Free Northerner is a “Dark Enlightenment” blogger who describes himself as “a Christian and a reactionary monarchist from British North America” who,
after a period of red pill exploration … decided to embrace Christian masculinity. I am working to improve myself for God’s glory. My plan is to find a wife and raise a large family with traditional values.
If any woman ever decides to marry him – and I sincerely hope no one ever does — she should be aware that her Darkly Enlightened husband does not believe there is such a thing as marital rape.
In a recent post, Free Northerner set forth the essentially the same argument as his fellow reactionary Vox Day: that the marriage contract provides “sexual consent … for life,” and that those who argue for the existence of marital rape are thereby undermining the legitimacy of marriage itself. And then he adds some tweaks that make his terrible argument even more terrible than that of Mr. Day. But we’ll get to those in a moment.
First, his basic claim:
Marital non-consent is an impossibility: if there is non-consent, there is no marriage; if there is marriage, there can not be non-consent.
So if a wife doesn’t want sex and her husband forces it on her – whether she is screaming no and fighting her husband, or if she is so cowed she can’t say a word – her “no” simply doesn’t count, because of the one time she said “I do.”
Free Northerner, a man of many short paragraphs, attempts to give a Christian justification for his stance:
The basis of Christian marriage is laid out in Genesis and reiterated in the Gospels. The man and wife become one flesh.
Can a person commit a non-consensual act upon their own flesh?
The very idea is absurd.
Indeed, he argues that anyone who believes that there is such a thing as marital rape isn’t a real Christian:
Any statement that there can be non-consent in marriage is an attack on the fundamental basis of Christian marriage and the Christian family.
And, furthermore, that anyone who says “no” to their spouse is a sinner:
The Bible is very clear that you should not deny your spouse sex. Someone who does is sinning.
But, hey, he’s no monster. If your spouse says no, even if this is Very Wrong because the Bible Told Him So, Free Northerner does acknowledge that it might not be so terribly polite or practical to go ahead and rape have perfectly justifiable marital sex with them.
All that being said, this should not be taken as encouragement to take your spouse if the spouse is saying no. Your spouse may be sinning and consenting, but it would not be the loving thing to do and might be sinful in itself. As well, from a practical standpoint, the law does frown upon it.
Free Northerner then pulls a very Warren Farrell-esque move. You may recall that in discussing his incest research in the 1970s, Farrell, the intellectual grandfather of the Men’s Rights movement, suggested that much of the trauma of incest might come not from the incest itself but from society’s negative attitudes towards it.
Free Northerner makes the same argument, a bit more forcefully, with regard to marital rape, claiming that the real trauma of marital rape comes not from one spouse forcing sex on another but on the notion that this violation is a violation.
That is, the real trauma of marital rape is caused by the idea of marital rape.
Here’s how he puts it:
The trauma of rape does not primarily come from its physical aspects, but rather its psychological aspects. The trauma comes from the violation.
If this is so, it stands to reason if there is no sense of psychological violation, there is no trauma.
The creation of the concept of marital rape, creates the idea that a spouse can be violated in marriage where the idea didn’t exist previously. Undesired sex that would have been an unpleasant duty is made traumatic by removing the psychological aspect of duty from it and imputing a psychological aspect of violation to it.
I think it likely, the psychological trauma of marital rape only becomes a reality because of the belief that there can be such a concept as marital rape. Pushing the concept of marital rape increases the likelihood of trauma from marital rape; the very concept of marital rape creates the trauma of marital rape.
Anyone with any degree of real human empathy can see that this is pernicious bullshit.
And in fact, Free Northerner has it completely backwards: it’s the fact that people don’t take marital rape seriously that makes it worse.
Even though marital rape is now illegal in the United States, numerous surveys reveal that both men and women take it less seriously than stranger rape, and there are still many who, like Free Northerner, don’t believe that it is rape at all. As late as the mid-1990s, fully half of the male college students answering one survey on the topic said that it wasn’t possible for husbands to rape their wives.
Yet numerous studies suggest that marital rape can actually be more traumatizing than stranger rape, both emotionally and physically. Rape by an intimate partner represents a profound betrayal of trust; it may be part of a broader pattern of mental and physical abuse, and it is likely to be repeated. Most wives who are raped are raped more than once, with a third of them raped twenty or more times. And contrary to what many believe, survivors of marital rape are often subject to more extreme physical violence than survivors of stranger rape.
Despite all this, many wives remain trapped in violent marriages without any outside support. Many raped wives are financially dependent on their husband-rapists and find it difficult if not impossible to leave; meanwhile, they’re often pressured to stay by friends and relatives who don’t even consider what happened to them to have been rape. Thus their trauma is made worse by the cultural denial that marital rape is rape.
