The headline for Jessica Pieklo's post says it all: "Ron Paul, What Exactly Is An “Honest Rape?”

Just in case there was any question, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX) is no friend to women. The latest evidence came during an interview on CNN where he told Piers Morgan that only in cases of “honest rape” would he consider abortion acceptable, and even then in he would just advise the woman to go to the emergency room for “a shot of estrogen.”

Source: Care2 Causes

All I can say is there are just way to many people making assumptions about what is or isn't rape. As far as they're concerned, of course. I think it's a really bad idea to make any assumptions at all. I'd have been tempted to add "if you're a guy" but really, what's the difference between Ron Paul's "honest rape," or Whoopie Goldberg's "rape-rape," or so many other people's similar variations on "real rape."

I guess there are plenty of reasons for trying to construct a distinction.

For people like Ron Paul (who despite some nominally libertarian window-dressing, behaves indistinguishably from the average old, white, southern "states rights" conservative Republicans) terms like "honest rape" refer to the conventional belief among anti-abortion activists that exemptions in their anti-abortion laws are a bad idea because it just "encourages" women to "circumvent" those "safeguards" by pretending they were victims.

For people like Whoopie Goldberg (who despite the serious lapse is generally pretty savvy about the issues) I'm afraid words like "rape-rape" tend to mean mostly "something my accused friend wouldn't have done." For others it means "it couldn't have been what I did."  And for still others, maybe a lot of others, words like that mean "that couldn't have been what happened to me."

For others it can mean "but ABCs can't be raped by XYZs."

For others it can mean "but she/he didn't say 'no.'"

Sometimes, I guess, you can say the distinction arises out of a paradigm-driven urge to blame victims -- in those cases they're not so much interested in absolving perpetrators (for whom lurid punishments are often proposed), just hammering the (generally perceived as female) victims for any perceived or perhaps even imaginable "lapse in virtue."

And of course a heck of a lot of the time it just arises out of a desire for... what?... "dishonest" rapists? ... "non-rape-rape" rapists? ... "unreal" rapists? ... to absolve themselves by saying "well, that's not how I do it."  Or "but if men (it's usually men they have in mind) can't do X, Y, or Z then they can't have sex at all."

But here's the point: what all the above have in common is that they're sure they know what the difference is.  I'm... pretty sure that anyone who assumes they know they can is unlikely to have the faintest clue.

I gotta be really clear here (it's central to the post, actually) that there's a large difference between sex and rape.  And I think it's relatively easy to tell the two apart.  But not if you believe there's a difference between "honest" rape and some other kind.

That's a perilous state for sexually active humans to be in: if you're sure you know the difference then, like Ron Paul, or Whoopie Goldberg, or Roman Polanski and his victim's parents, or like me and a heck of a lot of people who came of age in the 1960s, or 1970s, or 1980s, or sometimes even the 1990s and beyond, you are, or have been, or in the future might be a potential danger both to others and to yourself.