Akin's ideas about rape hark back to the colonial era

[salvorhardin]

Nicholas Culpeper's 17th century midwife manuals espoused that it was a woman's "womb, skipping as it were for joy" that produced "in that pang of Pleasure" the "seed" needed for conception to occur. If both husband and wife were not properly in love and enjoying sex, conception would fail, he asserted, because "the woman, being averse, does not produce sufficient quantities of the spirits with which her genitals should normally swell."

Although many women in early America undoubtedly knew that orgasm was not required for pregnancy to occur, many women also embraced the two-seed theory of reproduction.

Jane Sharp's 17th century manual, for example, explicitly discussed the clitoris, and described it as the location for women's physical sexual pleasures and the key to women's ability to conceive. "By the stirring of the Clitoris," she wrote, "the imagination causeth the Vessels to cast out that Seed that lyeth deep in the body."

Such notions of fertilization could have profound implications for women who sought justice after rape resulted in pregnancy. As historian of rape in early America Sharon Block has shown, colonial courts were notoriously suspicious of women who brought rape accusations. Women were seldom taken at their word and the status of the accused and the accuser became central to the outcome of the case. Moreover, a recurring theme in newspapers of the era was that that men needed to protect themselves against women — "the cunning sex" — who were out to falsely accuse them of rape.

Full article: http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-foster-akin-sex-20120822,0,5241846.story