By Margaret Maffai
the daily cardinal
Your right to your vagina ends with penetration. That's right, ladies, once he's inside you, you can say no, scream no if you want and if he doesn't pull out, it isn't rape.
This was the Maryland Court of Appeals ruling last year in the state's first case of so-called ""post-penetration rape.""
The central issue in the case, Maryland v. Baby, is whether a woman who initially consents to sex, has the right to withdraw her consent after penetration.
If she agrees to sex and says, ""Stop, it hurts,"" or ""I don't want to do this anymore,"" and her partner forcibly continues with intercourse against her will, is that rape? In Maryland, it is not.
This decision, currently under appeal in Maryland's highest court, reveals a lurking threat to women's bodies and women's rights.
The court's decision represents an undercurrent of misogynistic legal decision-making that should be outdated.
Historically, a father or husband could sue a rapist for the cost to his business and reputation resulting from the ruination of his daughter or wife but a rape survivor had no legal standing of her own.
Penetration, the act that eliminates a woman's virginity, reputation and value on the marriage market, was the legally defined moment of rape.
However, this ancient dinosaur of legal thought is neglected in modern sexual assault discourse, and an exaggerated emphasis on penetration continues to gnaw away at women's sexual and political autonomy.
Responding to demeaning stereotypes about women and rape, courts have carved out a false distinction between so-called ""post-penetration"" rape and ""real"" rape.
This self-serving, patriarchal legal fiction, designed to protect innocent men against fickle women who arouse the unstoppable male urge to procreate, then change their minds and cry rape, gives courts an excuse to refuse to admit rape cases to a jury.
The Maryland court did just that, founding its decision on the logically bereft reasoning of the 1980 case Battle v. State, in which a man raped a grandmother while holding a screwdriver to her head and the court said. ""Ordinarily, if she consents prior to penetration and withdraws the consent following penetration, there is no rape.""
How the court in 1980 could have found the victim's submission at the point of a screwdriver constituted consent is as mysterious as the state court's assertion that its victim, alone in a car with two attackers, one of whom had already raped and sodomized her, consented when the second man asked if he could ""hit that.""
In the Ancient Greek play ""Lysistrata,"" the women of Sparta and Athens swear an oath to withhold sex from their husbands until they agreed to end a bloody war. Though it is unlikely that American women will take a similar stand, we owe it to ourselves and to each other to recognize our bodies as legal and political battlegrounds. Women should demand that the men and the courts of this country end their bloody assault on our sexual rights.
This April, we should recognize Sexual Assault Awareness Month. Write your judges, your prosecutors and your legislators. Tell them you believe so-called ""post-penetration"" rape is not any less criminal, any less valid or any less real than any other rape.
Men who continue to force intercourse after their partners ask them to stop should be prosecuted as rapists.
Until the courts begin to respect women's fundamental rights to bodily integrity, we must, like the women in ""Lysistrata,"" take great care with whom we choose to let in our bodies. We may not be able to get them out.
