When rape first became a crime, we lived in a different world. Among the middle and upper echelons of society, women expected to be virgins at marriage and to be respectable in public thereafter.

These expectations arose from common knowledge which has been forgotten. Without the bonding that sexual inexperience provided, couples lacked the trust that came with shared exclusive experience. Their marriages also became unions of convenience, not based on the sacred but in business-like negotiations for mutual satisfaction on a day-to-day basis.

Not surprisingly when we abandoned this outlook our fortunes fell as far as marriage is concerned. First infidelity swept through marriages, then divorce became common, and now people simply avoid marriage in the first place to avoid being penalized to subsidize someone else after the inevitable divorce. Marriage is like extended dating at this point.

In saner times, rape ruined a woman. If it occurred before marriage, it made her unlikely to become married; if it happened afterwards, people saw her as being ejected from the throes of marital contentment. (This was for decent people in the upper echelons: peasants, criminals and gypsies rutted like pigs and still do, which creates their ever-expanding numbers and ever-decreasing fortune.)

In our new age however rape no longer carries this weight. No woman is ruined by having sex with one more man, since they commonly have sex with six of them on average that they will admit, but we know that people lie on surveys and the actual number may be ten times higher, some without even knowing his name or spending more than a dozen minutes in his company. At this point, it is farce and injustice to keep rape classified as a crime of violence.