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.
Cloudiah, it isn’t going to get dark enough here. It’s still only 7 p.m-ish. I’m a bit saddened.
I want to watch the meteor shower but am wondering if I’ll be able to see it in the city. I suppose I could walk down to the lake because it’s a little darker over there.
Ironic to see Kate calling women childish when in the other thread we’re dealing with a guy who thinks grown men need it explained to them by women that ogling a woman’s breasts is creepy and inappropriate.
I wonder what she would think if I decided to generalize that to all men?
Presumably she meant “defend” and her transition to Full Misogynist has removed her lady-ability to type/construct coherent sentences.
TIL from Kate Mintner that “ripened” people don’t “need” to rape. And that women are horrible because women doxx people, but that register-her.com is a form of justice.
Maybe by ripened she means that when other people see their views they are perceived as stinky, like a cheese.
@Alice: Or four million. Or two billion. And may they be broken Legos at that.
What is this drivel I just read…
Silly me, now I know when my ex force himself on me, he was just exercising his rights as my spouse to never be denied sex. I got it now; excuse me while I go throw up.
@justabrowngirl
:: offers hugs ::
@Ally, I’ll take them happily.
There too many triggers for me on this one.
All the hugs, justabrowngirl. So sorry people can be so shitty.
He found a church he likes? Yay! I occasionally think about our brief discussion about UU and I’ve meant to PM you guys on Tumblr and see if you wanted to talk more about it, but I always think of it while I’m in the shower and forget by the time I’m out.
Thanks Cloudiah, he has no idea what survivors go through…with all the self doubts and internalizing every decision you have made, is enough for strongest person to cave into down spiral.
Leum: I honestly think Paul’s reputation as an asshole is undeserved.
I agree (though it took me years of study to come to this). I commend “Paul among the people” for a take on his writings from the POV of a classicist, not a biblical scholar (though the writer is religious).
Her take is that we’ve lost the context of the times, and are doing a lot of “back-formation” from how things look; through the lens of a lot of strife, and cultural change and so imputing a lot of modern interpretations as if those were what Paul meant when he wrote the texts.
Dvärghundspossen: He’s a “Dark Enlightnment” moron. Think the worst aspects of Libertarian, married to a sort of techno-fascism.
Shedding light on the Dark Enlightenment
Mencius Moldbug:
What is England’s problem? What is the West’s problem? In my jaundiced, reactionary mind, the entire problem can be summed up in two words – chronic kinglessness. The old machine is missing a part. In fact, it’s a testament to the machine’s quality that it functioned so long, and so well, without that part.
Moldbug (a nom de net) is the “philospher” who created the movement.
Mouthbreathing Machiavellis
One day in March of this year, a Google engineer named Justine Tunney created a strange and ultimately doomed petition at the White House website. The petition proposed a three-point national referendum, as follows:
1. Retire all government employees with full pensions.
2. Transfer administrative authority to the tech industry.
3. Appoint [Google executive chairman] Eric Schmidt CEO of America.
This could easily be written off as stunt, a flamboyant act of corporate kiss-assery, which, on one level, it probably was. But Tunney happened to be serious. “It’s time for the U.S. Regime to politely take its exit from history and do what’s best for America,” she wrote. “The tech industry can offer us good governance and prevent further American decline.”
Welcome to the latest political fashion among the California Confederacy: total corporate despotism. It is a potent and bitter ideological mash that could have only been concocted at tech culture’s funky smoothie bar—a little Steve Jobs here, a little Ayn Rand there, and some Ray Kurzweil for color.
Tunney was at one time a prominent and divisive fixture of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Lately, though, her views have . . . evolved. How does an anticapitalist “tranarchist” (transgender anarchist) become a hard-right seditionist?
“Read Mencius Moldbug,” Tunney told her Twitter followers last month,
I still think Dark Enlightenment sounds like pseudointellectual Juggalos.
And Moldbug makes me think of Mr. Mybug from Cold Comfort Farm.
