Going along with it: sexually coercive partner behavior predicts dating women's compliance with unwanted sex
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Updated: Jun 12, 2026

Assessment of Sexual Behavior of Male Mice
Published on: March 5, 2020
Jennifer Katz1, Vanessa Tirone
1Department of Psychology, State University of New York College at Geneseo, Geneseo, NY 14454, USA. katz@geneseo.edu
Abstract:
Sexual compliance involves willing consent to unwanted sex despite a lack of sexual desire.The authors hypothesized that compliance would be significantly more common among women with sexually coercive partners because compliance allows women to bypass possible coercion. Undergraduate women in heterosexual relationships ( N = 76) responded to self-report measures of partner sexually coercive behavior at baseline and sexual compliance 6 weeks later. As expected, reports of partner coercive behavior at Time 1 predicted women's willing consent to unwanted sex at Time 2. Most compliant women consented to unwanted sex after learning their partners may coerce them if they refuse.
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