(Potential trigger words: rape, sexual abuse)
Right now, the only thing that anyone, anywhere, with any remote talking-head significance is talking about is the newest luddite to burst onto the national media scene for saying something dumb and offensive: Missouri Congressman Todd Akin.
In case you missed it, this is what he said, verbatim, in an interview on Sunday:
“It seems to me, first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that’s 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. You know, I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.”
I won't go into every single factual inaccuracy of that paragraph of sheer, unadulterated ignorance--there are simply too many, and people better qualified than me to fact-check medical science have already done an excellent job of doing so.
But I have friends--of both sexes--who are rape victims, who emotionally told me about what had happened to them at parties, during dates, or elsewhere.
You may have friends or loved ones who are rape victims as well, even if they haven't shared that deeply personal part of their lives with you yet.
So it's personal.
And it's personal in another sense because more than most crimes, sexual violence is still an intensely private matter--we grant anonymity to its victims in the media, after all. Victims can go days, weeks, months, or years without the emotional and spiritual support of others, enduring the trials of pain, hurt, and post-traumatic stress utterly on their own. Indeed, a majority of rapes likely go unreported.
More so than most experiences, abuse--and sexual abuse at that--demonstrates the simple truth that nobody is an island, and that nobody should be expected to wrestle with the remnants of abuse on their own.
By delineating different categories of abuse--whether "legitimate," or "forcible" (which is what Akin claims he meant to say)--we create hierarchies of abuse, saying that some abuse is more understandable than others, or easier to empathize or sympathize with than others, and such hierarchies are utterly artificial (last time I checked, rape is "forcible" by definition).
Around the same time Akin was busy preparing to stick both feet in his mouth, philosophy professor Firmin DeBrabender wrote a piece for the New York Times on what he saw as the fiction of our self-sufficiency, given just how much we as a people rely on a government and collective presence in our lives--in essence, we pretend to be self-sufficient.
The money quote in this column, for me, is this:
We are not the sole authors of our destiny, each of us; our destinies are entangled — messily, unpredictably.
While the article is about economic self-sufficiency, this principle applies just as much to our emotional and spiritual well-being, too.
Not only do things happen to us that are beyond our control (things exactly like sexual abuse), but precisely because they are beyond our control, we cannot keep them from affecting only us, or only affecting some people more than others, or only affecting people who appear to us to be more self-sufficient.
This is why what Todd Akin said is so wrong--not simply on a factual level, but on a communal level. He, or anybody else, cannot define rape as legitimate or illegitimate, forcible or non-forcible, precisely because such a destructive force defies our attempts to compartmentalize it. Its destruction is epic, its memory is staggering, and we cannot pretend to arbitrarily define its limits.
And no person should have feel like they must begin to cope with such titanic violence on their own because a civic leader said that their abuse is somehow less legitimate than other abuse.
An individual person cannot cope like that on their own Nor should they ever, ever be expected to.
Yours in Christ,
Eric
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