Intercourse (27 page)

* The spread of religious fundamentalism throughout the world right now is men retrenching to undo the civil and social advances of women; to reestablish male power as a fundamental reality by reestablishing gender as an absolute. This requires rigorous tightening of restraints on male sexual behavior as well as intensifying civil and sexual controls on women.

The regulation of men by men in sex for the sake of upholding the power of men as a class is the least recognized, least scrutinized aspect of both male dominance and law as an institution of social control. The overt uses of law to keep women sexually subservient and civilly inferior to men are more familiar. But many sexual laws that mandate a low civil status for women actually serve, first and foremost, to uphold male supremacy by keeping peace among men; creating an internal cohesion in the ruling class. Women are property; adultery, rape, and some forms of incest hurt the rightful owners of the women by damaging the value of the goods or by violating the
man’s
integrity through violating his legal and deeply felt personal right of private, exclusive sexual access. Following the rules lets men have sexual access to subjugated women while moderating male-male conflict over that access. Rights of ownership are delineated because inside the community of men itself relations are ordered precisely by the laws that regulate women as property. Men have a strong self-interest in having property rights over their own women respected; this gives men a strong self-interest in law over lawlessness. The law represents the best interests of men; lawlessness the threat of social disintegration—fierce intra-male conflict over women, for instance, or even the potential dominance of lawless women over men. The personal is political here too because the social rights of dominance over women become personal rights integrated into a man’s identity. Ownership of women becomes synonymous with the power and integrity of the individual male, e. g., “The nakedness of thy father’s wife thou shalt not uncover: it is thy father’s nakedness” (Leviticus 18: 8). Fuck her and you fuck him; and ultimately the law exists to keep men from getting fucked by men.

The law creates the female; inferior by nature; a lower civil and sexual status inherent in what she is, how and why she was made; inferior in existence right from the beginning.

There are two stories of the creation of so-called mankind in Genesis. In the first: “And God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them” (Genesis 1: 27). In the second, man is created first, singular and alone. He is dissatisfied and lonely. God parades all of creation before him but he cannot find a companion. Finally:

And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; and He took one of his ribs, and closed up the place with flesh instead thereof. And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from the man, made He a woman, and brought her unto the man. And the man said: “This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man. ”... and they shall be one flesh. (Genesis 2: 21-24)

Affirmed by God as “one flesh” and claimed by a sinless but nonetheless arrogant man as “bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh, ” she was his because she was of him; derived from him. Jurists for centuries thereafter recognized a man and his wife as one flesh: the man’s.

The first story of creation is nearly an equality model. It did not resonate in Judeo-Christian systems of law; nowhere does it appear as a model for the systems of secular law that take the Bible as a source of civic or social morality. The second story makes woman clearly subservient to the man even in Paradise, before sin or shame or the invention of death. She is inferior in her existence as such. She was created for him, to be his: bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh. She belonged to him in her flesh, which was his flesh. There is no closer, more intimate meaning of
belonging to:
made for him from him; bone of his bones, flesh of his flesh; and God affirms that they are “one flesh. ” 

Then the woman eats from the Tree of Knowledge, her inferior nature manifesting in the weakness that allows her to be seduced by a snake; she disobeys God and eats the apple; she seduces her husband into eating the apple. All the bone-of-my-bones business disappears, in a sense forever. She and he are “one flesh” in that he has sovereignty over her body; but they are different from then on, her bones not reminding one of his at all, her flesh so different from his that it might as well have been made out of some different material altogether. She never was much like him at all, it seems in retrospect, according to all the legal eagles, religious and secular, ever after until feminism.

God curses the woman:

Unto the woman He said: “I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy travail; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee. ” (Genesis 3: 16)

God curses the man too, saying that he will work and sweat and suffer and die; makes them clothes; and expels them from Eden.

Immediately on being expelled, “And the man knew Eve his wife; and she conceived and bore Cain... ” (Genesis 4: 1). The
Jerusalem Bible
translation, in modern English, is more direct: “The man had intercourse with his wife Eve, and she conceived and gave birth to Cain” (Genesis 4: 1).

