Thursday, October 1, 2009

Attention Trolls: A quick definition

From the lovely comment moderation box on "Apologize." for your consideration:

Feminism: Advocates of censorship and thought control.

Rape means more than "Sex with a woman that didn't want it".

Shame that feminists refuse to acknowledge this, and instead try to make every single thing on earth solely about them.

Why... one might as well call it "What about teh wimmenz???"

Not. Everything. Is. About. You.

Rape has multiple meanings, look it up, please. Celebrating this moron makes you look foolish and ignorant.

Also, there's no such thing as rape culture. Pushing idiotic buzzwords just makes you look idiotic.

Thank you, Anonymous for your lovely, though-provoking comment.

I'll have to admit, you're right about one thing. Rape does mean more than "sex with a woman that didn't want" - I'll broaden the definition to "sex with a person that didn't want it". Because that's EXACTLY what rape is.

Unless, of course, you're refering to the less commonly used definition of rape as "an Old World herb (Brassica napus) of the mustard family grown as a forage crop and for its seeds which yield rapeseed oil and are a bird food" (M-W). I'm going to use my deductive reasoning skills here and guess that's not what you mean, or what the person who used rape originally intended. "I'm going to herb of the mustard family you in this video game"? Nope.

So when we refer to rape, it's talking about "sex with a person that didn't want it", FYI.

Impersonators, any other important things I'm forgetting about in our definition of rape?

4 comments:

Amelia said...

Thanks for this post. When I came across this comment, I rejected it immediately, just to get it out of moderation. It's disgusting.

I was having a conversation with a younger friend of mine the other day, and he used the word rape in a manner that I thought was inappropriate (saying that he had been to this website and that it "raped his brain"). He didn't mean to be offensive - he had actually thought it through, and said that he thought it was an appropriate word because the website had gotten into his brain without his consent.

I wasn't able to finish the conversation with him as I had to go to class, but he seemed willing to discuss it later. He was focused on the definition of rape as "seizing by force," without reference to sexual activity, but let's be honest: In this society, when people casually throw around the word rape, they're referring to the kind that involves sex acts without consent.

However, I agree: When we say rape, we mean a non-consentual/coerced sex act, which could be performed by any gender, of which any gender may be a victim.

I think that the inappropriate use of the word rape is really problematic because when it is applied to trivial matters such as playing a video game, or viewing a website, it takes away from the validity of the horrible experiences of real rape victims (people who were forced into having sex against their will).

I think you got it basically covered.

Lindsay said...

I am having a hard time figuring out what this person is saying.

Is he really trying to argue that casual use of "rape" --- like the example in your other post, of the guy boasting about "rap[ing]" the other guy "so hard" in a video game, or other commonly-heard usages, like "I got raped on that math test" --- have nothing to do with the literal meaning of rape? Nothing at all?

Someone should tell that guy what a metaphor is.

And, yes, "rape" did originally mean "to seize by force," as in Alexander Pope's "The Rape of the Lock," in which a lock of hair is stolen. But since women in the Bad Old Days were most commonly "raped" in this sense --- carried off, forcibly, by strange men to become their wives --- the current meaning is a logical outgrowth of that.

Also, it takes a special breed of woman-hating douchebag to use a discussion of rape to talk about how feminists are selfish.

issa said...

I came across this blog and I thought that original comment was interesting. I'd like to add (in the spirit of Eve Sedgwick) that rape does in fact, mean different things in different historical periods, across cultures. For instance, during slavery in Southern America, a black woman literally could not be raped by a white man. But a white woman could also not be raped by her husband. We have to remember that cultural constructs of "what counts as sexual" shifts. This affects rape, as rape is a sexual crime. It is never as simple as just sexual intercourse because "sex" is always shot through with ideas of race, among other things.

rae333 said...

Is there a reason everyone keeps saying "he" when referring to this person?
I find this hypocritical