Hetero Sex, Rape and Lesbian Choice

First of all, I have not forgotten that I owe you a post on motherhood as a follow-up to the ‘Lesbians and Children’ post. This piece here started out as a part of it, but then developed a life on its own. When thinking about motherhood, it was inevitable to think about hetero sex, and while it would be much better for my peace of mind to ignore the topic on grounds of Lesbianism as I usually do, in this case I can’t.

Hetero sex has been a topic of radical analysis from the beginning, since hetero/ex-hetero Radical Feminists have an obvious and fully legitimate interest in the topic. The bulk of analysis is too big to be summarised in a single post, and this is not what I’m intending to do here anyway.

I want to focus on one aspect of recent Radical Feminist analysis I see all over our blogs.
When hetero Radical Feminists talk about hetero sex, they often frame it as rape, regardless the cirumstances it occurs. They invented the term ‘PIV’,which I dislike for its ″inside group speak″ character and the cute-ish sound (also, where is the difference between ″PIV″ and ″PIA″ or ″PIM″?). They also boiled down their analysis to a catching ‘PIV = rape’.

Well.

As a Lesbian Radical Feminist, I have overlaps with this kind of argument. Radical Feminist analysis makes it obvious that each and every interaction between women and men is necessarily inequal, and that a good portion of what we are culturally trained to perceive as hetero sex IS rape.

Feminists have come to understand that marital rape is a thing: for a long time a man couldn’t rape the girl or woman he called his wife, and many people still believe that.
Feminists also have come to understand that raping a drunk or otherwise incapacitated woman is, indeed, rape: again something even today people don’t necessarily agree on.
Feminists have uncovered countless forms of coercion as tools of rape, other than naked violence: Some laws in Europe still claim that it is not enough to just say no, real rape needs to be met with physical resistance to ″count″.

All these examples for rape which mainstream culture didn’t and doesn’t call rape (and there’d be dozens more examples) are so obvious even to the most superficial of feminists that the liberal feminists dreamed up the concept of ‘consent’ for distinction:
Consent, a term taken over from property law (telling), is the thing that magically turns two same acts into two entirely different things: A man sticking his dick into a woman is either rape or – by the miracle of consent! – the ultimately pleasurable human experience. Or worse, a man whipping a woman raw, calling her names, pissing on her and selling her to a gang of strangers who rape her until her pelvic floor is going to pieces can either be rape or – by the miracle of consent! – a great liberating, transgressing ″BDSM session″.

Somewhere along the way liberal feminists must have realised that there is something queasy about the principle of consent. The term morphed into ‘informed/enthusiastic consent’ in no time, when liberal feminists felt the need to clarify that consent can’t be reached by deception and does not equal playing possum (purists sometimes defend the use of mere ‘consent’ by saying uninformed and ″implied″ consent isn’t consent at all).

The point is, no matter in which incarnation, liberal feminists and sex positivists are convinced consent (informed, enthusiastic, whatever) is the ultimate tool of distinction between ″good for women″ and ″bad for women″.

Radical Feminists disagree.
″Consent″ is never given in a vacuum and without context. Every woman lives in patriarchy. Every woman is oppressed in patriarchy. It is ridiculous to claim that our sexual choices of all things somehow are unaffected by this.

BUT:
This doesn’t mean that I consider all women inable to make decisions. Not at all. And this is the problem I have with ″PIV = rape″.

″PIV = rape″ implies that this equation is true in all cases. It implies that each and every woman who acts in a heterosexual way is coerced in one way or the other. In this mindset, the most privileged – while women are always the underclass in patriarchy, it is undeniably true that some women are more privileged than others, rich, educated, white, heterosexual mothers are at the very top – of heterosexual women would be coerced by some invisible force commonly subsumed under ″socialisation under patriarchy″.

Privileged women somehow get to claim that their refusal to make the right choice is the same thing as the lack of choice more oppressed women experience: A privileged woman for example is able to choose or refuse motherhood. If she chooses to become a mother despite being in the position to either not to be with men in the first place or at least have an abortion, she, in the sense of the axiom ″PIV = rape″, is literally in the same position as a girl or a woman held captive and forcibly impregnated. They may not be beaten, locked-in, starved and raped, but they get to claim victimisation by socialisation. The force who made them mothers is maybe a little less visible, not embodied in the person of a rapist, but society as a whole, but it still is there and just as powerful as the poor woman’s rapist and prison guard.

