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Yes, obviously there is a level of implied consent between partners that does not exist between strangers (or even friends!). But you're doing the same thing Vox Day used to do:
"Marital rape literally doesn't exist, getting married implies consent."
"Okay, but does that literally mean you can physically force your wife to do things she doesn't want to do?"
"something something marriage contract sexual component"
Yeah, if your wife keeps refusing you sex (or a husband refuses his wife sex), that's obviously a marital problem and a breach of the understanding they presumably both had when they got married. That doesn't mean you have implied consent to force your partner.
You think it should be literally illegal for your wife to say "Not tonight, I'm not in the mood?"
"Consent will be given" does not mean "Consent will be given at any time on demand." Don't you think the "contract" also includes showing consideration for your partner (such as, accepting that sometimes they might not be in the mood or feeling physically up to it?)
A ridiculous analogy. An agreement to do something does not imply an agreement to always do that at any time on the terms demanded by either party, without boundaries. A trading contract doesn't mean I can break into your warehouse and take things off the shelves even if they are technically things that are part of our agreement.
Least convenient possible world. If the contract did stipulate that, what would your objection be?
I can imagine a couple having a relationship like that. It'd be considered heavy D/S nowadays ("consensual nonconsent") but as a kink thing, it's not that abnormal. Of course, marriage generally doesn't come with safewords...
Does the common marriage contract stipulate that? I'm not an expert in matrimonial laws, but don't the vows basically say "live in harmony and love each other" and leave it at that? Litigating how often your wife has to provide sexual access on first demand is among the furthest things from harmony I can imagine, and no, "there wouldn't have to be any demanding if she simply anticipated my whims and catered to them" doesn't sound like it either.
So your objection isn't so much with the concept as that it doesn't describe reality?
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If you can have implied consent for kissing and touching, you can have implied consent for PIV. Different bits, same principle. People in 50 years will be accusing you of groping without consent like a savage. They will pat themselves on the back for having "recognized" this great injustice. To think billions of people were kissed without consent, and sometimes, they were not in the mood. And the gotcha question will be : what did you do when you tried to kiss her and she pushed and ran away screaming? You beat her into submission, I bet. That's the way it was in the past.
If implied consent for sex is in the contract, they are in violation.
You can't avoid delivering the goods by claiming you're not in the mood.
Implied consent does not imply at any time, on demand, with no veto power.
No they won't. We're not talking about groping or having sex with your wife without a signed consent form, like in that old SNL skit about Oberlin College.
I asked you if you think it should be illegal. So you're arguing a wife who refuses sex is failing to live up to her contractual obligations. Fair enough - the remedy for breach of contract is a civil claim, which in the case of marriage, means divorce. You don't get to exact satisfaction using force.
No. But you don't get to break into my warehouse and take them because I'm late delivering, or even if I tell you I don't intend to fulfill the contract. You can take me to court, but you can't just use violence to make me hold up my end.
Since you think making marital rape illegal has not redressed any crimes, let me ask you: what is the downside of making marital rape illegal? Because I don't see how it harms anyone except men who want the right to physically force their wives to have sex if their wives don't want to have sex with them. By which I mean, holding them down and forcing their penises inside them, over their screaming protests. Which you already acknowledged should be illegal (but would not be, if marital rape were not illegal). So, we agree that if your wife refuses to have sex with you, you've got a legitimate grievance. What do you think your available remedies for that should be? Why are you insisting marital rape should not be illegal?
Things should be legal and not illegal, generally speaking. More laws, more thieves.
It's more neutral than negative, but it imposes a 'marriage light' for everyone, whereas it used to impose the opposite. Ideally people would choose for themselves how heavy their marriage is, with old school marriage on one side, treated like a total stranger on the other, light civil unions in the middle. This bans the heavy kind, and that is prejudicial to people who prefer it, obviously.
You're the one who keeps bringing up beatings and forcing her over her screams, which I wouldn't do. Again with the analogy: if she runs away screaming after you tried to kiss her, being a decent fellow, I assume your response would not be beatings, but confusion, questioning where this marriage is, if she even likes you anymore. And so it is for this past husband in a heavy marriage if she screamed rape at the thought of performing her wifely duties.
The argument that we're unnecessarily criminalizing behavior that shouldn't be criminalized and thus creating more criminals is not one that I think applies here, unless, again, you're actually willing to defend a man's right to rape his wife.
