There are many forms such denials may take. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core”—is how the character of David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor, describes the sex he takes from his student, Melanie, in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. “As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck” (1999, 23). What does one call that? If not quite rape, then what?9
