You Know You Want It

I've been thinking more about Dan Savage's remarks on sexual attraction, and I realized that I couldn't make any sense out of the final clause of this sentence:

But instead of reconsidering their ideas about attractiveness, a dumb fucking white person—even one from a liberal background—is likelier to say something stupid like “I don’t usually find Asian guys hot, but your Korean friend is attractive,” rather than rethinking their assumptions about their desires. 

As I wrote before, it seems to me that the statement he made up to attack represents someone rethinking their assumptions about their desires.  But then I wondered what "assumptions about their desires" are involved here.  Specifically, I wondered what Dan's assumptions about anyone's desires were, because I don't think he knows anything about the assumptions of the person he's criticizing.

Does he believe that she was already attracted to Asian men but simply, wickedly or fucking dumb whitely, refused to acknowledge it, even to herself?  Because Dan was expressing an assumption, he didn't need to express it clearly, even in his own mind. 

The reason I'm wary of the concept of sexual orientation is that it assumes that human beings contain a mechanism or an organ that responds erotically to a sex, male or female or both.  But as far as I can tell, most people are attracted not to males or females but to some males or some females.  Which ones often changes over time, probably based on experience; not just overt copulatory experience, because for most people the number of people we might want to copulate with is far greater than the number we do copulate with.  But we can still look, fantasize, dream, wish, and we do.  Some people do this more than others, but I doubt that anyone never does it.

People often talk about sexual fluidity, but they don't seem to really mean it.  If your desires aren't genetically, immutably rooted in your being, they don't really count and needn't be respected.  Which I think plays a role in the idea that discovering you're attracted to someone or members of a group you hadn't been attracted to before must be "fetishizing" them - if you weren't aware of it from the age of five, it's not authentic and is probably wicked and exploitative.  So, by Dan's assumptions, what does it mean that I wasn't attracted to fifty-year-old men when I was twenty, but I am now, at sixty-eight?  Was I really, genetically attracted to them already?  Should I have gone to bed with them even though I wasn't attracted to them, because I might be attracted them forty years later? If this case isn't comparable to being attracted to men of a specific "racial" category, how is it different?

There also seems to be a widespread assumption (which may coexist in someone's mind with other, contradictory ones) that our erotic partners are people who rock us to the core.  From what other people have written or said (listening to the stories of other volunteers on the GLB Speakers Bureau has taught me a lot), a significant number of people accepted erotic overtures from people they weren't particularly attracted to, with a "Why not?" attitude, especially but not always when they were younger and less experienced.

One of our volunteers from a rural background recounted how, when he was in high school, he met another gay kid his own age.  They came out to one another and became friends, and discussed whether they should have sex.  Neither had any experience up to this point, and didn't know how long it would be before they had another opportunity.  In the end they decided not to, because they weren't especially attracted to one another.  The instructor of the Psychology class we were addressing became uncomfortable at that point and reassured her students that not all gay men would have sex with just anyone, as if it were unreasonable for two people with few options to get together faute de mieux.  The situation isn't only a gay one; it's the premise of all the man-and-woman-on-a-desert-island cartoons I saw in magazines when I was growing up.  It's also the premise of arranged marriages, where erotic attraction is low on the list of priorities for the matchmakers.  What is important in any erotic situation is that both partners must have the right to say no.

Dan Savage seems to be assuming in this case that they don't have the right to say no, to not be attracted to people for irrational, even petty reasons.  But all erotic desire is irrational: it's not based on a fact-based evaluation of the possibilities.  No one needs a reason to desire another, or to refuse another's overtures.  I'm pretty sure Dan doesn't believe that it's illegitimate for him not to find women "hot."  I know that consent is one of the touchstones of his erotic ethic.  What I don't understand is why he thinks that he's justified in dumping on someone for not being attracted to any other people.  Not being attracted to someone of a given "race" is no worse, and no better, than not being attracted to them on any other basis, and no one should have to justify not being attracted to someone, even someone who wants them very badly.

