I assume it’s now some sort of GOP hazing ritual to have to make an ill-advised remark about “legitimate rape” in an interview, so it doesn’t really surprise me much that Rep. Phil Gingrey, chairman of the GOP Doctors Caucus, said this on Thursday:
“I’ve delivered lots of babies, and I know about these things. It is true,” Gingrey said, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. “We tell infertile couples all the time that are having trouble conceiving because of the woman not ovulating, ‘Just relax. Drink a glass of wine. And don’t be so tense and uptight because all that adrenaline can cause you not to ovulate.’ So he was partially right wasn’t he?”
I pretty much expect that of Republican legislators now. Call me cynical. But the [more?] outrageous part of Gingrey’s remarks comes when he tries to interpret what he thinks Todd Akin actually intended to say:
What he meant by legitimate rape was just look, someone can say I was raped: a scared-to-death 15-year-old that becomes impregnated by her boyfriend and then has to tell her parents, that’s pretty tough and might on some occasion say, ‘Hey, I was raped.’
Here are two reasons this is still offensive: 1) It reinforces the patriarchal culture that tells women they need to be ashamed to admit they’ve been sexually active, and 2) perpetuating the trope of the woman who lies to cover up her sexual indiscretions betrays an underlying mistrust of women and assumption that they lack integrity.
This is what the Republican party seems not to get about the entire conversation. They keep focusing on whether Akin’s remarks about women’s bodies and rape were medically accurate when it almost doesn’t matter, because the misogyny at the root of this thinking is what’s actually costing them the female vote.