Delores Alexander at right and the feminist writer Susan Brownmiller, third from right, on a tour of Times Square sex shops in 1979. Photo: Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times

By GINIA BELLAFANTE of the New York Times

“Makers: Women Who Make America,” an expansive, multipartdocumentary on PBS that chronicles the modern feminist movement, illustrates, among other things, how much of the ethos of the 1950s still coursed through the system in the decades that followed. It was not simply a pervasive distrust of female ability that lingered — and would, of course, carry on — but a more insidious rank dismissal of basic cognition: the belief, for instance, that a woman could not be considered a reliable narrator of the sexual violence that she had endured. Through the early 1970s, New York maintained the strictest corroboration requirements of any state in the country, meaning, essentially, that what a rape victim needed was a visitor from the future, armed with a cellphone camera, to record her attack.
Another decade passed before the “earnest resistance requirement,” which asked rape victims to establish that they had sufficiently fought off their assailants even when those assailants held weapons, was expunged.
Given these standards, rapists typically avoided imprisonment. There were 1,085 arrests for rape made in New York City in 1969; only 18 resulted in convictions.
The dismantling of various cultural and judicial obstacles to successful prosecution has proceeded well enough that we can now conduct civic debates about rape at the level of semantics. When former Representative Todd Akin of Missouri and other Republican politicians betrayed outrageous ignorance of the meaning and consequences of the crime last year, Americans responded with a virtually uniform voice of reproof and disgust at their language. “Rape is rape” was the meme quickly ignited to counter the lunacy.
And yet in some sense, the crisp clarity of that phrase is belied, however inadvertently, by a burgeoning progressive movement to broaden the legal understanding of the term. Last year, the Federal Bureau of Investigation changed its definition of “forcible rape” to include other types of sexual attacks when it gathers statistics.
Currently, there are two proposals in the State Legislature that seek to alter our thinking.
One, offered by Assemblywoman Aravella Simotas, Democrat of Queens, would re-categorize instances of forced oral and anal “conduct” as rape. They are currently punishable under the penal code as “criminal sexual acts,” and at the first-degree level come with the same strict sentencing guidelines that accompany rape convictions. This would not change if the bill were to become law. The move, in effect, is purely symbolic, intended to offer the victims of certain sexual crimes the permission to see themselves as survivors of rape in the eyes of the court. As Ms. Simotas has said: “No one goes around saying they were criminally sexually acted upon. Rape is a powerful word.”
This is indisputable, but we might deploy the same reasoning to argue that the power it levies, despite our best efforts, is stigmatizing and that our use of the word ought to be ratcheted down rather than up. As it happens, various states have eliminated the term rape from criminal codes in favor of more clinical language.
The proposal has left prosecutors and certain advocates for victims of sexual violence concerned that its effects would be dangerously counterproductive. As the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., writing on behalf of the District Attorneys Association of the State of New York, put it in a letter to certain members of the Legislature, any bill that clustered various criminal acts under the single umbrella of rape law could jeopardize consecutive sentencing, in which sentences are added to one another rather than running concurrently. Appellate courts could view multiple acts of violence as a single assault.
Prosecutors instead favor an alternate proposal from State Senator Catharine Young,Republican of Olean, that would eliminate the penetration standard for rape, meaning that only a certain kind of forced genital contact — the placement of the penis to the vulva or vagina — would qualify as rape, while other acts would remain under their existing classifications.
The impetus for these proposals is the case of Lydia Cuomo, a young schoolteacher who was raped at gunpoint by an off-duty police officer, Michael Pena, in Upper Manhattan on her way to work early one morning in August 2011. Mr. Pena ultimately received a 75-year sentence for his conviction on sexual assault charges, but the jury hung on the specific issue of rape, something unlikely to have happened in the absence of the penetration standard.
Ms. Cuomo felt vindicated by the sentencing, she told me, but despite the fact that Mr. Pena later pleaded guilty to the rape counts, she was left with a sense of Pyrrhic victory after the trial, having been technically denied the status of a rape survivor. I pointed out to her that no civilian who had followed the case would consider what happened to her in the context of other terminology.
“It’s gut-wrenching to hear that the thing that’s been keeping you up at night is something called ‘sexual assault,’ ” she told me. “I don’t think the word sexual belongs in there. There’s nothing sexual about those acts.”
As Susan Brownmiller’s transformative book, “Against Our Will,” established, rape is, of course, not a crime of lust or eroticism: it is crime of power and intimidation. Perhaps the answer is not to upend current law in deference to nomenclature but to create entirely new vocabularies within our existing frameworks. More immediately, lawmakers might want to consider that what happened to Ms. Cuomo was one of several similarly terrifying cases recently, among them the rape of a 73-year-old birder in Central Park and the attack on a woman in her Upper West Side apartment in which a pizza delivery boy was charged. What are the synonyms for prevention?
E-mail: bigcity@nytimes.com