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her at w ill by right of law. The law articulates and defends this

right. The state articulates and defends this right. This means that

the state defines the intimate uses of a woman’s body in marriage;

so that a man acts with the protection of the state when he fucks

his wife, regardless of the degree of force surrounding or intrinsic

to the act. In the United States only five states have entirely abrogated the so-called marital rape exemption— the legal proviso that a man cannot be crim inally charged for raping his wife because rape

by definition cannot exist in the context of marriage, since marriage

licenses the use of a woman’s body by her husband against her

will. Nearly three times that many states have extended the husband’s right to forced intercourse to cohabiting men or, in some cases, even to so-called voluntary social companions. But even

where marital rape is illegal, the husband has at his disposal the

ordinary means of sexual coercion, including threat of physical violence, punitive economic measures, sexual or verbal humiliation in private or in public, violence against inanimate objects, and threats

against children. In other words, eliminating the legal sanctioning

of rape does not in itself eliminate sexual coercion in marriage; but

the continued legal sanctioning of rape underlines the coercive

character and purpose of marriage. Marriage law is irrefutable

proof that women are not equal to men. No person can enter into

an agreement in which her body is given to another and remain or

become or act as or effectually be his equal.

The law takes the form it does with divine sanction: civil law

reiterates religious dogma. The law enforces a relationship between

men and women that has its origins in so-called divine law; the law

enforces the divinely ordained subordination of women through its

regulation of sex in marriage. The law is an instrument of religion,

and it is precisely as an instrument of religion that law regulating

marriage gets its special character: laws against assault and battery

pale in importance when compared with the divine law giving a

man authority over his wife’s body. The man’s authority over his

wife’s body is willed by God—even if the same relationship outside of marriage and without reference to gender would be described as slavery or torture. The laws of God are upheld by the laws of this republic, this proud secular democracy. The marriage

laws fundamentally violate the civil rights of women as a class by

forcing all married women to conform to a religious view of

women’s sexual function. These same laws violate the civil rights

of women by compelling women to serve their husbands sexually

whether they will it or not and by defining women as a class in

terms of a sexual function that must be fulfilled. *

Women feel the pressure to submit in a m yriad of w ays, none of

which have to do with marital law as such. The woman is likely to

encounter marital law when she has been abused and seeks to act in

her own behalf as if she had a right to the disposition of her own

body. The point is that the law sets the standard for the disposition

of her body: it belongs to her husband, not to her.

The good wife submits; the bad wife can be forced to submit.

All women are supposed to submit.

One of the consequences of submission, whether conforming or

forced, is pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to intercourse, and women may

then be required to submit to the pregnancy.

Women are required to submit to the man, and women may

then be required to submit to the fetus.

Since the law sets the standard for the control, use of, function

of, purpose of, the wife’s body, and since the law supports the

right of the man to use force against his wife in order to have sex,

women live in a context of forced sex. This is true outside the

realm of subjective interpretation. If it were not true, the law

would not be formulated to sanction the husband’s forced penetra­

*The American Civil Liberties Union has a handbook on women’s rights.

In that handbook, laws against prostitution are discussed in terms of the

right o f women to have sex: “the central focus of all these laws is to punish