society’s commitment to forced sex is reaclass="underline" marriage defines the
normal uses to which women should be put, and marriage institutionalizes forced intercourse. Consent then logically becomes mere passive acquiescence; and passive compliance does become the
standard of female participation in intercourse. Because passive acquiescence is the standard in normal intercourse, it becomes proof of consent in rape. Because force is sanctioned to effect intercourse
in marriage, it becomes common sexual practice, so that its use in
sex does not signify, prove, or even—especially to men—suggest
rape. Forced intercourse in marriage, being both normal and state-
sanctioned, provides the basis for the wider practice of forced sex,
tacitly accepted most of the time. Forced intercourse in marriage as
the norm sanctioned by the state makes it virtually impossible to
identify (male) force or (female) consent; to say what they are so as
to be able to recognize them in discrete instances. The state can
and does make distinctions by category—for instance, sex with little girls is off limits—but no finer kind of distinction can be made because that would require a repudiation of force as a part of normal sex. Since the nearly universal acceptance of forced intercourse in marriage is a kind of universal callousness—an agreement as to
the disposition of married women’s bodies, thereby annihilating
any conception of their civil or sexual rights or any sensitivity to
force in sex as a violation of those women’s rights—it is easy to
extend the callous acceptance of men’s civilly guaranteed right to
use force to get sex to broader categories of women, also to girls,
and this has happened. There is the belief that men use force because they are men. There is the belief that women like force and respond to it sexually. There is the belief that force is intrinsically
sexy. There is the conceit that the married woman is the most
protected of all women: if force is right with her, with whom can it
be wrong? if a man does to another woman what he does to his
wife, it may be adultery but how can it be rape when in fact it is
simply—from his point of view— plain old sex? There is the definition of when a girl becomes a woman: a girl may be considered
adult because she has menstruated (at the age of ten, for instance)
or because she has a so-called provocative quality, which means
that a man wants to fuck her and that therefore she is presumed to
be a woman and to have adult knowledge of what sex is and what a
woman is. There is the definition of the female in terms of her
function, which is to be fucked; so it may be unfortunate that she
is fucked too early, but once fucked she has fulfilled a preordained
function as a woman and therefore is a woman and therefore can
legitim ately be fucked.
With respect to pregnancy, if a woman can be forced to bear a
child conceived by force in marriage, there is no logic in differentiating pregnancy as a result of rape or incestuous rape. Force is the norm; pregnancy is the result; the woman has no claim to a respected identity not predicated on forced intercourse— that is, at best her dignity inheres in being a wife, subject to forced intercourse and therefore to forced pregnancy; w hy would any woman’s body be entitled to more respect than the married woman’s? Rape,
rarely credited as such by men unless the display of force has been
brutal almost beyond imagining, is in fact an exaggerated expression of a fully accepted sexual relation between men and women; and incestuous rape adds a new element of exaggeration, but the
essential sexual relation— the relation of force to female— remains
the same. Therefore, men—especially men responsible for maintaining the right and role of sexual force in marriage (lawmakers and theologians)— cannot consider pregnancy resulting from rape
or incestuous rape as significantly different from pregnancy that results from the normal use of a married woman; and in their frame of reference regarding intercourse, it is not. The woman’s function
is to be fucked— and if she is pregnant, then she was fucked, no
matter what the circumstance or the means. Being fucked did not
violate her integrity as a woman because being fucked is her integrity as a woman. Force is intrinsic to fucking, and the state cannot allow women to determine when they have been raped (forced),
because rape (force) in marriage is supported by the state. The
willingness to consider rape or incestuous rape exceptions at all
comes from the male recognition that a man might not want to
accept the offspring of another man’s rape as his own; a father may
not want to be both father and grandfather to the daughter of his
daughter. These exceptions, to the extent that they are or will be
honored in legislation forbidding abortion, exist to protect men.
Henry Hyde, author of the Hyde Amendment forbidding Medicaid money to poor women for abortions and opponent of all abortion under all circumstances without exception for rape, was asked by a television interviewer if he would insist that his daughter
carry a pregnancy to term if she were pregnant as the result of
rape. Yes, he answered solemnly. But the question he should have
been asked was this one: suppose his wife were pregnant as the
result of rape? This would impinge not on his sentimentality, but
on his day-to-day right of sexual possession; he would have to live
with the rape and with the carnal reality of the rape and with the
pregnancy resulting from the rape and with the offspring or the
damaged woman who would have to bear it and then give it up.
Regardless of his answer to the hypothetical question, only the
male sense of what is at stake for him in actually having to accept a
pregnancy caused by rape or incestuous rape in his own life as a
husband to the woman or girl involved could make the rape or the
woman raped real. Abortion can protect men, and can be tolerated
when it demonstrably does. In terms of the woman used, herself
alone, she is her function; she has been used in accordance with her
function; there is no reason to let her off the hook just because she
was forced by a man not her husband.
*
Norman Mailer remarked during the sixties that the problem with
the sexual revolution was that it had gotten into the hands of the
wrong people. He was right. It was in the hands of men.
The pop idea was that fucking was good, so good that the more
there was of it, the better. The pop idea was that people should
fuck whom they wanted: translated for the girls, this meant that