surprising POV?

[Bluegoat]

Yeah, I think some of the women as property business is overplayed.  It was certainly a thing in medieval Europe that a marriage was considered the point of sexual consent, rather than each individual sexual act.  Theologically the idea was that under normal circumstances the couple should be sexually available to each other, unless both had agreed to some other arrangement.  It's not the case that this only applied to the husband, and that is practical as well as theoretically - women sued their husbands over refusal of sexual access and won the cases.  The medievals were not particularly inclined to the view that women were uninterested in sex.  

We have a tendency to pick up these ideas about the past which flat around, and one is that people though women were delicate and asexual and had no sexual agency. and apply them in the wrong way, or too broadly.  Victorian attitudes about women or sex weren't necessarily reflective of what the early moderns or medievals or people of any other time thought or did.

 

As far as other posts - I think the idea that there is a basic sense in which a sexual relationship is implied in the marriage (or any other thing that acts like a marriage even if it's not officially) is true.  Sexual activity then takes place within that context, it's more about timing.  This is something that in hindsight I think seemed odd about the conversation I read - there seemed to be a sense in which there was never any implication that there would be an expectation of sex in the marriage.  I suspect that for most people, if it came to that without a significant reason, that would be the end of the marriage - that it's a commitment over time seems to me to be integral to the concept.

With regard to verbal consent being a useful safety element in marriages that are oppressive or abusive, where people feel coerced or don't realise that they are being coerced or pressured -  I don't really see how it would help - I think the same pattern would just play out verbally.

[Janeway]

21 hours ago, Bluegoat said:

So, witnessed an online conversation today that struck me as odd.

It was about sexual consent in marriage/long term intimate relationships.  As in many discussions like this, people expressed that there can be rape in these relationships, and that seemed generally uncontroversial. There was also the POV that it would be rape to have sex, or maybe even caress intimately, a drunk or sleeping spouse, or caress without first asking.  I've heard this POV before of course though it seemed a somewhat strong version of it.

What really surprised me though was that following on from this came a claim that even if both spouses wanted and were happy with the sex, because there was not consent it was rape, and women who were ok with this were just participants in their own oppression in some way.  This game me real pause - I've always taken the idea of consent as important only in so far as it is a signal of willingness to have sex. It seems that in this POV it is the thing itself, as a sort of abstraction, that is the issue?  That seems very odd to me, I can't figure out how to make that work out in a consistent way.

I'm curious about people's thought - I can kind of see, given where talk about this has been going, over the years, how this view came about -  but it seems completely unworkable and just odd to me.  Have people heard this before?

If one partner did not object to sex, it is not exactly rape. I think it diminishes rape and what it really is to claim it is rape just because the female did not use the actual word yes prior to sex. 

 

I have read a lot of stupid articles and opinions online. Just yesterday I saw one from someone saying it isn't okay for American Girl to make boy dolls and something about white boys having privilege and men wanting to take away reproductive rights away from women having something to do with there being a boy AG doll. It was one of the stupidest things I have read online. 

 

There will always be stupid things. Oh..and I am sure the word stupid will anger some people. But stupid is as stupid does. And the opinion that when a woman says she consents to sex, it is still rape and she is just oppressed because she does not want to admit it is not real consent if it is not done how some other person thinks it should have been done. Just to those opinions..whatever. 

[Violet Crown]

26 minutes ago, Bluegoat said:

Yeah, I think some of the women as property business is overplayed.  It was certainly a thing in medieval Europe that a marriage was considered the point of sexual consent, rather than each individual sexual act.  Theologically the idea was that under normal circumstances the couple should be sexually available to each other, unless both had agreed to some other arrangement.  It's not the case that this only applied to the husband, and that is practical as well as theoretically - women sued their husbands over refusal of sexual access and won the cases.  The medievals were not particularly inclined to the view that women were uninterested in sex.  

We have a tendency to pick up these ideas about the past which flat around, and one is that people though women were delicate and asexual and had no sexual agency. and apply them in the wrong way, or too broadly.  Victorian attitudes about women or sex weren't necessarily reflective of what the early moderns or medievals or people of any other time thought or did.

