By now, we’ve all heard the comments by Republican Representative Todd Akin who is running for the Senate position for the state of Missouri. On Sunday August 19, 2012, in a live interview on The Jaco Report, Representative Akin said “if it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to shut that whole thing down.” The comments spread like wildfire on Twitter and have affected the 2012 American Senate and presidential elections. Akin claimed, although he apologized for the remark later, that rape rarely leads to unwanted pregnancy. Even in fictional stories presented in comics, rape often leads to pregnancy.
The first case is a total reverse scenario from what Akin described as the female body's resilience against rape, but it’s worth mentioning. In the mini-series Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters, the character Ollie Queen, also known as the super hero Green Arrow, was drugged and made to conceive a child with the Japanese archer Shado. Shado was the perpetrator and the female, but she did manage to get pregnant after abusing Queen. A few years later, Green Arrow would discover his “love child.”
A rape that’s closer to the male on female rape deemed illegitimate by Akin is the rape of Princess Cora on her wedding night by her cousin Dardanus in The Atlantis Chronicles. The rape produced Kordax, a deformed and scaled baby who would plague Atlantis for decades. Apparently the internal defenses of Princess Cora worked so well, that conception not only took hold, it made the baby crazier and more dangerous...
Cult member Arella of Earth was raped by a demon from another dimension called Trigon. This lead Arella to birth Raven, a daughter with the powers of Trigon who would one day join the New Teen Titans and frequently be possessed by the powers of her father.
Of course, these rape scenes were pure fiction and some of them, like the one in Green Arrow, have parts of a reverse-scenario male fantasy to them where the hero can conceive while remaining “faithful” to his regular partner, Black Canary. However, in the case of both Cora and Arella, the rape was real and depicted brutally. Rape is often a plot device to make a story more dramatic but it should not be taken lightly the way Representative Todd Akin has taken it. The important thing to remember is that there is no forcible or legitimate thing as rape whether it’s in comics or real life. Rape is rape.
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