Peter Kellner
:Cameron's EU Tactics Backfire
Deborah Jack
:End Homophobia to Reduce HIV
Philip Mansbridge
:G8 or Too Late: Obama, Cameron and G8 Heads Must Tackle Ivory Poaching Crisis Now
European Parliament Web Team
:Homophobia: One-In-Four LGBT People Victim of Violence or Threats in the Last Five Years
Neil Durkin
:A Week's Delay Should Suffice: Is the UK Still Dragging Its Feet on Guantánamo?
A lot of men had a lot of opinions about rape this week.
I say opinions. The majority of men in question framed their thoughts as fact.
A lot of women had something to say on the topic too, although bar Louise Mensch, it seemed no one really cared about their point of view.
I don't have a problem with the issue of rape being on the agenda. With conviction rates as low as they are, the more we talk about the issue, the better.
I do, on the other hand, have something of an issue with the tragically misinformed opinions being bandied about, in the main by people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about.
George Galloway and Todd Atkin, I'm pained to admit, I'm dedicating yet more column inches to your hopelessly ill advised, ill informed streams of garbage.
I don't really want to. I'd like to rewind a few days, when I'd never heard of Todd Atkin, and Galloway was notable simply for being the only person in history to turn Celebrity Big Brother into a wise political career move. When the idea of 'bad sexual etiquette' meant rolling over and letting your partner sleep in the wet patch. And when a woman's right to choose meant HER RIGHT TO CHOOSE, not the Republican party's.
Here's a thought. While my Twitter feed is choked with their names and the blog sites I regularly visit aghast at their comments, maybe these two idiots have done us all a favour.
Yes, there are a few impressionable individuals who, gulp, might agree with what has been said, but the public outcry means anyone with half a brain cell is under no illusion about how a woman's body works and her right to say no.
Should that even be a consideration? Absolutely not. On one side of the Atlantic we have a man deemed intelligent enough to hold a position in senior public office with a seat in the Senate in sight (and, least we forget already a member of the House Committee on Science) without a grasp of basic human biology.
On the other, we have an MP and a household name, turning his adoration for self-publicity into a parody of support for Julian Assange with the most controversial comments he could come up with that particular day.
Does he even believe what he said? Or did he just realise the storm surrounding his comments would propel his weekly video views into the stratosphere and notch him up a slew of headlines.
In a brilliant column on Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan admits she has rape fatigue from the 'rape-related bullshit' flowing this week.
I am still at the angry stage, and angry we must stay until centuries-old attitudes are consigned to the fringes where they belong, and not on our TV talk shows.
Follow Carla Buzasi on Twitter: www.twitter.com/CarlaBuzasi
Bill Maher: My New Rule for Todd Akin and the Republican Party
Really? How so? What legal rights are you missing?
You have a right to abortion but that right does not in itself guarantee the state you live in will have a populate willing to tolerate it. All you then have to do is go to another state that is more tolerant. These are not hateful people. They have the desire to protect life from conception which is as selfless a cause as they come. These embryo's and fetus's won't bring you any reward for saving them.
The right remains, but he convenient access is not guaranteed.
Brought to you by the so-called "pro-life" movement, and Mitt Ryan. :)
That 'populate' you mention is the so-called 'pro-life' movement's whole agenda. Procreate until there are forty humans per square foot of earth, procreate until the food supply is completely depleted, procreate until every womb is completely and utterly exhausted, and every woman in America is Mrs. Duggar.
Selfless my ASS.
This would give a balanced conclusion that surely no-one could disagree with.
...the tragically misinformed opinions being bandied about, in the main by people who have absolutely no idea what they are talking about...
A good sentence, but, alas, Ms Editor-in-Chief, a little too close to the piece that you've written. I'm angry that this piece appears here, in a paper that I largely totally agree with, rather than in the pages of some papers that I disagree on all points with.
Akin is clearly factually wrong, it's that simple. Galloway is stating an opinion about what constitutes rape. Nobody has to agree with him, but we must all agree that there are some variables involved in the classification of sexual assault. If not, how come different countries have different rape definitions? Sweden alone has three different 'levels' of rape recognised in law.
