Participants conflate consent and wantedness when judging situations as rape (Peterson & Muehlenhard, 2007). Pleasure might also affect how such situations might be appraised by victims, perpetrators, and jurors. In four experiments, participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted, and pleasurable or not pleasurable. Participants judged whether they thought each situation described rape and how distressing they thought the encounter would be. Wantedness affected perceived distress when consent was given. Wantedness and pleasure also influenced whether participants considered the situation rape in nonconsensual scenarios. In additional experiments, we analysed the results by gender, manipulated perspective (being the subject or initiator of the encounter), levels of aggression, and compared the results to a group of participants who had viewed an anti-abuse campaign. Male participants and those higher in benevolent sexism were more likely than women to utilise pleasure and wantedness in judging whether situations described rape. Perspective and viewing the media campaign did not significantly affect judgements of rape. Our results have implications for models of the consequences of consent, wantedness, and pleasure of sex, and important implications for educational programmes aimed at reducing sexual assault and training for those involved in criminal justice.

While the lack of consent is the only determining factor in considering whether a situation is rape or not, there is sufficient evidence that participants conflate wantedness with consent and pleasurableness with wantedness. Understanding how people appraise sexual scenarios may form the basis to develop appropriate educational packages. We conducted two large-scale qualitative studies in two UK universities in which participants read vignettes describing sexual encounters that were consensual or not, wanted or unwanted and pleasurable or not pleasurable. Participants provided free-text responses as to whether they perceived the scenarios to be rape or not and why they made these judgments. The second study replicated the results of the first and included a condition where participants imagined themselves as either the subject or initiator of the sexual encounter. The results indicate that a significant portion of our participants held attitudes reflecting rape myths and tended to blame the victim. Participants used distancing language when imagining themselves in the initiator condition. Participants indicated that they felt there were degrees of how much a scenario reflected rape rather than it simply being a dichotomy (rape or not). Such results indicate a lack of understanding of consent and rape and highlight avenues of potential educational materials for schools, universities or jurors.