The Good Old Days
“We have forgotten that before we began calling this date rape and date fraud, we called it exciting.”
—Warren Farrell, men’s rights activist and
author of
The Myth of Male Power
Under old English and American law, “Husband and wife are one, and that one is the husband.”
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Coverture laws required that a woman’s legal rights were merged with her husband’s; even long after those regulations were obsolete, women still lacked equal rights in marriage, as they were required to be sexually available to their husbands—with no laws against marital rape, husbands could demand (or force) sex with no legal repercussions. A woman’s place as a personal servant for her husband in exchange for financial security was enshrined into law. According to family historian Stephanie Coontz:
“Even after coverture had lost its legal force, courts, legislators, and the public still cleaved to the belief that marriage required husbands and wives to play totally different domestic roles. In 1958, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a challenge to the traditional legal view that wives (unlike husbands) couldn’t sue for loss of the personal services, including housekeeping and the sexual attentions, of their spouses. The judges reasoned that only wives were expected to provide such personal services anyway.
As late as the 1970s, many American states retained ‘head and master’ laws, giving the husband final say over where the family lived and other household decisions. According to the legal definition of marriage, the man was required to support the family, while the woman was obligated to keep house, nurture children, and provide sex. Not until the 1980s did most states criminalize marital rape. Prevailing opinion held that when a bride said, ‘I do,’ she was legally committed to say, ‘I will’ for the rest of her married life.”
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These ideas are not nearly obsolete. In practice, many American couples have fairly egalitarian, progressive marriages—including conservative and religious couples. But a small yet incredibly powerful minority of conservative extremists is unhappy with the shift toward gender equality and the idea that a woman maintains her bodily integrity even after there’s a ring on her finger. Arguments for “traditional marriage” still rely on opposite-sex partners and an assumption of complementary roles—and those “complementary” roles assume that the man is in charge and the woman complements him. Regressive gender roles (and the need for complementary relationships) are among the most common arguments against marriage equality.
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And old ideas about the requirement of female sexual availability are far from dead. Anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schlafly—who has made a highly lucrative career out of telling other women to stay home—told students at Bates College, “By getting married, the woman has consented to sex, and I don’t think you can call it rape.”
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This ideology isn’t limited to a few wacky conservatives, either; we teach it in public schools. According to a report by U.S. Representative Harry Waxman that evaluated the most widely used abstinence-only curricula, girls are regularly described as dependent and submissive, and are even discussed as objects to be purchased or otherwise attained:
“In a discussion of wedding traditions, one curriculum writes: “Tell the class that the Bride price is actually an honor to the bride. It says she is valuable to the groom and he is willing to give something valuable for her.”
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And religious events like Purity Balls involve daughters pledging their virginity to their fathers until their wedding day, when ‘I give myself as a wedding gift to my husband.’ The father pledges, ‘I, [daughter’s name]’s father, choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.’
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This hymenal exchange is represented by a ‘promise ring’ that a father gives his daughter, which she wears until it is replaced by a wedding ring. The religious, abstinence-promoting groups that organize Purity Balls are bankrolled by the federal government—the Bush administration funds abstinence initiatives to the tune of $200 million a year.”
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Central to the right-wing family ideal is the position of women as servants and helpmeets, not autonomous actors or individuals in their own right. The very concept of individualism is a threat. Opposition to individualism and female bodily autonomy are crucial components to the so-called “pro-family” movement—even as most American families embrace the very values and achievements that conservative groups seek to dismantle.
The Female Problem
The biggest threat to the conservative traditional ideal? Women. Time and again, when women have the ability to plan their families, they do. When women have the right to open their own checking accounts, to make their own money, to go to school, to have sex without fearing pregnancy, to own property, to have children when they want, to marry whom they want,
they do.
When you extend human rights to women, they act like human beings with individual needs, ambitions, and desires—just like men.
A lot of women also have sex “like men”—that is, for pleasure. Ninety-seven percent of Americans will have sex before marriage, and 95 percent of American women will use contraception at some point in their lives. The average American woman spends about three decades trying to prevent pregnancy. Clearly, women like sex—and they like it on their own terms and for recreation, not just for baby making.
And therein lies the problem. Sex, in the conservative mindset, is essentially a bartering tool and a means to an end: A woman maintains her virginity until it can be exchanged for a wedding ring. After that, the family economy is simple: Women give sex, housework, and reproduction in exchange for financial security and social status, and sex is purely for reproductive purposes. The idea that women might want to have sex for pleasure without having to carry a pregnancy for nine months afterward and then raise a child is quite contrary to conservative values. So is the idea that a woman might have the right to say no to sex within marriage. Bodily autonomy doesn’t figure into the scheme because, as the conservative group Focus on the Family says on its website, “It’s Not My Body.”
While right-wing groups certainly don’t come out in
support
of rape, they do promote an extremist ideology that
enables
rape and promotes a culture where sexual assault is tacitly accepted. The supposedly “pro-family” marital structure, in which sex is exchanged for support and the woman’s identity is absorbed into her husband’s, reinforces the idea of women as property and as simple accoutrements to a man’s more fully realized existence. And the traditional gender roles so exalted by conservative groups—roles that envision women as passive receptacles and men as aggressive deviants—further excuse and endorse sexual assault.
