Time & Perspective Quote by Robin Morgan

A line like this is designed less to persuade politely than to redraw the map of what society is willing to name. Robin Morgan isn’t offering a narrow legal definition; she’s staging a moral intervention. By making “initiated by the woman” the bright line, she flips the default assumption that sex is neutral unless a woman forcefully resists. The provocation is the point: it drags into view how often women’s acquiescence gets misread as consent, and how frequently sex happens inside a fog of obligation, fear, economic dependence, or social training to please.

The specific intent is to collapse the comforting gap between “rape” and “bad sex” that patriarchy relies on. If rape is only the cinematic stranger in an alley, then the everyday coercions of dating, marriage, and workplace power remain culturally invisible. Morgan’s phrasing forces an uncomfortable audit: not “Did she say no loudly enough?” but “Did she actively want this, on her terms?”

The subtext is also strategic and separatist in its logic: it treats male sexual initiative as suspect by default, not because every man is a predator, but because the culture’s baseline scripts have historically granted men pursuit and women compliance. Context matters: Morgan emerged from second-wave feminism, when activists were trying to name marital rape, sexual harassment, and the politics of “consent” before the term had mainstream traction. The sentence is blunt to the edge of overreach, and that edge is deliberate. It’s a wedge meant to crack open a culture that had made coercion ordinary.