There's also a difference between not being attracted to a person and choosing not to copulate with them.  One might decline for any number of reasons: being in a monogamous relationship at the moment, not wanting to copulate with anyone at the moment, having religious or other principled reasons for abstention, not being in the mood right now, not wanting to copulate without being in a committed relationship with the other, etc.  Someone I knew years ago, a white Southerner with pretensions to gentility, acknowledged the beauty of a young African-American man we both knew.  But then my acquaintance became uncomfortable: "Oh, Ah couldn't," he said repeatedly, "Ah just couldn't, Ah couldn't."  So, I said, don't.  But he couldn't seem to let it alone.  Maybe he eventually rethought his assumptions about his desires (though his desire in this case was clear enough) and his criteria for an erotic partner; it didn't come up again.  But should he have decided to bed this young man because he had hangups about sex with black men?  What assumptions are we dealing with here?

"Race" is not the only issue.  As I've mentioned, sex/gender is another, and it's not clear why it's privileged -- why Dan Savage shouldn't consider himself a dumb fucking gay man for not wanting to have sex with women.  One reason I object to the bogus claim that we're all basically bisexual is that in practice it's often used to try to nag someone who into having erotic experience they're not interested in having because not being bisexual is so uptight.  Even if I were bisexual -- a "perfect 3 on the Kinsey Scale" as some doofuses have put it -- there would still be plenty of people of both sexes I wouldn't be attracted to.

There has also been some controversy because some lesbians refuse to copulate with transwomen.  Whether that refusal expresses prejudice ought to be irrelevant.  If it is, who would want to get naked with someone prejudiced against them?  I happened on a blog post on this matter a couple of years ago, and some commenters denied that anyone was saying that lesbians must have sex with transwomen - but very quickly some other commenters made it clear that that was exactly what they were saying.  You can argue with the rationalizations that some have given for not copulating with transwomen, they might be prejudiced or bigoted, but none of this overrides the principle of consent: everybody's right to say no and to have that decision respected.

One of the ongoing themes in discourse about human sexuality has been the attempt to justify negating consent: why someone should not be allowed to say no.  Sometimes it's just personal petulance -- I want you, why don't you want me, you have to give me what I want because I want it. But even then, the nagger may try to invoke larger principles.  Almost everybody pays lip service to consent, but in practice, they're not so sure.  I still don't know why Dan Savage thinks that people should be shamed or coerced into acknowledging desires they don't in fact have.  If you're not consciously aware of being attracted to someone, you're not attracted to them.  Maybe that will change, but for now, it's not there.

Am I running on too long about a minor issue?  I don't think so.  Variations on this issue are surprisingly common.  Most attention has been given to defending people's freedom to have the kinds of sex they want; less has been devoted to defending their freedom not to have sex they don't want.  It's interesting how easily asserting the first turns into denying the second.

Some of My Best Friends Are Putzes

Dr. Ruth Westheimer got some attention a few days ago by saying some stupid things about rape and consent in a TV interview.  Amanda Marcotte was one of many online pundits who gave her a good dressing-down.

Here's a partial transcription of Westheimer's remarks:

I am very worried about college campuses saying that a woman and a man—or two men or two women, but I talk right now about women and men—can be in bed together, Diane, and at one time, naked, and at one time he or she, most of the time they think she, can say “I changed my mind.”

No such thing is possible. In the Talmud, in the Jewish tradition, it says when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously, so I don’t agree with that.

It sounds like Westheimer's trying to be a kosher Camille Paglia.  I'm not going to address her remarks about consent, because Marcotte and others have done that more or less ably, including some of Marcotte's commenters, who referred to their own experience for counterexamples.  But I noticed an annoying tendency among the commenters to dismiss the Talmud, though they clearly had no idea what it is.  Well, I mean, like, who cares what a bunch of dead white men said like millions of years ago?  We're modern enlightened people and we have science, which totally proves that you can get naked with someone and they can't rape you, so there!  We don't need your Stone Age Talmud!

