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.
This is all the more disturbing because sexual willingness is a casualty in many abusive marriages, with one spouse withdrawing from the other due to physical and/or emotional cruelty. And yes, if a marriage is irretrievably broken down it should end, but it doesn’t seem to me that licensing rape in that situation would improve anything. In fact marital rape would make it harder for the abuse to stop and the marriage to be saved, or for the victim to recover after the relationship is dissolved. So again it looks like marital rape is the far greater threat to marriage than lack of sex.
@ Leisha
They do view women as human, but as a lesser breed of sub-human, made specifically to pleasure them.
Wouldn’t sex when your spouse is willing be, you know, better? I mean, they said right here:
“[M]arriage is where both partners should seek sexual fulfillment”
So wouldn’t it be unfulling for at least one partner if rape was involved? Wouldn’t that mean they aren’t doing their martial duty?
@Leisha Young: I think you mean ” with extra stuff attached to the vagina”. Cuz remember, they really do see them as just walking vaginas.
That extra stuff that’s attached keeps doing things like complaining, talking and whining about being treated as a person and that makes their boners sad.
Yeah, I don’t even have the words for this fuckery.
MRA: “Rape culture’s not a thing, stupid fucking femicommunazis!”
MRA: “Men should be able to sex their wives whenever they want, regardless of if the wife wants it or not, because it’s a woman’s DUTY to sex her husband whenever he wants (and I guess you feeemales can sex men whenever you want too).”
Can we move on to something more fun to make fun of and doesn’t make me want to punch my computer screen? Like the #HowToSpotAFeminist tag?
Or why Joss Whedon left Twitter amidst feminists asking him why he shunned Black Widow and turned her into a “I can’t have babbbieees I’m a monnnssstter” and Bruce Banner’s personal therapist?
Oh, and we can’t forget Tony’s rape joke (The bit where he said he’d reinstate the rule that kings can sleep with a woman on her honeymoon, though he used the Latin name for it), and the bit where a dude falls on to a woman’s breasts as a “joke”?
And now Gators are supporting him in a very sorry attempt to make themselves look better while hissing at feminists. “Because good people be nice to people they don’t agree with!” seems to be the consensus, which makes me laugh a big viking laugh of irony. Because of the obvious, and that they think it’s the feminists that chased Joss off of twitter, when he says here that he’s never really been a fan of twitter in the first place and only joined to promote an older movie.
Well, his version of marriage *is* an institution that enslaves women and should be destroyed.
No kidding, BritterSweet.
Ponder this:
“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.”
Gotta feel his pain. The good ol’ days when a husband could rape and beat his wife, and abscond with no consequences when tired of her and the kiddos, are nearly gone, no thanks to the evil feminazis and SJWs. The horror (a.k.a oppressive matriarchy, OMG!).
@ Banana Jackie Cake
Unfortunately, a lot of guys seem to like it when it’s clear the woman is just doing it because she “has to,” not because she wants to. Or so numerous comments on YouTube by different people would lead me to believe.
>”He is duty bound to pay his wife alimony even after divorce.”
Well, it’s not really alimony before the divorce… (sorrynotsorry for the pedantry)
“Rights come with duties”. This maybe be the most abject falsity of the lot. Duties by definition are intentionally taken on in exchange for something else or in accordance with some moral code. Amartya’s logic seems to be, however, that Rights are given to women in exchange for their obedience. Disgusting really.
Dude’s Twitter feed is pretty boring but if you scroll back far enough you find he’s also a Holocaust denier that thinks Hillary Clinton is a Jew. Not even joking. They sure know how to pick a winner over there at AVFM!
OBVIOUSLY, no one, no one is under any obligation to have sex with anyone else.
HOWEVER, I always find this a sore subject. Some people in this thread are talking about everyday marital refusal or a bit of ‘not tonight dear’.
For those who have not had serious issues with a disparity between sexual desires, it’s probably quite hard to understand how utterly demoralising it is to be yoked to someone who seems otherwise happy and healthy but will not have sex with you while expecting you to be faithful and content. I do think that spouses have a responsibility to look after each other’s sexual needs and to support each other in all kinds of ways. I don’t think spouses should be saying no to each other’s normal requests for intimacy far more often than they’re saying yes. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with one spouse saying that they’re unhappy about the amount of sex in a relationship or being a bit peeved about it when it falls far, far short of normality.
But this is a long, long way from marital rape. Which must obviously be against the law. And there are many, many examples of brutal rape and sexual assault committed by husbands against wives. And there are many greyer areas, including coercion and emotional abuse. But I get really uncomfortable when people who probably are having a decent amount of sex say “If my partner says no, then that’s just fine and dandy.” Implying everyone else should be the same.
