Sexualized violence

The parallel construction with sexualized sublation is deliberate and the difference is what is taken. Sublation takes the will and violation attacks the animus directly to extract anima by force, so violence is the more direct of the two operations and the disguise works the same way in both. Marsh's mechanical account is specific. Sexualized violence and physical attacks create an endosocial membrane around the attacker and the attacked, and the attack strengthens the membrane of the attacker, which is the endosocial power of sex operating to divide rather than to join. The victim is enclosed with the attacker rather than merely harmed by them, which is why the damage is not confined to the event. What separates this from sexual connection is not degree but kind, and Marsh's insistence on that is the whole purpose of the three terms. These acts ought to be considered separately because they are fundamentally different interactions, and it is far more important to know which occurred than to know anything else. Her treatment of paedosadism applies the same reasoning to naming, since an attraction that can only be enacted as rape does not belong in a category defined by attraction between consenting partners, and calling it an orientation classifies it alongside attractions that harm nobody. The disguise in both cases is linguistic before it is anything else, and removing it is what the terminology is for.

Sexual violence research established decades ago that rape is about power rather than desire, following Susan Brownmiller, and the framing is now standard in advocacy and in much of the clinical literature, though some researchers argue the power and sex elements cannot be cleanly separated. Trauma research documents the lasting effects Marsh attributes to the membrane. International law treats sexual violence in conflict as a weapon rather than an incident. Marsh's account converges with the power framing and supplies a mechanism for the persistence of harm, since a membrane enclosing victim with attacker accounts for an attachment that the power account describes without explaining.