Apparently worried that the world might forget what a thoroughly reprehensible human being he is, fantasy author and freelance bigot Vox Day (Theodore Beale) has decided to bring up the issue of marital rape again – in order to assert, as he has many times in the past, that marital rape doesn’t actually exist.
In a post yesterday on his blog Vox Populi, Beale notes with obvious pleasure that an Indian judge recently ruled that marital sex, “even if forcible, is not rape,” thus upholding a section of the Indian Penal Code that refuses to acknowledge marital rape as rape.
Beale crows:
Some of my dimmer critics have attempted to make a meal out of my factual statement: a man cannot rape his wife. But that is not only a fact, it is the explicit law in the greater part of the world, just as it is part of the English Common Law. …
The fact that some of the lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West presently call some forms of sex between a husband and wife “rape” does not transform marital sex into rape any more than a law that declared all vaginal intercourse to be rape would make it so.
Unfortunately for Beale, simply declaring that the world is on his side on this one does not make it so. It not simply a handful of “ lawless governments in the decadent, demographically dying West” that see marital rape for what it is. The United Nations has recognized marital rape as a human rights violation for more than two decades. And the world is coming around to this point of view.
While (as of 2011) only 52 countries had laws specifically criminalizing marital rape, many others don’t have a “marital rape” exemption to their rape laws, meaning that in more than 100 countries marital rape can be prosecuted. And that number will inevitably grow.
Here’s a map from Wikipedia showing the countries (in red) in which marital rape is illegal. The countries in black allow marital rape. In the other countries, it’s a bit more complicated. (See here for the details.)
But for now, at least, Beale is happy for another chance to explain the toxic “logic” behind his assertion that “marital rape” is impossible.
Anyone with a basic grasp of logic who thinks about the subject of “marital rape” for more than ten seconds will quickly realize that marriage grants consent on an ongoing basis. This has to be the case, otherwise every time one partner wakes the other up in an intimate manner or has sex with an inebriated spouse, rape has been committed.
Now, by Beale’s logic, a husband is entitled to force his wife to have sex over her screaming objections. Since “consent is ongoing,” in Beale’s version of marriage, a woman could say no or even fight back against her husband’s advances, but none of this would count as non-consent because once a woman is married there is no such thing.
But of course Beale doesn’t want to have to defend what is obviously – at least to anyone with any humanity – violent rape. So he tries instead to restrict the debate to the seemingly innocuous practice of “wake-up sex.” After all, what guy doesn’t want to be woken up with a blow job?
But even this example isn’t as persuasive as he thinks it is. Some people like to be woken up in an “intimate manner,” at least some of the time; some don’t, and you don’t get to override their desire not to be sexually manhandled in their sleep just because you’re married to them. And while drunk sex is not necessarily rape, marriage doesn’t give you the right to force sex on a partner who is intoxicated to the point of incapacity.
And for those who wish to argue that consent can be withdrawn, there is a word for withdrawing consent in a marriage. That word is “divorce”.
No, that word is “no.” There is no such thing as ongoing consent to sex. The fact that you are married to someone doesn’t give you the right to have sex with them whenever and wherever you want, whether they want to or not, any more than the fact that someone is a professional boxer gives you the right to punch them in the head any time you feel like it.
The concept of marital rape is not merely an oxymoron, it is an attack on the institution of marriage, on the concept of objective law, and indeed, on the core foundation of human civilization itself.
No, Mr. Beale, you having the right to do whatever you want to with your dick is not the basis of civilization itself. Civilization, in fact, is built in part on the repression of some of our darkest desires. Part of growing up is reconciling ourselves to the sad fact that we can’t just do whatever the hell we want to all the time; Freud described this as putting behind the “pleasure principle” of infancy and early childhood for the “reality principle” that governs the more mature mind.
Beale seems to be driven not only by a desire for instant sexual gratification, whenever and wherever he wants, but also by a certain degree of sexual insecurity. In a previous post on the subject, he wrote:
If a woman believes in the concept of marital rape, absolutely do not marry her! It would make no sense whatsoever to marry a woman who believes that being married to her grants her husband no more sexual privilege than the next unemployed musician who happens to catch her eye.
Beale seems to think that if married women are allowed to say no to their husbands, they’ll desert these poor beta schlubs en masse in favor of scruffy alphas with guitars. At the root of all his arguments against the idea of marital rape is an obvious terror of unrestricted female choice.
In a way Beale’s petulant, self-serving defenses of marital rape serve a positive function, in that they help to remind us how abhorrent the practice is and how nonsensical the “arguments” in favor of allowing it really are.
Every time he opens his mouth on the subject, he helps to strengthen the growing consensus against marital rape.
One of those people in fact recently told me on Facebook that “rape culture does not exist, at least not in the U.S.”
He also said that there’s no need for feminism in the U.S. anymore as women there have everything now.
