What is the true history of martial rape?

Source_or_gtfo · 2019-01-06T18:45:33+00:00

It was not illegal. It was not seen as "perfectly cool", it was just not seen as the same as full blown rape. Mary Koss famously (not too many years ago) described female on male rape as "unwanted contact" (rather than rape), so I guess you could say marital rape was seen as "marital unwanted contact" in the same sort of way.

Largely this was because rape was seen as being about sex rather than power, and social morality was such that people in marriage were seen as having not so much a right to sex (as a mechanical act), but a right to sexual wantedness, with the two together leading to a view that different sexual "no"s in different situations were qualitatively different, with different factors going into them, such that the magnitude of a reasonable sexual "no" between spouses was not the same, and therefore the magnitude of the boundary crossed (and therefore the severity of the violation) was not seen as the same.

Lots of people (as part of a coercively monogamist culture) also had a much stronger belief in the fixability of even the worst relationships (and disfavored criminal punishment for this reason) and had no problem throwing a minority of people under the bus if they saw it as allowing a structure which benefited the "common good".

mikesteane · 2019-01-06T11:15:29+00:00

adultery has been a crime in many times and places. There is a correspondence between the right to sex within a marriage and the prohibition of extramarital sex. This is something that needs to be mentioned whenever this "marital rape was legal" business rears its head.

MRA-Sid · 2019-01-07T19:08:25+00:00

article about same in detail

mikesteane · 2019-01-06T10:19:21+00:00

Why were women always so keen to get married, eh? It's almost like we're not being told the whole story on what marriage was like before feminism.

iainmf · 2019-01-06T10:40:59+00:00

The situation is probably more nuanced than it is being presented as.

Recently New Zealand introduced a law specifically for strangulation. That does mean that strangling someone was legal before that, it just means that there were no laws specifically naming strangulation. It was still illegal because it would fall under assault laws.

I suspect that a similar situation existed for marital rape. A man using force to make his wife have sex with him would be assault and so it would be illegal. The thing that probably changed is that being married to someone not longer implies consent.

Rape laws have changed over time and if the proposed standard of 'enthusiastic consent' becomes the threshold for rape, then we could say that rape was still legal in marriages up until the enthusiastic consent law was passed because wives would have unenthusiastic sex with their husbands.

Wisemanner · 2019-01-06T09:12:14+00:00

It was legal, in the UK and Australia, for certain. (But not, of course, encouraged. A husband could not be charged with raping his wife.) It was made illegal a few decades ago, if I remember correctly, after feminist pressure for it to be made so.

Incidentally, in Australia, government cucks have taken this issue much further. So, an Australian husband has no right of sex with his wife and, if he forces it on her, will be guilty of rape. However, he cannot stop her raping him, because to refuse her sex would be "withholding affection", that is: abuse.

Men-Are-Human · 2019-01-06T09:12:41+00:00

I'd be surprised if there was an unbiased source nowadays. With how much feminists love writing on the subject I'm sure that the first 10,000 pages on Google will be filled with their blog posts about it and "toxic masculinity" or some other weird quasi-religious buzzwords.

I heard that it was legal before, but I'm not sure. Maybe back in the 17th century it wouldn't have been prosecuted... I presume that's how it would have worked, since you can only declare things illegal, you can't declare anything legal. I have a hard time believing that it wouldn't have been prosecuted for the entirety of the 20th century and the 21st century in the western world.

What was the debate, if you don't mind?

Title	What is the true history of martial rape?
Author	Men-Are-Human
Upvotes	7
Comments	25
Date	January 6, 2019 8:54 AM UTC (7 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/ad40vj/what_is_the_true_history_of_martial_rape/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/what-is-the-true-history-of-martial-rape.1182770 https://theredarchive.com/post/1182770

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