Where does Todd Akin get the idea that, when she’s raped, a “woman’s body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down?”

Here’s an Akin tidbit that offers a clue.

For many years, Akin held Fourth of July picnics for supporters and friends at his family homestead in suburban St. Louis. And at those parties, he would dress up in a three-cornered hat and other colonial regalia. Akin took his colonial-themed party seriously, and so did others. According to the Washington Post,

[Akin’s church pastor] “would read from Ecclesiastes, take off his colonial robes to reveal a revolutionary military uniform and then march off with George Washington to war.”

Akin’s magic-womb theory is an idea that was floating around during America’s colonial period.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

In those days, prior to modern medical understanding of conception, women were considered to be “more amorous” than men, and it was believed that both partners needed to have orgasms in order for conception to occur.

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.”

Obviously, Todd Akin simply LOVES the colonial era and all its trappings, including, it now seems clear, its quaint and scientifically bogus ideas about women and their mystical lady parts.

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