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.
As an amateur feminist theologian: AAAARGH. Articles like this make me so. very. angry.
The whole “Do not deny each other” thing does NOT mean “You never have the right to say ‘no'”, but rather, “Don’t make a celibacy commitment without working it out with your spouse first.”
The whole “one flesh” thing does NOT mean “Abuse is therefore impossible”, it means “Abuse should never, ever happen because you should not treat your spouse in a harmful way, just like you would not treat your own body in a harmful way.”
I say again, AAAAARGH.
Seconding Kootiepatra… The “do not make a celibacy commitment without working it out with your spouse first” is not just a more agreeable interpretation for modern people, it’s a more plausible interpretation throughout. A really sexist person might write a passage allowing the husband to rape his wife, but it’s not plausible that anyone would write an equal opportunity rape text.
News alert: possible MRA tie-in to new mass/spree murder. http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/24/justice/california-shooting-deaths/ ‘It appears the suspect acted alone, Hoover said.
“This is a very active and complex investigation involving approximately nine different crime scenes,” she said.
Santa Barbara Sheriff Bill Brown called the suspect “severely mentally disturbed,” according to KEYT.
Authorities searching for a motive were looking into a video posted on social media that contains a man’s tirade against women who supposedly rebuffed him, Brown told the station.”
Some commenters are saying this video is connected to the slaughter. Caveat: none of this is verified yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbv5Vpa-B-0
“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.”
This is VERY telling I think. There’s a glimmer of acknowledging that unwanted sex is, er, “unpleasant.” His whole “one flesh” theory just collapsed with that phrase. Certainly one flesh couldn’t be submitting to an unpleasant duty on itself. He KNOWS it’s bullshit.
And anyway, who in the fuck would ever ever EVeR want to have sex with someone who considers fucking you “an unpleasant duty”. Can’t imagine a quicker way to be turned off. If I knew or even sensed that my partner wasn’t into it, I would stop. I would have to stop. I just, I mean,it’s pretty obvious he just doesn’t want consent in the first place.
Ok, this is why I never comment here. WordPress is constantly forgetting my password and by the time I’ve reset it I’ve lost my post. This is in response to Kate and the other commenters who have attempted to set her straight on the idea that marital rape is somehow “needed.”
I think this idea, that marital rape is necessary is related to the idea that torture is necessary–such as in the ticking time bomb scenario. Say you could only achieve your goals and save a trainload of blind orphans, hurtling off the track, from imminent death by having sex with your wife and she refused? Obviously (!) the greater good demands that you go through with raping her in order to protect those kiddies! Or what if a terrorist has hidden a bomb in a large public building but refuses to tell you where it is unless you have sex with your wife? Obviously again you must have sex with her, even if she refuses, because her right to bodily integrity and self determination ends when the needs of the many conflict with the needs of the one.
Having said this I think we can all see that Kate and her MRA buddies are absolutely right–marital rape is thus not just permitted, its even mandatory in some obvious circumstances. Without it selfish, solipsistic, “autonomous” individuals who inhabit female bodies would get the idea that their needs trump the legitimate necessity faced by their husbands on a daily basis.
Also, on the topic of one flesh–have any men in christian marriages accepted the notion that they must donate a kidney or their heart to their spouses on demand? Because otherwise this “one flesh” thing seems decidedly one sided.
@Kootiepatra
Thank you! As another amateur feminist theologian, I’m thirding your post.
I got into a debate about this recently and it really depresses me how many Christians (mostly men) mangle this passage to suit their own selfish desires.
I think Paul gets a bad rap because people 1) take things out of context, textually (as here) and 2) don’t understand the cultural and historical context.
Galatians 3:28 is what started me down the road to feminism.
And everyone else’s point* is that your assumption is not borne out by the evidence about who commits rape and why, or how their victims treated them. Rapists don’t rape because their victims weren’t nice or submissive enough. That’s just the excuse they use.
*I haven’t actually read the whole thread, but I think it’s safe to assume it went down just like every other thread of its kind.
Yeah, still getting creeped out by Kate’s “if you just had better relationship skills your husband wouldn’t need to rape you” schtick.
Kate, you missed my point entirely.
There are reasons why a married couple with generally good relationship skills may go without intercourse due to one spouses refusal.
Regardless of the length of time this period of undesired celibacy goes on, there is NEVER a ‘need’ for either spouse to rape the other.
I’ll agree with you that good spouses never rape their partner. I’ll append ‘because acknowledging your partners refusals and not raping them is just one component of being a good spouse.’
However, I thoroughly resent your implication that sex is a ‘need’, that this ‘need’ only exists for husbands, and that if a wife denies her husband sex for long enough that he’ll ‘need’ to rape her.
You may not have said that last bit straight out, but the inplication is there. If you don’t believe that women who deny their husbands sex (if they communicate about why, poorly) deserve to be raped, please consider dropping the phrase ‘feel the need’ in relation to rape.
Saying something is a ‘need’ strongly implies that obtaining or executing the need isn’t a bad thing. Since rape is awful, saying it is a need is terrible.
*implication. My bad!
Also, I’m seconding Sparky: a spouse having poor communications skills is not an excuse to rape them.
I get the impression that Kate’s mealymouthed implication is that a “ripened” wife is obligated to have the “relationship skill” of always consenting to sex, and that Kate is also implying that rape would therefore be the wife’s fault.
Hey Kate, thanks a bunch for the victim blaming (because is only the wife responsibility/fault to not get rape)…kindly fuck off.