A no must be respected, but it does not have to be accepted gladly. If you can accept a no gladly, then you’re probably getting laid on a fairly regular basis in your marriage or you have similarly matching low libidos.
By the way, I’m the woman in a sexless marriage. After years of begging and internalising the rejection, I cheated. No regrets except I should have done it sooner. Part of my personal feminist awakening is embracing my own sexuality – I like sex, with a man, and I expect it on reasonably regular basis as part of a healthy, respectful, cooperative marriage. I do not think there is anything wrong with a man saying the same.
The problem with the MRA dudes is that they don’t really want a healthy, cooperative and respectful marriage in the first place. They want a wife who submits and labours with adoration. And they don’t see anything wrong with dishing abuse in an attempt to get it.
Ugh, that’s sick.
It’s as if they see ‘sex’ as a continual condition, not, you know, a specific occurence (or a series of them). It just… I mean, just… how? You can’t just ‘agree to all sex’, because each occurence is different. Like you can’t ‘agree to all meals’, because sometimes you won’t like the food, or you’re not hungry.
@rugbyyogi
Obviously, what you’re describing is a different situation. I don’t have any such experience, but it seems like the solution for something like that should lie mainly in talking to each other to figure out a solution – be it adding a third person to the relationship (which doesn’t have to be ‘cheating’, polyamourous relationships are a thing, after all), trying to ‘adjust’ the two people’s needs in some way, or separating. It can’t be easy, but like you said, the key is a healthy, cooperative and respectful relationship.
Good on you for figuring out your needs; I hope your relationship is doing well now that you figured out a solution.
Most of the time it’s easy for me to sit here and laugh at how ridiculous and out-of-touch these clowns are… but every now and then it hits me how many people in the world who think like this have actual power, actual power over actual women… and then I have to pace around the room taking deep breaths and punching my hands.
Everything everyone above said.
1. This shows ZERO respect for male (and non-binary) rape victims, cause obviously men can’t be raped cause they always want every conceivable sex act all the time, as long as it’s not with a dude or a fatty. And yet imagine how AVFM would react if a story of an Indian wife forcibly pegging her husband ever broke. Especially if she were – horrors – fat! That would be the fault of rapey male-rape-denying female-rape-exaggerating cow-worshipping feminism for sure. This argument is basically “blue balls: NOT COOL BITCHES” taken to a faux legal/human rightsy level.
2. This assumes brides (and grooms) have 100% free choice in whom they marry.
3. Even if you’re only counting rape and not other forms of sexual assault in this, there are INFINITE ways and times and situations in which even a chauvinistic abuser might agree it’s wrong to force or pressure someone into intercourse. And some newfangled human rights pushers are even saying you should only have sex when you actually FEEL like it! Imagine that! But seriously, even husbands who expect their wives to lie there and tolerate it and don’t really care about pleasing them know that there are like, MEDICAL reasons, or trauma, or maybe you’re at like a PTA meeting…
And if you DO count other kinds of assault, I mean, like, that would mean signing a marriage contract is agreeing to EVERY conceivable act. If we can’t convince these MRAs that it’s acceptable not to want to get vanilla-assaulted, maybe they’ll believe that not everyone likes getting pooped on or having their balls popped.
@Penny – I can see that your comment comes from a supportive place, so please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m sure on reflection you’d realise that I and 99% of people in my position had considered the ‘talking it out’ approach already and I do have a good idea of whether or not my spouse would be open to the idea of polyamorous solutions (he isn’t). I would also say that I think it’s a very, very rare relationship that does better by involving a third party and no relationship carries on well when one partner’s sexual and emotional needs are neglected for a significant amount of time.
I apologise for talking out of my rear end on something I have no experience with; thanks for taking it so well.
@rugbyyogi,
I can empathize with your situation, I’ve been on the receiving end of sexual rejection more than a few times and it can cut a person’s self esteem to shreds. The reason I live with a non partner and not a partner is because fifteen years ago he decided he didn’t want sex anymore, period. Once it became clear he wouldn’t be changing his mind I ended the relationship but we stayed friends.
We’ve kind of drifted into sharing our lives together because my attempts to find a happy relationship elsewhere didn’t work out. It’s a compromise. And ‘talking’ is not the magic wand a lot of people seem to think it is, for one thing the other person has to be willing to listen.
I also categorically state that marital/partner rape is wrong, but at the same time a relationship of mismatched sex drives is going to have problems. I’m not talking about someone not being in the mood once in a while.
While the OP sounds like a repugnant individual, I suspect underneath the entitlement and misogyny there’s a real fear that he will make a commitment to someone only to find himself denied intimacy, while expected to hold up his traditional, patriarchal side of the bargain. He needs to have it explained to him that the solution to one’s insecurities is not to deny other people bodily autonomy.
