Todd Akin's Horrible Rape Comments Are Part of A Pattern

In case you somehow missed it, Todd Akin made unbelievably ignorant and misogynistic comments on the Jaco Report, claiming that women who are the victims of "legitimate rape," won't get pregnant:

(crazy comments start around the 4 minute mark)


Akin's quote:

“First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare,” Akin told KTVI-TV in an interview posted Sunday. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.”

This isn't a simple one-time mistake based on talking to a couple nutty "doctors."  This is part of an incredibly disturbing pattern from Akin when it comes to rape.  Some of the lowlights from Talking Points Memo:

Akin is perhaps the boldest among a crop of conservative 2012 nominees who could hamperGOP efforts to take back the Senate in the fall. Akin has called for an end to the school-lunch program and a total ban on the morning-after pill [even in cases of rape].

His claim about “legitimate” types of rape is not completely foreign to the current Republican Congress, however. In 2011, the House GOP was forced to drop language from a bill that would have limited federal help to pay for an abortion to only victims of “forcible rape.” Akin was a co-sponsor on the bill.

Nor is this Akin’s first time suggesting some types of rape are more worthy of protections than others. As a state legislator, Akin voted in 1991 for an anti-marital-rape law, but only after questioning whether it might be misused “in a real messy divorce as a tool and a legal weapon to beat up on the husband,” according to a May 1 article that year in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Bill McClellan Stands Up For Womens' Right To Be Asked Out By Wealthy Bosses

I have a strange feeling that more in-depth analysis is forthcoming from other spheres of the internets, but for now I'll just note that Bill McClellan writes some really terrible crap sometimes. From his column on the Herman Cain sexual harassment fiasco:

When I first arrived in St. Louis, I could not get on at a newspaper. I answered an ad for a job as a recruiter at a school for medical assistants. Its target audience was young women from low-income families because these women would be eligible for government loans. The young women would then use those loans to be trained for jobs that didn't pay much. The economics of it were shaky.

But the recruiters were not supposed to be selling the economics of a career as a medical assistant. We were supposed to sell the young women — and especially their mothers — on the likelihood of assistants marrying their doctor employers.

"That's why we need to keep churning out assistants. They keep marrying doctors and retiring. ..."

I say we. I did not get the job.

But I think of this army of medical assistants marching into the world with the collective dream of marrying doctors. How could this come to be if bosses are not allowed to date their employees? It would be unfair to these young women if the doctors were afraid to ask them out, lest they be accused of sexual harassment.

See that? When McClellan pines for the simpler olden days before all those loud feminists and sensitive types made life so incredibly difficult for wealthy bosses, he's not doing it for the men. He just thinks it would be "unfair" to the women.

How incredibly chivalrous.

Supreme Court to Cheerleader: You Should Have Cheered for Your Rapist

 Trigger Warning:  This post discusses rape and rape culture.


I just read about a horrible decision* by the U.S. Supreme Court, and I’m infuriated. Do you remember the Texas high school cheerleader who was kicked off the squad for refusing to cheer for her rapist? She just lost her court case against the school.

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

A federal appeals court ruled in September that the cheerleader was speaking for the school, not herself, and had no right to remain silent when called on to cheer the athlete by name.

The Supreme Court denied review of the case Monday without comment.

I am incredibly tired of a culture and legal system that blame and punish victims. Too many people in the legal system have very little understanding of trauma and how it affects the brain. Short statutes of limitation are one indication of this lack of understanding. The nature of trauma—especially human-induced trauma—makes it difficult, if not impossible, in many cases to pursue justice against a perpetrator in a timely fashion. But even when statutes can be tolled, they generally begin to run as soon as the victim realizes or “should have” realized that she has been harmed—not when she is psychologically capable of taking legal action.

This case is just another example of the iniquities that victims of violent crimes must face in a country that claims to be the land of the free, and the home of the brave. “Cowardly” does not begin to describe the officials at this young woman’s school and a Supreme Court that would not even hear her appeal. And she is hardly free when her First Amendment rights have been obstructed by a school that wanted to force her to cheer for her rapist.

High school graduates are not prepared to participate in a democracy when their rights have been trampled upon during an autocratic high school experience. Women and others who have been victimized are being sent a terrible message by the failure of the legal system to provide justice for this young rape victim. There needs to be a national protest of this reprehensible court decision.

“My Short Skirt” may in fact be part of a cheerleading uniform.


* Clarification 5/6/11:  It has been brought to my attention that my use of the word "decision" here may be misleading.  I am referring to the Supreme Court's decision to deny review of the case, not a decision to uphold the ruling of the federal appeals court.  I realize that the word "decision" in a legal context usually refers to the latter, and I apologize for any confusion.

Dana Loesch Claims Liberal Feminists Care Too Much About Looks...And Have Small Breasts

Dana Loesch, who claims to be a champion of "conservative feminism," took all of ten minutes to undermine any inkling of moral authority she might have on the subject during a Twitter argument with actual feminists.

The dust-up started, from what I can tell, when Megan Carpentier was doing a live tweet review of a movie, "Fire In The Heartland," which features Dana Loesch along with several other far right-wing women. Carpentier noted a particularly ridiculous statement from Loesch:

megancarpentier: Haha, Dina Loesch says Palin "split the community" between liberal feminists and conservative women, because Palin is unafraid to be pretty.

