What will happen next, I ask.
They’ll arrest him. Or they’ll ask him to come in for an interview and if he doesn’t they’ll arrest him.
They’ll question him. In the most thorough detail.
He won’t be able to have his wife there to hide behind.
OK, I say.
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It was a great relief to me to arrive at the point where I could say yes, I love and desire you but there are limits to the circumstances in which I will agree to the expression of those feelings.
It likely never occurs to most women with safe lives that they might have to take a stand on these things. In my experience of adult love the question of limits had never before arisen. That was a great good fortune for which I never showed any gratitude, taking it for granted.
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Bodily Integrity. Is the inviolability. Of the physical body.
It emphasises. The importance. Of personal autonomy.
And the self-determination of human beings. Over their own bodies.
It considers. The violation of bodily integrity. As an unethical infringement. Intrusive.
And possibly criminal.
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There is the moment of confusion when you first dimly perceive things are not going as planned. You doubt your perceptions and you think, oh, it will get back on track in a minute and we’ll do what we’d said we’d do.
It’s one thing if this happens in the abstract. It’s an entirely other when there are bodies involved. It’s like the difference between speaking and writing. We honour the written down, but we have it back to front. It’s the speech act that counts. Body to body, eye to eye, presence to presence. The integrity of the body.
People make this mistake all the time when they expect a correlation between the writer and what the writer writes. I did. It may be there. Equally, it may not. But what a body enacts upon a body is unmistakable.
For a brief instant when he turned the vehicle in an entirely unanticipated direction, I wondered if I was being hijacked. But I did not know the city and for all I knew he could have been heading for another car park. And the notion of a man you love and who loves you hijacking you, is ridiculous in the extreme.
A warning from another dimension that flashes through the mind, immediately dismissed, recalled in retrospect where did that foreknowledge come from, which part of me knew and sounded a warning, what sixth sense, underdeveloped but alarmed enough to break through the concrete walls of rationality told me you are being hijacked, like someone who at the last-minute refuses to board a plane that goes on to crash. What is that, and why did I give it no credibility?
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The idea that because a woman has consented to a sexual relationship with a man it infers that he may have her whenever wherever and however he wants, is not quite as prevalent as it once was, though it has not entirely disappeared.
A woman does not give up her right to personal autonomy when she loves a man. A woman does not relinquish her right to self-determination when she loves a man. A woman retains her right to bodily integrity when she loves a man. All this is self-evident.
No, it is not.
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What will happen next?
He will be arrested. Or he will be asked to come in for a very thorough interview. If he refuses he will be arrested.
His wife will not be able to answer for him, or tell him what to say.
He will be held accountable.
For unethical infringement.
Intrusive.
And possibly criminal.
OK, I say.
The Practice of Goodness 