A Voice for Men seems to joining the ranks of the marital rape deniers. In a post on the site today (archived here), AVFM contributor Amartya Talukdar attacks proposed laws to criminalize marital rape in India as part of an evil feminist plot to “criminalize marriage” itself. Because, in his mind, there is no such thing as marital rape.
In the post, he offers a muddled assortment of “arguments” against the very idea of marital rape. Echoing the, er, logic of sci-fi author and far-right crank Vox Day, Talukdar explains that once a woman marries a man she gives up her right to say “no” to sex with her husband.
The concept of marital rape is an oxymoron. Marriage is a licence for sex. A woman who does not want to have sex with her husband should separate from him and file for divorce.
Indeed, as he sees it, saying “no” to a spouse’s demands for sex is the real crime.
[M]arriage is where both partners should seek sexual fulfillment. Denying each other sex is a crime except in exceptional circumstances. This applies to both man and woman. In respecting mutual duties and responsibilities lies the successful marital relationship.
As long as a husband isn’t literally beating his wife, Talukdar suggests, she should simply submit to his demands — and shouldn’t even think about calling the cops on him.
Marriage is a partnership of trust. If a man should not subject his wife to physical pain, the wife should not subject him to the rigors of the criminal justice system.
Denying a husband sex is an evil act, because it might force the poor fellow to resort to masturbation — or worse!
What should a man do if he is regularly denied sex by his wife? Should he masturbate, visit brothels or should be commit adultery?
I’m going to take door number one here, and say, yes, it would be better for a man to masturbate than for him to RAPE HIS WIFE. (Having an affair or going to a brothel are also much better options than RAPING SOMEONE.)
But as Talukdar sees it, married men are essentially paying for a lifetime of sex-on-demand, and it’s a woman’s duty to live up to her side of this supposed bargain.
Rights come with duties. A woman in India has a right to maintenance even when husband is sick, and incapable of earning or is unemployed. He is duty bound to pay his wife alimony even after divorce. The Indian Courts have held that a man must “beg, borrow or steal” but he must maintain his wife. Then why shouldn’t a man have right to have coitus with his wife if he is duty bound to maintain her?
By this logic, divorced men paying alimony to their ex-wives should also have the right to demand sex from them, but never mind.
Since marital rape, in his mind, doesn’t exist, Talukdar resorts to conspiracy theory to explain why anyone would want to pass laws criminalizing marital rape in India. In his mind, it’s part of a longstanding plot by feminists to “criminalize” marriage and thus destroy it once and for all.
In India marriage is a sacrament. However, feminists have always viewed marriage as an institution that enslaves women. Hence they want this institution to be destroyed. …
Laws like no fault divorce, domestic violence, marital rape, alimony and child support have already made marriage an extinct institution in many countries. Hence caution must be exercised before Indian Law makers copy such laws.
In the world you and I live in, marriage is “extinct” in precisely zero countries. Talukdar, like most AVFMers, seems to live in a world of his own imagining.
Talukdar’s post is another new low in a long history of new lows from AVFM.
I agree. But how does a person voice their dissatisfaction with the current status of the sexual relationship such that it can’t be misinterpreted as pressure? And is it okay to expect that people who are in a loving, committed relationship will once in a while do things for each other even if they aren’t feeling particularly enthusiastic about it at the time? I don’t know the answer to those questions, but I know what it’s like avoiding them.
When you say that coercing someone into sex is a “gray” area, I’m going to dare to call you a rape apologist. There is no “gray” area when it comes to consent, and it can still be rape if there was no physical force.
How dare you call that something other than rape apologia?
Funny. My issue is with you trying to redefine rape, not with you being dissatisfied with your current sex life. It’s super-weird how you conflate those things. Why did you feel it was necessary to insert “gray rape” into your discussion about your personal sex life?
Did I say you didn’t? You can do that without trying to redefine rape. Why don’t you try that again without the rape apologia?
I don’t want anything from you except that you not try to redefine rape. Rape is sex in the absence of consent, something that I frankly thought was beyond question around here but I guess I was wrong. Your problems with your sex life don’t actually require you to go around claiming that sex under coercion is not actually rape (or at least not rape-rape) and it is possible for you to have a discussion about that without throwing victims of non-forcible rape under the bus. So why are you doing that? It’s unnecessary, and yet you seem to think you have a right to do it. That’s bizarre and impossible for me to understand.
Count me among the people who don’t think cheating is a big sin, just a sign of deeper inability to communicate and be honest with each other. You won’t get all your needs fulfilled just spending time with your spouse. Sex is one that traditionally is fulfilled solely by a spouse, but non-traditional arrangements are still healthy as long as both partners understand the situation and accept it.
Rugby, you don’t have a respectful, cooperative and healthy marriage. You said you can’t talk it out with him because he wouldn’t accept your needs. That means he would leave you if he knew the truth, or force you to change in a way you can’t do if you want to be happy, You might be content with your compromise solution of keeping your cheating from him, but the only reason he accepts the status quo of your marriage is because he doesn’t know what it really is.
You’re happier than before because you lie to him. He is happy because he trusts you when he shouldn’t. You lie to him. The false trust will come crashing down the moment you or someone else shows him reality.
If you want to spend the next however many decades hoping that doesn’t happen, and hoping he isn’t extremely bitter if he ever finally does find out, go ahead and take that risk. Or you could tell him what your needs are for the future without admitting you have cheated already, and let him walk away if that is what he chooses.
