by Anne Summers
The husband who insists on obtaining his ‘rights’ when his wife is too tired or for some other reason uninterested, is guilty of rape. These other reasons can include a husband’s brutish and selfish lack of consideration for his wife’s sexual satisfaction, which can leave her totally unmoved or even disgusted by sexual activity. The following letter from a reader to a woman’s magazine described such a case:
I am now one of the supine hurry-up girls. Why? Simple. I am tired of 33 years (I am now 50) of trying to get my husband to apply a little gentleness, coupled with loving, prior to sex, but it’s always the same old caper. I can be asked anytime. While I am peeling the spuds, playing the piano, reading a book, or as soon as I hit the sheets at night, especially on my busiest day – I am a working wife …3
A wife is legally obliged to accede to any reasonable demand her husband may make for intercourse. But what is reasonable can be interpreted in different ways. If their interpretations vary, her only recourse when she is tired or unwilling is to appeal to his better nature. If he does not heed her request and insists that she submit, he is guilty of rape. The marriage contract says nothing about a wife’s entitlement to enjoyable sex; if she has the misfortune to be saddled with an uncaring husband all she can do is submit and get it over with – or else pack up and leave him. If, after years of unrewarding sex, a woman has developed a complete disdain or repugnance for intercourse but is still forced to endure it, she is a constant victim of marital rape.
There are two other kinds of rape that are not recognised as such by the law. These are what Germaine Greer has labelled ‘petty rape’ and ‘rape by fraud’.4 With both these forms of rape, the woman’s consent is extracted – and so they do not meet the legal definition of rape – but this consent is not given freely or from a position of equality or independence. Both these kinds of rape escape being labelled as such because men exploit their superior social and economic power to obtain the woman’s submission. To realise the extensive incidence of rape in our society, it is necessary to distinguish between the willingly-agreed-to invasion of a woman’s body, which is inherent in intercourse, and an invasion that is a violation, a denial of her self-determination, an abrogation of her freedom and independence, an imposition of masculine power upon her female body. In order to make this distinction meaningfully, we have to situate a consideration of rape within the entire landscape of social, and especially sexual, mores which prevail in the society in question at the time.
Because men possess the pre-emptive strike capability, so to speak, and because they also possess the financial, political and other kinds of power that accrue to men in a patriarchal society, the social and sexual relations between the sexes are not equal. The constant manifestations of this unequal relationship as it occurs in marriage were outlined in the last chapter, and the legal immunity that a husband has from being charged with the rape of his wife gives to this a dimension of coercion and terror that cannot be overstressed. The situation between single people is very similar: a basic inequality pervades our sexual universe and is constantly demonstrated, underscoring the colonised status of women under patriarchy.
Men, the colonisers, not only regard women as sex objects but they continually remind women that this is how they see them. The existence of beauty quests, contests for women with the best bodies, legs, breasts and so on, are but ceremonial testaments to this objectification. Far more insidious are its everyday manifestations. Any newspaper story that happens to mention a woman will describe her by her sexual attributes: by her age, the colour of her hair, the cut of her dress. Women cannot walk even crowded city streets without being whistled at, being cat-called or having their bodies subjected to evaluative scrutiny by the men they pass. The whole repertoire of ‘jokes’ used by radio and television ‘entertainers’ depend for their appeal on the audience agreeing that woman equals body, and this view is constantly reinforced in advertising as well as in men’s conversations. So confident are men in their status as colonisers that even when they are alone they feel free to make insulting comments to women they pass, to brush their bodies against those of women they do not know, to hiss ‘I’d like to fuck you’ to women they encounter in the street. In groups, especially outside pubs, men acquire the bravado of numbers and increase the number and loudness of their comments. Such instances are not expressions of sexual attraction or desire: they are declarations of menacing intent. And far from being isolated occurrences they are, as any woman who has to use public transport or who has occasion to walk in the streets knows, more of an ever-present hazard than being knocked down by a motor car or being robbed. It is impossible for women to move around, even in the daytime, without being accosted in this manner. They are petty outrages but they are an indication of the power men possess to threaten and insult women, and of the freedom they feel to exercise it and to continually remind women that they possess it.
