man, his state, his God, and through intercourse an individual is
made into a woman: a woman is made. Whether a woman likes or
does not like, desires or does not desire, to be made a woman does
not change the meaning of the act. “There are many scarcely
nubile girls, ” wrote Colette, “who dream of becoming the show,
the plaything, the licentious masterpiece of some middle-aged man.
It is an ugly dream that is punished by its fulfilment, a morbid
thing, akin to the neuroses of puberty, the habit of eating chalk and
coal, of drinking mouthwash, of reading dirty books and sticking
pins into the palm of the hand. ”4
Forced intercourse in marriage— that is, the right to intercourse
supported by the state in behalf of the husband— provides the context for both rape as commonly understood and incestuous rape.
Marital sex and rape are opposite and opposing forms of sexual
expression only when women are viewed as sexual property: when
rape is seen as the theft of one man’s property by another man. As
soon as the woman as a human being becomes the central figure in
a rape, that is, as soon as she is recognized as a human victim of an
inhumane act, forced sex must be recognized as such, whatever the
relation of the man to his victim. But if forced sex is sanctioned
and protected in marriage, and indeed provides an empirical definition of what women are for, how then does one distinguish so-called consensual, normal sex (intercourse) from rape? There is no
context that is both normal and protected in which the w ill of the
woman is recognized as the essential precondition for sex. It has
been the business of the state to regulate male use of sexual force
against women, not to prohibit it. The state may allow a man to
force his wife but not his daughter, or his wife but not his neighbor’s wife. Rather than prohibiting the use of force against women per se, a male-supremacist state establishes a relationship between
sexual force and normalcy: in marriage, a woman has no right to
refuse her husband intercourse. Limits to the force men can use
have been negotiated by men with one another in their own interests—and are renegotiated in every rape or incest case in which the man is held blameless because force is seen as intrinsically and
properly sexual (that is, normal) when used to effect female sexual
compliance. The society’s opposition to rape is fake because the
society’s commitment to forced sex is real: marriage defines the
normal uses to which women should be put, and marriage institutionalizes forced intercourse. Consent then logically becomes mere passive acquiescence; and passive compliance does become the
standard of female participation in intercourse. Because passive acquiescence is the standard in normal intercourse, it becomes proof of consent in rape. Because force is sanctioned to effect intercourse
in marriage, it becomes common sexual practice, so that its use in
sex does not signify, prove, or even—especially to men—suggest
rape. Forced intercourse in marriage, being both normal and state-
sanctioned, provides the basis for the wider practice of forced sex,
tacitly accepted most of the time. Forced intercourse in marriage as
the norm sanctioned by the state makes it virtually impossible to
identify (male) force or (female) consent; to say what they are so as
to be able to recognize them in discrete instances. The state can
and does make distinctions by category—for instance, sex with little girls is off limits—but no finer
