9. Fifty Shades of Rape: Is There Ever Legitimate Rape In Marriage?
Is There Ever Legitimate Rape in Marriage?
I say nothing, not one word, from beginning to end, and neither does he. If it were lawful for a woman to hate her husband, I would hate him as a rapist.
PHILIPPA GREGORY, THE RED QUEEN
Legitimate rape. Not in the eyes of Saint Augustine. When he discoursed on the subject, he put the blame squarely on the man. He was not referring to an actual rape, but rather to the Roman legend of “the Rape of Lucretia.” What troubled Augustine was that after she is raped, Lucretia performs the only honorable act available to her. She kills herself. In The City of God, Augustine strongly objected to her suicide, for “when a woman is violated while her soul admits no consent to the iniquity, but remains inviolably chaste, the sin is not hers, but his who violates her.”1
William Shakespeare brought a new perspective to this ancient Roman legend in his lengthy poem “The Rape of Lucrece.” In his retelling, Lucrece regains her voice after the awful rape, refusing to take any responsibility upon herself.
“This first revelation of her own authorial power propels Lucrece to spring into physical action to take charge of her destiny,” writes Laura Stampler in her honors thesis at Stanford University.2 Lucrece struggles, however, in how best to claim her innocence, whether postponing her suicide or not killing herself at all and keeping the crime a secret. “Through lengthy inner struggle, Lucrece determines that she will not suffer her fate alone and allow the crime that has been committed against her to go unpunished.”3 In the end, she does the “honorable” thing and commits suicide, but not before she has told her husband and has the assurance that he will take revenge. But the moral of this narrative poem is that Lucrece has found a voice that can never be stilled. She tells her story publicly, while acknowledging that her chosen path will still lead to her suicide. Lucrece says to her servant:
. . . if it should be told,
The repetition cannot make it less;
For more it is than I can well express . . .
Go get me hither paper, ink, and pen.4
Go get me hither paper, ink, and pen. This should be the motto of all those who suffer domestic violence and rape. Like Lucrece, we are tempted to vacillate, doubting ourselves. But like her, we must claim our own voice. Unlike her decision, as Augustine so strongly declares, choosing to commit suicide is the wrong course.
The term legitimate rape entered the American lexicon in August 2012. That was when Missouri Republican congressman Todd Akin told a reporter that a pregnancy resulting from rape is “really rare.” He added that “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”5
Where might Akin have come up with this wacky theory that the female body can “shut that whole thing down”? His conclusion in the eyes of almost everyone was utterly laughable. But maybe he had a solid source backing him up. Had he been reading the ancient legend of “the Rape of Lucretia”? If he had, he might have learned that it was presumed in ancient Rome that if the raped woman became pregnant, she was actually an agreeable—if not eager—participant in the sexual encounter. So would hers then have been an illegitimate rape? By Akin’s definition, yes.
No scripture of any religion features more stories of rape than does the Bible. Some of these accounts are chilling and difficult to comprehend. We ask ourselves, How could God’s people commit such awful crimes and go unpunished when far lesser crimes are severely dealt with? Others have written about these “texts of terror,” which I will not review here. But even the laws regarding rape are downright confusing, particularly those that appear in Deuteronomy 22:23–29:
If a man happens to meet in a town a virgin pledged to be married and he sleeps with her, you shall take both of them to the gate of that town and stone them to death—the young woman because she was in a town and did not scream for help, and the man because he violated another man’s wife. You must purge the evil from among you.
But if out in the country a man happens to meet a young woman pledged to be married and rapes her, only the man who has done this shall die. Do nothing to the woman; she has committed no sin deserving death. This case is like that of someone who attacks and murders a neighbor, for the man found the young woman out in the country, and though the betrothed woman screamed, there was no one to rescue her.
If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay her father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the young woman, for he has violated her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.
We simply want to shut these laws down. They are too cut-and-dried and make seemingly simplistic assumptions that there are no other extenuating circumstances. What if the woman in the first instance had tried to scream for help but was prevented from doing so? In the second instance, the woman gets a break, and we are relieved that “she has committed no sin deserving of death.” And, in fact, her report of the rape is deemed hard evidence. In the third scenario, the young woman is forced to marry the man who raped her, apparently even if she had screamed for help. As frequently as it references rape, the Bible does not present the woman’s point of view. The description comes through the voices of men.
Describing rape in its ugliest form pummels the reader with unsightly blood and the raw, piercing throb of pain that no wail or cry can capture. The sounds that do deafen the readers’ ears are those awful, indescribably degrading rapist slurs and obscenities that puncture the soiled, stinking air.
One poet who speaks profoundly on rape is Samantha Coerbell in her 1999 poem titled “The Romanticization.” The pretense of romance is indeed sometimes how rape begins:
And when he said to me
“Honey, you will be my only one” . . .
