In modern western legal thinking, a human being cannot be owned by another. Owning another person means you deprive them from exercising their will. If you follow this thinking, you can easily see why rape is so evil – it deprives the victim from their will during the assault by a male. Rape is momentarily enslaving another person and breaching their bodily integrity.
There is also the passivity aspect of rape that further compounds the objectification of a person and highlights the transient inequality of the equal.
When I was in foster care, one of the teenage boys (he was 17) in one of the English families I stayed with told me something that in turn stayed with me. I was still Muslim, so I asked him if he would mind if his sister, who is only a year younger than him, had sex with two boys at once. He said of course he would. I said but you just told me you had it with two girls. Without thinking, he said yeah but there’s a difference here. “I fucked two” he said “she would be fucked by two”.
Let’s not confine ourselves to what Shakespeare in
Othello refers to as “making the beast with two backs”. Let’s not exclude joystick joyride, couch canoodle, doggy style, leg lock, pick-me-up standing, twirl-a-girl and the too common missionary style. This is because penetrative intercourse of any kind between a male and female cannot be conceived of or meaningfully carried out without one participant being stationary. Nothing controversial in saying that.
Nothing also is too bad of me when I say that as an Ex homophobe (this term I use loosely because it doesn’t mean anything to me as I didn’t have an irrational fear of homosexual people, I just murderously hated them) I can’t always suppress mentally trying to figure out which of the two gay men is, well, the doer. That it still hasn’t quite set within me as a norm to hear two men referring to each other as my husband.
Views still vary on how to interpret Sylvia Plath’s “every woman adores a fascist // the boot in the face”. And there’s a lot of codependency in popular culture that cognitively dissonances me to the very core of my post-Islam egalitarian thinking. I seem to lose every time when songstresses whistle their desire for the readily stupid, brutish man. Take Alicia Dixson’s The Boy Does Nothing as a case in point (not her as a person or as the author, but the song becoming a hit in so many different countries). And Rihanna’s S&M song, viewed in light of her protracted attachment to violent Chris Brown, might be more than a song – might be the preferred modus operandi outside her boudoir. No, seriously. Otherwise intelligent, successful, independent women falling for laughably uneducated, hunky if abusive men.
I myself found it discombobulating when a former girlfriend of mine asked me to tie her up, spank her and conclude in her face. She took a different view to what I immediately said to be degrading to her. Tying, to her, was an expression of trust in me; and spanking was my supreme acceptance and genuine caring for her. If it doesn’t hurt, she once said, then passion is not alive. This was revealing, as it did, that genuine pleasure tends to verge on the painful and vice (no pun intended) versa.
Now, you need to be an unbelievably idiot to take the above as me saying women deep down don’t want always to be equal to men, or that men should habitually hit and dominate them in bed or be nasty to them from time to time, all that simply because bad boys tending to be irresistible to many talented, great, conquerable women.
And to retrieve the initial thread of this musing, it is not for nothing that a girl always resists being reduced by boys to the wisdom of her vagina. This is because all the richness of a girl’s smile, style, character, wit, intelligence and much, much more could be dispensed with in and during the animal act of sex (for some boys dispensation seems to last after that too). The same could be said of boys too, and I did say it to myself once, only to imagine the possibly curt and without thinking reply of that 17 year-old boy: “even when she is on top I’m still inside her”. He of course wouldn’t quite appreciate that enduring power might lie with the femme fatale. Yet the symbolic (dignified) self during the sexual act does not appear to enter with urgent immediacy the sphere of two converging realities, where the female is consigned by biology to be stuffed.
And not very far from this is ‘limited consent’ cases where a man in a causal intercourse does what’s called ‘creampie surprise’ – unwanted internal ejaculation. This is ethically dubious but perfectly legal in that consent to sex is indivisible if binary, and includes things like happy as well as unhappy ending (incidentally, liberal and heterosexual people get shocked when I tell them that in the UK, you cannot consent to injury -- referring them to the famous Operation Spanner, how even the ECHR upheld the judgment of outlawing S&M as a matter of public policy -- and that you don’t have the final say or are over your body always sovereign; and, how Keith Vaz MP and his Home Select Committee got themselves into trouble when their proposal to crackdown on FGM seemed to have overshot its mark and plunged into criminalising things like vajazzling, reducing excessive labia and other genital cosmetic surgeries that got the 'mitts off my muff' campaign so incandescent with rage). These areas of ambiguity cannot be completely simplified by things like the WeConsent app. “Yes, I do” to sex is rarely said by a girl, that is true, and it is also rare to have “can I see some ID?” asked by a sexually brimful, undressing boy.
If yours is one of those tidy, rectilinear minds that has grown fat on a diet of black-or-white thinking, then you’d do well not to watch the following lecture that sheds some sceptical light on the sorry business of a human being saying “no” and it doesn’t always mean “no” and saying “yes” not always meaning “yes” in the context of sexual allegations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SpVVsOUsLo
Topic: Origins of the He Said/She Said Gap in Sexual Allegations