Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Once It's In, It's In


According to a Maryland court, once a woman has consented to sexual penetration, she's consented to seeing things through to the bitter end. As Jessica at Feministing puts it, "Once it's in, it's in." Here’s the logic:

[I]t was the act of penetration that was the essence of the crime of rape; after this initial infringement upon the responsible male's interest in a woman's sexual and reproductive functions, any further injury was considered to be less consequential.
Personally, I blame feminists. This sort of backlash was to be expected, considering that those bitches (no offense, ladies!) were so goddamn shrill in their weird insistence that they should be able to have sex without forfeiting their autonomy, their convictions, or their rights.

So that's that. Now, let’s turn to a happier subject: Modern dentistry, as depicted in a short humorous vignette entitled...
Open Wide for Chunky

INTERIOR: A dentist's office painted in horizontal purple and brown stripes, and hung with handsome prints from Hogarth's "The Progress of Cruelty." The DENTIST is poring over a well-thumbed folio edition of the Marquis Von Bayros when the PATIENT enters timidly and sits down in the chair.

DENTIST (wheeling 'round): You're ready for it, eh? Good. Open wide!

PATIENT: Please be gentle with me. It’s my first time.

DENTIST: Yeah, likely story. Now let me see you spread those gums. Wide! Wider!

PATIENT: Aaurhgh.

DENTIST: Excellent. You’ll find that prompt obedience is much less uncomfortable. Now, let’s see. Which tooth is it? You've seen one, you’ve seen ‘em all…

PATIENT: Ow. I own ting...

DENTIST: Shut up or I’ll give you something to complain about.

PATIENT: Ow.

DENTIST (unctuously): Let’s have a little music, shall we? How about Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder? I find it deeply erotic.

PATIENT: Gah. Yuh colleetly issane!

DENTIST (gritting his teeth): Not your cup of tea, eh? I thought not. You don’t seem like the type who’d understand the…higher pleasures. It’s all about the body for you, isn’t it? Like a farm animal. A stinking, sweating, drooling, vicious…

PATIENT : Ow. Awk! Assa ong ooth.

DENTIST: Oh, now I'm doing it wrong, according to you. Did you treat your other dentists like this? I bet you didn’t. I bet you let them do whatever they wanted. I bet you loved it when they sank the drill...here.

PATIENT (vehemently): Awk awk awk! Stah!

DENTIST: Stop? Not a chance, baby. If you didn’t want your teeth worked on, you shouldn’t have come into my office, sat down in this chair, and opened that big dripping mouth. Now you’re going to take it all, and like it.

The patient knees the dentist in the crotch, and kicks him in the face repeatedly as he rolls on the floor in agony.

CURTAIN.

6 comments:

Thers said...

Your play is choc-a-bloc with Rare Invention and Cunning Wit.

Phila said...

Your play is choc-a-bloc with Rare Invention and Cunning Wit.

Nay, sir. I do but catch the audience as Woodcockes and Widgeons are caught, by a lowd bell and a greasie light. What's eternal in the play is God's; only its faults are mine own.

Anonymous said...

That's an appalling ruling.
I really like your play - but I feel an unexpected injury is worse when one is expecting pleasure than when one is expecting a certain amount of pain.

Phila said...

I feel an unexpected injury is worse when one is expecting pleasure than when one is expecting a certain amount of pain.

That's my point, actually. As bad as this dentist scenario is, the corresponding sexual scenario is a good deal worse. You'd think that a woman would have more legal recourse in that situation, not less.

Basically, she's a consumer in the dentist scenario, and a commodity in the sexual scenario.

Anonymous said...

The reason for the Maryland law is that we have had too many instances of a woman agreeing to have sex, having said sex, and then a week later deciding that it was actually a rape.

Maybe all parties need to be held accountable for their actions and not just men?

Carry on.

Phila said...

The reason for the Maryland law is that we have had too many instances of a woman agreeing to have sex, having said sex, and then a week later deciding that it was actually a rape.

Hmm. It's interesting that the court didn't explain this in its ruling, and explicitly based its decision on the notion that the woman's value as a commodity is lost upon penetration, and further intercourse is immaterial to the case. I'm glad you were able to explain to me what they really meant.

As for deciding a week later that sex was actually rape, that doesn't seem like an inordinate amount of time to me. Some people might take longer than that to admit to anyone else they'd had sex, in some situations. I can well imagine that the decision to press charges would take a while to make, particularly for an inexperienced person who needs a lot of advice.

Plus, it'd probably take a while to steel oneself for being portrayed in court as a two-faced, cock-hungry slut.

All things considered, I'd say a woman who decides to go through with such a life-shattering decision after only a week probably feels pretty strongly about it, especially given how often she's likely to face contemptuous attitudes like yours.

Maybe all parties need to be held accountable for their actions and not just men?

The man in this case was asked to pull his penis out of a woman's body. It's hard to see how the woman is accountable for his refusal to do this, unless you want to argue that the woman has no say over the duration of intercourse once she's consented. Which would be utterly deranged.

Look at it this way: If I knock on your door and you let me into your house, that doesn't give me the right to do whatever I please while I'm there, or to keep hanging around after you've told me to leave. Hell, that'd be true even if you were renting, and I were your landlord.

See how simple the basic issue is, once you put aside the distractions of sexual horror and misogyny?