"Intercourse/PIV is always rape, plain and simple."

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I was trying to find out what piv sex meant when I came across this blog.

witchwind.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/piv-is-always-rape-ok/

I was rather taken aback by its premise.

Other quotes include:
...intercourse is NEVER sex for women...
...intercourse is inherently harmful to women and intentionally so...

Is this a commonly held view point amongst feminists? Or just the extreme radical side.

I am not posting this to be goady, if anything quite the opposite.

I was thinking more something like those small native tribes where the one with the highest social status is the one who throws the most parties where everyone gets free food, and stuff like this - a society structure where the most generous and kind people end up in the most influential positions.

And yet if you look at Venus of Willendorf statues it is strong very fertile women who seem to have the power (in that time anyway). Although without doubt having a baby you are feeding does make you more vulnerable but also more powerful as men cannot produce life like that.

Deo, is enough known about the cultural background to state that? Equally, a barren wife could be in danger so a statue of fertility might be her "prayer for Salvation" or indeed to request a safe delivery (as with saints' girdles etc in medieval Christianity)

Words can be weird. "Impregnable" can have two meanings, one being "invulnerable" and the other "able to be impregnated; fertile" (per online dictionary).

So, should a man attempt to have sex with an impregnable woman, or avoid her?

I think one can state that women are powerful as we have the power of giving birth. That is true regardless of culture and time period.

However, whether men actually respected that power, or exploited it for ulterior purposes, or just counteracted it by killing, we cannot know.

Likewise, a child who can build a beautiful sand castle is certainly more admirable than a child who can destroy the beautiful sand castle, but who is more powerful?

I just wanted to stick up my hand and say, what an interesting thread!

I've learned a lot, thank you. I've got a lot to think about. I'm fascinated by the reaction that the article provoked in me and in others - quite viscerally dismissive in some cases, and isn't that interesting? Why should that be, I wonder

Yes, it is an interesting thread.
My view is that prior to about 10,000 years ago we were all in small groups and there probably was more of a measure of equality between men and women (but no one really knows). The Ascent of Women BBC series certainly also suggested as much earlier this year. The Venus figures which were made about 28,000 years ago possibly illustrate female power. They look powerful to me and women can produce children and men can't so in a sense the vagina is the thing to fear and is all powerful and captures and retains the penis.

Then about 10,000 years ago we learned how to grow crops, could stay in one place more, possibly ate worse but at least we had reliable food sources and men (and some women) started acquiring thing - lots of women, slaves, land, building stone monuments etc and things turned from the spiritual to the physical in a sense and men started taking more and more power. Much more recently women got the vote and started taking power back again.

As to how I react to an article that vaginal sex is rape, I'm a lawyer so it's purely a legal issue. In the UK today but not back in the 80s men can in law rape their wives so no continuous consent is given in marital sex which it used to be and still is in many places on the planet. Most sex in most UK marriages is consensual although plenty of women on MN will be giving it to get it over and then get their sleep when they're up all night with a baby I suspect as that's the nature of new motherhood.

Deo I knew several people, all professionals, who said that if they didn't give in to their husbands, they would leave. A couple of them were still paying off the wedding cost! This was in the 90s.

Personally, I think men have got around the 'rape in marriage' thing by veiled threats of leaving, by the assumption that once in a partnership, sex (PIV) is on tap, regardless, and the availability of women via the internet dating sites.

Yes and from the men's point of view one reason they get married is to have a lot of sex.

The Woody Allen quote is not wrong:

[Alvy and Annie are seeing their therapists at the same time on a split screen]
Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I'd say three times a week.

The interesting issue is if only men breastfed or got up in the night and if they did about 80% of domestic chores and childcare and women earned a lot more than men would women want more sex than men do in the young children stage of life?

The interesting issue is if only men breastfed or got up in the night and if they did about 80% of domestic chores and childcare and women earned a lot more than men would women want more sex than men do in the young children stage of life?

If you don't limit that to PiV, which I imagine would be rather unwanted a couple of weeks or longer after giving birth ... yes, probably.

And if sex was centred on women's pleasure instead of men's (not the "it's over when the man had an orgasm" PiV thing), women might quite probably want more sex than men all the time.

One book I really appreciated was 'The Left Hand of Darkness', by Ursula K. LeGuin, where the race on the planet is no longer bisexual. As I recall, people only gain sexual charactersistics/differentiated genitalia during a period of mutual heat (or pregnancy), and there is no pre-set sex that a person will acquire. So someone can both birth children, and father them. So for most of the time, people are just people.