It’s not the idea of marital rape that causes trauma; it is the fact of it. It is marital rape apologists like Vox Day and Free Northerner who enable it in the first place – and make the trauma worse once it happens.
I remember Libby Anne making the same point – Christian Patriarchy types tend to omit the husband part. If you haven’t read her blog, I highly reccomend it:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/
I hope this guy never finds a wife.
Interesting how he says “Christian masculinity”, not Christianity. That’s a tipoff that his conversion was motivated by easy access to a pool of compliant underage girls who’ve been trained from day 1 to submit to authority. Agape, how does it work?
Two words: paper cut.
I bet he’s on Christian Mingle. Is it bad that I have an urge to join just so I can troll him? I won’t, but I have the urge.
http://weknowmemes.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/conniving-containers-meme.jpg
I always found it amusing that people leave out the rest of that Corinthians passage. Which is basically, “No one should be having sex with anyone. But you’re all a bunch of depraved sinners who are too weak to abstain, so I guess you should get married just so you don’t turn into complete animals.” Paul was kind of an asshole, is what I’m saying.
It also begs the question: How did this ever come to be seen as a bad thing in the first place? If women only object to being raped because someone told them to object…why did that person tell them to object? How did this mysterious instigator get the idea that it was objectionable?
He can go fuck a Hot Pocket! Blech!
My mom recently gave me the talk about how I am not getting any younger (I’ll be 26 next month), and that I should be searching for a husband before it’s too late. But really, this is selling marriage as a shitty deal.
@Anachronist:
Or, yeah, precede. But let’s not forget the all of those cute* miniatures with their horns and swords and pikes and spears! Since they’re made out of lead, even the wizard’s pointy hats are escalations of mere Legos…
But only in my fantasies, of course. I don’t actually wish lead poisoning on anyone.
*for a certain value of “cute”
“a Christian and a reactionary monarchist from British North America”
He really wants to be ruled by a monarch? Who gets to be the monarch? It sounds like he wants to be ruled by the British royal family, so… Queen Elizabeth II? She’s, y’know, a feeemale.
This guy has all these groovy beliefs (reactionary monarchist? he’s welcome to the Stuarts), scintillating grasp of logic, and Biblical exegesis…. and yet… he’s single? How can such things be?
OK, sarcasm off. This is vile.
Argh… and rape is no thing unless someone tells you it’s a thing. Because obviously someone who has been raped would never know otherwise.
Christ on a pushbike: small children who have no words to describe what happened to them still know it was something very wrong
David, I don’t know how you manage to wade through this stuff.
May invisible legos adhere to the inside of every sock he ever owns, and may everyone within a 1000 league radius know exactly what kind of person he is.
Damn….is this guy “Free Northerner” VILE, or what? Sad thing is, there probably are a fair number of guys out there who really do share this man’s awful beliefs.
Also, seconding Bluecat on this one. And may invisible Legos also show up every time he slips, falls, or trips on something.
@ Nequam & twincats:
Uggh. You’re right, sorry. In my defense, I really was appalled enough at this guy’s bullshit to not be thinking straight when I wrote that.
This picture is of me:
http://stuffonmycat.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/DunceTipsy.jpg
Yeah, he goes on to say how the best thing is to make oneself sex-less for the sake of the lord. Once upon a time, some Christians would interpret this as meaning that the best kind of Christian man is the one who chops his own balls off.
Fun fact: In Swedish, a republican is a person (often a socialist) who wants to abolish monarchy. In the states, it’s a right-winger. I’m the first kind of republican, but absolutely not the second kind. 🙂
Seriously though, I can sort of, dimly, understand that over half the population here supports monarchy, since Swedes are born into that system and always told how great it is, and the media does very little criticism of this institution. But how someone who lives in a non-monarchy could come to the conclusion that monarchy is a great idea really baffles me.
Well, he was a former serial killer.
Actually, I think most “lead” figures are made out of other metals now, to prevent the risk of lead poisoning. I think they use pewter now.
But to add to the RPG themed curses, may he fail all of his charisma checks when trying to convince women to date him, and may all of his character sheets have Pepsi spilled on them.
There is no bottom to this barrel we’re scraping, is there?
I honestly think Paul’s reputation as an asshole is undeserved. When he was writing most of his epistles, he quite honestly expected the world to end tomorrow. Anything that would distract the believer from Christ, and especially anything with the potential for creating emotional, physical, or spiritual distresss, was undesirable because there could be no benefit from it. The world would end long before any sort of long-term benefit could be found in it.
