Beyond Possession

Redefining Bodily Autonomy and Consent in Marriage

A candid exploration of how marriage is often erroneously viewed as a license for ownership. This essay challenges the normalization of non-consensual acts and calls for a new standard of partnership based on mutual respect.

A marriage license is not a contract for lifelong sexual possession. By examining the systemic failures in how society conditions men to be domineering and women to be submissive, it becomes clear that true intimacy requires mutual respect and unwavering bodily autonomy—not the entitlement often masquerading as love.

A Marriage License does NOT equal Consent!

A Marriage License is like a business license—it sets up a partnership and affords that partnership discounts from other businesses to help it operate. A business being able to purchase supplies at wholesale is analogous to insurance benefits of married couples.

Having a business license does NOT allow one partner to embezzle from the other; but, husbands seem to think a marriage license allows him to take his wife at any time he pleases as his sexual property.

I will NEVER marry again! My experiences with marriage include being yelled at, berated, having finances withheld, having my movements monitored and restricted, being isolated from family and friends, and being beaten and raped. This was my first marriage.

Despite my second husband knowing what I endured in my first marriage, my second marriage did nothing to help me see men any differently despite my hopes that this man was different. In my second marriage, my body was treated like his property that he could literally grab pieces of whenever he pleased. He repeatedly refused to take “STOP” and “NO” for an answer during oral sex. And, I was awakened several times to his penis being inside of me or awakened to being stroked, both without my conscious consent.

Men somehow think this lack of respect and lack of boundaries is love. It is the furthest thing from it! The use of the word love is an excuse for, let’s call it what it is, MOLESTATION AND RAPE!

A marriage license is NOT blanket consent to a husband for the rest of the woman’s life. A woman does NOT sign over her bodily autonomy to a man when he puts a ring on her finger! A man might think this is the case because most women just acquiesce out of fear of displeasing her husband. And, let’s not forget the contribution porn plays in men’s ideas about what women want and will allow.

Females have been groomed from the time they are born to be pleasers of their man. Males are taught from the time they are born to be domineering and take what they want.

I imagine the divorce rate has risen; because, women have had enough of being treated as property, a plaything, and only there to meet the needs of others.

The divorce rate could go back down, if males were taught to respect women, to respect their bodily autonomy, and learn that there are a multitude of things in life that show love other than sex, most of them more important to women than sex.

A new attitude about sex needs to come into full maturity. It is an act between PARTNERS! BOTH get a say in the when, how, where, what, and why! NIETHER gets to use it as a form of control or manipulation!

Let’s bring the old-time definition into reality and let it truly become love-making.