The other day I was thinking about the number of folks whose ancestors include a slaveowner and a slave, part of America’s weird cultural heritage. In passing I thought about how those offspring were all the products of rape.
So, the first question: is it possible for a slaveowner and a slave to ever have a consensual sexual relationship?
My initial response is that it’s not: by virtue of that incredibly unequal power relationship, it’s impossible for the slave to give meaningful consent. The slaveowner is raping the slave.
But then a different scenario occurred to me: what if a furious slave snapped and attacked a slaveowner, forcibly having sex with the slaveowner? In that case, it seems obvious to me that the slave raped the slaveowner, not vice versa.
And then I thought about the weirdness of this situation. It says that if the slaveowner consents to sex, the slaveowner is raping the slave. If the slaveowner does not consent to sex, the slave is raping the slaveowner. The slave’s consent is meaningless.
And I’m bothered by anything that denies the agency of anyone, whether or not they’re a slave.
What do folks think? FWIW, I think that, as counterintuitive as that interpretation is, there’s not a better interpretation of the situation.
The agency of a slave is certainly real and meaningful.
Slavery, even within American-style chattel slavery, encompassed a wide range of tones of relationships. Some of them were clearly as bad as any of us can imagine, or worse.
But it’s the ones that weren’t so bad that are probably hardest for us to conceive from the present vantage point. It’s wrong to suppose that slaves could not have feelings of loyalty, friendship, attraction for slaveowners, or other members of owners’ families. There are accounts of slaves defending their owners and homes in ways that don’t make much sense if slaves always perceived owners as only enemy and oppressor. Many slaveowner-class children were raised in large part by slaves; both parties to such relationships, I believe, have to acknowledge at least some elements of the other’s personhood.
Of course I’m not saying it was right, or that it wasn’t twisted in some fundamental ways. But we can recognize that certain kinds of contemporary relationships (parents, spouses, so on) can be supremely fucked-up and also containing genuine caring. It’s an insult to the memory of those who were enslaved to suggest that they were less capable of such decisions about their own values and feelings.
Throughout history slaves have often been valued by their owners as individuals; Roman legionaries who were forbidden to marrry from circa the time of Tiberius to that of Septimus Severus often took slavegirls who were their wives in all respect to the “mammys” who raised the plantation owners children and who loved and were loved.
Slavery is the absence of free choice. Not the absence of love or willingness though its not exactly overflowing with that either.
So here’s how the story goes - as told to me by an elderly maiden Aunt:
My Mother’s Great Grandmother was a slave in Meriweather County Georgia. She had a relationship with her owner’s son. When the owner passed away, the son agve her her freedom, and asked her to marry him. Instead, she left and went up North. She was concerned that any children they had would be declared slaves. And of course that the two of them would be murdered in their beds. . .
After Mr . Lincoln declared the slaves to be free she returned, married him, (in a religious, but obviously illegal ceremony) and they raised several children, my Great-Great-Grandmother among them. When she returned she brought with her “a substantial dowry.”
So, presumably their original relationship was consensual.
I think that “slave” is a label and that any time you use labels to talk about individuals, you start looking at them as a thing instead of a person. The same is true of “slaveowner,” too, frankly. When you get right down to it, these were human beings, with very complicated emotions, and you can’t really say anything definitively.
Slave wasn’t a label in this country initially, it was a legal status, as was slaveowner.
It’s certainly possible that a slave and owner had a consensual relationship aside from the relationship as slave and owner. But I still consider it impossible to have a consensual slave/owner relationship based on the legal interpretation of those terms.
I don’t see how this is any different than statutory rape laws are today. Yes, even if the 14 year old “consents,” we view that with skepticism because of the power differential and cognitive abilities.
The main issue is one of whether the slave would be, consciously or even unconsciously, agreeing because of the owner’s power and in order to try to ensure more favorable circumstances.