Yes. Just as there's a human tendency to look at the direction of current trends--the "arc of history"--and extrapolate forwards, there's a matching tendency to look at the recent past and extrapolate backwards. So the 19th century, which in many ways was a low point for women's legal rights, is assumed to indicate that women must have been even worse off in prior eras.

[Momto6inIN]

4 hours ago, Violet Crown said:

Well, while I'm lodging historical objections....

"Western Civilization" covers about 2500 years and, maximally, the continent of Europe plus non-European parts of the Mediterranean and, from the 17th century, North America. When and where, exactly, were women considered "property" qua women (excluding chattel slavery, which didn't distinguish sexes)?

And to make that question meaningful, what precisely is meant by "considered property"? A normal reader I think would take it to mean enjoyed the same legal status as, say, a horse or dog or tree or other living thing that we would speak of as property in the legal sense.

I would like primary sources on this, as I can find links to people making the claim easily enough.

No primary sources, and perhaps I used the wrong terminology, but to clarify what I was referring to - instances in history when women were married off with or without consent for political and/or economic reasons with no legal recourse. Maybe they had other rights that a horse or dog or tree didn't have, and so were not considered property per se in all situations, but in the situation of their marriages they essentially were considered goods to be exchanged between two other parties.

Edited December 11, 2018 by Momto5inIN
Eta But I still think this attitude didn't/doesn't necessarily translate into a bunch of men throughout history having nonconsensual s@x with their wives

[Bluegoat]

59 minutes ago, StellaM said:

http://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/marital-rape/

 

 

It's interesting the idea that "consent was not part of the equation".  I'm not sure if that is true - it looks to me that it was applied in a different way - that is, consent to marriage, a kind of contract in this legal sense, included consent to sexual activity within the marriage.  Lack of sexual activity, if it's from a willed POV, is linked with the end of the marraige itself.

 

[Guest]

5 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

A lot of men can't tell the difference between being attracted to women and actually liking them; as though being heterosexual and being a misogynist are mutually exclusive.

Good point. I think I have seen that general attitude radiating from some pretty public people. 

[Violet Crown]

On a literary tangent: the horror and brutality of marital rape is central to John Galsworthy's classic A Man of Property, written over a century ago. It contributed to his eventual Nobel prize.

Edited December 11, 2018 by Violet Crown

[madteaparty]

1 hour ago, Violet Crown said:

On a literary tangent: the horror and brutality of marital rape is central to John Galsworthy's classic A Man of Property, written over a century ago. It contributed to his eventual Nobel prize.

Forsythe Saga, yes? Not even Damien Lewis can make marital rape look good. 

[Violet Crown]

50 minutes ago, madteaparty said:

Forsythe Saga, yes? Not even Damien Lewis can make marital rape look good. 

That's it. I haven't seen either the 1967 or 2002 series. Any good?

[madteaparty]

17 minutes ago, Violet Crown said:

That's it. I haven't seen either the 1967 or 2002 series. Any good?

I’ve only seen the one mentioned above. It’s excellent, in that I aim to watch it annually, but many people objected to Irene’s...hair. Anyway I thought the casting was perfect. 

[gardenmom5]

8 hours ago, Rosie_0801 said:

A lot of men can't tell the difference between being attracted to women and actually liking them; as though being heterosexual and being a misogynist are mutually exclusive.

being female never stopped my grandmother from being misogynist.   she was a twisted woman . . . . .

she had a very prurient interest in sex.  wanted girls to get involved in premarital sex - so she could salaciously condemn them. but boys could do no wrong. 

1 hour ago, madteaparty said:

Forsythe Saga, yes? Not even Damien Lewis can make marital rape look good. 

my first encounter with the idea of marital rape was one of the poldark books back in the 70s'.  and, it was very brutal.  it actually made it into the filmed 70's series.  

[Rosie_0801]

19 minutes ago, gardenmom5 said:

being female never stopped my grandmother from being misogynist.   she was a twisted woman . . . . .

 

Yeah. Female misogynists are interesting. I had one accuse me of being a probable future murderer.