Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Very Poor Choice of Headline for Story on Marital Rape

Salon's Broadsheet has an item up about a study on marital rape, a serious topic. As has been recognized for decades in our law, marriage does not immunize a person from being charged with rape for forcing a nonconsenting spouse to have sex. Non-consensual sex is rape, no matter what the relationship between the parties.

Unfortunately, the tagline for the article is horrendous: "You don't feel like it, but you do it for him." It evokes images of the dregs of feminism that equate agreeing to sex after nagging or persuasion as rape, which is one of the most utterly ridiculous things of the many ridiculous things that the dregs of feminism preach. By that same logic, if I have a spouse (or even just a friend) who feels like, say, sitting at home on the couch and then I nag or cajole or otherwise try to strongly persuade said friend to accompany me out to see a movie, sitting in the theater to the end before returning home, and they agree to go, I'd have committed kidnapping and false imprisonment. Uh, yeah.

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