In a reappraisal of eighteenth-century Rococo culture, William Park shows that the period had come to identify the representation of the rapist in various cultural forms as a misfit, a character disempowered as an outmoded relic of the past. Faramerz Dabhoiwala elaborated on this assessment and has described the ‘cult of seduction’ as one of the ‘most enduring cultural innovations’ of the eighteenth century. Dabhoiwala's term, the ‘cult of seduction’, does not disregard the reality of sexual violence, rather it describes the harassment and assault so often downplayed as seduction on the assumption that all women secretly desire the attentions of their aggressors. While rape was an offence punishable by law, harassment and coercion were not in themselves considered crimes, even though such acts crossed over into forms of behaviour that would now be considered assault or abuse. Victims of seduction during the eighteenth century were those who had been coerced into consensual, illicit sex. As Dabhoiwala explains, women were particularly vulnerable to the advances of men, who likened the pursuit of women to hunting or chasing, and the consummation of their lust a triumphant victory.

Diane Wolfthal demonstrates that artists from the Renaissance onwards ‘glorified, sanitized and aestheticized “heroic” rape’, and modern analyses of mythological imagery have consistently supported this. The familiar theme of Pan's relentless pursuit of Syrinx depicted throughout the visual art of the early decades of the eighteenth century exemplifies precisely this kind of ‘sanitizing’ of sexual crime by artists and art historians.