(No Words Can Appropriately Title this Entry)
If this blog entry were a movie, it’d easily be rated R, if not NC-17. Please proceed at your own discretion.
There have been a large number of tweets in my twitter feed about one of Missouri’s Representatives to the U.S. House of Representatives, Todd Akin’s comments that “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” I find it morally repugnant that an elected official would say this, let alone one would say this and have the support of people from his party.
“Legitimate Rape” is a codeword to separate date rape from other forms of rape. Implicitly, people believe date rape to be less severe than forcible rape. From my own experience, I can make an argument that the opposite is true. Forcible rape by a stranger doesn’t violate the emotional and physical trust that you’ve placed in someone. Date rape does. This is not to belittle other forms of rape. Forcible rape is violent in different ways than date rape.
Date rape takes something from you, it puts a road bump in any subsequent intimate encounters, “Will he rape me?” That is not the thought that you want going through your head during a romantic encounter.
It may seem odd for a man to be discussing rape from the perspective of the victim. We have a prominent narrative in our society that rape is always a man raping a woman. While this is the most likely scenario, women can rape men, men can rape men, and women can rape women.
I was raped on a date when I was seventeen. Not only was I a victim of date rape, it was the first time I had ever been sexually intimate with someone.
The proper words and sounds have not been created by man to express the anger and rage that I feel. He took the experience of my first time from me and perverted it into a horrible memory. Now, whenever I think of the first time I kissed a guy, or the first time I cuddled naked with another guy, I have the memory of telling him to stop and him telling me “You’ll get used to the feeling.” That is something I can never change.
I was raped on a date when I was seventeen during the first time I was ever sexually intimate with anyone. So when some out of touch asshole politician says that a woman can’t get pregnant from legitimate rape, I want to eviscerate his words and his elected position from any published history, because he does not deserve the respect to be known to people in the future. He does not deserve to leave a legacy when he belittles the history of those of us who have been raped.
Representative Akin may you disappear from our history.