It’d be nearly impossible even for the people involved to be certain of their own motivations, much less for an outsider to determine their actual motivations. The slave may honestly care for the owner and be completely willing even if she wasn’t a slave, as in TruCelt’s story above. On the other hand, she may be doing it to gain more favorable circumstances for herself or family. Of course, many relationships have and continue to have this same motivation even now - anyone who has ever married ‘above their station’ may or may not count that as part of their motivation, consciously or otherwise.
jtgain, I’d say the cognitive abilities are a key difference. Nevertheless, this is a pretty good analogy, and it makes me think that my view makes some sort of sense. A 25-year-old and a 14-year-old can never have a consensual relationship under our current system. If the 25-year-old consents to sex, the adult is raping the child. If the 25-year-old doesn’t consent to sex, the child is raping the adult. This doesn’t present any legal problems.
Another key difference, though, is that this is a legal perspective. I’m unaware of a society that legalizes slavery but criminalizes sexual relationships between slaves and slaveowners, so discussing it from a hypothetical legal perspective is skewed. And as others have pointed out, individual situations get complicated. Theoretically it’s possible that a given slave could consent to sex with a given slaveowner, however rare or unlikely that could be.
As far as I know it was completely illegal for Caucasians to have sex with Africans in the slave-owning days of the US. Even if the African member of the relationship was free, mixing the races was considered to be a horrendous thing to do. And was done constantly.
While it’s hard for us to imagine legal slavery, that was pretty much the norm through most of human history. So yeah, I’m sure there was plenty of consensual sex, although it would be very hard to determine, and it was almost certainly the exception rather than the rule.
One interesting thought… there seems to be a fairly common sexual fetish of being dominated, and there are “consensual” master/slave relationships that people enter into. I wonder if any real slaves had such a fetish and actually “got off” on their condition. It’s a really weird thought, but if X% of people naturally have that fetish, then X% of the slaves probably would have, too. No?
I would think X would be pretty small for people who actually want to be on the slave side of a real slave/master relationship. The X for the master side may be quite large.
Maybe, though I imagine part of the reason people find it erotic is because its sort of exotic and taboo. For a real slave, who spends all day taking orders, doing the same in the bedroom is probably less fun and more like taking your work home with you.
Yes, but there are people who enter into full time relationships as master/slave. There was a recent GD thread on that subject.
I agree that there may be something different in your suceptability to the fetish if you are born a slave, but I don’t think we understand the whole issue well enough to say one way or another.
We do know, as a fact, that many people get off on being dominated, some to the point of wanting to be treated as a slave. My question is not so much about speculation one way or another, but whether or not we know if any real slaves get off in the same way.
I don’t know that there actually are, for a meaningful definition of “slave.” If you’re doing it by choice, and if you can leave anytime you want to, you’re not a slave. Slaves do the work they do because if they don’t they’ll be tortured or killed. I think that dynamic is literally universal to all slave relationships.
Some people enter into make-believe master-slave relationships, but that’s not the same thing, any more than furries are actual cats and hamsters.
Similarly, there are plenty of people who get off on fantasies in which they’re the victims of rape. I suspect the number of people who gain genuine (not merely physiological) pleasure from actually being raped approaches zero.
When you say “rape,” what do you mean exactly? Are we talking about any particular law against rape, all such laws in general or are we in some abstract morality land that some people think exists?
As far as criminal law goes, I don’t think the rule that a minor “can’t consent” to sex is rooted in the actual lack of ability of a minor to choose to have sex. It’s rooted in the idea that their consent is disregarded for their own protection.
So, if there were a rule that having sex with a slave was rape, there’s no problem of “lack of agency” on the part of the slave because the rule is slave-protective, not a denial of a slave’s ability to agree to have sex.
Do we know that the Mammys loved these children, though? From the perspective of the white slave owners/children, they may have thought that the slaves genuinely cared but how could they ever be sure? The slaves were doing a job and had a vested interest in looking like they cared. I’m sure there must have been resentment that they had to spend so much time caring for the children of their owners instead of with their real families.