We need to talk about sexual assault in marriage

VOX
March 08, 2018

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/3/8/17087628/sexual-assault-marriage-metoo

Eight years into our marriage, sitting in a therapist’s office with my husband, I mustered all my courage and said my deepest, darkest truth: “When we have sex, I feel like I’m being violated.” The unwanted sex at times made me sick: Once I had to run straight from bed to the bathroom, where I retched into the toilet. I spared him and the therapist that detail.

My husband shrugged and, staring ahead with more indifference than disdain, replied, “She’s always so melodramatic.” His response didn’t surprise me. It was his standard reaction to my complaints about the sad state of our marriage, his way of training me to see my needs — emotional connection and communication — as excessive, and his (primarily sex) as entirely reasonable.

I had dragged us to couples counseling because I could no longer live in the vacuum left behind after the emotional intimacy had seeped out of our marriage. My husband hadn’t noticed the loss, proclaiming himself happy. At home, having tried without success the therapist-prescribed exercises for restoring emotional connection — check-ins about feelings, “nonsexual” touch — my husband lobbied for his own solution: “The thing you need is really complicated and difficult, and it’s not something I can do. But the thing I need is easy and quick. Why can’t you just give me the thing I need?”

I acquiesced. At the time, it didn’t feel like a choice; it felt inevitable. I lived every evening dreading the signals of my husband’s desire. I bargained my way out of sex as often as I could. I gloried in being sick enough to have the right to refuse.

On the nights when I couldn’t get out of it, we used a method that I had taught myself to tolerate and that he, astoundingly, tolerated as well: I read a book to distract myself for as long as I could while he did the thing he needed to do. I did not let him kiss me for the last several years of our marriage. That was the rule: You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me, and I don’t have to pretend to like it. This satisfied him.

Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted, who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional connection, and who knew — who had been clearly told — that it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a sex doll. I felt unselfed.

But I blamed myself. I was the one whose desire was “deficient,” according to my husband and our sex-obsessed culture. When multiple couples therapists over several years made no significant impact, I blamed myself again: I should have been more forceful when I said my dark truth.

Only 15 years later, as I witness so much outrage on the behalf of women who have been shamed, coerced, and bullied into sex in so many other contexts, do I wonder: How could my husband listen to me say what I said — even once, even timidly — and sleep well that night, much less continue to insist on sleeping with me?

Reactions to my marital experience will likely depend on the reader’s age — which reflects the enormous evolution that the legal and social definitions of appropriate sexual behavior have undergone over the past 50 years. Marital rape was legal everywhere in the US until the mid-1970s and was not outlawed in all 50 states until the 1990s. Even today, it is not prosecuted as harshly as rape outside marriage.

These facts tell me that I matured from child to college graduate in a country where men “owned” their wives so completely that they could commit sexual violence on them with legal impunity. In that context, my acquiescence begins to make sense — even though my educational and professional background ensured I knew, intellectually, I was entitled to refuse sex.

I am a humanities professor who teaches feminist theory, models feminist behavior for my students and my own children, and has achieved success in a male-dominated field. Last year, my teenage son and I chanted in support of women’s reproductive rights at the Women’s March in Washington. And yet for years I submitted to unwanted sex from my husband, leaving me sexually traumatized long after I ended that marriage. All the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.

Countless movies and TV shows — including this year’s Best Picture, The Shape of Water — have used the shot of a husband jackhammering away above his blank-faced wife as shorthand for a stale marriage. But nowhere do we ask what it would feel like to be that woman, night after night, or whether the husband’s insistence might even be a kind of assault.

In private conversation, nearly every woman with whom I have broached this subject has shared stories — her own, a friend’s, or both — about suffering unwanted sex in marriage. And yet despite the #MeToo movement, the heated discussion around the New Yorker’s “Cat Person” short story, and the Aziz Ansari debate, the subject of sexual misconduct in marriage has not arisen in our public discourse.

The majority of sexual encounters in America take place in marriage. Half of adults in America are married, and married or cohabiting people have sex twice as often as single people. Do we believe there is no painfully “bad sex,” coercion, or sexual assault in marriage? If we do recognize the prevalence of these things, why aren’t we talking about it?

The questions about what constitutes consent and assault raised by the Babe.net article about Aziz Ansari become only more disturbing in the context of marriage. In the New York Times, opinion writer Bari Weiss wrote of “Grace,” who had the disturbing encounter with Ansari, “If you are hanging out naked with a man, it’s safe to assume he is going to try to have sex with you.” But what if you lie next to that man every night, and prefer to sleep naked? Should he assume your body is perpetually available to him for sex?

Weiss advised, “If he pressures you to do something you don’t want to do, use a four-letter word, stand up on your two legs and walk out his door.” But what if you know the “pressures” will never stop, and the only way you can escape them is to leave a lifelong relationship? And what if “his door” is also yours?

Leaving a marriage is much harder than calling an Uber. It requires breaking up a family, and deciding that avoiding unwanted sex is worth giving up half the time you would have spent with your kids. It means financial turmoil from which you might never fully recover. If you have kids, it may mean incurring the wrath of the person with whom you will be required to co-parent for decades, and so it also may mean losing his family, whom you love but who will no longer love you because you have hurt their darling boy. How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?

The issue at hand is not about Aziz Ansari, or about any one man. It is about that “emotional setting” Lindy West wrote of in the Times, quoting feminist activist Susan Brownmiller, in which women feel unable or not allowed to resist male sexual overtures. The institution of marriage provides a prefab version of the setting West describes. It gives a man years to accomplish the emotional manipulation that men on dates must squeeze into an evening. How can we consider such a persistent campaign for a woman’s compliance anything but assault?

Because marriage is sanctified, by your community if not also by your god; because it is now widely understood as a bond of love, not a social or financial codification; because in it, our expectation for female caretaking and reverence for male sexual desire meet in the gospel of a woman’s “sacrifice”; and because of the dangerous myth of postfeminism — we have come to see marriage as a relationship that is not about power, in which women cannot feel sexually violated or dehumanized.

Only when women say otherwise — in public debate, but also to each other, and to their partners, sons, and daughters — will we confront how the institution of marriage can hide damaging behavior that we’ve begun to question in so many other settings.