"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.

Sorry to lower the tone, but I'm loving the adverts I've got at the bottom if that page:

Butt hinges and a bed.
Made me laugh.

This is a bit of a tangent, but it is something that recurrs a lot on threads about female grooming in particular;

This author is not saying that individual women 'do not know their own tiny female minds'. The point is that society has evolved in such a way to prioritise male preferences; and makes them female preferences

Romii - I didn't mean that any of the posters were belittling rape, I don't think they were. But the original blog certainly did so, because it equated all penetrative sex as rape.

It doesn't belittle rape. It makes you think about consent in a patriarchy and whether women can truly give consent. It takes rape and consent as a thing defined by men (which it is in the main) and makes what happens to women and their experiences the focus.
"Imagine you had just had consensual sex and you turned to him and said 'you just raped me'. Imagine his reaction." There. Putting men's feelings at the forefront of a discussion about rape and consent.

And the reaction to FW wasn't about what she said but how she was so dismissive and refusing to engage. She doesn't have to engage of course. Just like she doesn't have to be rude and dissmissive either.

And as for losing the all men are rapists trope, I don't think we'll ever lose that and I don't think we should waste our energy trying to. Feminism isn't about pleasing men. They should feel uncomfortable, upset, angry and find parts of it unpallatable. It really is sweet FA in comparison to what men as a class have put women through over the millennia. And we should be challenging their privilege and oppression.

Scallop - so turn it around and look at it from a female perspective. Imagine a rape victim walking into a crisis centre and being greeted with "I know what you are going through. I had loving penetrative sex with my partner last night."

I don't think anyone is agreeing with the blogger. However, reading the blog has sparked a wider discussion about consent, and societal expectations of women - and men. The first few pages of the thread are mostly composed of people disagreeing with the blogger's point of view.

And, like Isis, the moderates completely disagree with the extremists interpretation... but, you know, after kicking it round a bit, taking all things together, the extremists might just have a few points after all...

NOT saying feminism is equivalent to radical Islam, just that the distinctions between moderates and extremists in any movement are always blurrier than the moderates would claim.

This is a fascinating discussion. I know I've mentioned this before, but I write a bit (amateur, very bad), some of it erotica. And it is fascinating as someone who likes PIV, likes it enough to want to write about it, to set about unpicking the male gaze, the underlying assumptions about power relationships both in and out of bed, the fundamental issue of a lack of vocabulary (there is no word, barring the clinical clitoris, for the organ that is actually responsible for the female orgasm - one is reduced to twee euphemisms and work-arounds). At both extremes of the spectrum - deliberately provocative blogposts that all PIV is rape, and trying to write feminist friendly erotica - you collide with the fact that how we view sex is conditioned by a world, even a language, which takes the male sexual experience as primary and central. (Re. penetration and the excellent point made up thread about not reducing women's bodies simply to holes, I toy with alternative language about "enveloping" , etc. - trying to make women's bodies an active part of the scene rather than passive recipients).

It's also interesting as a kind of piece of social anthropology to read slash fanfiction (male gay erotica written primarily by women for women). Some of it is written I think out of despair that it is so damned hard to write a relationship of equals for a heterosexual couple - so two men together gives you an idealised way of exploring relationships without the underlying socially predetermined power imbalance in het relationships (even the equal ones - because society in terms of expectations from family, the workplace schools - whose number gets called first when the kids are ill - all this eats up enormous amounts of head space because you actively have to fight against it if you want an equal relationship). Some of it does reproduce the tropes about power imbalance - there are some hilarious arguments out there about whether one partner should always "bottom" or whether they can swap over. And some of it actually reproduces the worst sort of "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" tropes imaginable (so called alpha/omega slash), because the writers are so embroiled in their own patriarchal cultures that they simply cannot make the imaginative leap to see a culture which could be different. (Important disclaimer - very little if any of this vast body of writings bears any resemblance to anything a gay man would actually recognise as his own life, if my conversations with gay male friends are anything to go by).

Sorry, possibly a bit off topic, but I do think it is fascinating when you start digging into the assumptions about power underlying het sex. You can do this with the sort of deliberately extremely provocative blog post at the start, or you can come at it from lit crit, or you can come at it by asking "why is rape in the criminal justice system conceptualised from the male POV as 'how did I know she consented?' rather than from the female point of view as 'sex I did not want'). But whichever way you come at it, sex doesn't happen in some primal animalistic bubble detached from surrounding culture, it comes with all the power relationships and inequalities of that culture.

Mephis this isn't an extremist view though. It being different to yours doesn't mean it is extremist. It's just an uncomfortable issue to discuss but we discuss choice under patriarchy when it comes to most other acts yet it's extreme when it's about sex? Why.

I support her right to make those comments. Most women don't get STDs and suffer damage from consensual penetrative sex and some men and women enjoy "forced" but consensual sex.

Most women don't orgasm from penetrative sex so you could argue it is not the best sex for them unless they want a baby and that it might be better and safer and more pleasurable for them if they never have it. There are plenty of people who seek relationships without any penetrative sex at all and that includes men who just want to be whipped but without sex and all the full panoply of the complexity which is human sexuality.

In fact if your sex life is just PIV I'd say wow - how boring, personally.

As to what is "rape" as a lawyer I can only go by what the law says. For much of my life a husband could not in law rape his wife in England as wives gave continuous consent to sex at marriage similar to Islam - and like Islam though any other physical violence to obtain that consent however was illegal. English law then changed in the 90s to say that a husband could rape his wife in marriage even without any other battery or violence which I am sure is regarded as a good change by most women. You can also divorce a wife in England for unreasonable behaviour is she refuses sex (and a woman can do the same to a man) so we clearly do see it as culturally normal that there will be sex in most marriages.

