This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

Way back when I was 21, I was a second-year undergraduate at a small university in Canada. And while this 4-year episode of my life is the source of all sorts of ‘a-ha’ moments better placed in my Birth of a Feminist series, I’m going to kick off the current post with a single memory from those years which has reentered my conscious mind several times in the 31 years since. And it’s the words I remember – the male language – not anything else about that day has been retained, likely because it wasn’t significant. Men make fun of women for having excellent memories for the shit they say. But only the controllers of language can laugh at a truth such as this. Language gives men freedom and loopholes and builds the cages women live in. We remember what men say because, so often, the consequences of even casually said male language, can have dire consequences for us. Remember that when men say they are joking when they threaten us or use hate speech against us, they most certainly are not.

Anyhow, to the memory.

I had been enrolled in a course in behavioural neuroscience, which was key to my field of study and of keen interest to me. It was taught by the only tenured, full professor in our department, an arrogant, insecure and very petty man with a drinking problem and rumoured to be drug-addicted as well. I didn’t know it at the time, but two years later, he would do his best to destroy my young career because I didn’t give him the respect he believed he deserved as a man. Nevertheless, I was ignorant of my future at the time, and I found myself sitting in a lecture one early morning ready to uncover the connections between our brains and what they allowed us to do.

I’m not sure what the point of that day’s lecture was supposed to be, and like I said, only one statement from its content was retained, but Professor Penis decided he was going to talk about sexual anatomy. I remember being wary, recalling memories of my child-psychologist-slash-sex-therapist father’s pop-up sexual anatomy book aiding him in a discussion of the birds and the bees when I was about 14. I was right to be on guard. After some reverential description of the penile landscape, we got to women, and the following was said: “The vagina is an infinite space.”

The few seconds of silence following that nugget of male PhD wisdom seemed infinite. I’m not sure what was going on in the minds of the other young women in the classroom, let alone the males. I reflected on the ocean, outer space, and then porn. I don’t remember how gross porn was in the early 1990’s, but what I have seen over time certainly has been a reflection of what this professor imparted to us. And I think a lot of men have some very strange beliefs about what vaginas are capable of enduring, what their purpose is, and most importantly, all males hold the idea that vaginas and the female body in general were designed for male use, consumption, abuse, ridicule, dismissal, and disposal.

In this post, I’m going to talk about consensual rape, and I guarantee, it’s going to get people’s backs up. It will make women angry because in this day and age, it is a crime to be a victim. It is a crime to be perceived as a prude. It is a crime to speak truths about male behaviour and women’s fundamental inequality. And it is offensive to imply that women are complicit in their own (and other women and girls’) oppression. It will make men angry because men always get angry when women speak without male approval and narrative-control. Men don’t like the implication that what they think they deserve is a mark of male privilege, not of human rights. To men, women’s words are violence, but men’s words, no matter how hateful or dangerous, are ‘free speech’.

There is a general understanding of rape. I say general because no one agrees on what it is, who can commit it, who can experience it, and what a victim looks like and how they should behave in the aftermath. In general, people believe that it is committed by strangers or few and far between crazed maniacs in our lives. There must always be explicit, observable evidence of violence, so a victim needs to have bruises, scratches, blood, and even broken bones. It is more believable if there is a paper trail of fear or refusal, and less believable if the victim has a history of saying yes or engaging in behaviour that implies a gung-ho attitude towards sexual activity. These days, despite a general understanding that only a vagina falls victim to rape, now men can be raped too, and women can be rapists. So, you can see that unlike most crimes, rape is both specific and incredibly murky in definition and public understanding.

This is deliberate. When you have a crime that, in reality, only females experience and only males commit, it is incredibly helpful to blur the lines in order to put the pool of potential victims at a massive disadvantage by confusing them and to put the pool of potential perpetrators at an incredible advantage by giving them linguistic wiggle room and the benefit of the doubt.

Now, it is hard enough to prove what I call ‘rape-rape’, which is the more or less acceptable definition of forcible rape that people and the legal system believe in. Forcible rape is a very difficult crime to get women and girls to come forward about, and then even more difficult to prove in a court of law due to male control of language and the legal system. You really do need to have evidence of violence done upon your body coupled with a video tape of the whole thing to see justice done. But the thing is that forcible rape represents only a fraction of the rapes enacted upon female bodies. And I would argue that 99.9% of these rapes are never spoken about publicly or even privately, and many of these are suppressed and cognitively repackaged in the minds of the victims. And this is simply because they fall under the male concept of consent.

