Tod Akin's Right, but He's Really Wrong.

[donquixote99]

Tod Akin is the 'legitimate rape' guy, remember? He collected no end of grief for that bit of syntax. It was such a public opinion disaster for the Republicans that he was pressured to apologize, and he did. Still, he lost his 2012 senate race anyway. And now he's taking the apology back.

He does this in his new book, “Firing Back: Taking on the Party Bosses and Media Elite to Protect Our Faith and Freedom." The title indicates that Akin feels badly used. Basically, it's his contention that the reaction against 'legitimate rape' was a lot of 'willful misunderstanding.' And he's got a point.

Everyone reacted as if he was using 'legitimate rape' to mean what it sounds like: proper rape, permitted rape, even good rape. But he thinks all his critics knew or should have known that what he meant was 'real rape.' If it's real rape, against the woman's will, the stress and trauma will act to prevent conception, in most cases, Akin continues to believe. So he now insists he said nothing wrong.

I agree with Akin in that his critics should have known he was trying to say 'real rape.' After all, his critics were liberals and/or professional writers, so their language skills vastly exceeded his. Correctly decoding his message would in general have been child's play for them. They just succumbed, in the midst of campaign season, to an irresistible temptation to get some big licks in by exploiting a bad choice of words.

But there's a deeper problem, one that Akin probably does not suspect that he has. Consider a bit of folk wisdom one still hears now and then (though it's no longer respectable). It's purportedly advice for women. It assigns responsibility for the trauma of rape to the woman, and is unsympathetic to the point of misogyny. It goes like this: "If rape is inevitable, lie back and enjoy it."

Now, regarding 'legitimate rape.' We immediately ask 'Well, what is 'illegitimate rape, that is, not real or not actual rape?' The answer would seem to be 'when the woman consents, at some level.' When she takes the old folk advice that continues to seem good to the unreconstructed male attitudes found so often in conservative circles. If the woman does not physically resist, or at some point stops resisting, it's not really rape. She chose to lie back and enjoy it.

Behind the 'legitimate rape' comment is the belief that rape often isn't 'legitimate,' that is, not 'real rape,' because the women really want it. That belief is what makes Akin a man who actually does believe in 'legitimate rape,' in the sense of 'good rape.' That belief is what makes him wrong, even if that's not what he was trying to say at the time. That belief is what makes him yet another Republican pig.