Usually, rape isn’t reported. When it is reported, it is often not charged. And when it is charged, it rarely leads to a conviction. These facts shape both our cultural understanding of sexual violence and women’s sense of their own embodied lives, clarifying something many of us already know – that while sexual violence is technically illegal and officially abhorred, it is also tolerated in practice, with actual arrests and convictions being so rare that most sexual violence is de facto decriminalized.

Only occasionally does a notable rape conviction come to pass; when it does, its very rarity highlights this dissonance, making plain the gulf between how rape is officially talked about and how it is usually treated. Now, that gulf has come to the fore again, because on Thursday one of the most high-profile rape convictions in American history was overturned.

Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood producer whose name became synonymous with the unchecked sexual violence of powerful men during the height of the #MeToo movement, had his conviction on felony sex crimes charges vacated by New York state’s highest court. This does not mean that Weinstein will be a free man; he has also been convicted of rape and sexual assault in California, and will be transferred to a prison there.

The court’s overturning of his conviction is not an exoneration, either: the judges ruled that Weinstein was entitled to a new trial on procedural grounds, and it is now up to Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan district attorney, to decide whether to retry the sexual predator. I imagine Bragg will be under considerable political pressure to do so.

But the overturning of Weinstein’s conviction was yet another brutal political defeat for the cause of........

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