Is This Marital Rape? Lori Alexander and Closing the Escape Hatch.

Lori Alexander is enraged that anyone would suggest that she’s promoting marital rape when she tells women they should never, ever say no to their husbands’ advances. She’s enraged, I say.

One way to get women’s ire up easily these days is to teach them to not deprive their husband’s sexually because, in their minds, this leads to marital rape. In the same way that teaching women to be submissive to their own husbands leads to physical abuse. Women, Satan’s goal is to kill, steal, and destroy. He loves to twist God’s Word into something vile and ugly. Do these teachings lead to men raping and abusing their wives? NO!

Men who rape their wives and are physically abusive to them are mean, angry, or evil men. Their wives’ godly and submissive behavior does not cause them to be abused. The men are solely responsible for their abuse and these women need to seek help as soon as possible.

This is a problem. If you teach that men who abuse their wives are “mean, angry, or evil men,” women married to men who sometimes seen good and kind, in between episodes of abuse, are going to have problems identifying what is happening to them. If men who abuse their wives are “mean, angry, or evil men,” an upstanding family man by definition can’t be abusive. Except that that isn’t true.

Ah, but Lori isn’t done. Remember how she said that women who are being abused should “seek help as soon as possible”? Her advice isn’t at all as simple or straightforward as that would make it sound.

We are too quick to label behavior abusive, too. Yes, I understand that there are women who are being abused but they are not whom I am teaching. As I stated, they need to seek help. I am teaching all of the rest of the women who aren’t being physically abused. Some may be in difficult marriages but their husbands aren’t truly abusing them. The problem is that abuse is used way too often.

Many of the women I mentored told me they were being abused but once I began mentoring them, I could see that they really were not. Their husbands were just not treating them the way they wanted to be treated. This is why godly, older women are so valuable. They can help women see if what they are experiencing is abuse or not. …

Women who are being abused should seek help as soon as possible, Lori says. However, she goes on, many women who think they’re being abused actually aren’t. These women are confusing their husbands “not treating them the way they want to be treated” (what does that actually mean?) with abuse. So yes, abused women should get help, but it’s really important to remember that “abuse is used way too often” and that many women who say they’re abused are just whining whiners. Basically?

Rather than actually addressing criticism, Lori spends the rest of her post repeating over and over again that women should never, ever, ever deprive their husbands sexually, because God says so and because bad things will happen if they do.

A woman who is not depriving her husband sexually will more than likely have a husband who is pleased with her. Before marriage, many women freely give sex to their boyfriends but not so much after marriage. Yes, there are children and homes to care for but there’s a good reason that God is clear that we are not to deprive our husbands. He knows our husbands are fallible and easily tempted. This is a reason for marriage – so we won’t “burn,” and we don’t deprive our husbands because of their lack of self-control, as God tells us.

We submit to our husbands because there can only be one leader in the home and God has ordained it to be the husband. God’s ways are good, and acceptable, and perfect (Romans 12:2). We must do all we can to obey Him. He’s our Creator and knows what’s best for us. He commands that we live in submission to our husbands and not deprive them sexually.

The real problem here is with terminology. Marital rape typically means cases where a woman says no to sex (with words or otherwise) and her husband pushes on anyway. There has to be a “no” from the woman (verbally or otherwise) and a choice on the husband’s part to override it. This is why Lori is so insistent that that’s the furthest thing from what she’s talking about. What she’s talking about, she says,  is cases where a woman does not say no. She says yes. Therefore no marital rape, by definition.

The words “closing the escape hatch” keeps coming to me here, for some reason, even though the phrase actually has to do with suicide prevention. Still, I feel like this is what Lori is doing—she is working to shut down women’s freedom to say no. You aren’t allowed to say no, she says. God says you have to say yes. And if you don’t say yes, your husband will cheat on you and it will be your fault.

Is this marital rape? By the technical definition, no. And it’s doubly messed up, because unlike situations where an abuser convinces a woman she can’t say no to his advances—because it will be worse for her if she does—the one threatening these women is Lori Alexander, not their husbands.

We’ll come back to this in a moment, but first I want to address Lori’s statement about women’s actions before and after marriage. She brings it up again in another post:

Most young women seem to give sex freely to their boyfriends or to anyone these days before marriage, but this stops once they get married. The feminist and worldly agenda (sexual revolution) have deceived women into believing they can have sex freely with anyone outside of marriage but then have the option to withhold it once they are married since they will NOT serve their husbands.

Here, let me fix that last paragraph:

The feminist and worldly agenda (sexual revolution) have deceived teach women into believing that they can have sex freely with anyone outside of marriage they want to but then and that they have the option to withhold it to decide not to have sex when they’re not into it once both when they are married since they will NOT serve their husbands and when they are not married.

It’s absolutely the case that some couples do have less sex when they’ve been together for years than they did when they first started having sex, but that has nothing to do with women suddenly concluding they have the option to “withhold” sex. It has to do with things like everything involved in raising kids and adult responsibilities that leave people tired. But frankly, these things effect men as well as women, and lots of couples go on having plenty of sex (I may be speaking from experience here).

But I am unconvinced that that is what Lori is talking about.

Consider the idea that women shouldn’t “put out” before marriage because that’s all guys want from them—why would a guy buy a cow if he can get milk for free? The mentality is that you have to find a way to effectively trap a guy into marring you. It’s under this mentality and this mentality alone that Lori’s statements make sense. Some women, Lori seems to suggest, have lots of sex with their boyfriends to lure them into marriage, and then after the wedding they shut off that flow, because they already caught the guy—he’s theirs—so it’s no longer necessary. But it’s Lori’s world that creates that situation, not the world of the “feminist and worldly agenda.”

I could go on. I could talk about cases I’ve known where married women haven’t wanted to have sex anymore, because their husbands are profoundly selfish lovers and make sex lonely and unpleasant. (I suspect this may be the case for Lori and many of the women she writes to, given how she describes sex—as an unpleasant chore.) The obvious solution here is to tell men to stop being selfish asses, not to tell women to put up with it and put out, but hey, this is Lori Alexander we’re talking about.

As I said, I could go on, but there’s something else I want to get to in Lori’s article, and I want to return to the original question re. marital rape. In the followup post—titled “She Would Give Anything to Be Desired By Her Husband“—Lori shares a comment a woman left on her blog:

I would give ANYTHING to be desired by my husband. If your husband wants you, you are blessed. He loves you. Quit complaining and rejoice in it and the love he offers to you. You ought to be ashamed of yourself if you turn him down. Do you want to know what it’s like to not even be wanted?

This is why people read Lori’s words and think marital rape. She’s closing the escape hatch. If your husband wants sex and you ever turn him down, she posts, you should be ashamed of yourself. You are a terrible, horrible, selfish person. (This is a comment from a reader, but Lori’s posting it on her blog for her readers to see with her complete endorsement, so it might as well be her own words.)

Let me add one more level to the messed up here—because Lori’s not huge on women communicating with their husbands, she never suggests that they should talk to their husbands about this, or even opens the possibility. As a result, there may be men out there who are completely unaware that their wives are so scared by Lori’s berating that they are now convinced they can’t say “no” to them. These men may now be left unable to tell whether their wives actually want sex—or are doing it because they are terrified not to. (Remember, Lori says to act like you’re into it—and fake it if you have to.)

No, these men aren’t rapists. But what does that make Lori Alexander?

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