@Cassandrakitty
Milton, The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, 1644
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/ddd/book_1/
Wow…the Blockquote Monster didn’t take any of my offerings… rejected outright.
Wow. Thanks for the links pecunium. That’s disturbing as fuck.
We have a serious problem with resurgent oligarchy (cf. Thomas Picketty), and really toxic ideologies cravenly trying to justify it. I’m frankly a little exasperated at my nice normal liberal progressive friends who absolutely refuse to see neo-fascism as a threat. I guess being fucking ridiculous is a kind of defense mechanism.
The scary thing is that the single greatest incubator for revolution/fascism is income inequality.
And the fuckers in gov’t don’t seem to care that they are manufacturing better and better conditions for some seriously violent reactions to it.
*breif de-lurk*
I looked around on Kate’s blog a bit.
Is she… an English teacher? She seems to say so in her post about Walter Mitty.
Bringing purple-prose misogyny to a new generation.
*re-lurk*
Not necessarily. Far too many people have read history written about kings and wars and landed aristocracy and thought the dynastic/ grasping/ diplomatic/ political considerations and manoeuvrings of marriage in those classes applied to everyone.
I strongly recommend The Subversive Family: An alternative history of love and marriage by Ferdinand Mount. He’s a very conservative person – anyone who edited The Spectator has to be by definition – but he has some really good insights into ordinary people and their romantic and family lives.
(Though I’d skip the first chapter if you’re Xtian. His research led him to unexpected places – he’d previously thought the church had been great supporters of marriage and family and of the status of women. Finding out he was wrong about this means that the first chapter reads a bit like a newly fledged non-smoker or vegetarian talking about the evils of tobacco or meat 6 weeks after the event. Read the rest of the book – or just the 2nd chapter on the evils of socialism, communism and other isms – first.)
@Robert
Full-on real LOL. I love this sentence so much I momentarily considered getting it a tattoo of it. Decided against the tattoo in the end, but I will steal it and actively hope to be able to use it in a future conversation.
@Robert
LOL that’s exactly what I thought. Stephen Fry in sweaty grossness. (I love the film but couldn’t get into the book.)
Yup. First example that springs to mind: ancient Egypt. Marriage among the vast majority of the people (peasants, artisans and so on) seems to have been an arrangement between the couple, no legal involvement, and I don’t think it’s known if there was any religious component. Divorce was pretty straightforward, too – they split up and the household wealth was divided. It wasn’t divided fairly, since the woman only got a third, but the whole setup’s way ahead of what many societies have even today.
Even among European royalty and aristocracy, marriages for love took place. No, it wasn’t the norm, yes, it could get you cut off from your family, but it did happen. With arranged marriages, couples could get lucky and fall in love. Charles I and Henriette Marie are good examples of that. I think the idea that romantic love is a modern notion is a bit of a furphy. Certainly our idea of companionate marriage can’t be broadly applied to other societies, especially ones that tend to be homosocial, but it isn’t a rigid distinction.
For me, the entire concept of marital rape is kinda insulting because, well, rape is rape – no matter what the relationship of the victim and perpetrator is like. The whole term kinda implies that marital rape is different kind of rape. I do perfectly understand the term when used in historical and cultural context but I just really am grossed out by the idea that the act itself gets treated so differently – especially considering how common it actually is.
Totally isn’t helped by the fact that stranger rape is far more rare than spousal assault 🙁
@contrapangloss: (A Candide reader? 🙂 ) Yes, very sensible. Men might feel the need, and that is what I think the Free Northerner post is about. My point is that that “need” should never arise: that with proper relationship skills, a concept such as “marital rape” would never exist.
::sigh::
They never can stick the flounce.
Kate: there is no need to rape, whether you use scare quotes or not. It’s a choice one person makes to violate another. Talking about relationship skills makes it sound like you think it’s an accident or poor socialisation.
Please take your rape apologism and go away.