I'm not a Talmudist, not even Jewish.  I'm a goyisher atheist, but I have picked up some shiny bits of information in my reading about the human heritage.  The Talmud is not the Jewish Bible -- that would be what Christians call the Old Testament.  The Talmud is a huge, complex text made up of Mishnah and Gemara.  The Mishnah was compiled around 200 CE; according to tradition it preserves in writing the Oral Torah, the discussions of Jewish scholars and authorities from the time of Moses down to, roughly, the destruction of the Second Temple around 70 CE.  This is probably not true, any more than the written Torah was written by Moses, or the Hebrew Bible was translated into Greek by seventy scholars in seventy days, or the New Testament gospels were written by some of Jesus' original followers.  The Gemara is commentary on the Mishnah, which accumulated over three or four centuries.  To add to the complexity, there are two Talmuds, the Jerusalem and the Babylonian, but the Babylonian one has priority for most use by rabbis and scholars.

Overall, the Talmud is an archive of "legal" debate among scholars.  I put "legal" in quotes because there's a tradition among Christian apologists to see rabbinic Judaism as a system of cold, soulless legalism, abetted by the fact that the Torah (which means "instruction," somewhat euphemistically) is referred to as nomos, or "Law," in the Greek of the New Testament.  To oversimplify so we can move along here, rabbinic Judaism is a system of warm, soulful legalism.  It is, like any legal or religious system, thoroughly human in its origins, implementation, and function.  As you might guess, then, it's usually inaccurate to treat the Talmud as a monolithic authority, as Westheimer did.  There's an old joking proverb: Two Jews, three opinions.  The Talmud is, like law or philosophy or theology or literary criticism, or science for that matter, a record of dissent and debate.  My first suspicion when I read Westheimer's claim was that if I looked at the text in its context, it would be a lot less direct and clear than she wanted people to believe.

One of Marcotte's commenters referred to the Talmud and rabbinic Judaism as "primitive."  No, it's not.  In a previous post I quoted a technical definition of "primitive" from the sociologist and Hindu monk Agehananda Bharati's book, The Light at the Center: Context and Pretext of Modern Mysticism (Ross-Erikson, 1976).

"A primitive society, by anthropological criteria, is a small, band-like society structured entirely on kinship lines, which does not deploy fulltime specialists for anything" (142).  Two things about this: 1) it's not derogatory or racist to use the word "primitive" in this way, just as there is probably a definition of "tribal" that isn't derogatory or racist, but either word can be used to put down what one doesn't like in one's own allegedly "advanced" culture, just as "childish" can be; 2) by Bharati's definition there are still "primitive" aspects of modern Western society, but these are not necessarily bad: friendship, kinship, taking care of others as amateurs rather than as specialists, without expecting cash payment for doing so.

I remarked to the commenter that he might as well have referred to the Talmud as fat or gay as call it "primitive."  He countered that the Talmud isn't fat or gay, but it is primitive, so there.  If you use "primitive" to mean "something I don't like," then yes, the Talmud is primitive.  If you're using the word in anything like the anthropological sense, however, it's not.  (There are other valid uses of "primitive," as in the arts, but he didn't mean those either.)  Ancient Judaism -- the much older Hebrew Bible, I mean, as well as the Talmud -- was the product of a literate society with fulltime specialists such as priests, scribes, and teachers.  You could call it "primitive" to mean that it was a long time ago and didn't have printing or telescopes or cell phones, but then the Greece of Plato and Aristotle, or the Roman Empire, or the sages of Vedic Hinduism, or the Buddha would be primitive too, and I doubt the commenter had them in mind.

On attitudes to women and sex, and rape in particular, the modern, enlightened West would also have to be referred to as "primitive."  Modern Western science has been -- well, I'll be nice and just call it "terrible" on these matters.  Think of the brilliant scientists (both male, of course, but aided and abetted by female colleagues) who, based on their evidence-based research, recommended that young men be required to take rape-prevention classes before they were issued driver's licenses and young women be advised not to wear tight sweaters.  Steven Pinker was embarrassed by the stupidity of the recommendation but still defended Thornhill and Palmer in The Blank Slate (page 371) -- they were so not justifying rape! -- by adducing the authority of Camille Paglia.  Then remember Michael Ruse -- philosopher of science, champion of Darwin against the Bible-thumpers -- showing his complete inability to grasp the difference between rape and consensual sex, or between rape and crapping on your boss's Persian rug.  There must be male scientists who are better than this, but I don't know of any.  Advances in thinking about rape came from man-hating, hairy-legged feminists, not from Science.