I’ve discovered that people who talk the most about THE history of marriage have the least idea of what that history entails. Marital rape has been acknowledged in many cultures for centuries (though I realize MRAs believe there is only one culture, White American Maybe Sometimes White European Culture, but they don’t have a lot of knowledge about, I don’t know, Planet Earth either, so there’s that).
TW rape:
This whole thread reminds me of something I heard some 17 years ago. My friend was on the phone with her older sister and they were giggling about something. When she got off the phone she told me that her sister and sister’s husband came home drunk and the next morning in the shower she noticed her tampon was shoved up really high in her vagina and had trouble getting it out. Apparently her husband made er, love to her while she was passed out. I was sort of shocked that they thought this was funny. I expressed this and she brushed it off and said “pshh, they’re married.” I accepted this at the time because I was very young and thought maybe that was ok. Her sister certainly didn’t seemed bothered by it (to us) and was in fact telling the story like it was funny. I thought to myself that maybe someday when I’m married, just being married will magically make me want sexy times all the time with my soul mate. Story always bothered me though.
Years later I met my future husband and when I told him this story he just reflexively said “he raped her.” I said yeah but is it rape even if she doesn’t “feel” raped. He gave me a very firm “absolutely”. It was the beginning of an education for me, still ongoing, unlearning this toxic women’s role-as-sex-machine crap.
Emcube – exactly. Though I don’t even give them the “can’t seem to understand” benefit of the doubt: I think it just suits them extremely well to paint rape the way they do. It gives them so much more cover if the idea of what rape is gets limited so much.
Cthulhu’s Intern – yes, it’s always “he’s innocent until proven guilty, ergo the b*tch is accusing him just to get him thrown in gaol for life” – like that’s ever going to happen.
WWTH – that is just the WORST misandry ever! How can Darrow live with such cruel cruelty against his manly catliness (or is that catly manliness)? Why, he’s being reduced to a CATGINA!
@Robert : Part of me hopes that this is the tipping point where many of T. Beale’s supporters stop and say, “what? He said WHAT? Oh my ears and whiskers, Scalzi was right – this guy’s a blob of glup”, and stop supporting him.
Well, it appears as if the idiots who pay attention to him are busy arguing whether wives have to submit to EVERYTHING their husband tells them to do, or just to those things which aren’t sins according to God.
Which means that they’re still hunky dory with husbands raping wives; the important question in their eyes is whether the husband can order the wife into a three-way with another woman.
See also Warren “what if she says no but our tongues are still touching?” Farrell.
Right? They’re like, “Rape is terrible. Now watch while I define rape so narrowly that I can claim it almost never happens.” For example, Gary’s comments above.
Before Vox Day, Spacebunny used to date George Glass.
(Seriously, I wonder if that istockphoto workout model knows she’s internet-married to a revolting rapey bigot…)
Hee hee!
Shorter Gary: “All rape is bad, but I get to decide what is rape because I’m nuanced unlike everyone else in the world.”
About that stock photo work out model: Why the short hair? I have heard Vox and “Spacebunny” say that women Ought To Have Long Hair as if this is some kind of a rule, not a preference.
Sorry, stupid question. I see now that it is tied up.
I can see it now. The Vox Day/Georgia Glass-Day household, where every time one of them is sick or grumpy or tired or busy saving the world from feminists, they have to file for divorce. It must get very expensive.
@weirwoodtreehugger
I just watched that movie like two weeks ago. It’s fairly horrifying.
Love it. 🙂
On the “a big burly man gets raped by a 14yo” business –> why is Gary using an UNDERAGE girl as his example? Did nobody else creep out when he bought a child into discussing rape matters?
Hookergal,
Yeah, he was just creepy all around. He could have said petite woman + big man to point out a rape accusation (that in his dumbass mind) is not believable.
On the plus side, it seems we drove him off.
So… either my husband has a right to fuck me whenever he wants to and there’s no such thing as marital rape, OR my relationship to him is not special in any way, sexuality-wise – I might decide to have sex to him tonight, but I might just as well go have sex with a completely different person, it’s totally arbitrary. These are the only two options.
Remind me – was he using the world “logic”?
I was told once that it’s very unfeminist to believe that someone can be raped despite not labelling her experience rape herself, because the woman must be allowed to define for herself what happened and yada yada. I think that standpoint mixes up a few things. Firstly, ,t’s a good rule to always believe someone who says she was raped. Telling someone that she was raped is usually a big step for a person; normally, there is no reason at all to distrust her (I say “normally” because we can always think up some weird scenario where it is). Secondly, if you tell someone “you were totes raped, you just don’t get it” that might come off as very disrespectful, and therefore be a bad thing to do. But none of this implies that a person who describes an act which is clearly rape and then goes on to say that it wasn’t is in the right.
