parameters of severity.