Marital Rape: Fact or Fiction?

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That we still have to ask this question is disturbing. This scenario belongs on the Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. Beyond Belief is a TV show that presents a series of events and asks the viewer to guess which of these events actually occurred. The show ends with the truth, and — often — the truth is unexpected.

I bring up this show because I always imagined that if it ran a segment on the claim that marital rape is not really rape, my fellow Americans would call it “fiction.”

Unfortunately, they’d be wrong. Marital rape is real, it is a fact, it has happened and still happens today in the US. There are people who are not ashamed to admit that they feel ‘marital’ rape is a feminist invention. In fact, they often say so with pride.

This is dangerous. This has serious consequences for married women. Denying the existence of marital rape effectively turns us into property when we get married. Marriage is not a contract that permits a man to have sex with his wife on demand.

Think this isn’t a problem? Today, I read an article about an eighteen-year-old woman who’d reported her husband’s abuse. The evidence was plain and very graphic: her husband smacked and starved her; he pinched her hard enough to leave bruises. She was also repeatedly raped. Her vagina was sore and raw from her husband’s abuse.

When this went to court, the judge found in favor of the husband. He supported the husband’s claim that marital rape was in accordance with his religious teachings.

Gasp, where is my pink plumber’s tape!?

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Why Feminism Must Go Underground

LAST MONTH, in an interview with the ever-incisive Katie Couric, Gloria Steinem noted, while offering a philosophical overview of contemporary society and world history, that there are relatively few women plumbers. This insight struck me like a lightening bolt. It showed that Ms. Steinem continues to be a penetrating thinker. Now, I have never met a single woman who wanted to become a plumber, let alone a woman who wanted to become a plumber but was prevented from fulfilling her dreams, but Ms. Steinem is probably very plugged in to the feminine plumbing subculture. Almost everything that is humanly possible exists in this world and I don’t doubt there are one or two frustrated women who have unclogged drains since early childhoo

d and have longed, to no avail, to commit themselves to the lonely, back-breaking labor of the plumber’s life.

I am here to tell you that it is not just plumbing that remains a closed field to women.

Look at this New York Post photo of the crew that just completed a new subway tunnel in New York City. Does something seem amiss? You are right. There are no women in this picture. Where was Ms. Steinem when this photo was taken? Her presence was needed. Ladies, oppression is real. It is real and ongoing. From the bowels of the earth, men are ruling the world.

She mocks us. She mocks feminists, she mocks Steinem, she mocks women in trades. That’s ok, we mock her back, just as snarkily.

The thing is, I kind of want to thank her for bringing this up. I did a quick search for “women plumbers” and was fascinated by my findings.

Little House on the Prairie Syndrome

Not pictured: famine, starvation, disease, poverty, redundancy and death.

I’ve noticed a very interesting phenomenon among many women from conservative or very religious backgrounds — or both, as they often go hand-in-hand. I like to call it the “Little House on the Prairie Syndrome.”

Why call it that? These ladies long for the “good old days” when women were seen as having just two places in the world — the kitchen and the bedroom.

I don’t see what’s so great about that, but honestly if that’s what pops your cork, go for it. For the sufferers of this syndrome, however, this doesn’t seem to be enough. They know their ways are most natural — and any self-respecting, non-delusional woman would agree.

Fortunately for us, society has moved on. And these women can only complain about the evils of the feminist movement as the start of Armageddon. I’m being melodramatic, I hope. But it’s hard to come away from their blogs thinking differently, whether they express these views outright or not.

So why should we care? Women lived like this before feminism. Why can’t we go back to the past?

It’s because these women want something that doesn’t exist. Their go-tos on the past — movies, TV, and books — often glamorize history by leaving out the disgusting minutiae of a woman’s daily drudgery. There has never been an epoch in our history where women did not work. Women have always been professionals. Even the Proverbs woman helped her husband take goods to the market. Since prehistory, there have been female gossips, adulterers, virgins, sluts, geniuses and even rulers. Either this history was suppressed or forgotten, but it has not made it into the movies.

Women are dogs, says woman.

F is too upset to write about this coherently, so it falls to me. As mentioned, she often surfs the far side of the ideological pool. I don’t like to go there too often, and I’m reminded why every time something particularly egregious comes up and she passes it along.

Political thought is often depicted along a single line, left to right. This is an oversimplified diagram, as is “feminist vs. anti-feminist.” For instance, you can be a woman who thinks women should be meek helpmates, or you can be a man who thinks all women are worthless. On this, they agree:

Women are animals.

This goes well beyond my atheistic, scientific acknowledgement that humanity is just one of many animals on this planet. No, MarkyMark and Laura Grace Robbins believe that women should be treated like animals.

Robbins: The major theme that Cesar Millan tries to get across is that as a dog owner you need to show that you are the leader of the pack and that you want your dog to be in a “calm and submissive” state. Hmmmmm, sounds familiar, huh? Discussions from my post, Submitting Love, got me to thinking if only there was a ‘wife whisperer’ who could come in and teach husbands how to get a handle on their wives.

Mark: Thank you, Laura.  That’s great stuff!

Robbins has a post all about this Wife Whisperer concept. She literally takes a a WikiHow article called How to Control Your Dog’s Behavior By Becoming a Pack Leader and replaces ‘dog’ with ‘wife.’ Her comments are in parentheses. This results in phrases like:

Is your wife doing a behavior that you don’t approve of? Does she pull you around? Do you feel that you can’t control her? Is it hard to take items (pretty things) away from her without being bitten (not literally of course)?

Visionary Daughters

I’ve been reading a lot about the Botkin sisters lately. And for you all to understand why I’ve been reading up on this particular family from Texas, I’ll have to start with an explanation.

Over the better part of the past two years, I’ve been scouring the Internet for points of outrage, places where I could read opinions that were very contrary to mine to see if there was any merit in these positions or whether they just reaffirmed what I already knew about them. Yes, I know that I should find something better to do with my time. But I figure that if I’m going to surf, I might as well make it a philosophically challenging experience.