Of course, the bisexual human alien visitors find this all very disconcerting!

Snails win out then... hermaphrodite all the way.

"The mating practices of snails allow them to deliver eggs for new snails to be brought into life at a consistent rate. Snails will go through a complete mating ritual with each other, usually which will communicate to the other snail for an average of two to twelve hours. At the end of this ritual, the pair will fertilize the eggs in the other, so both of them will deliver eggs. It is known that a snail can carry up to 100 eggs at a time.

When the eggs are fertilized, they will go through a process of growth inside the snail, until they are ready to be delivered. After that, both snails lay their eggs and bury them into separate places inside a small hole made in the topsoil in a cool place. This will allow the eggs to develop without being harmed."

Another interesting book ('cos SciFi by women tends to consider gender at some point) is 'Golden Witchbreed' by Mary Gentle. The aliens there don't have a sex whilst they are children/sub-adult, but develop one during a transition period (which can be quite physically demanding). The point being, of course, how do they know how to teach or train a child when you really don't know if it will develop into a male or female adult? And then you have the rare individuals who fail to make this transition, and become sexless adults.

Basic premise here seems to be -- where gender when sex is either hidden totally or non-existent? Rather than the more modern non-binary gender nonsense.

I still think that the Le Guin case, where anyone can get pregnant, is the most interesting, and as I recall she says that since anyone can get pregnant, no one is as quite as free as males are in our society. I suspect PIV would also be viewed rather differently! You do them this month, you do them next time round! And the fact that most of the time people are just people, no sex, and no male gaze!

Whoops! They do you, that should have been..........

I should have added that the premise is that most of the time you end up with a couple with one male and one female. Drugs or preference for one sex as opposed to the other is frowned upon, so I presume trying to be a lesbian on such a world would be a bit complicated! But then again in some ways, a little more like a homosexual heterosexuality, in that all members of that society would, on average, have the same body experiences as any other. Which is a way of looking at what she wrote that I have never considered before......................

I've always wondered when we will reach a point when we can implant a ferilised egg in an articifical womb what will happen. Some men already actively choose to have children paying a surrogate - a footballer has and his mother helps bring up the child.

I just showed one of my teenage boys the Men going their own way (MGTOW) postings on line including part of this video www.mgtow.com/video/the-exploitation-of-male-virtues/ which caused him to have a fit of giggles actually. Most MGTOW can't pull and are losers and plenty are virgins (one might argue) or you could instead say they are simply men choosing to reject PIV sex because the disadvantages they derive from it do not make up for the advantages of not having women in their lives.

Perhaps more and more of us male and female are moving to wards living alone without PIV sex and are a lot happier for that.

Deo - "Perhaps more and more of us male and female are moving to wards living alone without PIV sex and are a lot happier for that."

Japan is a country where that is increasingly the case. Young women rejecting the idea of living with a man entirely and staying with parents. They have money a free place to live and freedom to live their life. DW lived in and visited Japan fairly regularly and said it was a very obvious phenomenon even in the late 80s and early 90s. The men seem equally uninterested.

As a result they have a population crisis and a dramatically ageing population.

Which isn't necessarily a bad thing and the Japanese do have a huge variety and different kinds of sexual fantasy and practices. We need about 5 in 6 people to die on the planet to be sustainable so the less PIV sex the better one could argue, for the good of the planet.

Although I've just had a similar debate with one of my teenagers who was not impressed with my views.

Right bed time and no PIV sex tonight for me.

Oh, Japan. If sex is bad for women, logically it is the place for a woman to be. And it seems women and men agree that a life without a partner and without sex is just fine.

www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex

"This was also the year, as the number of elderly people shoots up, that adult incontinence pants outsold baby nappies in Japan for the first time."

We need about 5 in 6 people to die on the planet to be sustainable so the less PIV sex the better one could argue, for the good of the planet.

Yes, but it would be preferable if it was not happening so fast, as the elderly need someone to care for them. (Okay, maybe in Japan they just commit suicide, but I don't think that's ideal.)

Maybe Japan should enable those young women to become pregnant by sperm donors and give them enough money so that they are financially as well off as women without children.

SD- Have you read 'The Gate to Women's Country' by Sheri Tepper? She's wrong on a few things but that book has stayed with me for some reason. I also love 'The Left Hand of Darkness', and anything by her really.

Let me guess that you haven't in any way read the thread...

"Maybe Japan should enable those young women to...."

How about women in Japan decide for themselves what they want to do instead of some idiot Western feminist suggesting what they "should" do?