Yes, I assume you wouldn't. I assume we are both decent people who would not abuse our spouses, so no such law is necessary in our cases. But then, I also assume neither of us are rapists or murderers or robbers. If there were no laws against rape, murder, or theft, I still would not be raping, murdering, or robbing anyone. We make laws against things so there is a remedy against those who do commit those acts. You've carefully avoided answering my questions about what remedies you think should be available because some men do do those things.
You're still dodging the issue. Yes, we agree, the appropriate response to your wife screaming when you try to kiss her is to try to talk to her like a human being. And so for us, laws against marital rape are unnecessary. But in times past, there were quite a few husbands who were less reasonable. Who literally would beat their wives, and hold them down and force them over their screaming protests. You keep saying "Well, obviously I wouldn't do that," but you won't say what you think should happen to a husband who does do that.
Here's a thought: maybe rape should be illegal, and marriage shouldn't provide a special exemption. If your marriage is dysfunctional enough that a law against marital rape is an impediment, then the law against marital rape is not the problem.
Through this law, you are banning a certain kind of contract, formerly common, consented to by free citizens, are you not? What they did behind closed doors, and behind a contract saying that they could, was not the state's business, and now they're more meat for the jailhouse.
Fucks her while she says no? Nothing. She, (or he, as the case may be, this is an entirely sex-independent argument) can cancel the contract that says he has sexual access, and then she can treat him like a stranger before the law again. If the new law wasn't on the books, like in the past. In our actual timeline the contract doesn't say that, so jail it is.
If you don't include women in the category of "free citizens." Pretty sure very few women ever liked that the right to physically abuse them was part of the marriage contract, even if they implicitly accepted it (and hoped/assumed in most cases that it wouldn't be invoked). I am genuinely not sure why you insist it's a bad thing that they now have recourse under the law not to be physically abused.
That "formerly common" contract also included the right to literally beat your wife black and blue. Sure, this was considered uncouth, even brutish, but it was also something that stayed, as you say, behind closed doors, "not the state's business." It wasn't illegal. A beaten wife had no legal recourse, because she had, after all, consented by virtue of marriage.
Are you willing to defend the proposition that it should be legal to beat your wife? If not, why is it all right to criminalize beating your wife, but it's an abridgment of the rights of free citizens to make it illegal to rape her?
You're claiming in the past that a woman could instantly divorce a husband and "revoke sexual access"? That is not actually how it worked, modulo some few and probably apocryphal tribal societies. Even if that's how you think it should work, the all-or-nothing proposition that "You can divorce him on the spot, otherwise you must put up with whatever he wants to do to you" sounds like a mountain that only a Vox Day (who, credit to him, made no bones about the fact that he did indeed believe a wife with an abusive husband should take her beatings and remain married and obedient) or someone trying to be edgily contrarian, would really be willing to die on.
Whether they liked every part of it or not, they consented. They could refuse, remain unmarried. The contract contained its share of unpleasant duties and sacrifices for men too.
Actually yes, with the same caveats as before. Just like it should be legal to beat your lover in a BDSM game. As long as it's all consented and they can exit the agreement, closed doors, not my business etc.
The romans had divorce.
just contrarian, the edginess is circumstantial.
Consenting to be "beaten" because you're into BDSM is not remotely the same thing as consenting to a marriage in which your husband has the legal right to punch you in the face, but I guess you've made your position clear enough. We inhabit very different moral universes, is all I can say.
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Come on. Comparing implied consent to kissing, an act that lasts barely a few seconds (unless we're talking half an hour of tongue wrestling, and that's at the very least fucking weird if you continue to do it while your partner is not reciprocating), with penetration? Implied consent to initiating, sure.
Granted, I can't attest to any personal experience of fucking a disinterested woman, but it's more or less common knowledge that penetration can be uncomfortable or painful without arousal. It's not the same principle as "grabbing a kiss or a feel without asking", no. If you and your wife are into that kind of thing, you're free to have it. Not manufacture consensus that it's a normal and expected marriage thing.
I'm not manufacturing consensus, I argue for a minority understanding, from a minority position within it (since most defenders of the old marriage norms are trad and I have a liberal perspective with liberal preferences).
I'm not saying it's a normal and expected marriage thing now, but it was in the past, and it wasn't a great moral wrong now rectified. People who wanted a heavy marriage got their way in the past, and now those who want a light marriage get their way.
As far as you know. An advantage of the old norms is that people didn’t have to fake enjoyment every time, lest it be some terrible crime.
no pain, no foul, then, if that is your true objection.
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