Mutual Consent

One of the only places where the New Testament directly addresses rape or issues related to rape is 1 Corinthians 7:1-5.  Speaking of married couples, though legal marriage is absolutely irrelevant to what is a legitimate and hopefully lifelong romantic relationship (neither a church nor a state was there to "legitimize" marriages among the first humans), Paul writes, "The wife's body does not belong to her alone but also to her husband.  In the same way, the husband's body does not belong to him alone but also to his wife."  He goes on to add that any sexual abstinence as a couple is to be marked by mutual consent.  Yes, this is the only time the New Testament touches upon sexual consent directly, with every other condemnation of sexual immorality being broad, encompassing all of the sexual sins prohibited in Mosaic Law (with rape among them as the objectively worst one), or focusing on other sins in this category that do not involve physical force or any other means of manipulation into having sex.

It is as if husbands and wives share one body, and who hurts their own body willingly, outside of the likes of voluntary, consensual practices related to sexual pleasure?  The early verses of 1 Corinthians 7 emphasize that consent is a moral necessity for husbands and wives because this is the manner in which the body of the husband is the wife's and vice versa.  It does not say that it is only obligatory for one gender or the other to not prey on a lack of consent from the other party; also, inside of a marriage, there is just as much of a moral need for sexual consent as there is outside of it--there are interpersonal sexual acts that are nonsinful in contexts like dating depending on the intention, according to Mosaic Law (Deuteronomy 4:2), but acts like mutual masturbation or sexual fondling involving the unmarried that could otherwise be Biblically innocent still require consent.  Marriage, legal or otherwise, does not provide a place to do whatever a given spouse wants if it does not honor the consent of the other person, much less on the basis of their gender.

The explicitly egalitarian metaphysical and moral (yes, morality is a part of metaphysics, but I am distinguishing between the amoral and moral components of this) ideas Paul is putting forth are not suddenly being referenced in the Bible for the first time, as they are present from Genesis 1 onward or follow from what is established early in the Torah, including Deuteronomy 22:25-27's capital punishment laws for rape.  While this case law uses the example of an engaged woman as the victim, marital status, engagement status, gender, and age are irrelevant: rape is like murder, this passage says.  To murder one's own self is also sinful like inflicting it on other people, and since a husband and wife have mutual ownership of each other's bodies, they are to treat their partner's body as if it is their own when it comes to prioritizing consent as well.  So strong is the bond between husbands and wives supposed to be that they would not even think of pressuring the other into an unwilling sexual encounter.  It would be like inflicting undesired pain upon their very bodies.

Shared ownership does not, after all, mean that either party has a right to force or demand the other to perform sexual acts with them since each individual "owns" the other's body in a very specific sense.  That would contradict the "mutual consent" that Paul so clearly mentions (1 Corinthians 7:5).  A woman is not obligated to sacrifice her sexual autonomy to fulfill the whims of a man who believes female consent is nothing in the face of male desire, and a man is not obligated to sacrifice his sexual autonomy to fulfill the whims of a woman who might genuinely believe that men cannot be sexually assaulted by men because they always want sexual acts, or because a woman's desires matter more than his willingness.  Some gender stereotypes are extremely similar aside from the affiliated beliefs beyond them.  Both men and women are sometimes expected to simply submit to whatever a partner (or stranger) of the opposite gender wants.  However, if one of these groups has the right to not be sexually assaulted because they are human, so does the other.  As if Genesis 1:26-27 and Deuteronomy 22:25-27 did not already clarify this wholly, Paul holds this truth to the light again.