Whilst I'd hesitate to call this rape, I'd say it was definately coercive sex even though no specific coercion may have been applied at the time of a particular incident.
I just want to add to the points elene & MC are making--both of whom seem right on target to me, and articulate things so clearly that I have never taken time to sort out. This is very helpful to me. And, it reminds me, that part of why I find the Gaitskill article mentioned above also to be helpful is that she also talking about the lack of adequate language for different kinds of trauma.
You can also see the inadequacy of language being expressed in the "Women who perpetrate sexual violence" thread in the headshop at various points; I've linked to one poster's brief narrative of his experience that I found particularly compelling. Where he's struggled with the fact that his horrible experience has no word that seems to match his experience--the vulnerability and the shame and the sense of being emotionally "violated" even while (I infer) penetration doesn't seem to have been the issue.
From a strictly legal perspective, in many places, the only act that counts as rape is penetration of one body by an object or body part of another; other acts are "sexual assault" which, while still a crime, clearly does not have the emotive power of the word "rape."
A person coming out of such an experience or a relationship like the ones MC and elene and the linked story describe, who are trying to sort out what happened, and trying, probably sometimes in a kind of "shorthand" to establish the trauma as real, as deserving attention--even just attention from themselves--will I think sometimes use words like "rape" in order to say: "this was a really big deal. it was horrible. it has left me in a very bad place."
Some may be very tempted to say: oh those people shouldn't do that; they are "crying rape" (a phrase I loathe). I accept that to a certain extent that may be true (especially, probably, if legal action is involved). But unless we accept that there are horrible traumas that don't have an accurate name, and that people flounder to express the emotional reality of what they've experienced, we're unlikely to solve the problem.
In fact, another part of Gaitskill's point is that sexual relations that are problematic in their power dynamics, but which aren't strictly speaking "rape" in the clear "I said no, ze didn't stop" sense of the term, can actually be, for some people, more difficult to resolve and come to terms with, because your own "complicity" in the event leaves very little space for legitimately acknowledging the trauma and finding ways to get beyond it. This can mess up relationships and lives for years after.
I bet a huge percentage of people--probably more women than men simply because female bodies are framed as "permeable" in our cultures in ways that male bodies aren't--in their teens and twenties experience a relationship like this, something that they feel horrible about because they didn't want to, but did out of some sort of fear. Outsiders may then try to determine whether the fear was "legitimate" or not, which can be a pretty tough matter to determine. A better question, to me, is where's the fear coming from? Can we do things differently to make young women, especially, less fearful of saying no, more likely to say what they do/don't want in a more clear voice? Wouldn't we all be better off if they could?
So, to answer a question asked earlier in the thread, I do think this stuff often goes beyond being simply "bad sex," not in an explicitly criminal/ "let's lock up the bastards" sense, but in a sense that people are unnecessarily creating pain in each other's lives, and I don't think it has to be that way. It doesn't mean I think we'll ever get to a point where all sex is earth-movingly fabulous, but I don't think it has to be as likely to cause trauma as it currently does. I still think elene's point about power and the clear contractual agreements of D-S relationships really bears thought, and I also suspect there are other ideas out there. |