This power lurks around every male/female encounter but is most likely to emerge in its naked form in situations where the encounters could involve a sexual liaison. It is against a background of this reality that we can discuss petty rape and rape by fraud. Rape by fraud is the exacting of a sexual encounter from a woman by a phony tenderness or by phony promises, such as assurances of marriage or a long-term relationship, or even the likelihood of seeing the man again. In this way a woman may be persuaded to have intercourse, or even to surrender her virginity, because she has been led to believe that the man loves her, or at least that he likes her, and that she is not losing her self-respect or his esteem by agreeing. Under law, this is not rape, since the woman has consented, but her consent has been contingent, has rested on assumptions that are unfounded, which have been assiduously cultivated by a man who merely wants access to her body. This kind of rape is part and parcel of the sexual mores of Australian culture. Those who would object that the consent, however it was obtained, removes the charge of rape from such situations, ignore the inequalities inherent in the encounter. They might charge the woman with excessive credulity or stupidity but they ignore the excruciating position women find themselves in.
The desperate need women have to find husbands places the single woman – especially one who does not measure up to current images of beauty – in a very vulnerable position. She has to devise ways to attract, and then keep, a man’s interest and convince him that she is suitable wife material. But no matter how attractive, or how adept, a woman is, she is ultimately placed in a dependent position by the social customs of dating. Men are supposed to be the initiators: they ask the woman for the date, they usually own the car that provides the transport, they pay the cost of the outing, and they are afforded the role of instigating any sexual intimacy that may occur. Women are captive to the need to secure male approval and they have to calculate just what degree of response will earn them a further date and the hope of the man developing some affection for them.
In the past, a woman’s role was clearer: if she wished to retain respectability and eligibility for marriage, she had to remain a virgin.5 Today, with apparent changes having taken place in our sexual code, women are less certain about how (and how far) to respond. While some changes have definitely occurred, it is still men who are the arbiters, who define the limits of permissiveness and decide when a woman has transgressed them. So the woman who is eager to gain the affection of a man whom she likes has to decide if his professed ardour is genuine or merely a ploy. Few young women have the sophistication or the assurance to detect the difference and their own romantic yearnings will probably determine their decision to agree to what, for the male, may be his sole objective: to get her into bed. When she subsequently discovers that his avowals were fraudulent, that he has got all that he wanted from her, and being anxious not to entangle himself with a woman he does not care for, either does not want to see her again or makes it clear that all future involvement will be solely sexual, the woman realises that she has been conned.
What she may not be conscious of is that she has
also been raped, that the man exploited her dependent situation in order to invade her body. She has also possibly been permanently tainted. The man will boast of his conquest, drop the girl’s name to his friends, informing them that she is ‘an easy lay’, that ‘all you have to do is spin her a line’. The girl will possibly be pleasantly surprised at her newfound popularity – until she discovers its cause.
Conduct of this kind on the part of men is so integrated into the modus operandi of most young men that it is accepted by both sexes as perfectly normal. Men pride themselves in developing a convincing and irresistible seduction patter – their ‘line’ – and persuade themselves that it is the ‘line’ that has won them what they want. They exploit the patent inequalities of the situation but seldom make any conscious acknowledgment that this is what they are doing; instead they personalise it and take pride at the ease with which they can get women into bed. Women, on the other hand, realise these inequalities only too well, but they also know that they have little alternative but to take a gamble on reaching through the ‘line’ to the human being they assume, or hope, exists behind it.