Some of the commenters pointed out that women were forbidden to study Talmud until recently.  The determined resistance by male scientists to letting women work in the sciences must not be forgotten either.  (Especially since there is still a drive to erase the achievements of women scientists from the history, sometimes by tokenizing them.)  It's not really that hard to remember, since it is still with us, if slightly less virulent.  Yes, even now in the primitive times of the twenty-first century, male scientists are trying to explain away the lesser numbers of women in the sciences by blaming it on women's supposed innate lack of interest in science, or their supposed lack of compulsive competitiveness, or even because their brains aren't organized to do science like men's are.  You can condemn religious traditions for male chauvinism and misogyny, and you should; but you must also be aware of the same tendencies in Science.

Also relevant here is current scientific thought on homosexuality, which incorporates conceptions of gender and sexuality that could perhaps be called "primitive"; certainly they are descended from concepts that are ancient. As I've said before, where but on sex/gender do the primitive myths and misconceptions of the masses get respect from enlightened scientists, who seem to be under the impression that they invented them themselves?

But I digress.  When I read about Westheimer's statements I began wondering almost immediately: Did the Talmud say what she said it says, that "when that part of the male anatomy is aroused and there’s an erection, the brain flies out of that and we have to take that very seriously"?  I thought I recognized a Yiddish proverb invoked by Philip Roth in Portnoy's Complaint:  Ven der putz shteht, ligt der sechel in drerd -- When the prick stands up, the sense (or judgment) lies down in the ground.  This is of course an alibi made by men themselves, and has no scientific standing.  For one thing, the putz doesn't have a brain, as Westheimer implies: sexual desire is mostly in the brain a couple of feet above the gonads.  For another, sexual desire can impair judgment, but it doesn't destroy it altogether; an aroused person can still hear the words "No" and "Stop."  If a person is taught that he (or she) is not responsible for what he does when aroused, he will not even try to behave responsibly.  As Marcotte pointed out after Westheimer protested that she wasn't defending rape, "no rape apologist in the history of rape apologies has ever admitted to rape apologizing."

But did Ashkenazi folklore take this proverb from the Talmud?  I realized I'd better try to find out, and it turned out to be easier than I expected.  The writer of this helpful article tried to ask Westheimer for a reference for her Talmudic wisdom, but the Doctor was out.  The writer then talked to some rabbis, who recognized the proverb but didn't think it came from the Talmud.  Indeed, they said, that the Talmud is extremely anti-rape and pro-consent.

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose books about sex and Judaism include “Kosher Sex,” “Kosher Adultery” and “Kosher Lust,” said, “I know Dr. Ruth and very much like her, but anyone in the Jewish community should strongly object to what she said. Consent is offered by a woman, and it can be withdrawn at any moment."

“The idea that men are ravaging beasts who are controlled by their hormones and can’t stop themselves is a Neanderthal view that Judaism would never embrace. It’s a shockingly frightening excuse for rape.”

Rabbi Dov Linzer, head of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah, a liberal Orthodox rabbinical school, and co-host of “The Joy of Text” monthly podcast on Judaism and sexuality, agreed with Ruttenberg and Boteach. Linzer pointed to the passages they cited and also noted a passage in Berachot 62A saying that even when a man and his wife are naked together in bed, it is incumbent upon him to make sure she desires to have sex before beginning the act.

Although known for its conflicting opinions and arguments, the Talmud is notably consistent about sexual consent, Linzer said, adding that he could not think of any passage that forgives or condones sex without full consent and that “the whole issue of responsibility and culpability is a major theme in the Talmud.

