While taking the recent spate of rape apologists to task and relating some personal shit, Amanda made that most feminist of logical errors.
After all, just because a crime is highly traumatic and psychologically violent, affects 1 in 7 american women and further serves to victimize all women in society as a whole, it doesn’t neccesarily follow that a man can actually get arrrested for such a crime.
From the National Clearing House on Marital and Date Rape, here’s a list of the 30 (I shit you not) states where marital rape is not prosecutable if the victim is unconciousness, or suffering from some other form of incapacitation or coercion that makes her physically unable to consent/put up serious resistance (being drunk or drugged is legally taken as consent in otherwords), during the rape:
ALABAMA, ALASKA, ARKANSAS, CALIFORNIA, CONNECTICUT, HAWAII, IDAHO, ILLINOIS, IOWA, KANSAS, KENTUCKY, LOUISIANA, MAINE, MARYLAND, MICHIGAN, MINNESOTA, MISSISSIPPI, MISSOURI, NEVADA, NEW HAMPSHIRE, OHIO, OKLAHOMA, PENNSYLVANIA, RHODE ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA, SOUTH DAKOTA, TENNESSEE, WASHINGTON, WEST VIRGINIA and finally WYOMING.
…Further more, in West Virginia, Iowa, Minnesota, Connecticut and Delaware (which doesn’t give husbands special rights over their wives’ bodies that isn’t had by other men), Acquaintence rape is also an unprosecutable crime if the victim is incapacitated.
Notice that there’s no clear blue/red state distinction to the rapist shielding, there being no actual irreconcilable social or cultural divide between the blue states and the red states other than the one that exists exclusively in repug propaganda. Yes, keeping blue staters hating on red staters as much as red staters hate on blue staters helps the repugs because it stops us all organizing and uniting against our common foe.
Duh.
If I was in charge of the dems’ 50 state strategy (not that I would want to be in charge of any party that would put me in charge of it, I have standards after all), a heavy emphasis on female bodily autonomy combined with a few state referendums designed to clean up these rape loopholes might just start to utilize that 50% of the population that doesn’t own penii (which doesn’t consistently vote dem atm due to democratic party negligence), get them out to the voting booths and make the fundies be ever more obvious with their women hating by coming out in favor for marital and acquaintence rape loopholes because of their warped little excuse for theology.
But that’s just me I guess, never one to think in “practical” terms (Which I suppose would mean making rape ever more legal so as to appeal to the really important 10% of the population that makes up the social conservative “screw you, I got mine” assbag demographic) being such a “single issue” “idealist” and all.
Jesus H. Fucking Christ! I’m ashamed to admit I had no idea about laws that shield rapists. (And I’m surprised that my state, Florida, doesn’t sponsor them, being as we’re so backwards in every other respect…I’m sure Kathleen Parking is emailing a note to Jeb even as we speak.)
Anyway, I like your strategy suggestion. If the Repubs can stage a quadrennial Great Homo Scare to drive right-wing busybodies to the polls, why shouldn’t the Dems drum up the female vote and amend some bad law at the same time? Makes sense to me.
Yeah, shocked Texas isn’t on there somewhere, too. Can’t have a dildo, but can send your hubby to jail for rape. At least we’re only sort of heinous. Well, mostly heinous, but still.
[...] Of course both extremes are symptoms of the Always Fucknant philosophy of Patriarchy, if you’re not married and therefore always fucknant for your husband, you’re always fucknant for all men. Saying “no” is a manly activity like playing with powertools or fixing cars after all, and therefore bad for the feeble female figure (which is the important bit of the female, that and the meaty haunches, mmm, cannabilicious). [...]
[...] Not wrong like marital rape of course, which isn’t that wrong at all if the victim doesn’t struggle, or the torture of the mentally ill who, let’s face it, deserve to be a bit tortured if it is neccesary to protect this nation from terrorism the mentally ill person gives the guards and councilors (who, like all torturers, are the real victims) any trouble or doesn’t bother to respond well to treatment (the little ingrates). [...]
[...] Now the thing that, in hindsight, should have jumped out and humped my leg, is that an anthropologist who doesn’t look at the marriage, which as antony points out is the end product of all the west’s romantic rituals (a fact that had escaped me, the point of the romance ritual in western culture is marriage, not just sex,because marriage according to the patriarchy is a contractual agreement in which husbands are de facto owners of their wives’ sex, which is why marital rape still isn’t entirely illegal in america, and that is a much better end goal than merely one night of poontang), and go “By gads! There’s economics in this here mating ritual!” is a really bad anthropologist, come on, the fathers “give away” their daughters to their husband, there’s exchanges of goods, and this activity has been recorded to have been occurring right back in the jewish sacred scrolls and the bits of them that got repeated in the Old Testament. [...]