This is the sort of opinion that i was hearing as "feminist opinion" in the 80s as a kid along with "women need men like fish need bikes"

Presumably you weren't hearing many actual feminists say it? It's the sort of thing non/anti feminists use as a stick to beat feminists with.

I did have the women/man/fish/bicycle badge though

In days of yore, I have no doubt that many couples practiced contraception by not having PIV when not wanting to conceive.

So, for hetero sex, that seems to leave male on female oral and masturbation. Is that really what posters are arguing for?
What's wrong with doing it like dykes? The post just made it sound as if without PI-something, no utopia. Yet many dykes I know have managed their whole lives with what you describe. So please don't imply that even just mutual masturbation and rubbing etc and no penis in anything can't be good sex. Tribades and gay men into frotting disagree.

Also, the many posts comparing 'extreme' radical feminists and feminists to ISIS vs Islam! Some people are really scared of women asking awkward questions (but none of whom have ever murdered anyone in the name of their beliefs although Valerie Solanas did shoot Andy Warhol.)

This is the sort of opinion that i was hearing as "feminist opinion" in the 80s as a kid along with "women need men like fish need bikes" And I was one of them (although I've possibly lost the badge!) Just because some views and feminists are older doesn't make them wrong.

Many of the answers I'm hearing here I heard back then too......

There was a Boots ad a few years ago where the implied joke was that the woman had said no to sex because she had a headache and the man 'cleverly' produced a box of paracetamol - hey presto no more excuse.

That's the world we live in, where a well-known pharmacy will make a joke out of the idea that a woman can't just say no to sex, but must have an excuse to get out of it and if you take care of the excuse then hey presto sex on a plate for the man no matter whether she wants it or not.

"Some people are really scared of women asking awkward questions "

That's my next Tshirt.

The Islam/Isis comparison pied me off too, but I was too wimpy to complain.

Please don't do that again,MephistophelesApprentice.

"Scallop - so turn it around and look at it from a female perspective. Imagine a rape victim walking into a crisis centre and being greeted with "I know what you are going through. I had loving penetrative sex with my partner last night."." But who would do that? Witchwind wouldn't. And nor is she encouraging any woman to do this. If you held the views that PIV is inherently rape given the power structures and dangers for women at play, why would you describe PIV as "loving penetrative sex"? And just because you feel like that doesn't mean to say you would be insensitive to how other women feel about their rapes. Doing something like that would be deliberately provocative and it is disingenuous to suggest that this would be the result of the views expressed in the blog.

In addition, how women feel about PIV and rape should be centric to the discussion. Men's feelings shouldn't.

And indeed the classic way to help couples make their sex life better is often to say you can do anything but penetrative sex for a while. There does seem to be a lack of imagination as to what sex can and should be and is for many people.

itsbetterthanabox

It's not an extreme view because it's different to mine - I can understand the argument (as well as that of previous posters) it is simply an extreme expression of a data paradigm that you all share. Indeed, what makes it extreme is not the fundamental assumptions, but the absolutist language used. The statements that other posters have made to examine the position have been functionally supportive, only stated with a greater degree of collegial equivocation appropriate to those using a more rational approach to the argument.

BertrandRussell

I first encountered this article and blogger when they were referenced on Fundamentalists Say The Darndest Things (www.fstdt.com) a number of years ago. I think that the fundamentalist analogy stands scrutiny, though of course drawing an equivalence would be imbecilic.

I'll start with an apology, because I'm not too brilliant with terminology and big words .

My understanding is that on an individual level, all piv isn't rape, but on a class level, women don't have the power to say no to piv as a permanent/long term thing if they want to be in a relationship with a man, if a woman said she'd like to be married but not have piv and instead have other forms of sex and intimacy with her dh, she'd be seen as unreasonable by many, because society views piv as the default within het relationships and if you want to be in one, then you should want/expect to be penetrated? I know marriages without out exist but they are not the norm, and people often think it's odd. So on a class level, if piv is the norm, and it's expected , do women really have the power to choose to not have piv if they are raised in a society that conditions them that the status of marriage is something to want, and within marriage piv is expected.

I've heard convos in irl where if a dh doesn't want sex as a long term then it's suggested that if it's important to the woman she should leave. But if a wife doesn't want sex as a long term thing then it's suggested she see a gp, get counselling, ask dh to help around house more, figure out why etc. It's like a man can say he doesn't fancy it so the woman shouldn't push him, but if the woman doesn't fancy it, then it's a problem that needs fixing.

The lying back and thinking of England, the faking of headaches, the pretending to be sleeping, being relieved when baby wakes are common things I've heard said by some women I know in order to not hurt the dh feelings when she doesn't want sex. I've thought before about why they need to protect his feelings, because if he loves her, he would want her to want to, not hand her a pack of paracetamol and say problem solved like in the boots ad mentioned by a pp.

On an individual level,I love my dh and I enjoy piv mostly, certain times of the month it's uncomfortable so we don't do it and do other stuff instead, but if someone didn't want it ever, would they be able to reject it totally and still expect to be in a marriage?

I apologise if that makes no sense, I'm typing as I go and still making sense of the discussion. I find the posts here really interesting.

I didn't know any grown up feminists just me and my best friend. And damn, you can't see previous posts in the app brb.