Notes On Mad Wife: A Memoir by Kate Hamilton
STRAIGHT PEOPLE ARE NOT OKAY! OMG!
In Mad Wife: A Memoir** Kate Hamilton (a pseudonym) details the violent dissolution of her marriage after staying in a relationship where her husband, Rick, expected her to have sex with him whether she wanted to or not. This sort of disinterest in and disregard for consent is rape, though far too many people are reluctant to recognize it as such. In Mad Wife, it’s alarming to read about a husband who so callously disregards his partner’s wants and needs in service of his own. It’s heartbreaking to read how fundamentally incapable Rick is of having an emotional relationship with his wife. The author’s loneliness and isolation during the worst of her marriage is palpable. And, it quickly becomes clear that repair is not be possible with a man who fundamentally does not understand what needs repair or why.
At times, Hamilton’s story is painfully familiar, the way we carve off pieces of ourselves to satisfy someone else’s needs, until there is little or nothing of ourselves left. Worse, that other person knows we’re whittling ourselves away, and they either don’t care or they welcome how small we’re willing to make ourselves. And, Hamilton argues, heteronormativity is predicated on our simply accepting this as the state of affairs. “If we accept that men are aware that some if not much of the sex they make happen is unwanted,” she writes, “then the only way to preserve our shared societal delusion that men who coerce sex are not raping women is to hold tight to the accompanying belief that a woman who submits to sex she really doesn’t want experiences it as no big deal; as a small price to pay for a man’s pleasure, relief, or validation; as the minor inconvenience of ten minutes lost out of her evening.”
It is a sad, damning reality but most women experience, to one degree or another, with sexual coercion. So much of the straight man’s approach to sex is predicated on wearing women down with persistence and/or cajoling and/or whining and guilting and/or otherwise emotionally manipulating a woman into sexual congress. They do this instead of, say, making themselves appealing by being emotionally intuitive, interesting, curious about other people, well-groomed, and/or kind. Oftentimes, it feels easier to just give in and get it over with, or give in to avoid being further harmed and that is, ultimately, not consent. It is the opposite of consent, which Hamilton calls, “empty consent,” or “submission that may look like consent to the pressuring man but does not feel like consent to the uninterested woman. It’s ‘consent’ to an asserted obligation a woman feels she can’t avoid, or whose avoidance seems more difficult, or dangerous, than submission.”
Throughout Mad Wife, Hamilton details the ways in which she was forced to give empty consent to “Rick,” her now ex-husband. Their difficulties quickly escalates from bad to worse to intolerable as she tries to make the marriage work for the variety of reasons people generally have when they try to fix a broken thing because, they recognize, that is what is expected of them. Because divorce carries such a stigma, even now. Because when children are involved, leaving is a different kind of complicated.