This sounded very impressive. Why, the Talmud is completely in accord with modern feminism!    (Notice, however, Boteach's reference to "Neanderthal" brutishness.  We don't in fact know anything about the sexual behavior or manners of the Neanderthals.  The word has the same function here that "primitive" did for the commenter I mentioned earlier.  If the Neanderthals were contemptuous of consent, though, that would mean they weren't primitive but as modern as Dr. Ruth or Michael Ruse.)  English translations of the Talmud are available online, so I decided to find these passages if I could, and see how the rabbis expressed these modern ideas so many centuries ago.  I began with Berachot 62A online, and I cannot find anything about the necessity of a husband's ascertaining his wife's willingness to copulate there, in or out of bed.  The section is mostly a discussion of outhouse etiquette between men, mainly rabbis.  For example:

Our Rabbis taught: Who is a modest man? One who eases himself by night in the place where he eased himself by day.  Is that so? Has not Rab Judah said in the name of Rab: A man should always accustom himself [to consult nature] in the early morning and in the evening so that he may have no need to go a long distance? And again, in the day-time Raba used to go as far as a mile, but at night he said to his attendant, Clear me a spot in the street of the town, and so too R. Zera said to his attendant, See if there is anyone behind the Seminary as I wish to ease myself? — Do not read 'in the place', but read, 'in the same way as he eases himself by day'  R. Ashi said, You may even retain the reading 'place', the reference being to a private corner.

Kinky, but not relevant to rape or consent in the marital bed.  I checked other passages cited in the article.   Nedarim 20A says nothing I could find about connubial drunkenness ruling out consent, though it does contain some familiar folklore about children being marked by their parents' behavior during and after conception:

R. Johanan b. Dahabai said: The Ministering Angels told me four things: People are born lame because they [sc. their parents] overturned their table [i.e., practised unnatural cohabitation]; dumb, because they kiss 'that place'; deaf, because they converse during cohabitation; blind, because they look at 'that place'. But this contradicts the following: Imma Shalom was asked: Why are thy children so exceedingly beautiful? She replied: [Because] he [my husband] 'converses' with me neither at the beginning nor at the end of the night, but [only] at midnight; and when he 'converses', he uncovers a handbreadth and covers a hand breadth, and is as though he were compelled by a demon. And when I asked him, What is the reason for this [for choosing midnight], he replied, So that I may not think of another woman, lest my children be as bastards. — There is no difficulty: this refers to conjugal matters;  the other refers to other matters. 

There follows some discussion of anal penetration of the wife, which the rabbis generally accept because

R. Johanan said: The above is the view of R. Johanan b. Dahabai; but our Sages said: The halachah is not as R. Johanan b. Dahabai, but a man may do whatever he pleases with his wife [at intercourse]: A parable; Meat which comes from the abattoir, may be eaten salted, roasted, cooked or seethed; so with fish from the fishmonger.

Only 37A came within a country mile of R. Boteach's account: "Ye maintain that a menstruant woman is permitted yihud [privacy] with her husband: can fire be near tow without singeing it?"  This seems to me far from "the man has to prop himself up on his elbows and subside," however, and it seems to imply that the proximity even of a menstruating wife will "singe" her husband with desire.  Or maybe not.  But on the basis of these scholars' references, I can't see that the Talmud is particularly humane or enlightened about women, copulation, consent, or reproduction.  That, however, is more because it's the work of male scholars, than because it's religious or "primitive."

Oh, How Can You Say Such Awful Things?

I'm reading Gary C. Thomas's essay "'Was George Frederic Handel Gay?': On Closet Questions and Cultural Politics" in Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (ed. Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood, & Gary C. Thomas; 2nd edition, Routledge, 2006).  Thomas does a beautiful job showing how Handel's virtue has been defended fiercely by his biographers for the past three centuries, without any evidence to support a claim of heterosexuality.  Often they have simply made stuff up: Thomas quotes a late twentieth century biographer who confidently asserts that Handel wasn't homosexual because "in an eighteenth-century context the vagabond life of musicians made marriage a distinct hindrance" (170).  You mean like Haydn?  Or Mozart?  (Even if marriage was a hindrance to musicians, it doesn't seem to have deterred them from marrying.)  Oddly, Thomas counters this claim by pointing out that "gay men from Handel's time through Stonewall (but especially in the eighteenth century) married more often than not, and for a variety of reasons"; a really determined apologist would use that as evidence that Handel wasn't gay, or he would have married.  More germane, and Thomas spends a good deal more space showing this, is that the evidence we have (including from his contemporaries) is that Handel didn't have any erotic liaisons with women at all, unlike many of his artistic bachelor contemporaries.  That's not proof that he was gay either; but it argues against any confident assertion that he was heterosexual.

