If you begin having sex in the great state of North Carolina, want to stop, and your partner forcibly restrains you to continue having intercourse, well, you should have made up your mind beforehand. Once you've initially consented to the act, you relinquish the right to your own body, according to a 1979 state Supreme Court ruling: "no rape has occurred though the victim later withdraws consent during the same act of intercourse." If your partner ignores your pleas to get off you or causes physical injury to keep you from leaving, that's still just not rape.
And this is not just one of those laws that no one pays attention to (like in Minnesota it's technically illegal to sleep naked). This law has been practiced:
Using this ruling, a district attorney recently decided to drop a rape case against a high school football player, which brought this disturbing state of affairs to light. As Cara at The Curvature points out, there are additional issues with this particular failure to prosecute sexual assault charges, because the victim told reporters that she never agreed to have sex with her boyfriend in the first place. Regardless of this additional dimension of wrongfully ignoring the accusations of rape survivors (a not unusual practice in law enforcement), the rationale utilized to dismiss the case exposes a major legal problem. Even if you accept that the victim withdrew consent, the law says that's just kosher.
Seriously, wtf? This is a classic case of institutionalized sexism, and it makes me want to puke.
The blogger mentioned above has more information on this and other similar, sickening laws.