I believed
He would take me in his arms . . .
The more than three thousand words that follow describe rape that is too graphic to quote. The reader can look up the poem online or try to imagine the utter depth of awfulness. In the end, when the hateful physical violence is over, the victim again believed.
the only ringing
was in my ears
When he said
“Whore, I should kill you”
I believed.6
My own account of rape, if, in fact, it was legitimate rape, was not a violent, physical episode saturated with blood and piercing pain or even punctuated with obscenities. But it was a scene of soiled, stinking air—an ugly episode of hateful, “God-ordained” domination and supremacy, wholly devoid of the sweet fragrance of delightful sexual intimacy. What may have been satisfying to his incensed psyche I will never know. As for me, foul shame penetrated my very soul. I felt dirty and humiliated, utterly defeated. Polluted, that ancient Roman term of judgment seeping through the centuries into my pathetic sniffles. I slunk to the bathroom, locking the door, not able to turn toward the mirror. In those minutes while the hot water ran in the tub, I vowed it would never happen again. One flesh had become unalterably severed.
John is reading The New Yorker and doing crossword puzzles close by as I now write. Knowing I’m recounting this ordeal and writing it out, he just asked me, “Is this hard for you? Is it painful for you to tell of that incident?” My answer was no, as it never could have been before yesterday when I read Shakespeare’s “The Rape of Lucrece.” I quoted to John, with passion, those memorable lines of a raped woman: Go get me hither paper, ink, and pen.
I am writing this chapter on rape during Valentine’s Day week 2015, the opening week of the film Fifty Shades of Grey. It would have been too easy in the previous chapter on cultural considerations to have made a rant about this film alongside my rant on rap music. But one more old lady whining does little to alleviate the problem. Does the film demean women and celebrate rape? Does it have anything to say on the subject of multinational rape and sex trafficking? You bet it does, at least according to Mimi Haddad, who is the president of Christians for Biblical Equality.
As the film industry promotes Fifty Shades of Grey, launching on Valentine’s Day, I sit beside sixty scholars, activists, and faith leaders from more than twenty countries at a forum convened by the Carter Center: “Beyond Violence: Women Leading for Peaceful Societies.” Working to end the domination of women worldwide, these leaders recognize that “prejudice, discrimination, war, violence, distorted interpretations of religious texts, physical and mental abuse, poverty, and disease fall disproportionately on women and girls,” as Jimmy Carter notes in Call to Action: Women, Religion, Violence, and Power . . .
While these activists labor to combat abuse, filmmakers are working to normalize the sexual domination of women as entertainment . . .
Meanwhile, in hidden corners of nearly every city of the world, girls and women are held in secret prisons and brothels where they endure gang-rape. Firearms and other weapons are used as instruments of rape.7
The response of those who defend books and movies like Fifty Shades of Grey is that no one is forced to read the book or watch the movie, and the kind of sex that is portrayed is assumed to be a choice that is freely made, not coerced. And what about rape itself? Is that an act that is a choice freely made by both partners? It obviously is not rape if it is—or is it?
Dare we ask Todd Akin’s question: Is a particular incident a case of “legitimate rape”? I may be walking on thin ice here, but perhaps the question has merit. As we’ve already seen when it comes to domestic violence, we should not automatically believe everyone’s story. Is there a motive for someone to lie, perhaps in a child custody battle? And what is the definition of abuse? Is it abuse when a husband tells a wife she ought to lose twenty pounds and wear sexy nighties? While such behavior may not be appropriate, we dare not flatten a crime so much that it means nothing. If almost everything is abuse, then nothing is abuse. So it is with rape. If we define it too broadly, the term almost becomes meaningless. So, then, what is legitimate rape?
Let’s say one of my seminary students had made a serious commitment to forgo sexual intimacies before marriage. He is dating a young woman from the college across the way. Let’s say she is not a virgin and does not hold to his high standards. They’ve been dating for some time and are getting serious. She’s leading him on, maybe even imagining that sex will seal their relationship. He believes that premarital sex is a sin and insists they are going too far. He says no. She doesn’t stop. He is stronger than she and could push her away and get out of the car and take a long walk. He just keeps saying no. She persists until, against his conscience and better judgment, he succumbs to temptation. Is she guilty of rape?
What if the situation is reversed, and she is the one saying no, insisting he is going too far? She says no, telling him to stop. But she does not kick and push and scream and scratch his face with her fingernails. She succumbs. Is he guilty of rape?
Does an awful experience in my own marriage fit the definition of rape? These are not easy questions, but they ought to cause us to think deeply about definitions, as well as about contributing factors. For example, did a belief (religious or otherwise) in male supremacy influence the outcome of the sexual encounter? Did corporate power make a difference, let’s say, causing a young man on the make in the corporate world to succumb to the demands of his boss? Was he caught off guard, as was Joseph when Potiphar’s wife tried to force him into bed?
