I had a 30-minute conversation with an advisor at a marriage agency, and I think I’ve got a pretty good grasp of the business overview. The conversation veered off into a related topic: “Do members self-report non-consensual sex?” I was impressed when the advisor told me, “Normally, if a woman reports it, the terms of service stipulate that sexual intercourse during the dating period is treated as a successful match, resulting in mandatory expulsion, so it doesn’t lead to any trouble.”
There was also a post on X suggesting, “If a woman alleges non-consensual sex, shouldn’t the man simply report that it was non-consensual as well?” While this represents an “affirmative” perspective given the political climate at the time the statute on forcible sexual intercourse was enacted—which recognized that men could also be victims—there also seems to be a cultural viewpoint, grounded in criminal law theory, that there is no need to define “consensual sex.” Ultimately, given that women are in a physically vulnerable position due to the structure of their genitalia when a claim of non-consensual intercourse is made, and if we adopt a relatively strict interpretation that “acts similar to sexual intercourse are not sexual intercourse,” it is probably unavoidable that the woman will be the one to determine whether consent was given or not.
While the crime of forcible sexual intercourse was accompanied by a detailed list of examples, the crime of non-consensual sexual intercourse seems to have foregone such a list. In other words, whether consent was given or not—to use the terminology from Masari Toyama’s “Binary Criminal Law Game Theory”—is structured as a nested framework of criminal intent/negligence and civil intent/negligence. Given that it is clear this differs from the concept of “lack of consent” in the crime of non-consensual abortion, and taking into account that criminal law is shifting from punishment toward education, the debate can be resolved by using the criterion of whether civil damages were intentionally caused, separate from the infringement of criminal legal interests.