Sexual incompatibility played a major role in my divorce. I love him profoundly. We were not compatible as intimate partners though. You can’t talk through fundamental differences in personalities and needs. Amongst other things, his lack of desire to have sex with me was devastating.
It would have been delusional of both of us to think bringing a third party into the relationship would resolve the dissatisfaction I was experiencing and not at all harm what good we had so we never pursued that route.
To prevent further hurt and save what we did have, we ended the marriage. There’s still sadness sometimes (I hate myself for having been dissatisfied with him and for having hurt him so profoundly) but for the most part we just dearly love and enjoy one another.
It’s the 21st century. If your partner does not satisfy you then you should end the relationship sooner rather then later.
I believe it is always better to break up with someone then to cheat on them.
rugby & marine: I get what you all are saying, I think. In my first marriage, my now-ex would regularly refuse intimacy and then masturbate to porn. We had sex maybe 1x a month (tops) and always at my insistence. But it was just the cherry topping to a shit-pie relationship. I didn’t realize how thoroughly broken I’d been until after he left me mid-deployment for a contractor he’d met.
Really, though, it was the best favor he could have done for me. A few months into my life as an impoverished Mom living in a single wide trailer while working full time for very little money and finishing my degree (our first had been an, “Oh…so…turns out I suck at taking birth control” baby [prox’s clarification: Turns out that it’s actually that hormonal BC doesn’t really work very well for me; see: our second child; secondary evidence: I consistenty begin menstruating a month after childbirth even when exclusively breast-feeding – my body’s just like, “Shut up with that no-baby nonsense!” until I stick an IUD in it] when I was a Junior and we were dating) I realized that I was happier than I’d been in years.
My second marriage – with a man who respects me, treats me like a fekkin’ queen (-gasp- amirite, MRAs?), and actually wants to have sex with me – has already lasted longer than my first and it still feels brand new.
Lesson learned: Life’s too short and precious to be spent in misery. It’s one thing – a good thing, in my book – to stand with an beloved spouse through a difficult time. It’s entirely another to try to shoehorn happiness into a place it just doesn’t want to be.
Nope. Your first statement here is describing rape culture, and nobody should be surprised when rape culture leads to rape.
Who gets to decide what is a “normal” request and what is abnormal? You’re talking about a mismatch of sexual drives here. Wanting to have sex literally every day, sometimes multiple times a day, is completely normal for almost everyone at some point in their lives, and it is the norm for some people the majority of their lives. Wanting to have sex never is also completely normal for almost everyone at some phase, and being asexual one’s entire life is a thing, a thing that some people object to having labeled “abnormal.” Who, in your world, gets to be the arbiter of normality, and what happens when you fall outside it, as you inevitably will at some point because people’s sex drives change over the courses of their lives?
Why do you think that, if you think spouses have a responsibility to one another and should not be refusing one another’s “normal” requests?
Rape includes more than “brutal” attacks. What the fuck.
I’m going to pile a big mountain of “nope” onto this. Having sex with someone who does not want to have sex with you is rape. It is rape no matter how you accomplish the sexual contact, even if it’s “only” coercion. Again: What the fuck, dude.
And I get really uncomfortable when someone starts redefining rape to suit their own purposes. I understand that you’re in a situation you don’t like, but people who have been raped by coercion and emotional abuse are also in situations they don’t like, and you don’t have a right to tell those people that what they suffered was not “really” rape.
And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with calling off the relationship, breaking up, and getting a divorce. Which is your remedy when you and your partner are sexually incompatible and it is irreconcilable. Your remedy is NOT to rape your spouse, and it is NOT to come onto the internet and lecture to rape victims that their rapes didn’t count.
Right, so do these guys think that a woman could demand sex from her husband and, if he refuses, tase him, tie him up pump him full of alprostadil (an erectile dysfunction drug) and have wild sex until she is completely satisfied?
I don’t think so, but if they are being consistent they should think that’s OK.
… sorry I tried to say that MRAs might be consistent …
I think Pakman or someone in the comment thread under the Pakman/VD story had this response to the “marriage implies consent to sex” argument, which I thought was almost perfect. Basically, if marriage implies consent to sex, that would go both ways. And what specific sexual actions do you consent to by entering marriage? Are they willing to take this to the logical conclusion? Because somehow I think they might not agree that they’ve consented to, let’s say, pegging, just through getting married.
@schwadevivre:
They obviously don’t give any thought to their lip service “equality clause” and its implications, because somehow the idea of forcing a husband to perform his “marital duties” does not occur to them, in spite of inserting their assurances that their reasoning applies to both sexes equally.
We never hear from an MRA / redpiller who’d admit to rejecting his wife sexually for whatever reason and feeling bad about it (*and* advocating marital rape as a solution to her sexual frustration), or even admitting the real possibility of this scenario, although the instances of husbands shunning sex are quite common.