Cheating is a disrespectful and hurtful thing to do to one’s partner, and is a betrayal of trust.
It is not even on the same level of awful as raping one’s partner, however. I’m not sure if there’s many worse things one can do to someone else.
Also, am I the only one who finds it weird that Talukdar seems to differentiate between committing adultery and visiting a brothel? As far as I know cheating is still cheating, whether you pay for the sex or not.
I seem to recall having read that in India it has traditionally been considered acceptable for married men to patronize brothels, and it is thus a serious concern for married women that their husbands will infect them with STIs acquired at the brothels.
cretaceouskitteh78, woah, thanks for letting me know about that. I’m going to do a post on it; would you like credit in the post for bringing his Holocaust tweets to my attention?
@KSRay
Exactly. And there’s also, for most people, some pressure to sometimes have sex simply through the fact that you’re in a romantic relationship. This isn’t a case of one person pressuring another, but I’m just trying to say that in reality people do always feel some level of pressure to behave in certain ways.
Obviously you need to be able to express dissatisfaction with aspects of your relationship, or you’ll have no hope of keeping the relationship alive and well. But once the topic has been raised you can either find an acceptable solution, or not. When you can’t solve the problem in a mutually acceptable way, that’s when we’re gonna start disagreeing on the ethics. I’m of the opinion that in certain situations cheating might be the least (or one of the least) bad option. Others apparently think cheating should never be on the table, treating it as if it’s in a category of unforgivable sins. I think it’s ok to just disagree on that point, because it doesn’t seem to me like something we could hope to solve through arguments.
I think in a healthy relationship it’s possible to agree to sex even when you don’t really want it, because you know your partner wants it – and that doesn’t have to happen through coercion or pressure. Obviously sex is different in many ways, but in my case the occassions where I agreed to sex even though I wasn’t really in the mood weren’t more dramatic than making dinner for my wife even though I wasn’t personally hungry. (BUT, I also recognize I might not feel the same way if I had a history of sexual coercion, or the power dynamics were different in our marriage, or probably a trillion other reasons that I can’t think of right now.)
If a wife wants to peg her husband, does he have the right to say “No”? I’d like to hear the manosphere’s opinion of marital rape in that case. What if she’s into face sitting? What if she wants rimming on demand? What if she’s *gasp* fat and hairy? I thought men would rather die than fuck a woman over 150lbs?
Gender flipped, MRAs would recoil in horror at marital rape.
Historically? Yes.
Jackie, they’re just saying that not only should she be raped, she should have to enjoy it. If a woman does not like being forced to supply him with a warm body to fuck, she’s broken. That’s not his fault. He’s giving her everything she deserves and she should appreciate it. He’ll tell her when she should feel fulfilled.
These men make marriage sound alot like hell.
@Catalpa
He is writing at AVFM, so I’m guessing he is drawing the distinction because to him visiting a brothel is just paying for a wet and better substitute to your hand, rather than adultery where you might actually have feelings for the woman you cheat with. Sort of “Honey, it’s not really cheating, there is no way she would even fuck me if I hadn’t paid her. Really, you don’t have any reason to feel jealous.”
To most people, it is the sex behind your spouse’s back that is the problem, so there wouldn’t be any distinction. I personally see things a little differently from the norm, it isn’t the sex itself that bothers me at all, but the lying and subterfuge that go with it. I don’t see any distinction between a brothel and an affair either, they’re both cheating.
I can see how even some non-misogynists might make a distinction between intentional, one-time, paid-for sex and an actual affair, though. It’s up to each individual to determine what part of it really bothers them the most.
Sorry David Futrelle for not getting back to you sooner! Been working like a mofo. But, no. Totally not necessary for you to give me credit for the discovery. Happy to help and expose this garbage. But I’d probably have sqealed like a little girl if you had lol!
It occurs to me that some married gay men have a different perspective on what is and is not cheating. If my husband has sex with someone other than me, I do not experience it as a betrayal. From what I’ve been reading here, it seems to work differently for some opposite-sex couples.
Regarding the abominable Talukdar, he seems to have a problem with the idea of a married man masturbating. I don’t know a lot about how straight dudes do sex, but is there an idea that masturbating is somehow inappropriate for adult men? Because that would explain some things. For an otherwise healthy man in his twenties to believe that the only correct way to achieve orgasm is PiV intercourse puts a tremendous burden on him and any woman he is attracted to.
What does and does not constitute cheating does depend in the couple. There are folks in open relationships who are fine with one or both partner having sex with other people. If someone has their partner’s approval to sleep around, it’s not cheating. Cheating happens when one partner goes behind the other’s back without a prior agreement having been reached, and an implicit expectation of monogamy has been established. At least in my opinion.
@Catalpa
Agreed. Cheating is all based on what terms of the relationship are built on, which happens to be one reason why communication is so important in a relationship. While I wouldn’t mind having an open relationship or if any partner of mine has a little something-something here and there, I’d rather have these terms talked about before hand rather than assumed.
Catalpa and Banana Jackie Cake – thank you, that resolves my confusion.
The one relationship I had where I was truly in love…I didn’t care if he slept with other people. If he came back to me at night, and didn’t embarrass me, I didn’t care who he slept with.