Marital Rape and the Law

Murder is murder regardless of whether killer and victim are strangers, acquaintances, friends, lovers, or husband and wife. Assault is assault regardless of the relationship between attacker and victim.

However, many people have a hard time accepting that rape is rape. Date rape is often regarded as less serious than stranger rape. Rape in marriage is often regarded as no crime at all. Indeed, it was legal in all states of the union until recently and is still legal in some.

Phyllis Schlafly recently gave a speech at Marietta College in which she made some good points – she always does – about how women’s lesser physical strength makes them less suited for military combat and strength-intensive careers like firefighting.

During the question and answer period, she said that marital rape should not be a crime but a matter to be resolved by the couple because “that’s what marriage is all about.”

This unfortunate view of sexual brutality within wedlock contrasts starkly with her other, good statements on rape. In opposing the suggestions of some feminists to have this crime prosecuted as assault, she noted that the latter is “a much lesser offense” and its penalties “not nearly as strong as those for rape” which she has correctly called “a terrible crime.”

Why does a terrible crime become no crime at all when the parties are married?

Ironically, this advocacy of rape’s legality in wedlock contradicts some of the fundamental tenets put forth by Schlafly and her sister traditionalists about the role of sex in marriage. Helen Andelin in Fascinating Womanhood states that “a wife owes her husband a generous amount of sex but he does not own your body.”

In The Power of the Positive Woman, Schlafly wrote that women will never have “an equal desire, an equal enjoyment, or an equal freedom from the consequences” of sexual expression.

Many people would object to that assertion, especially the idea that women lack the ability to enjoy sex as much as men do. There is much evidence that at least some women can have more orgasms than men can and evidence to suggest female orgasms are often more intense than those typically enjoyed by males.

Schlafly goes on to say that the female’s lesser sexuality means that, “women have far greater control of their sexual appetites.” Thus, a wife can use her husband’s desire for sexual contact “to motivate him, inspire him, encourage him, teach him, restrain him, reward him, and have more power over him than he can achieve over her with all his muscle.”

It is easy to see this formulation as degrading to men because it makes them sound less like humans than like dogs while portraying wives as their trainers. However, Schlafly and others certainly have a right to view sexuality this way and model their marriages accordingly. But if sex is to be a “motivator” and “reward” for a husband, the wife must be able to say “no.” The legality of marital rape renders a “no” powerless.

Sex in marriage can be many things. But the one thing it should not be is forced. Marriage is indeed about compromise and working through problems. Conflict resolution is a normal part of wedded life; brutality is not.

Of course, there are special problems with enforcing laws against marital rape. Rape is a hard crime to prove in any case and the circumstances of marriage render it even more difficult. There is also the problem of the complex emotional relationships between victims and alleged attackers. In one of the first cases of a husband prosecuted for allegedly attacking his wife, he was acquitted – and the couple, named Rideout, reconciled after his trial. To the embarrassment of anti-rape activists, the reunited Rideouts were photographed looking deep into each others’ eyes.

Similar things happen in cases of attempted murder in marriage. Both husbands and wives “forgive” the spouse who tried to kill them and ask that the crime not be prosecuted. The infamous case of Frances and Tony Toto inspired the film comedy I Love You To Death. Frances tried to murder her husband (either on her own or through confederates) five times. Tony believed he had provoked his wife to these crimes since he had been unfaithful to her. He waited for her while she was in prison. Their marriage continued on her parole. Neither this case nor others like it mean that spouse murder is something to be worked out between the married couple themselves.

To treat the marriage license as a permit for rape does not uphold marriage but insults it. Force should never be “what marriage is all about.”

Published in the Bolivar Free-Herald