Eve’s curse is in the pain of childbirth and in feeling desire for her husband; they are her punishments. The rule of the husband over the wife is in sexual intercourse itself; his sovereignty over her is in the fuck. The New Testament is less direct but not at all ambiguous in saying the same: “For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man” (I Corinthians 11: 8-9). According to one Christian writer of the modern era, this means that the wife 

willingly accepts the fact that man is the head of the woman and submits to her husband’s authority not grudgingly and in fear, but willingly, freely, and in joy.
²⁷

In Christianity, attitude is everything; in Judaism, simple compliance is. In each faith, the man’s authority means that he has a right supported by law—divine law—to fuck his wife; her legal duty is to submit; and intercourse itself is a legally defined hierarchy in which the one who fucks has sovereignty over the one who submits. Human codes of law replicate the hierarchy in intercourse established by divine will; intercourse is the legally prescribed right of a man over his wife. In
The Total Woman, Marabel Morgan, who never disappoints, provided her own unique biblical exegesis when she wrote: “God understood women. He knew they would probably use the prized possession of sex to manipulate men, and He warned against rationing it out. ”
²⁸
A Mrs. Ellis, in 1846, despite her Victorian upbringing, was more straightforward in language and also had a keener appreciation of sexual politics when she wrote:

In her intercourse with man, it is impossible but that woman should feel her own inferiority, and it is right that it should be so... she does not meet him on equal terms. Her part is to make sacrifices in order that his enjoyment may be enhanced. She does this with a willing spirit but she does it so often without grateful acknowledgment. Nor is man to be blamed for this.
²⁹

Being grateful is the celebration of one’s own inferiority; as Mrs. Ellis suggests, it is uncommon.

The metaphysical ground rules for male and female were set in Genesis, in the beginning. The implications have been comprehended deeply and honed into laws and practices. The implications go far beyond the letter of the law, especially beyond the specific small laws that regulate the when and how of intercourse. The implications honor the basic law, men’s ownership of women through intercourse. As Maimonides explained:

Since a man’s wife is permitted to him, he may act with her in any manner whatsoever. He may have intercourse with her whenever he so desires, and kiss any organ of her body he wishes, and he may have intercourse with her naturally or unnaturally, provided that he does not expend semen to no purpose.
³⁰

All the tangle of rules that govern when a woman is accessible to her husband and in what ways—all the rules that make her off-limits some times of the month or prescribe sexual intercourse in the vagina or proscribe sexual intercourse in the mouth or in the rectum—all the rules are suspended when the man wants them to be because of his authority over his wife; except that his semen, the totem of his power as a man, must be ejaculated into her vagina, her capacity to get pregnant redeeming him from the gender ambiguity of any sex act he might commit for his own pleasure. She has no right of refusal.

She is his; not flesh of his flesh at all in terms of rights or dignity of being but belonging to him in sex, his authority over her expressed in his sexual rights over her, which, in the end, are absolute. Inside this system of rights and obligations, forcing intercourse or any other sex act on a wife cannot be rape; the intercourse is legal and so the force used to effect it is legal too.

The sanctioning of rape in marriage by law is usually traced to the jurist Matthew Hale, chief justice in England in the seventeenth century. He wrote:

But 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 up herself in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract.
³¹