Petty rape is very similar to rape by fraud except that it is stripped of the pretence of affection. The petty rapist capitalises on the inequality between the sexes by insisting that he deserves sexual repayment for having taken a woman out or even for having driven her home. The petty rapist is a calculating man who does not wish to waste his time or attention unless he can be pretty certain of gaining what he wants. Unlike the rape-by-fraud man, he considers a seduction patter to be extraneous and will put his proposition to the woman in direct and crude terms. Sue Rhodes, a Sydney journalist who wrote a book about Australian sexual mores, described this phenomenon:
I know men, and talked to them at some length about it, who freely admit that six dates is the limit with them. If she hasn’t come across by then or strongly indicated that she will next time, they’re not about to waste any more time or money on her. ‘But why?’ I asked one of them. ‘Surely if she came across early you’d only think she was too easy anyway?’ ‘Oh yeah,’ he admitted. ‘But then I’m not gonna marry her anyway, am I? I’m only taking her out.’6
That was seven years ago: nowadays the petty rapist expects the woman to ‘come across’ on the first, or at most, second date. Many petty rapists prefer not to have to expend any time or money at all; the most they are prepared to pay is a gallon or so of petrol. Women need to be up to date with the conventions and argot of Australian men if they are not to misinterpret a situation. For instance, when most Australian men say to a girl they have just met at a party, ‘Do you want a ride home ?’ or if they ring her and say, ‘Do you want to go to a drive-in?’ what they generally mean is ‘Do you want a fuck?’, and any girl who takes the invitation at face value is likely to find herself landed on a lonely road and forced to walk home or else spend the evening fighting off a genuinely amazed male who refuses to believe that she did not realise the contract she had entered into.
Both the petty and the fraudulent rapists are aware of the legal definition of rape and are clever enough to ensure that they are never culpable in that respect. Their strategies are designed to extract consent, however grudgingly or reluctantly. The petty rapist, in particular, will take a woman’s ‘No’ as a challenge rather than as signifying the end of his attempt to conquer her. He will cajole, persuade, threaten (but not with violence – he is not so naive; rather he will merely threaten to withdraw his esteem of her) and often present himself as immobilised by sexual frustration, appealing to the woman’s kindness and generosity to put him out of his misery. Eventually he is likely to succeed. Worn out by the verbal struggle and the constant battle with predatory hands, most women who have had previous sexual experience (and for whom, therefore, the intercourse holds no additional fears of an unknown quantity) are likely to mutely submit with a hurry-up-and-get-it-over-with attitude. At least that way they will get driven home.
Variations of this tactic are the sexual conventions that operate in many groups. Especially in those that are professedly opposed to the mores of bourgeois society, such as bikie gangs, surfies, and various hippie and other counter-cultural groups, sexual permissiveness is posited as being among the ways in which opposition to ‘straight’ society can be demonstrated. These groups are always dominated by, if not entirely composed of, men, and their credos are devised for their own benefit. Women who wish to be associated with these groups (for, although they may not immediately realise it, they can never belong to them) must accept this sexual ethic. Many willingly do so for they, too, wish to escape the stultifying effects of family and suburban attitudes and the ways in which these confine women. But it is illusory to think that they can flee from the colonisation of their sex. The conventions might differ in form but their result is the same: to deny women self-determination.
Most of these groups have a definite hierarchy among their members and a woman’s status is derived from the man she is sexually involved with. In order to increase her status, a woman must form a liaison, or at least have a casual encounter, with a man who occupies a higher rank than her current lover. The men at the top thus derive considerable benefits as they can choose from any of the women attached to the group. To maintain their connection with the group, women must comply with whatever is demanded of them, and such dependence is by definition demeaning. Members of these groups seldom want to marry so the main criteria they seek in their women is sexual attractiveness. The women’s involvement with the group can only ever be transitory, can only last while they remain young and attractive or until the entire group has, literally, been through them.
