Understanding consent is key to untangling this web
Because 2020 wasn’t bad enough, I ended the year trying to figure out why anyone would think that the Bridgerton sex scene was rape. It wasn’t rape. But first, let me explain how I got there.
Early New Year’s Eve, I came across an article describing how our Bridgerton heroine Daphne raped her husband, Simon, a handsome duke. The word rape is jarring in any context and is one that gets my attention, so I read on.
And if all I’d done were stick to the articles, I too would think it was rape.
Ok, I thought, I’ve got the time, and you’ve got my attention, let’s see what’s going on.
Calling up Netflix in the early afternoon, I started watching Bridgerton, a Regency drama set in 1813 London. Replete with the expected characters, costumes, and everything else we love from renditions of Jane Austen’s work. And I, of course, loved it.
It would surprise no one to learn the plot ran a predictable course while avoiding spoilers. It begins with a formal coming out, then a series of suitors paraded across the screen. It ends in a marriage — a marriage following Daphne’s ascent as the most eligible young lady of the season. Marrying a handsome but brooding young duke with daddy issues was her ultimate mark of success.
Episode six begins with the newlyweds having sex around the grounds of their Downton Abby like estate. This compels us to recall the joys of young love as we follow them and sets us up for what happens next.
At around the forty-minute mark, our duchess asks her lady’s maid about sex. The duchess had no sexual education or understanding of the role semen plays in conception.
It seems the Duke liked to pull out at the critical moment, spilling his seed on the ground. This was the reason for her question to her maid. For the first time, connecting children and sperm, an unspoken question appears to rise in her mind, but we don’t know what it is.
The duke had earlier disclosed that he cannot have children.Understand those words. Cannot. He does not explain himself further but was emphatic enough.
Curious, I suppose, the duchess mounts her man in the throes of sex and rides him to completion. I watched the scene five times, and this was the sequence:
- They begin making love.
- He mounts her in the missionary position on the bed.
- She directs him with a slight touch to roll onto his back.
- She mounts him and begins her race to the finish.
We see her with eyes open on him, but we don’t know if she closed them. The camera shifts to his face from her point of view for the last seconds before his orgasm.
We see lustful desire on the face of a man who is in the thick of desire. Then two slight grimaces. Grimaces like those my lover makes when he holds himself back as he tries to heighten his pleasure.
And a second later, Simon orgasms.
We don’t see him attempt to show he did not wish to ejaculate inside her. His grimaces could have been that, but then, we don’t know what faces he makes during sex. And we don’t know if she saw them.
What I saw on his face didn’t appear to say, I don’t want to ejaculate inside you, but I don’t want to ejaculate inside you yet.
We hear nothing other than their lustful noise. An article I read mentioned he’d said “wait” twice. I watched the scene five times and didn’t hear the word, even as I searched for it. I also didn’t hear the word “no.” The subtitles say “wait” twice when he grimaces, but who sees the subtitles? Not Daphne.
There are two ways to show consent in any sexual encounter. The first is explicit, like saying, “yes.” The second is implicit. This includes continued participation in the acts as they change or evolve. We can use them in combination or on their own.
There are also two ways to withdraw consent, and again they are explicit and implicit. Saying “no” is unmistakable. The implicit way is to show you are no longer willing to participate in the act, or the subsequent act, by taking some form of non-verbal action. We can also use them in combination or on their own.
The only challenge with implied consent is the person you are having sex with has to understand what you are trying to imply. What does a grimace imply? What does a grimace imply if the other party’s eyes are closed? The implication is vague in the former, and in the latter, there is none.
When our duke comes to his senses after his orgasm, he asks his duchess, “what have you done?”
Pain replaces the post-orgasmic bliss on his face, and with a rush of anger, an argument between them ensues.
The duke tells her he assumed she had known what he meant when he said he could not have children. He appears to understand at that moment that she hadn’t connected his words with the reason he had pulled out.
For her, the penny drops. She reminds him of the difference between cannot have and does not want children. She also realizes he broke his wedding vow to accept children into their marriage.
Up to this moment, she’d believed her spouse had been honest.
Could she have asked him to confirm what her maid had told her about sperm? Yes, but based on how she reacted to his question about masturbation, I’m not sure she had the ability or language to discuss the issue with him. Would ignorance excuse rape? It wouldn’t, and there were other factors at play as well.
Forget for a minute that this is period fiction. If someone says they cannot have children, it is reasonable to assume that means no child will be forthcoming from any sex act.
If that same person makes a habit of ejaculating elsewhere, for a woman with no sexual education, there’s no reason to connect the two. “Cannot,” was an established fact by Simon, and ejaculating outside of her was an apparent preference. I say apparently because the duke never stated this was a preference or anything else about it.
Based on her information, it is reasonable to assume Simon could not impregnate her if he ejaculated inside her.
Could she have hoped he was wrong? Could she have sought to keep his sperm inside her and to show him he could have children? Perhaps, but is that an assault? He never said he didn’t want children, so she inferred from his wedding vow only that he couldn’t.
It was also reasonable to believe Simon consented because he took no explicit or implicit action, either before or during the sex, that could lead Daphne to believe otherwise. By vowing to accept children into their marriage, stating he could not, and assuming she had knowledge she didn’t, he further confused the situation.
Simon states, “I thought you knew…”
I read in various articles that Daphne gaslights Simon from this point on. But to me, the gaslighting starts here.
Simon spends the next two episodes, brooding, arguing, shaming, and humiliating his wife for something he thought she knew. He lied to her and blamed her for not knowing something he never told her — a classic gaslighting tactic.
If not having children was so important to him, you’d think he would have brought it up. He had asked her if she masturbated in an earlier episode, so talking about sex didn’t seem to be an issue for him.
Instead, what this sounds like is a failure to communicate. And a failure to communicate is not rape.
I will not degrade myself by using the facetious argument that their size differential was such that she could not rape him. Female teachers have raped larger students for decades — size isn’t the issue.
Consent is.
Rape occurs when one party does not stop the sexual contact the other party wants to be stopped. Period. Full stop.
But our duke did nothing to show he withdrew consent, and his grimaces were not enough. If her eyes were closed, she wouldn’t have even seen them.
He would have known that it would be more difficult to withdraw when she mounted him. His assumption that she would somehow know to do that is absurd.
What I saw was a man who regretted what happened. I also saw a man who didn’t want to take responsibility for creating the situation.
I didn’t see a wife laying a trap for her husband, but one that believed his lie. That isn’t rape.
I didn’t read the book, and I don’t know how the scene played out there, so I can’t comment. So rape may have very well occurred in the book.
I’m not talking about the book, but some may have looked for rape in the series because of the book. This opens the potential for confirmation bias by those who saw rape in both.
Confirmation bias occurs when you only accept evidence supporting a previously held belief while disregarding the facts that don’t.
Men are raped, and we do not take it seriously. Male rape jokes will undoubtedly remain the last reserve of the rape culture we are trying to eradicate. Linking that to Bridgerton only trivializes the meaning of male rape. And doing that will only prolong rape culture by confusing what consent is rather than clarifying it.
Simon lied to his wife, assumed she knew things he’d never discussed with her, and then relied on her to disengage before his orgasm — all without explicitly or implicitly indicated in the heat of the moment he did not want to orgasm inside her.
This was a failure to communicate on Simon’s part, not rape on Daphne’s.
© Teresa J. Conway, 2021An Injustice!
A new intersectional publication, geared towards voices, values, and identities!medium.com
By Teresa J Conway on .
Exported from Medium on April 8, 2021.