Obviously, since we live in a rape culture, it will happen all the time that women are raped but don’t think of the act in that way. If rape doesn’t become rape until the victim calls it so, then marital rape would have been a non-problem back in the day when almost no one believed a wife had the right to say no to her husband. But as everyone but the trolls know at Mammoth, that’s bullshit.
Gary T: I would say that legal marriage necessarily comes with it, the strong *presumption* of implied pre-consented sex.
Bullshit. My consent isn’t implicit. My partner and I have discussed how the question(s) of what sort of mood we are in are to be answered. No, we don’t always use the word yes, but if one of is engaging in suggestive behavior, and the other isn’t responding with encouragement we assume this isn’t the time.
Because consent is active, and revocable. I guarantee you that if I’m not in the mood, you sure as fuck ain’t getting any.
I am not saying it can’t happen, but I am saying that unlike an unmarried couple, a high burden of proof, even for the charging stage, should be upon the spoused accuser of rape. It cannot be the same standard of proof as to two simple acquaintances.
Again, bullshit. The question is exactly the same, “this person had sex with me against my will”. That’s rape. It doesn’t matter what the legal relationship is. Being married doesn’t mean one has the right to rape someone.
Your question pre-presumes the rape.
As I said in my original post, the problem is more of a practical one than fundamental.
Only if you reduce the presumption that a person reporting a crime is being honest.
Because that’s what your, “higher burden of proof” means; that we presume a married person who reports a rape is lying.
Your (tortured) examples don’t help your case. After all, it’s not as if small people (I’m going to ignore your fatuous 14 year old fantasy), can’t be capable of using coercion, or weapons, or simple pressure, to obtain sex against the actual wishes of another person.
One of the biggest hurdles to getting people to admit that consent is easy, is to do exactly the blurring of lines you are attempting. A lot more men are raped than people like to think, because women are able to press, and “cajole” and otherwise wear down their resistance because assholes like you insist that only someone using violence is really committing rape.
And to be clear, rape should never happen, and if it does it should be prosecuted.
Unless it’s just too hard to do; what with them being married and all. It’s not like the woman actually knows if she didn’t consent; I mean she married him, amiright?
You are why rape is so common, because you actively refuse to admit rape is rape.
Makes me wonder if there are skeletons in your closet; things which might, in the right light, be seen as rape.
Ken L. no, I don’t like to make people uncomfortable but I’m not going to lie about what I think.
Then allow me to not lie about what I think: You know fuck all about Russia. It’s not that I think Russia is a great place to be non-straight, but your simplistic set of clichéd “truisms” about Russia are banal, ill-informed, and skewed by your sources.
In short, you’re a twit.
“A lot more men are raped than people like to think, because women are able to press, and “cajole” and otherwise wear down their resistance because assholes like you insist that only someone using violence is really committing rape.”
I’m worried about the names people may call me, so I ask this under another screen name: If someone is pressed, cajoled and worn down until they say yes to something they do not want, is it rape? It is lousy, but does the word “rape” apply?
Reflecting further: one if the reasons WHY men who are raped by women aren’t “believed” or “need a higher burden of proof” (gag) is because people like MRAs (and society) are so focused on men being “masculine” and not allowing them to feel what happens. Or simply laughing at them when they state this. Or stating men who are raped by women need a higher freaking burden of proof to even go to the police. Seriously?? Feminists actually challenge gender roles – they try and break down these “feminine and masculine” ideas that society (and sadly the “humanists” men’s rights fellows) follows. It’s sickening you think people in different situations need different burdens of proof. Cos I’m positive the actual law doesn’t agree with you.
You might as well (note that I do NOT actually advocate this stance) argue that there should be less proof required for marital rape, because wives tend to love their husbands, and accusing someone you love of raping you and possibly sending this person to jail must be a terribly big step that no one would take lightly, so for that reason we should put MORE trust in women accusing their husband of rape than women accusing someone they’re not that close to.
The “real rape should be prosecuted” thing also bugs me for another reason: It’s messed up whenever someone says the justice system should only be used some of the time. How can you even have a justice system of it’s not applied equally to all reported crimes?
It is no news that Vox does not believe in marital rape, but this thread nevertheless convinces me he is even more evil than I thought.
The Spacebunny story is trivial by itself, but if he has no wife, he has no evidence that the “married man game” he sells even works. There is a difference between
(a) a sincerely wrong believer in something, who proclaims a lie because he don’t know the truth,
and
(b) someone who simply don’t care if he misleads his followers, don’t care if his message causes harm, don’t care if his advice works.
If (a), Vox is still evil, and his non-seeing of the harm his messages can cause will be because of a lack of heart. If (b), then he seems to have no conscience towards anyone – follower or foe. His followers seemingly are, to him, useful objects for his goals the same way subservient women are objects towards male goals.
On the other hand, the Spacebunny story does turn him into laughing stock, and it is more fun to laugh than to be angry.