How many of your friends have ever told you that they’ve been raped by a midterm or a final? Maybe they were raped by their 15-page research paper that they started the night before it was due.
“Oh my gosh,” your friend will say, as he plops down in the chair next to you, exhausted by his day. “I was totally raped by that lab. It sucked.”
And how many of you know someone who has been raped? Or even sexually harassed? Sexually victimized? Had things shouted at them on the street?
It might seem ridiculous and annoyingly politically correct to parse the word “rape” ““ to make a big deal out of a simple four-letter word that has entered slang as a synonym for “owned” or “destroyed.” Oh, look ““ another obnoxious feminist, trying to make sure we watch our language so that womyns’ feelings don’t get hurt.
You’ve got to be kidding me. The fact of the matter is that one in six women has been a victim of rape or attempted rape. For college women, it’s one in five. Seeing as only about one in six rapes go reported, chances are that everybody knows at least one woman who has been raped or sexually harassed and hasn’t told anyone.
The problem here is the use of “rape” out of context. Rape is generally defined as “unlawful sexual activity and usually sexual intercourse carried out forcibly or under threat of injury against (one’s) will.”
Ushma Vyas, a fourth-year political science and history student, said, “Rape connotes violent and sexual seizure over another person’s body and thus reflects a pointed history of violence against women.”
The implications of the word “rape” are not limited to women in the United States but to women abroad as well. Anyone who went to Mighty Mic this year would know; the concert benefitted organizations aimed at helping women who have suffered through the trauma of rape, which is used as a weapon of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
“(Rape) is an instrument for promoting hegemony and perpetuating systems of oppression, particularly toward women and girls,” Vyas said.
So people might think twice about saying their midterm raped them in front of a woman brutally gang-raped by several armed men.
“The truth is, millions of women each year are raped as a method of warfare in countries across Africa, and here in the U.S. someone is sexually assaulted every two minutes. So when someone uses the term “˜rape’ out of context, it trivializes the impact it should have on all of us,” said Miranda Petersen, a fourth-year psychology and women’s studies student and executive board member of Bruin Feminists for Equality.
Many might make the argument that usage of the word familiarizes the concept or meaning and thus makes it less scary and abnormal. This is generally how slang is normalized; words like “suck” and “damn” that were shocking several decades ago have lost their sting because of widespread usage. This should hardly be the case with the word “rape.”
“It surprises me that individuals can continue to be so ignorant in their choice of words under the false pretense of de-stigmatizing a very real and horrific experience,” Vyas said.
The trauma experienced by a rape or attempted rape victim is belittled by the way people throw the word around. While frequently using an offensive word makes it less scary, using it as if it meant nothing as a way of assuming control of its usage and thus changing its meaning might work for derogatory words and names, but rape has had and always will have the same definition.
“Rape is a violent act used as a tool to exert control over and terrorize people’s bodies. … It is a heinous and devastating act,” Petersen said.
Rape should never be trivialized. Using the word “rape” out of context lessens its emotional impact and its significance as an act of sexual control ““ whether committed by a stranger or a friend, through force or through drugs.
You might use the word flippantly and on an everyday basis (I have a friend who complained that a recent quiz raped him; he scored 89 percent), but you might be using the word in the presence of someone who actually has been raped and hasn’t said anything: your mother, your sister, your cousin, your girlfriend, your best friend.
While telling someone not to use a certain word for fear of striking a sensitive nerve might sound contrary to the principles of free speech, protecting women from the trivialization of rape and sexual assault is a crucial issue. Rape already suffers from underreporting because of feelings of shame, stigmatization and guilt; it doesn’t need to be even further underreported because someone threw the word around as though this violent, awful, degrading act of violence didn’t matter ““ as though it were an everyday event that happened to everybody, with professors, quizzes, sports teams, whatever ““ because it isn’t. It’s rape.
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On the other hand, we do use words like “kill”, “torture”, “murder” in the same way:
– “Man, I just got killed by that test”
– “Sitting through that exam was torture”
– “That final murdered me”
These expressions convey a feeling/idea without ever intending to trivialize those that have actually been murdered or tortured. While saying one “got raped by a test” may not be the most tasteful way of expressing that idea, arguing it trivializes actual rape means one would have to say the same about the above expressions and cease using them. I think rational, well-meaning individuals can separate the uses of a word in different contexts.