After some internet sparring, Loesch reiterated the idea yesterday in a tweet:

dloesch: Why no, I don't think that there is a damn thing wrong with discussing how it's not a bad thing for a conservative woman to be hot.

So, first of all, Loesch's claim that "liberal feminists" have an issue with "being pretty" is laughable. The vast majority of feminists I've met don't think there's something wrong with "being pretty:" rather, they simply think that women shouldn't be defined by their looks. It's a critique of the all-too-obvious fact that society often overemphasizes the standards for attractiveness in women, and often underemphasizes other abilities.

But Loesch doesn't just get her story wrong, she reveals herself as supporting exactly what most of the feminist movement (both liberal and conservative) has been working to combat for a long time: she appears to think that womens' looks should be used against them in political discourse, and she repeatedly attacks other women based on their looks while implying that this says something about their moral worth. As I've documented, Loesch has a history of this: she previously said that women at Emily's List had "hair lips" and were jealous of Palin, and she suggested that those criticizing her were like "chicks who pad their bras."

And today, while in the middle of ridiculously arguing that liberal feminists place restrictions on women based on their looks, here's what Loesch had to say:



IBTC, as google informed me, stands for "Itty Bitty Titty Committe."

Got that? While bragging about how much more enlightened "conservative feminsts" are compared to "liberal feminists," Loesch claims that the people arguing with her have IBTs (which, according to some societal standards, is less cool than GBTs?). So even as she is arguing that liberal feminists place restrictions on women based on their looks, Loesch attacks the women trying to have a discussion with her based on their looks! Or at least, what she imagines about their looks. Could she be more ridiculous?

Profiles in Cowardice: Loesch Attacks Feminists Then Runs Scared

Dana Loesch wrote an opinion piece for the Washington Times Examiner doing her typical logic-inverted gibberish routine about how the people who fight for the rights of oppressed people (i.e. people who inevitably aren't neocons or tea partiers) are actually the ones who are secretly responsible for the oppression. In this case, she was claiming that feminists are actually responsible for "a political ploy to tether women to The Man."

Karoli at Momocrats, though seemingly doubting the value of responding to someone as intellectually dishonest as Loesch, nevertheless decided that the piece was too absurd to leave unchallenged:

I debated about whether to take on the latest turd Dana Loesch dropped on SFExaminer.com in the form of an op-ed column or ignore her. Other than being the latest Ann Coulter wannabe, she hasn't said much original for the past year or so. (Yes, I snark. It serves as a reminder not to take her too seriously.)

The Sarah Palins, Michele Bachmanns, and other members of the "feminist right" can always be counted on to echo the newest Luntz talking points through the echo chamber. Now that Betsy McCaughey, Pamela Geller and Dr. Laura have been thoroughly discredited, they just pick up some other woman looking for her five minutes of fame and hackery. Dana is the newest candidate. Not the first and she won't be the last.

Do conservative women -- especially intelligent ones (yes, they do exist) -- ever wonder why the party faithful finds the dumbest, most extreme groupies to deliver their message? Republican cynicism at its best -- pay lip service to women's equality but find the ones dumber than a rock to deliver it. Bachmann, Foxx, Palin, Angle....need I say more?

After this blistering intro, Karoli proceeded to perform a point-by-point takedown of nearly every disingenuous paragraph of Loesch's post. She took down Loesch's false claims about Avastin. She took down Loesch's conspiracy theory about Allee Bautsch. She took down Loesch's ridiculous suggestion that "librul" policies are responsible for the current unemployment levels. She rightly mocked Loesch's childish claims about the education system. She questioned Loesch's fact-free assertion that males are "being suppressed." And she noted Loesch's complete head-in-the-sand approach to the fact that women make 78% of what men make for similar jobs. In other words, she destroyed each and every substantive point in Loesch's article. Read the whole article. Trust me; it's worth it.

And what, pray tell, was Loesch's response? She completely avoided all substance and tried to brush off the entire post by saying that those mean "liberal-chicks" were "name-calling:"

The implication from Loesch, of course, is that all the post does is "name call" and so doesn't substantively address her points. But in fact, addressing all of her points is precisely what Karoli did, despite her own stated misgivings about wasting time on such nonsensical tripe. And it was Loesch who was completely scared sh*tless by the prospect of having a conversation about the actual issues being discussed.

And lest you think that Loesch was in fact responding to some other post that really did just do name-calling, it's pretty obvious that's not the case. You can see Loesch responding with the "waaaaah, name-calling" claim right after PunditMom tweeted Karoli's article:


And, of course, she didn't stop there:

As she always does when discussing feminism, Loesch makes sure to bring in some physical references about how the people she's arguing agaisnst are somehow lacking in some "femininity" or some physical characteristic. For example, when I tuned in to her radio show after the Emily's List mama grizzly video came out, she made sure to repeatedly make claims that the membership of Emily's List has "hair lips." For some reason, Loesch can't seem to talk about women's issues without bringing it back to physical appearance, which some might say is also a way in which women are kept down.