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Notes -
To be fair, in that story it's quite clear that the society of the time has a very different view of what rape is, has no idea what, historically, the reality of rape was, and if they heard about it would probably die from vomiting up everything they ever consumed in their entire lives.
That's why he has the character of the Confessor who comes from the before times before everyone was cured of being mean and wicked and evil and nasty and who does know what 'rape' meant, and that's why he evokes (successfully) the reaction of the reader about "They legalised rape???? What kind of perverted monsters are they?" and then the other shoe drops about "Oh hang on, they don't mean rape rape, they mean some dumb form of flirting that implies consent to sex without explicitly verbalising consent". It's clever, I'll give him that, but yeah - it does leave him open to precisely that kind of "did you know?"
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