When Republican Todd Akin, an anti-abortion Republican candidate for Senate, made a bizarre statement on a local Missouri Sunday news show that women who have suffered a “legitimate rape” rarely get pregnant because “the female body has ways to shut the whole thing down” the online community exploded with outrage.
What is meant by “legitimate rape”? And, how in the world did such junk science beliefs that women can automatically repel a rapist’s sperm ever get beyond the extreme right-wing crackpot fringe? A group so determined to ban abortion for any reason they have sought to redefine a heinous sex crime to insist that if a woman claims she became pregnant as a result of said crime, it couldn’t have possibly been rape at all. The little lady is just “crying rape” to get out of a run-of-the-mill unwanted pregnancy.
While high-level Republicans like Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan sought to distance themselves from Todd Akin, and even demand he end his Senate campaign, Akin and his supporters (yes, apparently he has enough of them to have recently won a tight primary race) held fast, and let a Tuesday deadline for dropping out come and go.
By that time, the blogosphere and mainstream media had echoed and underlined Sunday’s online rampage against Akin and unveiled his views on “legitimate rape” (i.e., must be terribly forcible and preferably extremely violent) and the odds of a woman getting pregnant from this type of assault were about “as common as snowfall in Miami,” weren’t that far removed from the GOP mainstream as Romney/Ryan would like us to believe.
It’s a scary time for a presidential election and a scary time for women (and the men who support our rights to make our own decisions about our bodies). Just when we thought the crazy GOP war on women waged earlier this year by the likes of Rush Limbaugh, various state governors and legislatures and members of Congress desperate to derail Planned Parenthood might be a-fizzle, a GOP Senate candidate says out loud what a majority of his colleagues have been thinking all along. Add to the mix that Todd Akin is a member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology and you start to wonder how far these men are willing to go to control and snuff out women’s rights?
What else are people talking about online this week?
- What happens in Vegas goes viral, especially if you’re Prince Harry, third in line to the British throne, and invite a couple of girls with smartphones up to your suite for a game of strip billiards!
- New apps will make it possible for you to do even more with your smartphones (than take photos of naked royalty). Right now in France, you can pay for your Cheeseburger Royale at McDonalds when you link your Paypal account to your phone. In the U.S., you can text donations to the Obama campaign.
- You’ve created your drag queen name, soap opera character name and porn star name – now what? Create your hobo name using this hobo name generator.
Kathy Drasky regularly writes about online culture. Her marketing and communications work with the ANZA Technology Network, Advance Global Australians and with various Australians and Australian enterprises has led to at least a dozen trips Down Under.
An accomplished digital photographer, her photos have appeared in 7×7 Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle and Google Schmap.