But I'm digressing; what got me started on this post was Thomas's partly rhetorical question on the same page: "Why in an enlightened age wouldn't the possibility of a gay Handel be greeted if not with enthusiasm, then with a 'modicum of dispassionate objectivity'?"  It's understandable why Handel's contemporaries would have reacted with horror to the suggestion that the great man was a Sodomite; but not in our supposedly "enlightened age," when we know that earthquakes aren't caused by buggery.  One of the virtues of the first edition of Queering the Pitch (1994) was that the more intemperate reactions to it cast doubt on the widespread fantasy that the world of classical music is a tolerant, accepting, even welcoming haven for homos.  If the suggestion that Handel (or Schubert, or whoever) may have liked men is so absurd, why not simply refute it with evidence and reason?  Why do so many highly educated and worldly people react instead with illogic and fantasy?

I can now segue to the main topic of this post, namely Todd Akin, the Republican candidate for the US Senate from Missouri who uttered these now-notorious words in an interview on a St. Louis TV station:

First of all, from what I understand from doctors, (pregnancy from rape) is really rare. If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child.

Akin's claim is ludicrous, of course, but people reacted to it almost as ludicrously.  This Kansas City Star article, for example, quotes an emergency-room doctor as saying, "To try to be able to say that anyone’s going to respond in a consistent pattern that’s going to limit their probability of becoming pregnant is ridiculous."  The doctor seems to be thinking in terms of medical procedures, like a morning-after pill or a medical abortion; what Akin evidently had in mind was an automatic physiological response of a woman's body to forced copulation.  I'm referring to the Star article because it explains where Akin probably got his belief:

But Tim Wildmon, president of the American Family Association — a nonprofit that describes itself as a pro-family organization — told The Star on Monday that “fair-minded people” know what Akin really meant by his statement. Wildmon speculated that Akin was differentiating between forcible rape and statutory rape, which can be consensual.

“What I read from some medical sources, when a woman is raped, her body shuts down in some respects that may prevent her from getting pregnant,” Wildmon said.

Wildmon referred to an article by physician John Willke, president of the Life Issues Institute — a nonprofit anti-abortion group — and former president of the National Right to Life Committee. In that article, titled “Rape Pregnancies are Rare” and published in April 1999, Willke wrote that one of the most important factors to consider is that a rape victim’s hormone production during such trauma may be “upset,” resulting in a possible pregnancy being compromised.

“There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape,” the article reads. “This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy.”

Leading experts on reproductive health, however, dismissed this logic...

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

(Newsweek's Michele Goldberg, on Democracy Now yesterday, also cited Willke.)  This is what I'd consider the proper response to someone like Akin: Oh, really?  Which doctors?  Can you point me to a source?  What do most doctors say about this?  The struggle for women's reproductive autonomy has been going on for quite some time now, much like the struggle for racial equality or the struggle for the equality of sexual minorities.  Yet every time some bigoted fool says something absurd, the typical liberal response is to freak out (Oh, how can you say such awful things?) and vilify the person rather than his or her words, despite the liberal claim that liberals and especially liberal Democrats are sane rational people while conservative Republicans are irrational wackjobs.  Which isn't to say that Akin shouldn't be vilified, but so should many Democrats.  People who haven't learn to think or debate rationally are not people I trust with a movement for social justice.

