If you want your stomach turned this early in the morning—-or even if you don’t, but you want to read a fascinating account of the automatic nature of rape condoning in our culture—-check out Bill Wyman’s account of the whitewashing of Roman Polanski’s crime of anally raping a 13-year-old, a crime that keeps him from returning to the U.S. (because he’s running from justice), and a crime that he’s trying to clear his name of, even though he admitted that he did it. In fact, there’s absolutely no doubt whatsoever that he drugged and raped a 13-year-old girl. When there’s so little doubt about guilt regarding other crimes, there’s rarely this sort of public hand-wringing about whether the guilty is really guilty, but we’re talking rape and we’re talking about our rape culture. A rape culture is a funhouse mirror version of the anti-choice culture’s attitudes about abortion. Anti-choicers want abortion to be illegal with the three exceptions being health, rape, and me. Rape apologists, who still sadly dominate the discourse, think rape should basically be legal except for dark alleys, virgin daughters, and me. Even though every single rape apologist claims to oppose rape, they find ways to claim that rape isn’t rape, even when the victim is 13, drugged, and pleading with you to stop as you rape her up the ass. Rape apologists in fact tend to see the victims as the real criminals, with some rape apologists suggesting mandatory criminal charges against victims if the prosecution can’t find the defendant guilty, which is another way they agitate to legalize rape without coming out and saying so. If you can’t report a crime, it’s de facto legal.
Since both traditions stem from the same misogynist place, you occasionally see darkly funny examples where rape apologists see forced childbirth as the appropriate punishment for a rape victim, except one of the three major exceptions. Take Bill Napoli’s famous comment about who “deserves” an abortion:
A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.