FORCED COITUS IN MARRIAGE

To determine the degree of association of sex and aggression in Rungus society, we will now explore the questions as to whether or not forced coitus exists in marriage and whether or not it is recognized as such in the Rungus conceptual system. Does a husband force his wife to have coitus against her will, or does he give her the choice to refuse coitus? If forced intercourse occurs, is it recognized as having happened or is it an unmarked event? And if it is recognized as having happened, at what level is the response? Is it handled at the level of interpersonal relations or at the level of community sanctions? That is, does the jural system recognize the right of a spouse to refuse to have coitus?

It is stated that a wife may refuse intercourse at any time, and her wishes will be accepted. It is expected that women will want to refrain from intercourse during their menstrual period, if they are sick, or after giving birth. However, a husband will get angry if he is frequently refused by his wife, and this will be the cause of disputes and divorce. Specifically, one informant stated that if a man's wife no longer wants intercourse, the man just gets up and leaves.

A man may also show no interest in intercourse. But if lack of interest in intercourse on the part of either spouse continues, it is suspected by the other that he or she is having an affair.

However, it is known that there are men who will tabpa'an, "hold on to", "grab hold of" their wives to induce intercourse, but this is a rare occurrence. It is important to note that tabpa'an is also used in jural cases where a woman is grabbed hold of by a man, a fineable offense, or is induced to have intercourse, again a finable offense. But in the case of a wife, there are no jural sanctions against such behavior. That is, a wife induced to have intercourse against her will, if it occurs, does not bring it up before the village moot. I say if it occurs, for we have no cases of intercourse in such instances being consummated. In time, one informant said, this kind of behavior would be a source of arguments between the man and his wife, and, if she hadn't already, she would return to her parents' household (lumaping). And she will stay there until the matter is resolved satisfactorily. And a husband to get her to come back would have to give a small piece of brassware to his father-in-law.

There was a case of this about 1972 in a neighboring village. Two weeks after his wife gave birth, the husband wanted to have intercourse. The term used in the narration of this case was mongizut, "to induce intercourse", "to get her to fuck", a term that may be substituted for tabpa'an. The usual waiting period is about three months, which is the time when the child begins to smile, or until the wife is no longer is sore. However, this husband tried to pressure his wife into it, so she left for her father's house. She wouldn't come back until her father made her husband promise not to try this again, and if he did, the father said he would bring about a divorce.

Is There Forced Coitus in Those Cases Where the Bride Does Not Accept Her Husband?

Under certain conditions a bride will engage in behavior that is termed amu tumutun and which I have referred to as "the reluctant bride" pattern of behavior. The bride may refuse to acknowledge her husband's existence in her family's longhouse apartment. She may refuse to feed him, sleep near him, or go to the fields with him alone. If the husband makes advances, she may hit at him with her arm brass. Not only does she refuse to have intercourse with him, she also refuses to engage in the usual domestic tasks of a housewife. In other words she in essence shuns him (see L. W. R. Appell in this volume for a fuller description of this behavior).

The explanations given for this are: the spouse selected by the bride's parents is not acceptable; the bride is "ashamed", "embarrassed" at publicly performing the role of wife, which implies coitus, before her parents and other members of the longhouse; she may be afraid of engaging in coitus, particularly if she is very young; and finally if she does not show a certain amount of reticence it would indicate that she lacked character and wanted to have intercourse. At these times, does her husband use force to engage in coitus?

This is a difficult question to get reliable data on. In some instances a husband who is shunned will finally divorce his wife. In rare instances, a husband will threaten or attempt suicide. Frequently, the relatives of the bride will engage in activities to bring about a marital union, to pressure the bride into accepting the sexual advances of her husband.11 For instance, one bride during the daytime would sew up the bottom of her sleeping robe to prevent her husband from intercourse, while her sisters undid it when her back was turned.

From one informant we learned that even though she was engaging in coitus with her husband shortly after marriage, she nevertheless displayed amu tumutun behavior in front of her parents because she was "ashamed" of having her parents think she was engaging in sexual activities. In another instance, a woman who displayed this behavior for six months nevertheless had become pregnant.

So we have to deal with the unresolvable problem of disentangling public from private behavior.

Sometimes the shunned spouse will resort to love magic to bring about coitus with the reluctant spouse. However, there are no forms of magic, as there are among the Gusii of Africa (LeVine 1959:968), that a bride might use to hinder or bring about the failure of her husband's sexual competence.

It is not entirely clear in each case of rejection of the husband whether these behaviors of the bride represent deep-seated feelings or whether they are only a presentation of the social self to the longhouse community, a public display of how a proper young woman should feel about the possibility of sexual relations. Whatever the case, we have no evidence that a woman in any instance was forced to have intercourse. She was always able to refuse her husband's advances.

However, in one unusual, ambiguous case of a bride rejecting her husband, her husband complained that he had only been able to have coitus with his wife by deceit or cunning. When he would try otherwise, she would be angry with him. So he would wait till she was asleep. Then he would quickly pull up her skirt and have coitus. One wonders if this could have occurred without some acquiescence on the part of the bride. And in this particular case her shunning her husband may have been brought about more by his past behavior rather than any ambivalent feelings towards fulfilling the role of wife. Prior to initiating bride-price negotiations for her, he had been involved in a case of alleged fornication with another woman, and it was said that his wife was still angry about this. Also, she may have had a certain reluctance to get involved physically with him because of this. He would have been ritually "hot", if he actually had engaged in fornication. Only the public sacrifice of a pig could nullify the ritual consequences of his act. And if he were hot, this disability would have endangered the health of his wife and any children (see L. W. R. Appell in this volume for a discussion of the consequences of the ritual heat arising from illicit intercourse). Their marriage occurred in 1962, and the shunning of her husband went on for a couple of months. But by 1986 they had nine children.

It is important to note that if a husband mistreats his wife, causes bruises or hurts her, she has recourse to her father who will sue his son-in-law. A husband is not allowed to beat, hurt, or injure his wife.

Finally, the reluctant bride behavior only occurs with women on a first marriage. Remarriages as a result of being widowed or divorced do not involve any such behavior on the part of women.