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"Some Girls Rape Easy"

Excuse me while I momentarily sigh with despair over the entire Republican Party.

OK. Now that’s over: Roger Rivard, a Wisconsin state representative, recently said that in his youth his father had told him the above thing. He later clarified to a reporter:

“He also told me one thing, ‘If you do (have premarital sex), just remember, consensual sex can turn into rape in an awful hurry,’” Rivard said. “Because all of a sudden a young lady gets pregnant and the parents are madder than a wet hen and she’s not going to say, ‘Oh, yeah, I was part of the program.’ All that she has to say or the parents have to say is it was rape because she’s underage. And he just said, ‘Remember, Roger, if you go down that road, some girls,’ he said, ‘they rape so easy.’

“What the whole genesis of it was, it was advice to me, telling me, ‘If you’re going to go down that road, you may have consensual sex that night and then the next morning it may be rape.’ So the way he said it was, ‘Just remember, Roger, some girls, they rape so easy. It may be rape the next morning.’

“So it’s been kind of taken out of context.”

This is a little better, although I don’t really approve of scaring boys into celibacy by painting young women as so lacking in moral fiber that they would accuse someone of rape rather than admit they had consensual sex.

I’m just even more confused by why all these Republican politicians can’t seem to get that rape is a very important, sensitive subject and they should stop using the word lightly or making unthinking remarks that require long, involved explanations to understand “properly”.

Edit: If you read this earlier than the afternoon of October 14, in place of the preceding two paragraphs you saw a long, snarky rant about the inherent misogyny of Rivard, Sr.’s thinking. On reflection and dialogue with one of my readers, I decided that it was unnecessarily condescending and, more importantly, incorrect.

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