Well, this is horrifying.
I… What?!
Yeah, read this, promptly threw-up in my mouth a little bit.
I don’t usually like to post politics on here, seeing as it’s a cosplay blog and all, but I will point out this because it’s particularly poignant to me:
In early modern Europe (more commonly known as the Renaissance), it was a belief that an orgasm was absolutely necessary for a woman to “release a seed” (as it was believed back then) and fall pregnant. Ergo, if a woman was raped and fell pregnant, it signaled she enjoyed it and therefore was not actually raped. Being pregnant was proof of an orgasm, whether or not a woman had orgasmed at all. At the time, it was believed that the female sexual organs were virtually identical to male sexual organs, only they were “inside out”; instead of a vagina, a human female had an interior penis, for example. Modern terminology and understanding of female sexual organs didn’t come about until the Enlightenment a few hundred years later.
So with that in mind, just let me just put this in perspective for you: there are American politicians who are still (more or less) operating under ideas about biology, rape and sex from the fucking 16th century and earlier. That’s the fucking 1500s. Forget all ideas about Republicans wanting to take the United States back to the 50s, because some of them are going hundreds of years further.
- Jenn
And because I hate sourceless information, have some sources:
- Baldasar Heseler, Andreas Veralius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna, 1540: An Eyewitness Report, ed Ruben Eriksson (Uppsala, Almqvist and Wiksells, 1959), p. 181
- Wiesner, Merry E., Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 47.
(via fallingivy)