By the time he wrote Romans, the latest of the undisputed epistles (I Thessalonians, Phillipeans, I and II Corinthians, Philemon, Galatians, and Romans), he was less certain that the world would end before breakfast, and so was counseling churches to think in a more long-term manner. Though he still probably believed celibacy was superior, because he inherited a lot of Grecian philosophy of the superiority of mind over body.
There might be benefit in the separation between the ceremonial “Head of Sate” and the legal “Head of Government”, especially when nationalism is bound up in party politics, and disagreement with the President is disagreement with America itself. But actual hereditary dictatorship by the aristocracy? Hell no.
(That said, we still get a few pro-monarchy twits here in Canada. Their political influence is somewhere between “diddly” and “squat”.)
Free Northerner needs a lego body-slam.
@Leftwingfox: Yeah, that’s what people always bring up in support of monarchy. But you can have an elected president which is more of a ceremonial figure as well. Granted, zie won’t inspire as much reverence as a king/queen, but that’s really for the better. It makes me sick how servile a lot of otherwise rational people become in the presence of the royals.
Everything around them is so fucked up. They’re the only ones in the country to whom freedom of religion doesn’t apply – the constitution says they have to be protestants (obviously there’s no way to check that they actually believe in God or anything, but they must at least say they do). The king can actually decide whether his kids are allowed to get married or not, and he wants them to marry properly posh people, so if they want to marry someone not properly posh they need near-infinite resources of stubbornness. And obviously no one in their family could be gay or anything. Being a gay politician is fine, but with royals it’s unthinkable. They spend enormous amounts of cash and it’s very poorly reported on, because apparently the royal family is the only post where we can just pour in tax money without knowing where it’s going more precisely. Defenders of monarchy always says it pays off because having a royal family is great advertisement for a country and somehow means more business here and a higher GNP than we would otherwise have – as far as I know, there is precisely zero evidence for this claim (Finland, for instance, has for most of the time had a similar GNP per capita, and it’s a fairly similar country in many respects but without the monarchy). Also, they’re the only ones in the country you’re supposed to refer to by title. We never use titles here otherwise, but just calls everyone by their first names. Except the royals. It was revealed some time ago that the king has been cheating big time on the queen, and for some time had Camilla Henemark, then singer in Army of Lovers, as his mistress. But they’re still somehow supposed to be family value rule models.
Fuck monarchy!
bodycrimes:
Ew. The first half of that was basically, “we have all the guns, so we should be using that to intimidate the opposition.”
As for the OP, what the hell do you say to that? Other than fuck off, an I hope he steps on all the Legos?
That’s the general gloss I’ve heard of the passage; it really only makes sense in the context of both Greek stoicism and the early church’s ideas about the apocalypse.
The second half of the passage is really just saying that if you want to be celibate you shouldn’t get married, and while there are criticisms you can make of that, it’s not a particularly terrible point.
I like it when people have radical contrarian ideas about marriage and family life before they are married or have kids.
Kind of wonder if he’s right though– I mean, maybe I find having my personal belongings stolen offensive and irritating mostly ’cause I was raised from birth in a culture that has quite a strong concept of personal property rights. If we just abolished the idea of individual personal property, most theft could cease to be a thing within a generation or two. 😀
No? You don’t think that would work, and even if it DID you wouldn’t want to live in the resulting culture?
oh.
I’m not a Christian, but I once was. I did a fair share of Bible reading. I don’t get this kind of thinking at all. Does this dude not respect the writers of the Bible enough to understand that they sometimes wrote in metaphors? Even in the NT, Jesus is big on using parables. Clearly two people do not become one flesh. That’s impossible. Even a very long time ago, people knew that. They also knew how to use metaphor and simile. “Spilled his seed upon the ground” sounds classier than, “pulled out before he came”. “My beloved’s breasts are like newborn fawns” sounds nicer than, “My wife’s got perky tits”. They were writers considered good enough to turn stories handed down through spoken tradition into written word. Even if you think the whole thing is fiction, you could at least have some respect for the writers. If you believe that God himself hand picked and inspired those writers, then that shouldn’t be a difficult task.
But, no. This guy has decided that they wrote as badly as he does. What a self serving jackass.
Also, if married folks are one flesh, doesn’t that make married sex masturbation?
Isn’t that a nopey no in most fundamentalist churches?
The bible can be used to support anything. That is why I have trouble looking at as a good moral guide.
In terms of marital rape, I think it’s horrible. In my mind it would be the worst knd of rape. I am genuinely shocked that so many people don’t even believe it exists.