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A Story of Rape?



Below is an excerpt from Black and White Bible. Since the book has come out there have been many bloggers and others who have gone into overdrive to defend male headship. These are the kinds of stories they are trying to discredit.

There are many reasons why rape is less than appropriate and exact in my case. I have read and listened to horrific accounts of rape, and thus I wonder if I should actually use the term. I did not kick or scream when my ex-husband demanded sex, but I let him know how utterly disgusting I found his demand to be. There was nothing remotely mutual about the encounter. I was forced to have sex with my ex-husband. Or was I? When I look back on that ugly ordeal, I struggle even to this day to actually place myself amid that utterly repulsive scene, though truly I was there.

She is in her forties, a strong capable woman, albeit a wife who had been beaten and battered and pummeled and terrorized on many occasions by her husband. So one morning she is packing her bags to make an auto trip to speak at long-scheduled meetings. The husband enters the bedroom, his mood dark and foreboding. And then the threat. There is no physical violence this time, but the demand for sex—sex or stay home. No alternative. She would not be leaving the bedroom or the house until she had submitted to sex. He, as he had told the minister, and reminded her on many occasions, he was the “head of the home from the bedroom to the kitchen.”

What was I to do? Should I have grabbed the phone and tried to call 911? Phones had been broken on similar issues before. And the police? Even if I had been able to make such a call—it would have been laughable to report that my husband is ordering me to have sex before leaving town. The story probably would have made one of those lists of the silliest police reports. I suppose I could have tried to put through a call (had my ex-husband permitted) to someone in charge of the meetings and simply told the truth or made up a lie that I was sick. What were my choices? Do I succumb to the demeaning act of nonconsensual sex, fulfill my obligations, contact an attorney when I arrive back home and file for separate maintenance?

Was this an incident of legitimate rape? And was it even the worst incident of sexual abuse I had suffered? Whether legitimate or not, the rape I experienced was considerably less vile and spiteful than other of his sexual violations against me.