Todd Akin Is Not the First To Cry “Legitimate Rape”
I was just barely seventeen years old when I moved out on my own, and it was six months later that I found myself living in a house that rented out rooms for a couple hundred dollars a month. My room had a deadbolt, so I was pretty happy with it, until New Years Eve, 1985.
That night I’d gone to a party but was the designated driver and refrained from drinking. I got home pretty early, and was in bed by 2am. Around 4 in the morning, I woke up with my nightgown pulled up and someone touching my breasts.
It was my landlord. He’d let himself into my room, into my bed, and was in the process of trying to rape me. He was fairly small, thankfully, so I tossed him off of me. I ran to the phone to call my friends for help, but he ripped the phone out of the wall before I said too much. I spent the next half hour running around the house trying to get away from him, until my friends arrived with baseball bats and got me out of there.
Once I was safe, I called the police. The officer who was taking my report closed his notebook without writing anything down after I told him what happened: he said, “Well, it sounds like to me this is just a goodnight kiss that went too far.”
I was livid.
My mother, an avid feminist, had taught me well. I frostily replied to the cop, “He is my LANDLORD. I was NOT ON A DATE WITH HIM. He BROKE INTO MY ROOM. I am filing charges.”
From then on out, it was a battle. The District Attorney attempted to reduce the charges to domestic assault, since he lived in the house as well. I fought with them until a new DA was assigned, and finally, he was charged with sexual assault. He accepted a plea for assault and battery and served sixty days and was required to write me a letter of apology. I also sued him privately for causing me to lose my home, and won a settlement there too.
At every turn I was challenged on the legitimacy of my claim of being sexually assaulted. The man held me down, attempted to take off my nightgown, and kissed me brutally, chased me around my house, and prevented me from calling help. Even so, I was told that my case wasn’t enough.
This happens every single day to women in this country, and to women that were far more brutalized than I was. If you are raped in the United States and try to prosecute your attacker, you must be willing to withstand a non-stop barrage of claims that you, in fact, asked for it.
So I wasn’t too surprised to hear Congressman Todd Akin say that in “legitimate rape” pregnancy isn’t a concern for women.
Which – let me just make this entirely fucking clear – is BULLSHIT. Pregnancy DOES happen from rape, and it’s incredibly unlikely that the women that get pregnant from rape consider those babies to be gifts from God.
While this incredibly ignorant statement by Todd Akin is bad enough, it’s even worse when you pull back and look at the bigger picture, such as noting that Mr. Akin co-sponsored an antichoice bill that also attempted to redefine rape with current Vice Presidential Candidate Paul Ryan. Paul Ryan, of course, is the guy that wrote a personhood amendment (meaning defining a fetus as a person from the moment of conception) that didn’t mention the word “woman” or “mother” once.
To my (admittedly feminist) eye, it appears to me that men like Akin and Ryan believe that women do not own their sexual organs or functions; that women’s bodies are, in fact, the property of men. I think there is a part of them that also believe women who insist on claiming ownership of their bodies – including those sexual bits – are dirty, dirty whores that deserve what they get. I do not believe that they love and want to protect babies – if they did, they’d do more for the babies already here. They simply want to control how women use their bodies, and forcing women to remain pregnant (or get pregnant because they’d also like to ban most forms of birth control) is the single best way to control them.
Knowing that, well, it doesn’t shock me one bit that Todd Akin believes only in “legitimate” rape. His disregard for life – and by life, I mean the life of women – proves to me that he’s not “pro life.” He’s just yet another douche bag that is anti-woman, so saying that women don’t get pregnant from legitimate rape is just par for the course. Why are we so surprised?
Cecily writes for Babble at MomCrunch as well as at her own blog, Uppercase Woman. Clearly she’s in love with words.
I’m not surprised, Cecily, I’m saddened. Sad that he has gotten to the position he currently holds because this cannot be the first time he’s uttered such nonsense. There are others who believe him, women included (OK, well THAT might shock me a bit, but not really). It is beyond unfair that rape needs to be so utterly “determinable” because you word is not enough. I never attempted to prosecute the man who inappropriately touched me when I was a teen. I never spoke of it until earlier this year, actually, and even then it was evasive and vague. There is such a stigma associated with rape: the did I cause it, is it my fault, everyone’s going to judge me for “letting it happen.” Damn. If only all those women pregnant from rape knew their bodies had the ability to simply not become impregnated with sperm forcibly inserted into them. Pity.
I was shocked by his comments. I know there’s a group of people (mostly men, it seems) who believe this, but they usually are clever enough to phrase their wording just so instead of coming out and saying “If you get pregnant from a rape then the sex was really consensual.” That’s what Akin basically said. He claimed women have “defense mechanisms” that prevent pregnancy in cases of “legitimate rape.” So if a woman gets pregnant from a rape then it obviously wasn’t rape because you don’t get pregnant from rape. Circular logic at it’s finest (and quite possibly at it’s stupidest).
He is now backpedaling, claiming he misspoke. “Misspoke” clearly means “I should have phrased it slightly differently to avoid the PF firestorm I’m getting though I really do believe all that stuff.”
Hopefully, something good comes from Akin’s idiocy: Maybe the reporting of it will spread some real information about rape and pregnancy, dispelling any misconceptions people might have about it.
I was really hoping you’d write about this a-hole. And you did. Thank you.
This story made me so furious, I could hardly breathe. Thank you, Cecily, for saying what I would have liked to. If men had vaginas, the world would change for the better in about ten minutes….
So. Completely. Infuriating.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0214_030214_genghis.html
This is proof that rape victims do get pregnant. It is also proof that National Geographic has some douchebag writers as well. “Lover” is not “Rapist”. I really cannot believe all his conquests were willing “lovers”.
Im sorry that happened to you but I am so glad you fought so hard for justice. Comments like Akin’s infuriate me. And you are right, this is about controlling women and treating us like property. Thanks you for writing this. It is incredibly important for women to stand together against men like this.
I’m not surprised either… that’s what is so sad and infuriating.
Thank you for sharing your story. There is an attempt to systematically de-humanize women in this country, and it’s the brave voices of women like you that will make a difference.
I’m not willing to use FB to reply, but picking up on Karen Krahl and Caroline McGuire’s comments above, as I understand it (this from a discussion of Akin’s words and the ensuing, er, conversation, on NPR) part of the basis for the legal distinction between forcible and not-forcible rape, particularly in connection with legal access to abortion, is one that is about statutory rape — that is, intercourse that was consensual (in the sense that those involved did give consent) but is nonetheless legally classified as non-consensual, or rape, because of the age of one of the individuals involved. So I think it does make sense that there are some kinds of rape that are non-forcible because there was not physical force involved (nor was the person raped unable to resist, i.e., they were not passed out, drugged, or frightened into submission), but they are still appropriately seen as non-consensual because the victim is seen as not having the ability to consent.
Mind you I also think that the question of whether a pregnancy was conceived through an act of rape, forcible, statutory, or otherwise, and the availability of legal abortion should be entirely unrelated issues, but there are many who link the two, and I think this is where the question of forcible and other-than-forcible arise.
Thanks so much Cecily for writing this and telling your story so bravely. Putting a face on these issues, is what is needed, and I loved this part of President Obama’s reply that you reported,
“What I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making health care decisions on behalf of women,” Obama said
Thanks again for this well-thought, well-researched post.
Amen, sistah. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
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