None of these three kinds of rape – marital rape, petty rape or rape by fraud – is legally acknowledged as such, but each is as much a violation of a woman’s body, and of her integrity, as the violent rapes that occupy the statistics. Each is part of the colonisation of women for each is an everyday happening or possibility, and each a constant reminder to women that their bodies are not their own to control or to give. And each contributes to the creation of total passivity and even masochism among women who realise that so long as they have any social encounters with men, they risk being raped. As Germaine Greer put it:
Sexual rip-offs are part of every woman’s daily experience; they do not have the gratifying strangeness of disaster, with the special reconstructive energies that disasters call forth. They simply wear down the contours of emotional contacts and gradually brutalize all those who are party to them. Petty rape corrodes a woman’s self-esteem so that she grows by degrees not to care too much what happens or how. In her low moments she calls all men bastards; she enters into new relationships with suspicion and a forlorn hope that maybe this time she will get a fair deal. The situation is self-perpetuating. The treatment she most fears she most elicits. The results of this hardening of the heart are eventually much worse than the consequences of fortuitous sexual assault by a stranger, the more so because they are internalized, insidious and imperceptible.7
What we can call illegal rape, that is the rapes recognised as such by police and courts, differs in several important ways from the three kinds of rape mentioned above – although all four kinds combined are part of the colonisation of women. Illegal rape is committed by one or more men and invariably involves threatened or actual violence as well as brutal penetration. The illegal rapist is also very likely to increase the shame and repulsion his victim inevitably feels by forcing several kinds of perverse sexual acts upon her. Anal rape and forcing the victim to perform fellatio on the rapist often accompany, or occur instead of, vaginal penetration. The victim of illegal rape is far less likely to know her attacker – although she may possibly have noticed him lurking in her neighbourhood. American studies have shown that most rapes are pre-meditated and rapists go to considerable trouble to watch their victims’ movements and routines before they attack.
If the other forms of rape can be seen as relatively peaceful colonisation, illegal rape is
mass terrorism which has a dual purpose: to caution women against stepping outside their permitted sex-role boundaries, and to punish them for purportedly doing so. Illegal rape brings home to women most forcefully that they are a colonised group. It can occur any time, anywhere, and there is virtually nothing women can do to prevent it. They are not safe even within their own homes as about 50 per cent of such rapes occur within the victim’s home8, and rapists can go to extraordinary lengths to gain access to their victim. I know of one example where six men kicked in the front door of a house to reach a woman (a stranger to them) whom they all raped; and of another where the man cut off the woman’s electricity and telephone before stealing into her bedroom late at night and holding a knife to her throat while he raped her. Some victims are abducted from bus stops; others are attacked as they walk home down well-lit streets. In other instances, the victim has accepted a lift or gone to a party with a man or group of men who have subsequently raped her.
It is rapes of this kind that are held in abhorrence by the public, which are characterised as ‘a fate worse than death’ and which evoke vengeful cries for the rapist to be castrated. Yet even in cases such as these, the violation and the outrage are tempered by a farrago of myths and prejudices that attempt to extenuate the attacker and to implicate the victim. At the same time as rape is considered to be an horrific crime, there exists the myth that it is impossible for a woman to be raped. Related to this belief are the corresponding ones that if the woman submitted to the rapist, rather than risk incurring additional physical injuries, then she did not really resist and that she must have enjoyed the experience. The basis of this collection of myths is that all women secretly want to be raped, that women harbour a deep-seated longing to be violently conquered. This myth affirms and reinforces the fundamental sexist dichotomy between women and men that colonisation seeks to create and sustain: that women are passive receptacles and that men are active conquistadores. Yet these myths are patently untenable as the existence of several other, contradictory myths demonstrates. Women are said to provoke rape: by being alone in the streets, by wearing certain kinds of clothes, by acting in a fashion that is contrary to the code of feminine behaviour, for example by being drunk, or by accepting lifts from strangers. This myth, that women are responsible for rape, directly contradicts the notion that rape is impossible. Rather, the placing of blame on the victim attempts to absolve the rapist from full culpability for his actions.