Crucial to the ideological notion of ‘rape’ is the concept of consent. Rape is sexual act of a man against a woman - it is conceived by the bourgeois legal apparatus to be an act of heterosexual intercourse without the consent of the woman—Its criminal nature centers on this question of consent. Thus the law, based on the ideological construct of equality and thus 'free choice’ makes a sharp distinction between heterosexual intercourse which is freely consensual and that which isn’t, the latter legally constituting rape.

It would seem to be obvious at this point that one effect of the ideological function of 'rape’ is to obscure sexual relations between men and women. To make a qualitative distinction between rape and consensual heterosexuality on the basis of such a profoundly ideological concept as bourgeois equality, is not only to indulge in political naivete but to avoid an analysis of sexuality as a whole. It is to avoid what is essential to an understanding of rape - a scientific analysis of the way in which capitalism organizes sexuality.

—Rosalind Innes, Rape Ideology and the Maintenance of Women’s Oppression, June 1977