Violence against women begins and ends with silencing; the two are not separate phenomena; a voice is what a human being has when that human being also has rights and membership in society, the voice with which to participate in society and to determine who she is and what she does or does not consent to. Yet some men are still insisting that women’s bodies are there for men to use and that consent insofar as it matters at all can take many strange and durable forms; we are only a few decades out in establishing that husbands can rape their wives; before that “I do” meant a kind of permanent and irrevocable consent that was the same as relinquishing bodily self-determination.
RetroFed