Michel Foucault famously said of all sexual relations, “There is no difference, in principle, between sticking one’s fist into someone’s face or one’s penis into their sex.” A punch in the face is violence that employs the mechanisms of violence; rape is violence that tarnishes the apparatus of love. Rape violates the intimate, private self as well as the outer, social one. It is neither purely sexual nor purely violent; it is the humiliating expression of a power differential that aggressively unites these two motives and behaviors.