The focus has been on Akin's fantasy about the wonderful, no doubt God-given, powers of the female body to protect itself against invasion.  (While he was at it, he should have mentioned the tiny but sharp little teeth that come out of the vagina to chomp up the membrum virile of a dirty rapist, praise Jesus!  That would be a fantasy too, but why stick with half-measures when you're talking about a serious issue?  The more serious, the more important it is to make stuff up.  It's okay, because it's in a good cause.)  I can't help wondering, though: if a woman's body blocks pregnancy after a rape, isn't that like natural abortion?  Should a woman be allowed to punish a zygote, or even a sperm cell, just because she was raped?  That is, I hope you noticed, Akin's rationale for disallowing a medical abortion in cases of rape: punish the rapist, not the "baby" -- once the sperm is in the vagina, it's a potential baby.

It isn't actually irrational to believe that women's bodies could reject unwanted sperm.  Such things happen in nature.  Among zebra finches, females do not conceive after forced copulations, and females of some other species have been observed ejecting sperm after copulation; see Marlene Zuk, Sexual Selections [California. 2002], 84-85.  Women aren't birds, unfortunately, and if Todd Akin wants to build social policy on the assumption that they are, he needs better evidence than one speculative paper by one anti-choice doctor.

Fussing about the definition of rape, as many of Akin's liberal critics have been doing, is really beside the point.  Some have looked past it, pointing out that his fantasy about women's power is an attempt to justify his denial of an exception for abortion in the case of rape, which is the current Republican Party stance on abortion.  The issue is not the definition of rape, but that women's right to make decisions about their own bodies has been whittled away that far.  Roe v. Wade asserted a woman's freedom to decide whether to have an abortion without qualification in the first trimester of pregnancy, whether she has been raped or not.  But focusing on the definition of rape allowed President Obama, for example, to pontificate:

Rape is rape. And the idea that we should be parsing and qualifying and slicing what types of rape we’re talking about doesn’t make sense to the American people and certainly doesn’t make sense to me. So, what I think these comments do underscore is why we shouldn’t have a bunch of politicians, a majority of whom are men, making healthcare decisions on behalf of women.

Obama's own record, however, is dodgier than these tough words would suggest.  As this blogger points out, the Affordable Care Act (conforming with the Hyde Amendment) forbids the use of federal funds for abortion, "except in cases of rape or incest, or when the life of the woman would be endangered," as well as other amendments which "prohibit discrimination" (!) against health care providers whose religious "conscience" forbids them to provide abortion services.  Sounds like male politicians making healthcare decisions on behalf of women to me.

It's worth looking at Akin's "apology," too.  Does he apologize for his determined, longstanding opposition to women's reproductive freedom?  Of course not:

I’ve really made a couple of serious mistakes here that were just wrong, and I need to apologize for those. First, I might say that I’ve always been committed to pro-life, and it was because I didn’t want to harm the most vulnerable. But likewise, I care deeply, you know, for the victims of people who have been raped, and they’re equally vulnerable. And a rape is equally tragic. And I made that statement in error. Let me be clear: rape is never legitimate. It’s an evil act that’s committed by violent predators. I used the wrong words in the wrong way. What I said was ill-conceived, and it was wrong. And for that, I apologize.

It's a typical politician's apology.  Which is why rape survivor and author of the Vagina Monologues Eve Ensler missed the point in her HuffPost response to Akin.  Ensler invited Akin to imagine a violent, stinking stranger breaking into his house in the night and forcing him to submit to his vile appetites -- but stranger rape, preferably by unwashed derelicts of color, is the paradigm of rape that the Religious Right accepts.  (At least in theory: in practice, the victim had better be a white blonde virgin, whose flimsy feminine garments are rent by the brute's grubby paws, and even then they'll never quite believe she didn't ask for it.)  The Republican National Committee didn't cut off their funding of Akin, nor did Romney denounce him and call for him to withdraw from the race, because they've suddenly become pro-choice.  (As usual, the Onion got it right.)

