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Free Northerner: "The concept of marital rape creates the trauma of marital rape." And spouses who say "no" to sex are sinners.

Just because she says  "I do," it doesn't preclude herfrom saying "no" ever again.
Just because she says “I do,” it doesn’t preclude her from saying “no” ever again.

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.

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Ally S
10 years ago

Oh look, another rapist who treats female rape victims as a monolith. Totally not horrific and creepy at all. /sarcasm

He can go fuck a Hot Pocket! Blech!

xD

Nequam
Nequam
10 years ago

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.

IIRC gaming miniatures were legally classified as toys for the purpose of monitoring lead content, even though most gamers wouldn’t let a small child handle their minis without really close supervision.

These days, a great many gaming minis are plastic or resin. This does making transporting a Warhammer army slightly less cumbersome.

talacaris
10 years ago

Dvärghundspossen

Somebody I knew said monarchy is cool because it is so blatantly undemocratic

Alice Sanguinaria
10 years ago

This guy needs to go step on a Lego. Or two. Or six. Or ten thousand.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

He needs to upgrade the Legos to the infamous caltrops of tabletop gaming

Random, but y’all know that caltrops are a vegetable too, right? The first time I saw them I was all, what is this awesome thing that I am being served?

http://www.rasamalaysia.com/uploaded_images/caltrops1.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_caltrop

They’re actually a type of water chestnut, but I think they look like tiny little winged demons.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

On the OP, I can’t even get shocked by the marital rape apologists any more. They’re a bottomless pit of misogyny and sexual violence. If you think they may have reached the limit of their awfulness, nope, there’s more.

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

My husband just gets this deeply pained look on his face whenever he hears about dingbats like these. Then he says that he’s sorry he shares a religion with these people. (He’s going to be marching with his church to fight hunger on Monday.)

RE: emilygoddess

“You’re only traumatized because someone told you it was traumatic” is such gaslighting, agency-denying bullshit

Yup. And how convenient that it just so happens to encourage survivors and victims not to ever talk to each other or warn each other…

RE: Shaenon

As a married lady of ten years, I don’t get this mindset.

I think it works like this. There’s this presumption that if you marry someone, they will ALWAYS want to have sex, at any time, because LOVE or some shit. Ergo, you can’t rape your partner, because they always want it! (And if not, well, obviously they can’t REALLY not want it, because they married you!) It’s a very circular logic.

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

RE: cassandrakitty

I wonder if the caltrop weapon name came before or after the vegetable name?

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

The vegetables are too squishy to actually pierce skin, I’d think, but stepping on a bunch of them wouldn’t be much fun, so I wouldn’t be surprised if they had inspired the weapon.

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

BIOWARFARE: the early days!

kittehserf
10 years ago

Nequam – yup, that’s Elizabeth Taylor in the pic.

katz
10 years ago

Maybe they purposefully bred caltrops to keep out invaders, in the long tradition of breeding domesticated species for patriotic purposes, as seen with the Danish protest pig.

Michelle C Young
10 years ago

Nope. I’m just noping away.

Gonna go plan my dream vacation, and as long as I’m dreaming, I want a unicorn/pony.

Bye, all!

Dvärghundspossen
10 years ago

@Talacarus, that’s pretty terrible, but I guess the person who said it thought zie was really cool.

Kate
10 years ago

A man who learns what engenders sufficient attraction in his woman will never have to worry about needing to “rape” her. Hint: guarantees are attraction killers. As Oscar Wilde wrote: “The very essence of romance is uncertainty.”

Unripened men and women often have these lists of expectations for another person never bothering to truly consider what they, themselves, will be *contributing* to the relationship. They want contracts and pre-nups. They are thinking about what they can get rather than what they can give. Love doesn’t work that way. It isn’t negotiated with a lawyer. It is drawn out from sacrifice for each other’s sake. It is elicited to protect innocence. It is found in unlikely ways overthrowing everything we anticipated.

These types of people want to fantasize about what they imagine relationships and marriage and family to be like with very little conceptualization of the reality of those institutions. The reality is: a woman who consistently does not want to have sex with her husband is a HUGE red flag. Something is already seriously wrong with the relationship. And it’ll be an uphill battle to remedy that.

Marie
Marie
10 years ago

@kate

eeuuggh.

A man who learns what engenders sufficient attraction in his woman will never have to worry about needing to “rape” her.

WOw nice scare quotes jerk.

Even if she’s not attracted to him he shouldn’t rape her because men are fucking human beings and can control whether they rape people.

he reality is: a woman who consistently does not want to have sex with her husband is a HUGE red flag.

Do you even know what a red flag is? People can break up because of inconsistent sex drives, and there’s nothing with that, but the way you’re phrasing this is just fucking bad.

cupisnique
10 years ago

My mom recently gave me the talk about how I am not getting any younger

My mom has taken up that inspiring message, as well. Last year when I was still a few months away from 26, she told me “well, you’re almost 30”, say what?! That’s news to me.

Ally S
10 years ago

@Kate

A man who learns what engenders sufficient attraction in his woman will never have to worry about needing to “rape” her.

Fuck it, I need a smoke.

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

It’s amazing how much creepy Kate managed to squeeze into that one sentence, isn’t it?

cupisnique
10 years ago

After reading your post Kate I have numerous red flags popping up. I find what you wrote very troubling.

Kate
10 years ago

@fromafar2013: lol what?

cassandrakitty
cassandrakitty
10 years ago

Speaking of purple prose, have you seen her blog?

http://demarkate.com/

LBT
LBT
10 years ago

RE: katz

the long tradition of breeding domesticated species for patriotic purposes, as seen with the Danish protest pig.

And now I’ve learned a new thing today. Will wonders and human ingenuity never cease!

RE: Kate

A man who learns what engenders sufficient attraction in his woman will never have to worry about needing to “rape” her.

Wow, you’re not gross at all. Because yes, all rape only happens because the dude isn’t attractive enough or good enough in the sack. Sure. Totally.

Stay classy, Kate.

weirwoodtreehugger
10 years ago

needing to “rape” her

What the fucking fuckity fuck? Nobody needs to rape anybody else ever. Why would you say that? Why is rape in scare quotes?

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.