By Kevin Govender
A Frenchwoman who lost her divorce case has filed a legal appeal with the European Court of Human Rights after French courts ruled that she had violated her “marital duty” by refusing to have sex with her husband.
Feminist groups are in uproar as they view this as sexual servitude within the marriage institution.
In 2019, an appeal court in Versailles found that a 66-year-old woman was the only one to blame for the collapse of her marriage because of her protracted refusal to have sex with her husband.
In her defence the woman declared that it was partly due to her poor health and her husband's violent ways. The court, however, found that her refusal constituted a “serious and renewed violation of the duties and obligations of marriage and made the maintenance of shared life intolerable”.
In South Africa, marital rape is illegal.
While I am definitely not an accessory from the Dr Eve stable, such a taboo and incongruous topic needs addressing or we can continue to add another brick to the wall of silence.
Sex and emotions are the greatest gift mankind has been presented with and men and women alike have displayed singular talents to review in an ongoing basis their hardy explorations of the realms of lust, love and desire.
Marital rape is a nebulous and contentious topic that will stretch the elasticity of the courts as to how to define and prove it. In most cases , the predatory male species , completely led by the groin, are the culprits.
A major contributory factor in putting women off is infidelity in men.
Other factors may include polygamy, substance abuse, violent tendencies, health issues, perversion and a whole plethora of excuses.
Familiarity made sex as much a domestic chore as washing the dishes – if it did not need to be completed, there was little to be mourned. However, necessity can be a cruel master. It is funny how overnight, women become unsusceptible to male stirrings and worldly desires, how they remain puritanical after opting for a form of celibacy, basically finding virtue in self-flagellation.
Many women find themselves under the undesirable obligation of intimacy and hence go on to refuse their philandering hubbies their conjugal rights. It is however very true when they say that many women crave the security of marriage but don't want to feel the intimacy if it.
In the early days, she makes the nest, adding twigs, thinking about the little chickadees. The husband helps with the nest but misses the hunting. But then the chickadees grow up and fly away, the child-bearing bailiwick falls away.
Substance abuse too can be the principal flaw, the ingredient in the cocktail of lust that sours the matrimonial drink.
Time and experience have taught many women that true sex appeal is based on not so much as what a man can do to her, as for her.
Not addressing the problem timeously may build impregnable barriers and it won't be long before there is a nagging sense that the best times have come and gone, never to return.
The Star