I got into a verbal tussle with the blogger Vast Left on Facebook yesterday, because he blamed Akin's view on the Bible, and invited his commenters to cite cases from the Bible where rape resulted in pregnancy.  His own example was that of Lot and his daughters.  Faithful Bible readers will recall that after the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, which also resulted in Lot's wife looking back and being turned into a pillar of salt, Lot's daughters got him drunk on successive nights and copulated with him in turn.  They both became pregnant as a result.  I pointed out that if anyone was raped in this story, it was Lot; Akin's fantasy wouldn't apply to him.  Vast Left didn't seem bothered by the distinction, but of course we're going after Republicans here, and Christians to boot, so all's fair.  More cases were mentioned, such as slaves being used sexually (which, as I've pointed out, doesn't seem to bother gay Christians as long as master and slave are both male), of concubinage and the like.  I pointed out that in the Hebrew Bible, brides were routinely purchased, so it would seem that all Biblical women were raped (except possibly Ruth).  The concept of "consent," so important in liberal discourse on sex, is a legal fiction: in America in the recent past, white women could not consent to copulate with non-white males, wives could not withhold consent to copulate with their husbands ("I do" amounting to consent while the marriage continued), and of course no one of either sex could consent to be penetrated anally.  Legal consent, enshrined in the cliche "consenting adults," is very different from commonsense notions of consent, which have their own problems.

Vast Left offered a nice platitude: Sexual attitudes in the past sucked, and so do some today, but consent is important.  And religion is okay as long as believers extract whatever good they can from it.  Who gets to decide that what is extracted is good? I asked.  Atheists haven't done better than theists where ethics and morality are concerned, as far as I can tell, particularly on questions of sex and gender.

Wherever Akin and Willke got their fantasy about the abortifacient powers of the womb, they didn't get it from the Bible.  Indeed, Willke is a doctor, and they were both appealing to the authority of science, not religion.  Where consent is concerned, atheists -- especially male ones -- have not distinguished themselves.  Remember the proudly atheist and pro-science philosopher Michael Ruse, who confused sex with a woman and defecating on a Persian rug: his rationalist exploration of rape delved into whether he should clear a potential copulation with another male, and the woman's opinion didn't enter into it at all.  (He did lament that human females don't go into heat, because then rape somehow wouldn't be an issue, but again, he was addressing other men's judgment of his behavior, not the woman's wishes.)  "Scientific" discussions of rape have been no better, such as Thornhill and Palmer's recommendation that teenagers be required to take classes on rape prevention before being issued a driver's license: boys would learn the evolutionary issues involved, while girls would be taught not to dress "provocatively" -- any Taliban mullah would surely agree.  Or the whole "evolutionary psychology" approach: rape is awful, terrible, horrible, and maybe someday we'll find a way to alter the genome so men won't do it, without losing their manliness.  Meanwhile, according to the evolutionary psychologists, women will just have to learn not to blame Nature if her sons are sexist; it's nobody's fault.

This is one reason I don't blame religion for bad things in human society (or give religion credit for the good things).  People use religion to ratify what they already want or believe, which is why when many people reject religion, they tend to keep the teachings they like.  Sex and gender are topics that seem especially tenacious.  But again, all this is a distraction from the crucial issue of women's right to make decisions over their own bodies.

That was all I had in mind to say, but just now another friend posted a meme on Facebook to the effect that if men could get pregnant, we wouldn't be having this conversation.  It's a familiar gag; one version went, "If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."  The point is a good one, but I don't think I agree.  Patriarchy regulates men's sexual behavior pretty strictly too: consider the story of Onan (Genesis 38), struck dead by Yahweh for spilling his semen on the ground instead of siring a child on his widowed sister-in-law.  Masturbation, called onanism, was ginned up into a major source of hysteria by the medical profession, more than it ever had been by religion.  Men are supposed to respect each other's property rights over women, though of course they constantly cheat.  And male homosexuality, conflated with the regulation of styles of manhood, is a major arena of anxiety and discipline; men who fail to conform pay a heavy price.  Which brings me full circle to the question at the beginning of this post, and good night.

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2012/08/20/3771226/doctors-dispute-akins-claim-but.html#storylink=cpy