What is rape? The Bible does not even suggest there is such a category as marital rape. Augustine had strong words, but not relating to the marriage bed. Sir Matthew Hale, a seventeenth-century English jurist, established the legal tradition in the English-speaking world for nonrecognition of rape in marriage. His reasoning was that when women married, they gave themselves to their husbands in a binding contract: “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given herself in this kind unto her husband, which she cannot retract.”8
Giving license for marital rape, however, is not something out of the dark past. Until the 1970s, there were no laws in the United States making marital rape a crime. And even today noncriminalization of marital rape has its supporters. Virginia state senator Richard Black, in 2002, asked his fellow assemblymen “how on earth you could validly get a conviction of a husband-wife rape when they’re living together, sleeping in the same bed, she’s in a nightie, and so forth, there’s no injury, there’s no separation or anything.”9
But if we assume this subject is a matter that interests only law-makers, we are mistaken. In the summer of 2012, a lengthy quote by megachurch minister Doug Wilson was posted on the website of the Gospel Coalition, whose council members include Tim Keller, Al Mohler, and John Piper. “We have forgotten the biblical concepts of true authority and submission, or more accurately, have rebelled against them,” writes Wilson. “However we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”
Aware that this may seem shocking, he blames the “rebels”: “This is, of course, offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage . . . as they relate to the marriage bed.”10
Authority and submission were key factors in the awful nightmare I experienced. But I continue to mull over the question, Did I endure a legitimate marital rape? For anyone who might have a prurient interest in exactly what happened, there would be real disappointment even if I were to describe it in minute detail, which fortunately I have mostly erased from my memory. Prior to the incident, I had made journal entries that bear on the issue.
January 22, 1986
Sexual submission, as he defines it, has not related to my unwillingness to have intercourse with him. I have very rarely denied him that . . . My lack of submission is rather my“pulling away” from him at night. That charge is partially true. His fixation with anal touching has bothered me, as have other things he’s tried to do. I woke up early one morning to discover him on his knees on his side of the bed with a flashlight under the covers looking at my rectal area. I have also caught him peeking through the keyhole while I was in the bathroom.
August 11, 1987
Today begins the 20th year of our marriage. Yesterday was our anniversary, but there was no mention of it from [him]—not from me either. I guess that was appropriate. How can you celebrate or even acknowledge something that is so torn apart as our marriage—except, of course, that [he] still expects and gets sex. If our marriage is good enough for that, I guess I would think that it would be good enough for him to suggest we go out to eat at a nice restaurant on our 19th anniversary, but if we haven’t gone out in the previous 18 years, why start now.
There are many reasons that the term rape is less than appropriate and exact in my case. I have read and listened to horrific accounts of rape, and thus I wonder if I should actually use the term. I did not kick or scream when my ex-husband demanded sex, but I let him know how utterly disgusting I found his demand to be. There was nothing remotely mutual about the encounter. I was forced to have sex with my ex-husband. Or was I? When I look back on that ugly ordeal, I struggle even to this day to actually place myself amid that utterly repulsive scene, though truly I was there.
She is in her forties, a strong capable woman, albeit a wife who had been beaten and battered and pummeled and terrorized on many occasions by her husband. So one morning, she is packing her bags to make a car trip to speak at long-scheduled meetings. The husband enters the bedroom, his mood dark and foreboding. And then the threat. There is no physical violence this time, but the demand for sex—sex or stay home. No alternative. She would not be leaving the bedroom or the house until she had submitted to sex. He, as he had told their minister, and had reminded her on many occasions, was the “head of the home from the bedroom to the kitchen.”
What was I to do? Should I have grabbed the phone and tried to call 911? Phones had been broken over similar issues before. And the police? Even if I had been able to make such a call, it would have been laughable to report that my husband is ordering me to have sex before leaving town. The story probably would have made one of those lists of the silliest police reports. I suppose I could have tried to put through a call (had my ex-husband permitted) to someone in charge of the meetings and simply told the truth or made up a lie that I was sick. What were my choices? Do I succumb to the demeaning act of nonconsensual sex, fulfill my obligations, contact an attorney when I arrive back home, and file for separate maintenance?
Was this an incident of legitimate rape? And was it even the worst incident of sexual abuse I had suffered? Whether legitimate or not, the rape I experienced was considerably less vile and spiteful than other of his sexual violations against me. Before I went to court to plead for separate maintenance and full custody of Carlton, my attorney recorded on his yellow pad my testimony of abuse. My journal was helpful, but he insisted on more details. I resisted, embarrassed to reveal some of the utterly icky incidents. He pressed, and I felt forced to tell him of a revulsion I had never before voiced. I begged him not to ask me about it in court. He said it would depend on his discernment of the mind-set of the judge. He had already told me I had been assigned the judge he least desired for my case.