The idea that 'rape is rape is rape' is just childish. An attack on a stranger in the street is a million miles from someone rolling over after a night of passion and trying their luck one more time. Particularly if the recipient of this attention is woken by the physical contact and does not say 'no thanks Julian'. Both may be wrong, but both are not the same.
There is a time when the focus on one individual has to stop, and focus on the true nature of the allegation. There is just too much that needs to be dismissed in order to seriously consider Julian Assange's paranoia.
Maybe, everyone should forget domestic violence. Maybe, everyone should ignore the real statistics about sexual predators.
Maybe, those whose life revolve in a fantasy world will realize that women do stay in loveless relations all the while pretending how perfect that relations really is.
If someone says no, then they are no longer consenting to whatever act may be about to take place and that means it is rape. No amount of distortion, no bending of the rules, no bad etiquette defence can take place, it is rape. As for a woman's body being able to deal with an unwanted pregnancy on its own, does that mean every miscarriage is an act of murder? Because if it is, then the GOP seems to be advancing their war on women to a whole new level, one that should scare every female voter in the country into rejecting them on a grand scale.
No means NO, whoever you vote for. Remember that when you go to the polls in November.
Children never give credit to parents, however let me give praise to mine. I now understand just how exceptional my parents were. They pointed at the open fire, said, 'burny', I didn't question them, I understood, I could feel the heat. When they said 'no', I grasped what they said and what they actually meant.
No means no! It does not mean maybe, or, oh! alright it's you - it means NO!
If you don't understand what I am saying, then buy clothes with velcro and slip on shoes.
Your comment implies you mean to control men through shame. People are free to think for themselves shame or not. If shame were all that were needed to bend the will of all of us there would be no heretics to set us free from the dogma of others.
Neither of these men's comments have anything to do with women's equality. At no point did any man declare women inferior in anyway or declare that they must be forced to have unwanted sex.
We had one man who said if sex is truly unwanted it will not result in pregnancy. The comment was stupid but it does establish women to be inferior, it simply assumed they had birth control powers they do not.
The other man declared that retroactive revocation of consent is invalid. That seems morally sound in my opinion. You can't change your mind on consent after the fact or declare rape because of some arbitrary precondition not being met. Imagine if a person was accused of rape for having lied to their partner about not having a boyfriend or girlfriend at the time. If sex were conditioned on that fact it could thus be interpreted as rape. We can't allow for conditional consent, it's YES OR NO not .. IF THEN.
"..We had one man who said if sex is truly unwanted it will not result in pregnancy. The comment was stupid but it does establish women to be inferior, it simply assumed they had birth control powers they do not.."
This is rhetoric. It is impossible to believe that a campaigning politician would say something like this without something materially wrong with the functioning of his conscious thought. Having this belief in the first place is stupid, not recognising that it will cause him enormous damage if he says it is the wrong bit of his brain responding to the question. I do not believe you to be an idiot, therefore you cannot believe what this guy said is merely a factual mistake.
Having said something that isn't credible, I must necessarily distrust your motives, and the truth or otherwise of anything else you say is irrelevant. I don't now if you believe it, so we cannot have a conversation.
"Imagine if a person was accused of rape for having lied to their partner about not having a boyfriend or girlfriend at the time. If sex were conditioned on that fact it could thus be interpreted as rape."
There is a decent point buried in these horrible words, but we cannot now discuss it. Rhetoric makes constructive conversation impossible.
Let us be kind to Galloway, and assume that he has simply been habing round with awful misogynists for too long, rather than assuming he simply seeks out like minded dinosaurs.
Questioning the definitions of rape is NOT a good thing though, which is what Galloway is doing.
We absolutely should be questioning what constitutes rape especially when that definition has been expanded beyond the lack of consent at the moment of intercourse or discounts tacit consent from a ongoing sexual encounter. Questioning these things does not make you a misogynist but unfairly and frequently accusing men of hating women can make you a misandrist. Just like the distrust of women is part of the definition of misogyny the same applies to those who hold a deep distrust or fear of men.