LOL!! I would love to know who you have been sleeping with, because this has NOT been my experience!!
Vaginal tearing most definitely does occur with rape, and even sometimes in consentual sex, because this "drop of a hat" lubricating vagina just doesn't exist for most women.
I'm referring to studies done about arousal. They checked penile tumescence and vaginal lubrication via blood flow monitors and showed people pictures of a variety of things while asking them to rate how turned on they were. Men in general reacted physically to the images they said aroused them, but women reacted physically to *anything* even vaguely sexual, from monkeys mating to an aerobics class to suggestively shapes cakes, and completely without regard to their reported feelings of arousal. Were all of these women actually just perverts who secretly got off on monkeys? The study concluded (much more reasonably, to my mind) that a woman's physical response is nowhere near as strongly tied as a male's physical response to mental attraction and arousal, and is likely an automatic response to sexual images or situations in which the body tries to protect itself from forced invasion.
But that's okay. Keep telling women that if they get wet, they're turned on and getting gratification. It doesn't have any implications for rape victims dealing with their trauma or anything.
I see a few places where I seem to be having a very different discussion than other people. Let me see if I can address those.
1) Physiological vs. Mental arousal
I think it's pretty common knowledge that physiological arousal does not equal mental arousal. So, we need to be very clear which one we are talking about in any particular point.
2) Lubrication vs. Arousal
I checked on GoogleScholar but couldn't track down the study Scattercat refers to, so I can't comment on that specifically. But, *by definition*, lubrication is a component of physiological arousal. Now, that doesn't mean that physiological arousal is a necessary and sufficient condition for lubrication. Many women don't lubricate even upon full physical arousal (that's where K-Y jelly comes in). Conversely, lubrication can be completely unrelated to arousal (of any kind), due to factors such as ovulation, disease, etc. So, its actually even more complex than an autonomic response.
3) Arousal vs. Consent
The legal community seems pretty clear on the concept that arousal (of any kind) does NOT equal consent. So, even if someone were to consider lubrication = arousal, it doesn't follow that they immediately jump to lubrication = consent. We need to be very careful in attributing such a jump to others.
4) Ejaculation vs. Lubrication
My original post was actually about female ejaculation, not lubrication. Ejaculation does involve release, and so physiological gratification. Again, gratification does not legally equal consent. So, here too, we need to be very careful in attributing such assumptions to others.
5) Lubrication: Rape vs. Bad Lover
I understand that those who took offense at my post are approaching the whole lubrication thing from the point of "We don't want society telling a woman that because she ejeculated, moaned, was lubricated, what-ever, it wasn't rape". That's a vary noble and valid goal. I am approaching the lubrication discussion from the point of "We don't want a lazy lover thinking he doesn't need to worry about foreplay, because the woman will "juice up" as soon as he penetrates her". In my opinion, stamping out that kind of thinking will benefit many more women on a daily basis, and so is an equally noble and valid goal.
I hope that this clarifies my position, and that everyone will now understand that I never said any of the things people keep assuming I did.
On a side note, I have been completely blown over, and thereby intrigued, by how people bring their own biases to the discussion and impose those on other people's statements. I think we all need to be more careful about that.