Growing up in various Protestant churches, I never heard one sermon on rape in marriage. Those churches put a lot of emphasis on avoiding sex before marriage, but once you were married, supposedly everything was fair game. Even under US law, courts did not recognize marital rape as a crime until the 1970s. Yet any act of sexual force against a woman or man, in my opinion, is rape, whether or not the people engaging in the act are married.
This topic came up recently when I was pregnant with my son. My husband and I have a healthy sexual relationship most of the time, but when I was pregnant, my sex drive decreased significantly and I struggled to get “in the mood.” I felt like my body was not just for me, but also for the baby. For other women, pregnancy has the opposite effect. During my pregnancy, often I would start sex reluctantly, but then end up enjoying it. After all, it is a bonding experience. But there was one incident where I felt like I had almost been raped.
My husband wanted to try a new position, so I said we could try it. It was nothing crazy, but in a new location and not something we had tried before. I discovered early on in that position that it was not pleasurable for me. I asked him if we could change positions, but he just kept going. I asked him again if we could change, but he did not. Eventually we did change positions and the rest of the experience was fine, but those two instances of denying my request were very upsetting to me. I talked to him about it afterwards and he apologized. He has never done it again. But it did not completely remove my feelings of violation. If I had not been pregnant, maybe I would have felt differently, but that experience was terribly upsetting.
In my prayer time after the incident, I could not think of one Scripture reference to comfort me. There is not one instance of marital rape mentioned as a bad thing in the bible and there are no stories that express the experience of rape, in any context, from a woman’s perspective. There are stories about rape, of course, such as when Lot offers his virgin daughters to the men of the city (Genesis 19), but these are told from a man’s perspective. It became evidently clear that the bible was not written for me as a woman. Anyone who thinks there is a Bible verse for every situation in modern times is only fooling themselves.
If a Scripture could be written today on this topic, this is what God would say:
I have created you with free will and you have a right to deny your body to anybody. I am Female and rape appalls me. I am a God of love, not force.
I would have loved to read a Scripture like this during that incident. Or I would have loved to listen to a sermon on it. But those things are missing from modern churches and that is a serious deficiency.
Eastern Moon Blog 