What Is Consent?

If you look up consent in a dictionary of male language, most people stop at: permission for or agreement to something. But there is another part that people overlook even though it is the more important part of the definition and is the reason that we use the word consent rather than just permission. Men, the controllers of language, have dictated that when consent is required for something, it is because one party holds power or authority over the other party. The one with less power must give explicit permission for something to be done to them or for a transaction between the two parties to occur. Without it, the more powerful party can easily abuse the less powerful. We see this in transactions involving medical treatment, human experimentation, business dealings, and parental decisions regarding their children. In all of these situations, one party has more power than the other, and the latter requires protection from the more powerful. Now the interesting thing is that males have made consent the essential element in determining whether a rape has occurred or not. Sexual intercourse is consensual, by male definition – if there is no consent, it is rape. It really is the only difference between sex and rape. And note that it is not the male who must consent, but the female, and this is because females are fundamentally unequal in all dealings with males. Always have been, always will be. Liberal feminists and slimy men who say they support female sexual freedom shout loudly and constantly that women are equal now, but if that were the case, we wouldn’t need this thing called consent. If women were equal to men, they wouldn’t need to consent to sex, and then you get into a weird problem about whether rape can even exist.

But there is a bigger problem. If you believe in the concept of consent, and if you acknowledge that males and females have a fundamental power imbalance, how do you prove or disprove that sexual consent has occurred? And even more problematic, in relationships or transactions that are not one-off situations where consent is the default and doesn’t require constant renewal because it has already been given once, how do we determine whether rape has occurred? Perhaps the concept of consent is flawed at the most basic level and was created by males to allow them to keep doing what they have always done – controlling women on all levels, but most importantly sexually – but to feel their asses are covered in a more legally observant society. To boil it down, if you have a man`s figurative gun to your head and are asked to consent, is it true consent or something else entir

Myself, I consider all sexual intercourse to be a form of rape because I believe females to be kept forcibly unequal to males on all levels, but especially sexually. I also believe the concept of consent is flawed and serves to legally and morally protect males. True permission can only be freely given between equal parties. Women so often find themselves in desperate and difficult situations, and as we should all know, decisions made when desperate are never, ever things that we would do or even consider if we were truly free and tend to override our common sense, experience, intelligence and instinct for self-preservation. And so I believe most rape to be of the consensual sort and is something all females are groomed from birth to accept as the price we must pay for so-called safety and protection, opportunities in life, love and attention, and economic support. And we are groomed to see this price as ‘not rape’, even if alarm bells are ringing and neon lights are flashing in our lizard brains. Let`s look at a few situations where women give consent to their rapes, but almost never acknowledge that this is what is going on.

The Heterosexual Contract

I wish all straight women would sign highly detailed prenuptial agreements before agreeing to marriage to men, and would re-negotiate them each year as the relationship dynamics inevitably change. Hell, I think straight women should sign highly detailed contracts before just allowing males to use their bodies. I think this would solve half the problems heterosexual lifestyles create for women. I’ve heard men respond to similar ideas proposed by other feminists as being boner-killers and mood killers taking all the spontaneity and excitement out of casual sex and taking the romance out of marriage proposals. I think most women would agree with that as well. But I say who gives a shit. What woman enters a transactional relationship with a male with her head on straight? Seriously, we all have free access to decades of data on violence against women, rape, unwanted pregnancy, venereal diseases, femicide, yet few women choose to see themselves or their male partners as anything but special snowflakes immune to what women just like them experience and males just like their special man do. The violence and poor treatment and shitty relationship conditions are always some kind of surprise. This is the very effective outcome of heterosexual grooming that all girls in every country of the world throughout time experiences. And almost all will write off their crappy experiences (if they survive them) as something other than rape, and most will rationalize their suffering as the challenges of marriage, sacrifice, evidence of devotion or love, and they believe that on some level, this is what they agreed to. This is the cost of doing business. And besides, there are often enough perks or special moments to make them second-guess the whole thing.

