Secular Café: Male politicians annoy women

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Male politicians annoy women Aug 25th 2012, 16:37 Some of them anyway. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...oway-akin-rape Quote: What trouble beckons for men when they talk to women. Not all men, of course. But for a certain breed of male politician, it seems the territory marked "women's issues" is a minefield. That did not stop three of them wading in with clumsy boots this week, one cretinously, another creepily and the third recklessly. The cretin was Todd Akin, would-be Republican senator for Missouri, author of the novel idea that a woman's body automatically prevents itself from becoming pregnant through rape – but only if the rape is "legitimate". It was an absurd word to use, as he tried to distinguish between sex involving a violent stranger and other forms of coercive, non-consensual sex - all of them rape – but he was not the first to do it. His party's vice-presidential nominee, Paul Ryan, co-sponsored legislation last year to deny federal funding for all abortions, with an exception for pregnancies resulting from incest and "forcible rape" – implying this was the only form of rape that matters. Our very own Ken Clarke made a similar distinction when he spoke last year of "serious rape", as if there were any other kind. With Ryan for company, Akin might have got away with it. But his middle ages notion that "the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down" was too much for his party leadership. Apparently too much for the voters too. Last week Akin led by nine points, now he trails by 10. The creepy intervention came with George Galloway's video defence of Julian Assange. In language that made the flesh crawl, Galloway offered this dissertation on sexual consent: "I mean, not everybody needs to be asked prior to each insertion," adding that Assange's accusers could fault him at most for "bad sexual etiquette". The name of the Bradford MP's weekly online broadcast – Good Night with George Galloway – suddenly acquired a whole new meaning. At least the Respect MP refrained from naming Assange's alleged victims. No such restraint for Craig Murray, a former British diplomat, who denounced one of them by name on Newsnight, violating the British legal scruple that holds that a woman who may have suffered the trauma of rape should at least be granted basic privacy. What these three episodes have in common is how much they seem to reveal about the speaker. It's easy enough for politicians to maintain the mask when speaking about, say, tax or industrial policy. But get them on to these fundamental matters of how men and women relate to each other and their character starts showing. The comments are interesting. I don't know anyone in Britain who has any time at all for Galloway. I note that he is referred to by various words describing parts of male or female genitalia. Not usually terms of respect.

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