Marital Rape

As anybody who has read this blog will know, I’m not one for posts with not a lot of research and documents backing it up. However, the following issue is very close to my heart, as I have a friend who has experienced something very similar. We’ll call her Caitlin, for the purposes of this post.

The following is a reaction to a Feministing post on comments made by Dennis Prager about how a wife should have sex with her husband even though she doesn’t feel like it. Or to quote the man himself:

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

…

First, women need to recognize how a man understands a wife’s refusal to have sex with him: A husband knows that his wife loves him first and foremost by her willingness to give her body to him. This is rarely the case for women. Few women know their husband loves them because he gives her his body

This is just disgusting.  “Give her body to him” and “gives her his body”, because sex is a commodity, right? To be given and taken and sold and traded and bought.

So many good points were made by commenters on the Feministing blog. But rather than to point out how this kind of attitude implicitly encourages marital rape (i.e. a wife should never refuse sex, but should rather lie down and take it even if she doesn’t want it), I will instead detail Caitlin’s experience of marital abuse, which she has kindly shared and agreed to let me recount, to demonstrate why these attitudes are the beginning of a rape mentality.

Caitlin met her ex, Justin, when she was 17. At the age of 18 they were married and they moved in together. At first their sex life was very active, but as time wore on the romance disappeared and they had sex less often, “about 3 or 4 times a week”, she said. This, in her mind, was just a natural progression of the relationship. However, Justin was not nearly as realistic about it, and couldn’t understand why she had stopped having constant sexual relations with him. He began to talk about how sex is a sign of affection to him (isn’t it to all of us?) and about how when she doesn’t have sex with him, that shows that she doesn’t love him. This, of course, led Caitlin to worry and she started to have sex with him more regularly, however she would always lie underneath, was obviously not into it, and really didn’t want to be having it. She tried not to say ‘no’, of course, because she knew this would just make him angry and he would start blaming her for his own self-esteem problems, basically saying that she was breaking down the relationship and that because they’d had sex before, that meant that she ‘owed’ it to him regularly.

Caitlin then says that “sex became like a chore”, because she saw it as something she had to do on a regular basis as part of being in a relationship with him; kind of like taking out the trash or doing the washing. She was emotionless about it and did it begrudgingly (as you do with most chores!) and so then Justin would get even more angry, saying that she should be active and get on top and be into it. So now the chore became even more difficult, required more energy and time, and Caitlin did it with even more disdain than before. Justin had turned sex from being something they both enjoyed together, to something which Caitlin ‘owed’ him, could not realistically say no to, and which essentially deleted all of her sexual desire. She couldn’t enjoy or yearn for sex anymore. Naturally, she only very rarely had an orgasm. Nevertheless, “he would insist I cum sometimes, and would get mad if I didn’t do it quickly”.

Eventually, with a lot of difficulty, a lot of pain, and a lot of angry phone calls, Caitlin left him after being married for almost two years.

“Why didn’t she leave sooner?” You might ask. Well, because Justin had basically manipulated her into thinking that her lack of enthusiasm for sex was her own fault, that she was ruining the relationship, and that by not having sex she was hurting him emotionally. He made her believe that it was she who had the psychological issues, not him. Nevertheless, the fact remains that if he hadn’t put pressure on her in the first place to have sex more than she wanted or was comfortable with, the relationship could have lasted a lot longer than it did. She loved him, a lot, she felt all connections with him, including sexual, until he started putting pressure on her to have it, until he told her it was her duty.

I was going to end the post there, but the final paragraph of Caitlin’s email to me was particularly moving:

“I always saw myself as someone with a strong libido. I really, truly enjoyed sex. I wasn’t nervous or hesitant about any uncontroversial sexual acts, and was actually proud of my own ability. After Justin and I broke up, though, I suddenly found myself having to date people completely different from him to enjoy it. It took a long time for my libido to come back. Justin used to make ‘deals’ with me about when and how often I should give him blowjobs, since having sex with a passive head was more fun for him than sex with a passive person. If a guy, even a boyfriend who I’ve been dating for a while, asks me to give him a blowjob (as I might ask him to go down on me) I freeze up and I become turned off, instantly. I can’t do it. I honestly feel like crying whenever I think of how I used to have to give Justin a blowjob every Saturday. It wasn’t negotiable, I couldn’t say no or else a fight would start.. I look back and I can now see how I was abused, tormented, I might even use the term rape. I couldn’t say no, but at the same time he knew I wasn’t consenting.”

So let’s look at Prager’s comments again now, shall we, after knowing that.

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

Can any of you say that Caitlin didn’t love Justin, to stay with him that long despite being so abused? Can any of you truly say that Caitlin, who did “rethink” refusing sex with Justin, did the right thing by ignoring mood and desire and consent and effectively ruining sex for herself?

 I didn’t think so.