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About this quote

What does it mean?
Marriage often serves as a woman's main livelihood, and she may endure more unwanted sex in marriage than in prostitution.
In plain terms
Women often experience more unwanted sex in marriage than in prostitution.
What can you take from it?
Marriage can be a source of sexual coercion for women.

Where it applies

  • family law
  • women's rights advocacy

Putting it to work

  • reform marital consent laws

Questions to consider

  • What legal protections exist for marital consent?
  • How do economic factors influence marital dynamics?

Another view

The statement generalizes without data across cultures.

More from Bertrand Russell

  1. Even in civilized mankind faint traces of a monogamous instinct can sometimes be perceived.

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  2. The psychology of adultery has been falsified by conventional morals, which assume, in monogamous countries, that attraction to one person cannot coexist with …

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  3. Nine-tenths of the appeal of pornography is due to the indecent feelings concerning sex which moralists inculcate in the young; the other tenth is physiologica…

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