Why did I look down at the comments?
The very first one was a PUA dating coach who said that this wouldn’t have happened if he had studied his dating advice. So gross.
Nthing the giant fuck off to Kate.
There is never ever a need for rape ever. Not ever. That framing is incredibly creepy.
Kate used the term “commentariat” and “unripened” in reference to people, so if she weren’t saying such creepy things under smiley faces and condescension I’d be tempted to ignore her completely.
She reminds me of a person who bullied me in middle school. I find it difficult to explain how I was bullied without describing what she did in detail, but the reason was that I was more gifted than she was and she thought it was unfair. Trust me, I’m not being egotistical and making that explanation up – that was her reason.
Everything she wrote and said was peppered with flowery, purple prose and general disdain for the people around her.
She went on to major in rhetoric at the same college I attended. I thought that might at least squeeze the purple out of her prose (if not the disdain), but NOPE.
After accidentally running into her in real life recently (to an almost comedic reaction on her part), her blog, and an article she wrote in a campus magazine, I’m very glad she is out of my life and clearly doesn’t care about or want to know what I’m doing anymore.
In short, I generally haven’t had good experiences with people who write like that as adults.
Stop. Stop. No, stop. No.
The need to rape should never arise… because of proper relationship skills, the possession of which makes the concept of rape an impossibility.
A fable.
A city has three doctors. They are knowledgeable, and they possess family secrets. The youngest fixes the medical problem people have moments before they become terminal. The youngest is renowned throughout the country for saving people’s lives.
The middle-born helps alleviate symptoms of pain and suffering that people have had for a while.The middle-born is is renowned throughout the city for helping people with their joints, always fixing the acute, chronic pain people have lived with all their lives.
The eldest, who has practiced the longest, fixes tiny stings and the oddest sensation of remotest pain through the neighborhood. The eldest doctor is only known by the family. But everyone else was trained by the eldest
In which way is this like the concept of rape? The answer is it fucking isn’t, because the “overpowering need for sexual gratification” that “Leads to rape” when it is not “Properly managed” by “relationship skills” has no relation to such natural forces as disease, the pressure of steam boilers or the temperature of tea.
The idea that the “Need” for a concept like “marital rape” wouldn’t arise if two people possessed proper relationship skills is so disastrously full of loathing that it’s a little hilarious.
What you are literally writing is that so long as the “need” of one person is managed in the correct way, the possibility of rape does not exist, and the concept of the event has no need to exist either. After all, it never comes up. Needs are being managed.
Well… that’s just… A great way to look at relationships. You’re right. As long as I always make sure to submit to my partner that partner won’t rape me because I am, after all, managing that partner’s needs, and there is no “need” for something like marital rape, because, hey, I’m submitting every time, see!
This isn’t about communication or relationship skills or mutual sexy times had with great gusto and fun, this is about something outside of two people being described in ultimate terms (“the need”) and it being the responsibility of these two people to manage this to avoid the terrible consequences of this not being managed (“the rape”).
Not only is it wrong, in that that is not commonly why and how rapists rape (They aren’t sex werewolves with magic overpowering libidos that turn them into momentary monsters until they climax), it’s the wrong way to think about something with the direct consequence of physical violation and mental anguish. It turns the person who is doing the raping into concept that must be managed, an entity devoid of anything but some specified need that “proper relationship skills” can appease.
Congratulations. You’ve turned a pair of partners into someone in supplicative worship to a natural force that only the proper doctrines can starve off the terrible wrath off.
So wrong.
So, so wrong.
Let me guess who’s responsible for keeping up the relationship skills in Kate’s scenario. Fuck off, Kate.
@Kate
the flounce! We talked about this! You have to stick to the flounce!
Nope. Men do not feel the need. Rape is not a need. If he thinks there is a need, he’s terrible, and buttering up his feelings won’t help.
Let me ask a question: how do the people at wehuntedthemammoth propose to eliminate “marital rape”?
Adding to the “fuck off” chorus for Kate.
And that video scarlettpipstrelle posted, and the story–it’s horrific. My friend’s daughter is going to UCSB (she’s fine, but easily could have been one of the victims), and this really hit me hard.
I watched much of it, and the guy talks about how he’s going to “slaughter” women and in the next breath how he is a “perfect gentleman” that the “sluts” have inexplicably rejected. He illustrates Michael Kimmel’s concept of “aggrieved entitlement” absolutely perfectly.
@kate
Again with the scare quotes.
1) by acting like its not a need, and not blaming the victim for not satisfying the rapist.
So, pretty much, the opposite of what you want.
2) by actually prosecuting rapsists instead of acting like their victims weren’t trying hard enough to avoid the rape.
3) by showing marital rape as atrocious, not as something that can be avoided by fufilling the rapeists ‘needs’
4) by supporting rape victims and not supporting rapists.
but those were just some wacky idea I had. Sure I can just talk about how to avoid your husband ‘needing’ to rape you, like you do.
Am I the only person who thinks Kate’s behavior merits a banhammer? I’m pretty upset about this shooting, so maybe my temperature gauge is off-kilter.
@Kate – the same way we propose to eliminate all rape, by teaching people that consent is mandatory and writing and enforcing laws that treat violating consent as the crime that it is.
Let me ask you a question: Two married people are sitting on the couch last night. Person A says “Hey I really want to have sex later tonight” and Person B says “No, I’m not up for it tonight.” Person A then forces Person B to have sex. Do you agree with the original post, that Person B has not right to say no? And that this scenario is not rape?