U.S. Rep Steve King (R-Iowa) asked if not for rape and incest “would there be any population left?”
He noted that throughout history, rape was common and women bore the children. Why, he evidently wonders, should things change?
During the Kavanaugh hearings, King also said, if sexual assault is the new standard, “No man will ever qualify for the Supreme Court.”
That’s because the general attitude before about 1970 was that men are natural aggressors. Men will be men. Rape is what they do.
That was what Trump meant in the Access Hollywood tape when he said he sees an attractive woman and just starts kissing her. He doesn’t wait. He just grabs.
Wait, what? The sins of the mother? In connection with “rape?”
This actually makes sense within the world view of people like Steve King and Donald Trump.
When someone holds the view that rape is naturally what men do, the woman becomes responsible for guarding her chastity. If she fails, it’s her fault. Anyone older than 50 knows what I’m talking about. The attitude was common to blame girls for “leading him on.” If a woman was wearing provocative clothing, for example, and she was raped, she’d be blamed for the way she dressed.
But rape isn’t a natural result of human nature. It’s a means of exerting patriarchal power.
What King (and Trump) want is to return to the days when men could grab whatever they wanted.
Forcing women to bear babies conceived by rape is also a means of exerting patriarchal power.
Isn’t the whole Incel movement just a complaint about the fact women are now allowed to say “no”? Being forced into celibacy wasn’t a problem in the days when men could grab what they wanted.
One of the times I volunteered in a detention center (offering legal assistance through RAICES to asylum seekers) I asked a woman from Guatemala what would have happened to her if she stood up in a public place and said, “A woman should be allowed to say no.”
She said, “I’d be killed.”
Women were not allowed to say no, so they had to be carefully “protected.” Rape and abduction was the means by which women were kept in fear and under wraps.
Domestic violence often happens when women say ‘no.’
Remember when the Trump administration wanted to deny asylum to those fleeing “domestic violence”? That came from the same thinking: Women should do what they’re told in “domestic” situations.
The problem is defining “domestic.”
One asylum seeker told me that when a gang member killed her husband, he claimed her as his prize (according to custom, if you kill a man, you get his woman.) He took her as his “wife” (no marriage ceremony.)
She ran away. Is that “domestic” violence?