This argument probably would be true in a world where there are no lifelong Lesbians. But we are here. Right here. Many of us have been raped in the strictest sense of the word. And yet, most of us who have been raped and by this experienced the ultimate coercion into heterosexuality did not turn to men afterwards. We remained Lesbians, even if this meant we were vulnerable to more (corrective) rape.
We are living proof that women can make a different choice than submitting to men.

Queer theory disciples, liberal feminists and – more implicitly – some hetero Radical Feminists want to belittle, erase and take away our choice. They say we are ″born this way″, having a ″sexual orientation″. To them, we sometimes even seem privileged: Nature designed us to be able to stay away from men, so when we do stay away from men, we are not doing something worthwile and radical, we are just following our bodies’ and minds’ design and should be dutifully grateful that we were born without the seal of slavery.
(Queer theory and liberal feminism at the same time do their best to force us into worshipping men, flooding us with accusations of ″transphobia″ and ″bi-erasure″, two offenses we commit purely by existing.)

In this mindset, a hetero woman turning away from men is doing something much greater than us boring Lesbians who just got away by a fortunate fate that made us Lesbians.
But it wasn’t a fortunate fate, and it wasn’t an accident of biology that made us resist.

Born this way is nonsense. We are choosing women, day after day after day. We are not even ignoring men. There are no men in our minds. We are choosing women and – those of us who are lifelong Lesbians – never have done anything else.

This is proven by the fact that many of us were raped before we had a Lesbian community, political analysis or even an idea of ourselves being Lesbians. Countless little girls are raped, many of whom grow up to be Lesbians. We didn’t have the plaster cast of political awareness and Lesbian strength to put on our broken bones when we were little. But we knew, deep down, that other girls had to be at the centre of our world, not boys and men. And we stubbornly clung to that knowledge, choosing girls and women over the dazzling promises of privilege within heterosexuality.

We choose girls and women over giving in to patriarchal attempts to coerce us into heterosexuality. We are living proof it is possible. We are living proof other women did not resist. We are living proof that other women deliberately choose heterosexuality, which is one of the main reasons why Lesbians are so very much hated by liberal feminism, sex positivism, the trans cult and even hetero Radical Feminists.

We are proof for an inconvenient truth:
Heterosexuality is doing patriarchy. A heterosexual woman makes herself, her energy, her body, her mind, her talents, her time available to men. Men are the patriarchy.

Liberal feminists coined the term ‘slut-shaming’. They claim heterosexuality as a woman’s right. They think it is possible to fight patriarchy while submitting all their might to male interests before female solidarity. But they forget that a slut is tied together with the virgin: They attack the mindset of the virgin-slut dichotomy, the Madonna-Whore-complex.

But instead of throwing out the whole dichotomy, they just try to make the ″negative″ pole of the dichotomy positive as well. By this, they act as if the Whore meant sexually active, and Madonna meant desexualised (and by this dehumanised). They are forgetting that a virgin (in the patriarchal sense of the word) is a woman not yet fucked, waiting to be fucked, remaining unfucked although she is intended to be fucked: A little girl in patriarchy is an adult woman waiting to happen, not desexualised. An older virgin is a spinster (NOT in the feminist sense of the word), the one who didn’t yet win a man, not desexualised. A nun is renouncing physical heterosexuality in favour of mental heterosexuality, not desexualised. A woman in a hijab is so very sexual she has to cover herself up with fabric all over, not desexualised. Even an ″asexual″ woman in the sense of the modern ″orientation″ isn’t desexualised at all; terms like ‘heteroromantic’ or ‘demi-sexual’ are often associated with her.

Virginity (in the patriarchal sense) is heterosexuality in the making. The Virgin and the Whore are not fundamental opposites. They are the exact same thing: Heterosexual women, doing patriarchy in their respective ways. The fight against ″slut-shaming″ isn’t more but the liberal try to get a better deal inside the system. A slut does not threaten patriarchy any more than does a virgin.

The real opposite of the Virgin-Whore-dichtomy, the only thing that really has no connection to patriarchy whatsoever is Lesbianism. When we are not colonised into assimilation, Lesbians don’t need or serve men in any way.

I don’t know if it can be possible to be hetero by choice and be a Radical Feminist. I don’t think so. I can’t imagine to invite the enemy into my home, my bed. I sometimes desperately wish I could believe that all those smart, intelligent, strong hetero Radical Feminists were driven by some invisible force that makes them invite the enemy against their very wills. I tend to look for the tiniest shred of evidence for coercion because I so very much want to believe that these smart, strong het women are not wasting themselves on men for the silliest of reasons and the most hollow of privileges.

But the ugly truth is, many of them do.