Heterosexuality, intercourse, and rape.

A commenter at Heart's writes:
"...the relationship I have with my current partner is the first one where we have not been physical. And in fact, it’s the first relationship where I have known true intimacy. What the patriarchy thinks of as intimacy is only a shadow of what my partner and I have. More is conveyed in the simple touch of a hand or in a look than can ever be done with genital contact.

My previous sexual experiences can best be described as a series of rapes. They were with men who all were completely dominant over me. The sex just reinforced that dominance. That’s what sex is: a means to control and subjugate wymmyn. It’s a form of abuse, plain and simple. The worst part is, they were all rapists and didn’t even know it. My heart weeps for the wymmyn those men ended up with. They’re rape victims. All heterosexual wymmyn are."

I can understand trying to find ways to relate to each other that are not "male" or that do not involve treating the other person like a sex object. But this comment - and another commenter who immediately agreed that all heterosexual women were rape victims - makes me wonder what the goal really is, here.

Radical feminism has always sought to explore healthy feminist sexuality without tones of "male sexuality." Radical feminism generally opposed pornography and tried (unsuccessfully, but it was a sincere effort) to draw a line between "erotica" and "pornography," with the distinction that the latter objectified women. (As we know from the history of legislation surrounding pornography, there has never been a commonly-agreed-upon definition for "pornography" that tells us, when we look at a picture, whether or not it is pornographic. The same is true for "erotica." When I was in college in the late '80s, some of us distinguished between the two as erotica being "sensual" and pornography being "sexual" - a popular distinction during this time - but feminist theorists generally gave up on this distinction because it was still too muddy.)

But what I see in this comment does not seem to be about developing a feminist, woman-centered sexuality. True, it is about developing intimacy, and people do often embrace celibacy, alone or with partners, in order to put their energies into something else, whether that be spiritual or emotional or whatever. I think developing this kind of intimacy should be respected. It isn't easy, and I think it's great that people can do it and want to do it.

However.

When someone moves from saying, "I was dominated in my relationships with men"* to saying, "all heterosexual women are rape victims," and in the context of promoting a celibate life, then I have to wonder, first, if the goal is to eradicate sex from relationships because of a belief that sex, itself, is harmful to women. "Sex" hasn't been defined here, so I don't know if we are talking about penetration, orgasm, or what. And, too, when we talk about "all heterosexual women," we need to remember that the same variety of sexual experience applies. Plenty of heterosexual women don't have intercourse but have other kinds of sex. Are they rape victims, or are we only talking about intercourse? Is the assumption that heterosexual women never want to have sex of any kind with their partners? That they are never freely able to make decisions about their sexualities and sexual relationships?

There's a really good argument to be made - and Andrea Dworkin made it, in Intercourse - that we as a culture have constructed violence and force into heterosexual intercourse. Here is how she supports this claim (and in this next part I am actually drawing from Laura Carpenter's work, but the following paragraph is from Dworkin): we think of virginity loss as only happening in relation to heterosexual intercourse, which is, as sex goes, a male-defined act. It is "male-defined" because it is dependent on the penis: we know it has occurred only if a penis has entered a vagina and ejaculated. Whether or not the woman orgasms is immaterial.

Dworkin reminds us that we think of virginity loss as something that happens in one, forceful moment; we accept that it involves tearing and pain. We never question this reality. But Dworkin points out that vaginal walls stretch, that over time, they can accomodate, and that we *could* think of first intercourse as a gentle process that occurs over time. We don't. That tells us something about how female and male sexualities are perceived in our culture, and about how men and women are perceived in our culture, and about the ways in which female sexuality and experience is already defined for us, before we even get to explore it for ourselves.

So there is good reason to challenge patriarchal notions of sexuality. I would even go so far as to suggest that there is a "gray area" - that there is, in fact, cultural coercion - operating on women in regard to sex in general. Intercourse is central to the notion of heterosexuality, which is not to say that there aren't many heterosexual people who have more enlightened perspectives on their own sexualities and who can make honest choices to engage in whatever kind of sex they want to engage in.

I'm not saying that intercourse is rape. I am saying that the fact that we assume, as a culture, that it is inevitable that a woman will engage in this kind of sexual practice; that the fact that we assume, as a culture, that virginity loss must be painful; that the fact that we assume, as a culture, that female pleasure doesn't matter, but male pleasure does, in determining whether sex has been had - all of these things add up to a loss of some agency, a loss of some options, on the part of women AND of men. And there are, therefore, times when intercourse is culturally coerced (not unlike Rich's notion of compulsory heterosexuality).

But even given that, that is a huge step away from claiming that all heterosexual women are rape victims, which is something that even Dworkin didn't claim. Such a claim mimimizes the reality of rape and the agency of women who have taken risks to explore and defend their sexualities. It suggests that there is no difference between consensual sex and the actual brutality of forced sex. It also posits, once again, the notion that women who are not heterosexual are, simply by virtue of their sexual identity labels, free of rape (not true - rape occurs within women-women relationships, and women who love women are still raped by men). Finally, it suggests that men exist in all of this only as a harmful force, that men who have sex with women are always raping them because men+sex=rape. (As an aside, this is not a real helpful construction for those of us who work with boys and men to take leadership in stopping rape and sexual assault.)

None of this is feminist (nor, sadly, is it original). This commenter is really quite revolutionary - building a relationship on an emotional connection rather than on sex is radical and inspiring. But it would be nice if the justification for that act could be in the good that comes out of it, and not in the assumption that one experience is universal, nor in identity politics posturing.


*I'm using quotation marks here, not to quote verbatim, but to quote approximate ideas. I'm also not quoting the commenter's spelling of "woman" and "women," because I wrote like that for while and I find it annoying now.