Women of America, It’s Time to Cry “Rape”

I’ve had cause to get polemical on the GOP before. Hell, if we’re being honest, I’ve had cause to get polemical on the GOP since the day I was born with a uterus and became part of the 50 percent of humanity deemed by this political beast to be unfit for bodily self-government. But this week, in light of the very justifiable uproar over Todd Akin’s painfully “legitimate” assertions about “legitimate rape,” I feel like voluntarily going all the way, as it were.

GOP, I address you now as a political body. I address you with all the flippancy and unfounded generalization your own political candidates command when they proclaim that women’s bodies (you know, just in general) “have ways” to prevent pregnancy in cases of rape. I address you as a one-faced, two-armed conglomeration of white man parts: You are a rapist. You have violated every woman in America, whether she knew it or not; whether her—to quote your favorite witch doctor John Willke, former president of the National Right to Life Committee and Todd Akin’s personal cheerleader—”uptight” fallopian tubes were “spastic” enough to magically prevent impregnation by rape or, you know, not.

Granted, I am not talking physical rape (though the mandatory transvaginal ultrasounds you were pushing a few months back are pretty much tantamount to forcing a robot penis unnecessarily inside a protesting female). What I am more concerned with here, what Eve Ensler and I are more concerned with, is the violence of your rhetoric, the real and actually legitimate harm your words and beliefs cause to women, all women, not even just those who have been victims of sexual violence, as Ensler so eloquently argues.

You will try and deny this. You will attempt to maintain distance from those parts of yourself too volatile and/or stupid to phrase their positions so as not to offend; to marginalize those party members (I’m looking at you, Todd) who too bluntly assert the pseudo-science justifications that, in fact, many of your component parts champion and believe. This, in fact, you’ve already attempted; the Romney/Ryan face of your darling GOP political body came forward after Todd Akin’s public self-hanging to declare that “a Romney-Ryan administration would not oppose abortion in instances of rape.” Of course, how could the pretty Republican presidential face be expected to acknowledge the truth of the Republican heart—the truth that, as of this week, the GOP’s official platform plank states that abortion should be outlawed, and makes no exceptions for rape or incest.

You cannot hedge, you cannot distance. You believe that women’s bodies should lie as fallow, passive fields to the seeds of any and all, and there’s no good denying it. Whether or not some foolish misspeaking hack outed your pathetic attempts to rustle up a medical justification for this violence is immaterial; the violence of your words, the violence of your proposed laws is real. And goddammit, I’m sick of calling this kind of verbal assault so carelessly committed against women everywhere anything but what it is.