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Wednesday, August 22, 2012

What Akin Said Legitimizes Sexual Assault

The politics (which has nothing to do with principles) of the GOP throwing Todd Akin under the bus over his evil idiotic misogyny, and all the Romney/Ryan double talk and spin squirting like squid ink to obscure the long record of doll-eyed dolt Paul Ryan's long legislative collaboration with Todd Akin's evil idiotic misogyny, and now the predictable wingnut jeremiads against "liberal media bias" are all starting to warp the discursive field. Now, Todd Akin really seems to think that people were outraged because he "said one word wrong" with the consequence that many thought he was approving of some rapists as "legitimate" when he used the used the words "legitimate rape" in an interview. He almost certainly was alluding in so saying to the phrase "forcible rape" as he has subsequently said, which is a phrase he has actually used in legislation for which he was an original co-sponsor with vice-presidential candidate Republican Paul Ryan. It is easy to see why he might in an off the cuff setting substitute the term "legitimate" for "forcible" since the rhetorical project of distinguishing "forcible" from nonsensical "non-forcible" rape is to introduce ambiguity into the scene of sexual assault the better to legitimate the Republican effort to focus not on violence against actual women but the imaginary violence of abortion against the cellular gum-wads that are fetal non-persons, which they want to outlaw, and often in ways that actively require sustained sexual assaults of women (forcing a woman to carry an unwanted demanding and even dangerous pregnancy to term against her will under threat of precisely the conspicuous government coercion Republicans claim to dislike when in fact they love coercion like a glutton loves lunch). And so, of course, the truth is that people were and remain outraged because Akin said what he really thinks with the words he used, and they know that he meant to suggest that some women who are raped have no legitimate right to say so because they are either lying or don't understand the reality of the experience of their own rape as well as he does, which means more specifically, whatever his protestations to the contrary, that he is indeed approving of some rapists not as "legitimate rapists" but as "legitimate non-rapists" even though they are rapists, because he is an evil idiotic misogynist pig.

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