Jon Stewart& Brutal HR3 Reality

As you may have read earlier, Twitter has been set ablaze this week by another feminist protest, this time for the recently proposed “only forcible rape gets federal abortion funding, sorry!” bill in the House. HR3 is an outrageous, illogical proposal that seeks to draw lines in the sand when it comes to rape, sexual assault, you name it– the House is ready to dismiss it all in the name of “smaller government spending”.

I in no way expected the mainstream media to point out the absurdity of the bill. Call me cynical, but with very few exceptions, the media is more apt to cry, “crazy feminists, why so sensitive?!” than they are to question why outrage might be necessary. Picture my surprise, then, when I flipped past Comedy Central last night and saw a five minute segment on exactly what had been flooding my Twitter stream for 72 hours. And it was good.

In typical Daily Show style, Jon Stewart acted as the straight man, watching his misguided correspondent (“Senior Women’s Issues Correspondent” Kristen Schaal) in horror as she explained the thinking behind HR3.

Jon Stewart: “But all rape by definition is forcible.”

Kristen Schaal: “Ooh, Jon. I’m not comfortable with that term: all. In truth, there’s a whole rainbow of rape, covering a wide spectrum of gray areas!”

And she went on to address just about every ridiculous stereotype about rape: “but he’s a famous director!” “rape, or rape rape?” “well, was she dressed slutty?” “how could she know she was being raped, maybe it was a rapemare,” and so on and on and on…

The brilliance of the segment was that it took the implications of questioning rape and stated them outright, making them sound as ridiculous as they are. You can hear the hesitation in the audience’s laughter: do we laugh at this? It seems like a bit much. And it does.

But as absurd as the segment may have sounded, there was nothing Schaal said that I hadn’t heard implied in the media before. The Daily Show may be satire, but the mirror it held up to HR3 and its supporters wasn’t so much a funhouse mirror as it was….well, a mirror. It was spot on, and all the more horrifying for it.

So while the House has now let go of the ludicrous “forcible” line, the fact that it was there at all reveals an unbelievable, willful and ultimately unsurprising ignorance regarding the realities of rape: the language may be gone, but the sentiment is far from it.