supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.
Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual
expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when
rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As
soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in
a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an
inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the
relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned
and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no
context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the
woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has
been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force
against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to
force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between
sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to
refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use
have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and
properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual
compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the
society’s commitment to forced sex is real: 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