So there I was in court, testifying to shameful episodes, prompted by my lawyer. Fortunately the room was empty except for the judge, two attorneys, and a court recorder. My ex-husband, living out of state, did not make a showing. With my testimony over, we took a brief recess before Carlton was scheduled to enter the courtroom to testify. In the restroom, I came face-to-face with the court recorder. Perhaps she spoke out of turn. Her words tumbled out. “I’m so sorry about what you’ve endured. In all my years in court, I’ve never recorded such disgusting abuse. I hope everything works out.” Her only words. When I returned after recess, she was in her place, her demeanor that of a robot back to recording.
And my testimony in court was not the worst of it. (A reminder that everything in this chapter and nearly all of the domestic violence detailed in this book occurred in the years after we moved from Crown Point to Grand Rapids—in the years after I did not report my ex-husband’s sexual abuse of Deana. The sordid stories I did not fully detail in court relate to a trip out west and four weeks of camping in the summer of 1985. If I were to write of these episodes in this manuscript, I would delete the paragraph before it was finished. I have no such delete capabilities to erase memory.
These reprehensible acts that occurred during my first marriage could in no way—not even remotely—be characterized in terms of love or mutuality.
Some eight months before I escaped my domestic dungeon of violence, the Grand Rapids Press (February 24, 1987) carried an Associated Press story: “Michigan’s rape law, which forbids anyone from being charged with raping their spouse, is being studied for possible change following a ruling that freed a man convicted of raping his estranged wife.”
I found that clipped article recently while sorting through my files. Had I taken any consolation at the time the law was being studied? I seriously doubt it. Here was a man, now free, who had raped his estranged wife. Who could possibly understand or care about my situation? I was not yet estranged from my husband, and I could barely make a case for legitimate rape.
Longtime former editor of Charisma magazine Lee Grady wrote about the dark side of wives submitting to their husbands. Many of his stories are about women he encountered in his worldwide travels. A woman in Hungary confided that her husband, a professing Christian, forced her to “engage in sexual acts with him that made her feel uncomfortable and dirty.” He talked with women in Kenya who told him their “AIDS-infected husbands often raped them—and then their pastors told them they must submit.” And in America, he has counseled “women [who] are told that obedience to God is measured by their wifely submission—even if their husbands are addicted to alcohol or pornography or if they are involved in adulterous affairs.”
Grady stands out among evangelicals. He has called out his fellow church leaders on this subject. “This distortion of biblical teaching has plunged countless Christian women into depression and emotional trauma,” he writes. “I’m not sure which is worse: the harsh words they hear from their husbands or the perverse way the Bible is wielded as a leather belt to justify domestic abuse.”11
In many ways, it seems to be a strange coincidence that I am writing this chapter on rape in the middle of February 2015. The weekend began with Friday the 13th, the very day that almost everyone, it seemed, was hurrying to the theaters for the Valentines weekend blockbuster Fifty Shades of Grey.
As I contemplate these clanging symbols, I wonder if the best antidote to fifty shades of rape is to quote in full one of the most touching love letters I’ve ever read. John doesn’t write love letters, so I have to read mine vicariously—in this case from the pen of David Martyn Lloyd-Jones (1899–1981). He was the much-celebrated minister of Westminster Chapel in London, succeeding G. Campbell Morgan. Martyn was also a widely read author and onetime president of InterVarsity Fellowship (UK). He is revered today by New Calvinists for his strong endorsement of Calvinism during the mid-twentieth century.
His engagement and subsequent marriage in 1927 is what I find most interesting. Martyn was a medical doctor, and Bethan Phillips had only recently passed her exams at the University College Hospital in London, which certified her to practice medicine as well. But then a chance meeting on a tennis court turned their lives upside down. They fell in love and married. But within a month after their marriage, having given up their medical careers, they found themselves serving in a run-down city mission. “So began eleven-and-a-half happy, fruitful years, for which I will always thank God,” she wrote fifty years later.12
She was a brilliant and confident woman. They both had given up careers for what they believed was a higher calling. His letter to her, written in early autumn 1939, needs no introductory comment except to point out that it is a monument to a marriage of mutuality.
My dear Bethan,
Thank you for your letter of this morning, though I am very angry that you should have been up till 11:30 p.m. writing it! . . . As I have told you many, many times, the passing of the years does nothing but deepen and intensify my love for you. When I think of those days in London in 1925 and ’26, when I thought that no greater love was possible, I could laugh . . .
I am quite certain that there is no lover, anywhere, writing to his girl who is quite as mad about her as I am. Indeed I pity those lovers who are not married. Well, I had better put a curb on things or I shall spend the night writing to you . . .
Ever yours—Martyn13