The bottom line is that all straight women consent to relationship rape, and while this is because they have been primed for this kind of treatment from birth and are essentially brainwashed, as adults with working brains and access to information and evidence 24/7, they really should know better. This is not shaming or blaming, but a refusal to infantilize women. They get this enough from men and I won’t do it too.

How to straight men gain the consent to rape within relationships? Well, there are many tactics, many of them psychological in nature, but all women live with the threat of male violence and fear of what men can and often do, whether they acknowledge it consciously or not. And keep in mind that likely all men do this to women and it won’t really register to either the males or the females as no one really talks about heterosexual dynamics honestly. Men sincerely believe that they are owed sex in relationships, and women believe that they have to put out. Heterosexuality isn’t about love. It is transaction. So, the three most common non-violent forms of rape that aren’t considered to be rape include:

Manipulative rape, which occurs when a man psychologically screws with a woman’s head. He may reward her for consenting to sex with compliments or actual gifts. He may make subtle hints that he will cheat on her if she doesn’t put out or that his friend’s wife or girlfriend really puts out and is thus better than her. There may be all sorts of backhanded compliments or passive aggressive comparisons with other women or relationships. He may make conditional statements. If you do this, then I will do that. There may also be manipulation when men try to inspire pity or sympathy in a woman by fabricating a sob story or exploiting a real tragedy in his life. There are many ways to keep women off-balance and insecure being exploited through emotion, and allowing sex to occur when it isn’t actually wanted. This is rape.

Coercive rape is a more threatening and direct approach to getting sex in a relationship. There are often demands for the woman to prove her love through putting out. There may be threats to leave the relationship or cut off economic support if sex isn’t provided. There may be statements that the woman should be grateful that she only has to provide sex, and at least the male doesn’t hit her or cheat on her. This is rape.

Nagging. It’s kind of funny. Men complain all the time that women nag them to do basic things around the home. But I actually think men are bigger and more dangerous nags than women are. They nag women for sex, and some men are relentless and perhaps a better word for it is ‘blitzkrieg’, a war tactic where the invader attacks with overwhelming and relentless force to ensure victory. In the case of sex, a male will ignore a woman’s ‘no’ and spend an intense period of time physically, verbally and psychologically trying to ‘convince’ her to give him what he wants. In most cases, women will give in to end the exhausting attack. This is rape.

A Final Word

I wouldn’t be so concerned with the lives and decisions of committed and active heterosexual women if not for a few truths. You see, contrary to what defensive straight women say, no one (except men) is telling them what to do. Feminists do ask women to think, especially about their decisions with regard to men because the personal is political. When women devote their energy to men, they make things harder for the minority of women who don’t. Heterosexuality, the practice and the lifestyle, were designed by men for men and only serve to divide and separate women and keep them powerless and shackled to their oppressors. That is the first reason that I care about this issue. Another reason is that the negative outcomes of heterosexual relationships take enormous resources from society: the women’s shelters and rape crisis centres, the healthcare required to deal with an overabundance of pregnancies and the complications associated with them, the unwanted children and the system that must support them, the criminal justice system dealing with violent male offenders and drug addiction that seems inevitable in a patriarchal, capitalist society that causes and thrives on suffering. Male domination, maintained mainly through consensual rape relationships and secondarily, through the threat of non-consensual rape-rape costs a lot to society due to the sheer amount of suffering inflicted disproportionately on women and children. I frequently see women in online forums wondering how they can raise a daughter to be independent and maybe even feminist, but not to hate men, and all I see in that is grooming for consensual rape.

But no matter the kind of rape, whether it be a form of consensual heterosexual intercourse or legally and socially acknowledged rape-rape, it all comes down to pleasure and purpose: literal male pleasure in the using and controlling of women’s bodies, but also in serving our male-defined purpose. We have ‘holes’ and they must be filled. By men. Not to be devoted to this purpose is a crime in men’s and many women’s eyes. Having a vagina, or what men generally consider to be body part disconnected from a whole person, or very simply a hole, or perhaps by the drunk and educated, an ‘infinite space’, is a catch-22. If you’re not filling it, you’re committing a crime against manity, but if you’re filling it, especially in the ‘wrong way’, you’re also guilty. There is no winning.

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