Akin to Idiocy, or George Galloway’s Insertion

Jenny Diski 20 August 2012

It’s a big week for rape. And it’s only Monday. In a mid-August special, the Republican candidate for the Senate Todd Akin and balcony diva Julian Assange’s best friend George Galloway have come together to bring you the truth about rape. What it is and what it isn’t. Akin, who sits on the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, has explained that there is no need to consider abortion for rape victims since ‘from what I understand from doctors’, women rarely get pregnant from ‘legitimate’ rape as ‘the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down’ ...

This is not to say that Akin isn’t talking science, only that his science is the science of medieval physicians. It was believed in the 13th century that a woman couldn’t conceive if she hadn’t had an orgasm (why else would she have one, after all?). This looks very like the hot news brought to us by Todd Akin. The theory was last mooted in 1814 as a legal argument ...

I use the word penetration very slightly in preference to George Galloway’s chosen alternative to ‘fuck’, as in: ‘Not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion.’ This is his explanation, in the rather frighteningly named Good Night with George Galloway video podcast, for the invalidity of the use of the word rape in relation to Julian Assange’s alleged offence of having non-consensual sex with a sleeping woman he had had consensual sex with earlier in the evening ...

Galloway’s law that not everybody needs to be asked at each point of insertion suggests that Galloway and Assange, at least, naturally possess a special skill in distinguishing those who do need to be asked from those who don’t. How can those not so blessed tell which is which? Galloway considers Assange to have shown poor manners in having sex with two women who did not know about each other (he doesn’t mention Assange’s wife). It might have been ‘really bad manners not to have tapped her on the shoulder and asked do you mind if I do it again’ but it is, he booms with evangelical rhetoric, ‘not rape, or you bankrupt the term rape of all meaning’. You see, he is much more serious about the vileness of rape than the rest of us ...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2012/08/20/jenny-diski/akin-to-idiocy-or-george-galloways-insertion/