Living with the Rapist

“I just want to sleep. A coma would be nice. Or amnesia. Anything, just to get rid of this, these thoughts whisper in my mind. Did he rape my head, too?”
This extract from Laurie Anderson’s book ‘Speak,’ is merely a tiny tip of the iceberg. While women continue to be raped, many societies continue to remain in the slumber of ignorance. Before we barge into the malady of marital rape, it is paramount that we travel back in history to get a better grip on how past events have shaped our present societies.

Famous American author Naomi Wolf writes, ‘The law states that ‘beauty provokes harassment,’ but it only looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it.’ Wolf summarizes the idea of patriarchy so elegantly, which literally means ‘the rule of the father.’ It paints a canvas where the world is perceived, sustained, and expanded only by the fathers. Fredrick Engels traced the idea of patriarchy to the emergence of private property when societies transitioned from communal systems to private property systems, power dynamics shifted, and class-based societies came into being where men became the property owners, and women were destined to a life of humiliation and servility. These systems were truly catalyzed by the Industrial Revolution, where capitalism, private property, and patriarchy created a vicious nexus for women.

In all of it, marriage became a tool to further establish patriarchy, as it was just another means of obtaining private property that would provide service for life. The marriage did not only legally subsume a woman’s identity but also created a male-headed household where a woman was essentially treated as an enslaved person. Early rape laws considered rape as a property assault, and it was not considered a crime against the woman but male members of his family. With this in mind, the denial of many Eastern cultures and early Western cultures to even admit marital rape as a crime makes a lot of filthy sense. Juror Matthew Hale, one of the most influential legal authors of the 17th century, addressed the idea of marital rape and declared that once a woman gets married, she ipso facto gives consent to her husband for life, and therefore, marital rape becomes an oxymoron as wife becomes the sexual property of her husband.

Even today, these notions strongly underline most cultures all around the world because control of women’s bodies through marriage is a foundational facet of patriarchy. While Western societies like the US, the UK, and Australia may have criminalized marital rape and have taken social strides in addressing this dilemma with a strong legislative framework but they are still patriarchal in nature. On the other hand, Eastern societies like Pakistan, India, China, and the Arab world have lagged considerably as they have failed to even admit marital rape as a crime. Although there exist strong laws to criminalize rape, the word marital rape remains elusive in the legislative volumes of Eastern societies. It paints a very grim picture because the social structures of these cultures are heavily predicated on marriages, and if marital rape is not addressed, gender-based violence will continue to rise exponentially. Most of these tragedies will not even be recorded in the statistics.