Manly Men and Passive Women
“To resist rape a woman needs more than martial arts and more than the police; she needs a certain ladylike modesty enabling her to take offense at unwanted encroachment.”
—Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield, author of the book
Manliness
At the heart of the sexual assault issue is how mainstream American culture constructs sex and sexualities along gendered lines. Female sexuality is portrayed as passive, while male sexuality is aggressive. Sex itself is constructed around both the penis and male pleasure—male/female intercourse begins when a man penetrates a woman’s vagina with his penis, and ends when he ejaculates. Penetration is the key element of sex, with the man imaged as the “active” partner and the woman as the passive, receptive partner. And sex is further painted as something that men
do to
women, instead of as a mutual act between two equally powerful actors.
But the myth of passivity is not the only cultural narrative about female sexuality. Women are simultaneously thought of as living in inherently tempting bodies, and using those bodies to cause men to fall.
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These two myths—the passive woman and the tempting woman—have been used to justify the social control of half the population for centuries. The biblical fall was caused by a woman, and her punishment was painful female sexuality and suffering in reproduction.
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We have hardly seen reprieve since. In Western societies, women have been cloistered away, been deemed alternately “frigid” or “hysterical,”
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undergone clitoridectomies as girls to “cure” chronic masturbation,
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been barred from accessing contraception and even information about pregnancy prevention,
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been the legal property of men, been forcibly and nonconsensually sterilized,
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and been legally forced to continue pregnancies they did not want.
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The ideas of the female body (and, specifically, female sexual organs and reproductive capacity) as public property and as open to state control persist today, as abortion and contraception remain hot-button issues and the anti-choice right promotes policies that would give a fetus rights that no born person even has.
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The message is simple: Women are “naturally” passive until you give them a little bit of power—then all hell breaks loose and they have to be reined in by any means necessary. Rape and other assaults on women’s bodies—and particularly infringements and attacks on women’s reproductive organs—serve as unique punishments for women who step out of line.
Male sexuality, and maleness in general, are socially enforced by requiring men to be Not Women. Men who transgress and exhibit characteristics that are traditionally associated with female-ness—passivity, gentleness, willingness to be sexually penetrated—have their masculinity questioned. The most obvious example is gay men, who are routinely characterized as “effeminate” for transgressing the boundaries of gender and of the act of sex itself.
Aggression is such a deeply entrenched characteristic of maleness that it is often justified through references to nature and evolutionary biology. It further bleeds over into the sexual sphere, wherein men are expected to be aggressive sexual actors attempting to “get” sex from passive women who both hold and embody sex itself.
In the ongoing effort to paint men and women as opposites, men take on the role of sexual aggressor and women are expected to be sexually evasive. While virginity until marriage is practiced by very few women, deeply held standards of female virtuousness remain, and women are rarely taught how to say yes to sex, or how to act out their own desires. Rather, we are told that the rules of sexual engagement involve men pushing and women putting on the brakes.
While this clearly compromises women’s sexual subjectivity, it also handicaps men and prevents them from connecting with their own desires. Men are as well versed in the sexual dance as women are, and when they are fully aware that women are expected to say no even when they mean yes, men are less likely to hear “no” and accept it at face value. When society equates maleness with a constant desire for sex, men are socialized out of genuine sexual decision making, and are less likely to be able to know how to say no or to be comfortable refusing sex when they don’t want it. And the “boys will be boys” sexual stereotype makes it much easier for date rapists to victimize women and simply argue that they didn’t
know
they were raping someone—sure, she said no, but it’s awfully easy for men to convince other men (and lots of women) that “no” is just part of the game.
The Feminist Challenge
Feminism and anti-rape activism challenge the dominant narrative that women’s bodies aren’t our own, they insist that sex is about consent and enjoyment, not violence and harm, and they attack a power structure that sees women as victims and men as predators. Feminists insist that men are not animals. Instead, men are rational human beings fully capable of listening to their partners and understanding that sex isn’t about pushing someone to do something they don’t want to do. Plenty of men are able to grasp the idea that sex should be entered into joyfully and enthusiastically by both partners, and that an absence of “no” isn’t enough—“yes” should be the baseline requirement. And women are not empty vessels to be fucked or not fucked; we’re sexual actors who should absolutely have the ability to say yes when we want it, just like men, and should feel safe saying no—even if we’ve been drinking, even if we’ve slept with you before, even if we’re wearing tight jeans, even if we’re naked in bed with you. Anti-rape activists further understand that men need to feel empowered to say no also. If women have the ability to fully and freely say yes, and if we established a model of enthusiastic consent instead of just “no means no,” it would be a lot harder for men to get away with rape. It would be a lot harder to argue that there’s a “gray area.” It would be a lot harder to push the idea that “date rape” is less serious than “real” rape, that women who are assaulted by acquaintances were probably teases, that what is now called “date rape” used to just be called “seduction.”