The Sexologist: The Republican party has a rape apology problem

This week, yet another Republican politician made an egregious and medically inaccurate claim about pregnancy from rape when Trent Franks said, "The incidence of rape resulting in pregnancy are very low."

You know you have a PR problem when members of your party repeatedly make public statements exhibiting that they possess a pitiful misunderstanding of basic 5^th grade level human biology, and harbor a heartless and insensitive attitude towards what is the most prevalent human rights violation on the planet affecting roughly 20% of their voter base. Not smooth.

Since rape apology is bad for business, I've created this handy guide for the GOP on how to not make absurdly offensive comments about rape.

If your problem is ignorance: Perhaps you're thinking of saying in an interview that rape can't lead to pregnancy because you're uninformed and actually believe this to be true. I understand our sex education system is atrocious, and maybe you never learned where babies come from. Let me enlighten you.

Penis, vagina, put them together. That's called sex. Then, little sperm cells swim up the uterus and fallopian tubes, where one may meet with an egg cell. This is called fertilization. The fertilized egg tumbles back down the fallopian tube and implants on the walls of the uterus. This is called pregnancy. Now, the key thing to understand about this process is that it can occur regardless of the type of sex that happens. Pregnancy can result from good sex, bad sex, hot sex, boring sex, married sex, unmarried sex, shower sex, back seat of the car sex, consensual sex and non-consensual sex.

There is no magical rape induced pregnancy repellant. There is no vagina army that can karate-chop rape sperm. There is no way for a woman to "shut the whole thing down" (Todd Akin, I'm looking at you). It's not true that "the facts show that people who are raped – who are truly raped -- the juices don't flow, the body functions don't work and they don't get pregnant. To get pregnant, it takes a little cooperation' (ahem… Henry Aldridge). While your sci-fi explanations for reproduction are creative, they're wrong and make you look like a complete Neanderthal moron.

If your problem is insensitivity: So often, people are unintentionally insensitive about issues that they have never experienced firsthand. It's not that they're bad people, it's only that they've never been exposed to it and so it never crossed their mind to be concerned with it. I used to say without a second thought, "Let's grab lunch. I'm starving". I was not trying to be insensitive or trivialize the fact that millions of people are actually starving and that complaining about going a few hours without a hot several hundred calorie meal was in fact insensitive. I didn't realize that until I did volunteer work and met people who struggle with real hunger, and I've never said it again.

So perhaps you are a politician who is about to make a comment about rape, or write a piece of legislation about rape. Unless you've had the experience of having an unwanted penis or object enter an orifice of your body, or have consoled a child, friend, or other person you love through such a hideous experience, it is possible that you may say something incredibly offensive and hurt a lot of people in the process.

Please allow me to enlighten you. When you say pregnancy from rape is rare or impossible, you are invalidating the lived experience of hundreds of thousands of women. When you make ridiculous claims that women have "juices" or "mechanisms" to "shut down" or stop a pregnancy from rape, you are putting blame and onus on the victim for her predicament when in reality she is 0% to blame. When you try to quality, classify, or create a rape hierarchy by saying some rapes are "legitimate", "forcible" or "real" you are implying that by comparison there is such a thing as fake rape, not-really-rape, illegitimate rape, or non-forcible rape, which is not true. When vaginal, anal, or oral penetration occurs without consent, it's called rape. The end. There are no distinctions, and even if there were, you are certainly not qualified to be making that determination. Rape is a brutal and ugly weapon used to humiliate and torture women and one BILLION women currently living on the planet today have experienced it. Whether it's your intention or not, you sound callous and heartless- frankly, you sound like a dick, when you discuss rape when it's clear you have no clue what you're talking about.

(I've been kind. I suspect most of the politicians who have made these outrageous remarks know full well how reproductive biology works, and that rape is awful. I suspect the true motivation for their comment lies in one of the following.)

If your problem is cognitive dissonance: If you are an anti-abortion Republican, you have a pesky problem. You don't want abortion to be legal. You believe a fetus is a living thing and deserves protection. But you can't write a simple piece of legislation about it because a fair percentage of women seeking abortions were impregnated against their will through rape, and requiring them to incubate a rapists' fetus for nine months, blending her DNA with a rapist's, is considered cruel by pretty much everyone.

You have a conflict called cognitive dissonance (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance) which is the term for the psychological tension and discomfort that occurs when you hold two opinions that are at odds with each other. What people will often do in this situation is tell themselves a lie to go back to mental equilibrium. This is why hazing is so effective at building loyalty- a person will convince themselves the organization they joined is the best thing ever, even if they have to lie to themselves to believe it, because if they believed the organization wasn't worth the pain they endured to join it, they'd have unresolved cognitive dissonance.

In this case, you think requiring a woman carrying a rapists' fetus to term is really harsh. But her aborting it is against your beliefs too. Conflict! So to relieve the cognitive dissonance, you've told yourself, there is no conflict, because pregnancy can't result from rape after all. Problem solved!

That George Costanza quote, "It's not a lie if you believe it" doesn't hold water here. I'm glad you're feeling morally at peace now, but you can't just make up science about things as nuanced and complex as rape, abortion, and forced motherhood so that they fit into a nice black and white box for your mental comfort. If you can't resolve your cognitive dissonance in a less deranged manner, perhaps this isn't a conversation you are equipped to be a part of.

If your problem is misogyny: As comedian George Carlin said, "They're not pro-life, they're anti-woman". We can't rule out the possibility that you would make a comment about rape not being able to cause pregnancy because, well, you don't like women. You don't have respect for women, you don't care if a woman has to suffer financial or emotional turmoil over birthing and raising a rapist's child. Maybe you think women who have sex should be punished, even if she did not against her will. Maybe you don't think the sex really was against her will, and that women make up rape allegations. If this is the case my advice is: do not speak. And do not push these measures that redefine rape (as Paul Ryan did) or that limit access impregnated rape victims have to abortion services. Whether you like it or not (and let's face it, you probably don't like it) women can vote, most men aren't misogynists, and they vote, and history shows that when a politician runs his mouth about rape and pregnancy, he loses the next election. Welcome to 2013, where misogyny is career suicide.

_______________________________________________________________________________________

Dr. Jill McDevitt is a nationally recognized sexologist, and the only person in the world with a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree in human sexuality, making her the most formally educated person about sex on the planet. Dr. Jill has reached a documented 8.1 million people in her relentless promotion of the idea that sex should be fun, and everyone has the right to enjoy their sexuality without fear of violence. She founded Feminique, her sex education business, at just 21 years old.Dr. Jill McDevitt is a nationally recognized sexologist, and the only person in the world with a bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degree in human sexuality, making her the most formally educated person about sex on the planet. Dr. Jill has reached a documented 8.1 million people in her relentless promotion of the idea that sex should be fun, and everyone has the right to enjoy their sexuality without fear of violence. She founded Feminique, her sex education business, at just 21 years old.