Does penetration = presumption of power/control?

[skrumle]

Was chatting with my H last night and mentioned the Romeo and Juliet law in Ireland that's been discussed on here a few times. Anyway, when I asked if he thought it was reasonable his immediate answer was "no". I then asked him: if our son was gay, and started a conversation about a sexual experience that he was unhappy/uncomfortable about would he be more likely to feel that our son had been forced/co-erced if he was the one penetrated rather than penetrating and got a in reply...

I have to be honest, when I read the original thread on here my automatic view was that to protect girls over boys like this was to deny the fact that girls enjoy sex too, almost like taking a step back. When I read the thread fully though and thought about the implications for girls I probably did start to think that girls should have more protection than boys.

So, should there be a presumption that penetration equals a greater degree of control? So two heterosexual 15yos - greater responsibility lies with the boy to ensure that this is what both of them want?

FWIW I say PIV like sieve/wiv. Or even give. If you want to be posh maybe rhyme with hive

'feminism - now with extra PIV'

Now, you see girls, you're just giving feminism a good name.

sparky come back!!!

This thread is not good for my pelvic floor

I find the whole idea of a marriage not being made a proper one without the sexual act offensive. A total red herring.
Why on earth should a marriage only be considered complete if sex has taken place?
How does a person prove they have not actually had sex, anyway? (if both are not virgins)? Even if they are virgins, what are we to do, medically examine them for virginity? Outrageous idea! The idea that people can have marriage annulled if not had sex is ridiculous Either one or both could be lying.

Time to get to the 21st century and say to people: 'You've made a legal pact in front of witnesses. That is it. Whether or not you choose to have sex together is up to the pair of you, but, it does not, however, make your marriage more or less valid. You're still married if sex place takes or not.'

Wamster, it was a huuuuge issue in the past; e.g. Henry VIII's marriage to Katharine of Aragon, and whether she'd dunnit with his brah. Then the Howard/Essex divorce case. Usually midwives would examine the lucky bride to see if piv had occurred. It actually happened a lot, and I assume it still does - wasn't it Caroline of Monaco who got an annulment on these grounds? Probably, if it REALLY mattered, you could do some kind of vaginal examination.... interesting in a way that we are more interested in mind/spirit, and they in bodies.

Oh, I totally agree wamster. It's such a bizarre bit of history IMO.

And 'examinations' are notoriously unreliable, anyway.

It's horrible, but a couple of centuries ago a woman could be arrested if the police considered she might be having premarital sex (it was meant to be a way of controlling prostitution). She would be examined with a mental speculum, which would probably break the hymen anyway and which - as you can imagine - must have been incredibly unhygienic. There are reports of women being 'examined', then - because the hymen was broken and it 'didn't matter' any more, raped.

It is truly horrible and I am so glad we've moved away from that bit of history.

So we've come full circle in this thread. Why is it the only thing that matters? Maybe because it's the most likely to lead to a bouncy little bundle of consequences? Everything else is deniable.

LRD your studies sound absolutely fascinating. Is there any accessible book you've come across that you could recommend to a non academic?

I know, sieglinde, and I think it terrible. Absolutely awful. But then I will admit that I am an atheist and would like to see the act of getting married being a purely legal affair and not dependent on whether a couple have had sex or not.

I want to live in a society that doesn't think a marriage more or less valid if intercourse takes place or not. It makes me cringe when people say things like 'they haven't had sex so not proper marriage'. Yes they are married, they signed the bleedin' forms.

sal - thanks! But that's not actually my studies at all and I can easily tell you the book - it's from Jennifer Worth's brilliant trilogy about being a midwife in London's East End. That particular issue she mentions because she goes into the history of midwifery and women's history quite a lot, but it is all well-written and well-researched (she has a reading list in one of the books IIRC).

Virginity testing still happens in a lot of places around the world.

Although I have disagreed with a lot on this thread, I think that in the case of piv= power and control sex being used to determine whether or not a woman is married or not, that this is very, very much a case of piv=being used as a tool of oppression. I cannot and will not argue against that!

Recent article here about Egypt

bbc

Yes, I think it really hits home when I think about marriage like that too wamster.

I am still fucking pissed off that when DH and I got married (we'd just moved in together because we couldn't really afford two rooms, but FWIW we weren't sleeping together because of DH's beliefs), DH's priest actually said there was no point him marrying us because we were already 'living as man and wife'. Creepy, eh?! We actually had to tell him we weren't shagging! As if that should define your marriage.

Thanks LRD - I'll update my Amazon wishlist. .

I'm just idly musing on all those bonnets&cobblestones novels where PIV - not necessarily rape - did ruin girls. But that's not the act itself, it's the social constructs around it....

I'm just trying to remember which of the three books it's in sal - it's definitely not the first. They are all good to read though.

Sardine - thanks for th elinks.

Can I just say this is one of the most interesting threads in a long time mainly due to the impressive and sometimes necessarily dogged consistency of serious people addressing a really important issue. Whenever you get uderstandably pissed off with all of the attempted derailments I just hope you know there many of us who learn and take a lot from these threads so Sakura et al I salute you

Living as man and wife is a phrase that I find annoying; (it's not an issue of 'shouldn't that be husband and wife?' for me-I can't get worked up about that) what does it mean? It is entirely subjective and dependent upon an individual point of view. For example, a lot would say that 'living as man and wife' would only have validity if they had children; others, if they had a mortgage.

I'm of the opinion that people are married or they are not (for me, this means a legal act and not a religious one- keep religion as an optional extra when it comes to marriage) and phrases like 'living as man and wife' should be consigned to the dustbin. Especially as it adds fuel to the myth that cohabitation = marriage and that cohabitees will be treated the same as married people if their partner dies/leaves them. But that is another topic altogether.

Me neither saf!

According to this organisation, it is impossible to tell whether somebody has had sexual intercourse or not. Which rather calls all these virginity tests on grounds of efficacy apart from anything else. Can this really be true? I just can't believe that throughout history, men (and women) have carried out virginity tests without the slightest notion of exactly what it was they were looking for.

myths about vaginal corona