9/12/2012 Update: I'm going to turn this post into a catch-all post for places this definition has been used.
I submitted an entry for "legitimate rape" last night on Urban Dictionary and it was their Urban Word of the Day today. About 4000 thumbs up so far, and many dozens of tweets linking to that definition. Urban Dictionary's first of two Facebook status posts that link to the entry has over 2000 likes and hundreds of comments. About 800 people have shared UD's two status updates about my definition.
I did this in reference to Rep. Todd Akin's recent remarks, of course.
I'm now the leading authority on Legitimate Rape. How do I develop this into a legal paper?
Update: Popular legal culture blog Above the Law did a little profile of me because of this. They even suggest that people hire me. Seriously, please hire me.
Update 2: Mentioned in the Washington Post! Not bad!
Update 3: My definition has now been used in a few other news sources. A Mother Jones article about the history of men defining rape even closes with my definition. This article has been tweeted about almost 2000 times and liked on Facebook 2400 times. These numbers indicate that hundreds of thousands of people have read this article, which is very cool. Thousands of years of men defining rape, and now I'm the latest! That kind of makes me uncomfortable, but as long as Republicans don't start actually adopting my definition, I'm proud that it caught on. The hundreds of posts on various forums about my definition are fun for me to read too. It's cool to think about thousands of people, which is just a portion of the hundreds of thousands of people who've read my definition, choosing to "like" something I wrote.
I'm part of the zeitgeist now. Decades from now, when people read about this scandal as a minor historical episode, my definition will be mentioned as one of the major cultural responses. I'm glad that I've made this revealing episode for the Republican Party that much more memorable and I hope it keeps biting them.