The decision itself, however, suggests that by the seventeenth century in England there was a substantial challenge to the sexual rights of a husband over a wife. The husband’s authority was rooted in biblical law and enhanced by secular laws that had for centuries defined the wife as chattel, forbade her to own her own property, and deprived her of all civil rights and liberties because of her sex. Contemporary feminists continue the challenge to male sexual sovereignty over women in marriage in efforts to criminalize rape in marriage. Traditional rape laws in modern society “usually define rape
as
the forcible penetration of the body of a woman, not the wife of the perpetrator...
”
³²
Some states have made forced intercourse in marriage a crime. Some states require that the wife be physically and legally separated from the husband before forced intercourse will be recognized as rape. Some states have actually (by statute) extended the right of marital rape to cohabiting men or to so-called voluntary social companions. The legal fight here goes right to the heart of women’s legal status and whether that status will change or not. Will the metaphysical laws of male dominance articulated in Genesis prevail; or will the state enforcement of those laws of gender and female inferiority be ended? Will intercourse remain the fundamental expression of male rule over women, a legal right protected by the state especially in marriage; or will this protected institution of male dominance—intercourse in marriage—be modified or reformed through changes in statutory laws; and what will the consequences of such reform be—for men, for women, for intercourse? Or will the rights of husbands over wives be legally extended to unmarried men over unmarried women so that intercourse functions as state-sanctioned domination not only in marriage but also outside it?

The right of a man to use his wife the way he wants has been the essential meaning of sexual privacy in law. The state, to quote one Florida legislator who opposed criminalizing rape in marriage, “has absolutely no business intervening into the sexual relationship between a husband and a wife. ”
³³
The state, of course, has created that relationship and has protected the husband’s forced access to the wife; and it is the above conception of privacy—keeping the wife sexually subjugated to the husband as a matter of law (statutory, metaphysical, divine)—that cloaks the abuse of wives in a legitimacy and a secrecy that stop active, cogent, material interference. The down-to-earth meaning of this privacy was eloquently stated by Bob Wilson, a state senator from California, talking to women lobbyists in 1979: “But if you can’t rape your wife, ” the lawmaker asked, “who can you rape? ”
³⁴
The answer, of course, is: no one. Freud, writing about law and authority in
Totem and Taboo, noted that “[t]ouching is the first step towards obtaining any sort of control over, or attempting to make use of, a person or object. ”
³⁵
Anyone whose legal status is that she exists to be touched, intimately, inside the boundaries of her own body, is controlled, made use of: a captive inside a legally constructed cage.

A man’s use of his wife follows the law, obeying it. He can also break the law by having illegal intercourse. The breaking of the law itself becomes an eroticized part of the sex: sex is intensified as a violation of boundaries when laws are violated. “If I had no consciousness of taboos, ” wrote Kobo Abe in
The Face of Another, in the persona of the man with the new face who wanted to fuck his wife as if he were a stranger, “it would be doubtful whether I could feel such shuddering fascination. ”
³⁶
Not only does the law, then, create gender, female inferiority, and an ecology of male power; it itself is the guideline, the signpost, for sex outside the law. It says where, how, when, in what ways to be lawless. Sex exists on both sides of the law but the law itself creates the sides. One side emphasizes the utility of sex for power; the other side emphasizes the utility of sex for pleasure. “It [is] quite impossible, ” Abe writes, “to be aimlessly erotic about one’s wife. ”
³⁷
The right that one has to her is lawful, in the service of the state, no matter what one does to her. Raping her, with rare exception, is lawful. Brutalizing her is within the spirit of the law. To be outside the law, breaking the law, breaking so-called taboos, is a practice of pleasure or many pleasures that appears to be in opposition to legal intercourse. There is a false appearance of freedom from law when one is simply following the sexual topography the law itself has created. The law says what is lawless with precision, in detail, drawing lines the lawless adhere to. In keeping men or masculinity supreme in value or in subordinating women through sex, legal or illegal, one does the law’s real work. The law lets men work both sides of it and uses both the legal and the illegal fuck to create conditions of inferiority for women; conditions that not coincidentally keep women divided from one another. The illegal fuck, for instance, keeps the prostitute incarcerated in a ghetto hellhole of sexual subservience while the legal fuck keeps the wife used, controlled, sexually subservient, in the home. The legal and the illegal fuck create the legal and the illegal woman; but the law controls what is created, how, in what circumstances, under what conditions—the kind and quality of subordination each is subjected to; the inferior status of each; the role of intercourse in the subordination of each. Law creates lawlessness, and, in each sphere, intercourse is political dominance; power as power or power as pleasure.