More on Words and Meaning
In two recent posts, here and here, SC&A have offered personal opinions on what we believe is the intentional the misuse of certain words, to further particular agendas. The word we commented on was 'rape.'
We feel very strongly about the matter- so much so, that we wish to republish some comments that were offered on our original post.
We are not experts on the matter of rape- nor are we casual observers. Like you, we have children, siblings and families.
Below are some of the comments left by MaxedOutMama. While many of you may disagree with some or even all of her remarks and ideas, they are all cogently and well presented and are worth considering. Some of her remarks are very clinical, some are more personal and heartfelt. All the remarks merit consideration.
We feel very strongly about the matter- so much so, that we wish to republish some comments that were offered on our original post.
We are not experts on the matter of rape- nor are we casual observers. Like you, we have children, siblings and families.
Below are some of the comments left by MaxedOutMama. While many of you may disagree with some or even all of her remarks and ideas, they are all cogently and well presented and are worth considering. Some of her remarks are very clinical, some are more personal and heartfelt. All the remarks merit consideration.
"...I can't fault your etymology, but SC&A's point is a fine one and holds more water in this context (IMO). The old English meaning is to take or seize by violence. When used in connection with a woman it refers to violent penetration and a permanent claiming of her being. This is so since the traditional remedy to such was generally forcing the rapist to marry his victim, and if not, traditionally the woman has been looked at as being permanently impaired by suffering a loss of purity and integrity.
Now our culture has fought a long and bitter battle to remove this stigma, but you reinforce it by comparing literal actual damage (the destruction of a viable ecosystem) to a cultural stigma. That's the first danger you don't seem to see.
In our culture, when you use the term rape in combination with "Mother Earth" you are using the emotional impact of the fear, suffering, isolation, powerlessness and loss the act carries for women and trying to map those emotions onto an ecological concept. SC&A objects to this rhetorical flourish because he feels it dehumanizes women. I agree. Women are not some mythical womb-bearing archetype of maternal fecundity and sexual satisfaction. In our culture, we defend their rights as autonomous individuals who can be independent of males altogether. I also object to the use of emotional arguments about objective, scientific problems.
Second, I think the emotional implications of the argument you make are wrong. Individuals do have rights in the earth - we are part of the ecosystem, not some alien invaders from outer space. Destroying the environment is a crime of degree, an imbalance, an improper usage of resources. But the same is not true in our culture.
But the same is not true in our culture of a rapist and his victim. We decry the crime of rape because it is an absolute violation of the rights of the victim.
If you are going to use the analogy, a more accurate way to use it would be to compare ecological irresponsibility to marital rape, in which the trust of the relationship is sabotaged by the violation of consent. I still think it is a bad emotional and scientific argument, but it is at least a slightly more accurate way to make it. A much better analogy to use is people in a space ship destroying their own life support system.
..."Mother Earth" is often used to describe this planet, so destroying the ecosystem, which we very much need in order to survive, in this instance, is indeed, a rape of Mother Earth."
This statement humanizes the natural world, but you don't seem able to understand the suffering of a victim of rape as anything but an abstraction. Please understand that I am not accusing you of being a bad person. I'm pointing out what I think is a blindspot in both your objective thinking and your emotional understanding of what victims of rape might experience and the baggage that they have to fight against as a result of societal stigmas.
Let me humanize the victims of rape for you. I have never been raped, although I still think that the time I encountered a man late at night in the parking lot behind the building where I worked at the time and pulled a socially unacceptable instrument out from under the car seat might have ended differently....
For some reason I don't understand people I sometimes know not at all or very slightly will walk up to me and tell me about something that is troubling them. At one office where I worked, with a grand total of 7 women, 2 of them approached me and told me about having been raped.
One of these happened when the woman was 14, in school in a restroom after regular school hours. She was beaten and strangled to the point where she passed out. She was also impregnated. Her family was religious and consulted the family doctor. After he determined she was carrying twins he told her parents that in his medical opinion it was unsafe to give birth, that she was too small and too lightweight to endure the pregnancy safely or give birth to healthy twins. They took her for an abortion.
At the time I met this woman she was 38. She was not thin, not slender, but gaunt, almost emaciated. She looked at least 50. She had married and truly loved and admired her husband, but she had had problems with both her pregnancies because she didn't eat enough. She was afraid to leave the building alone or be alone in the building. I thought her eating problems stemmed from the subconscious belief that her only acceptable "out" to the fear of another rape and resulting pregnancy was literally to be unable to carry the pregnancy. I thought she was unconsciously keeping herself on the borderline of health in order to maintain that escape route, but that this strategy was failing now that her daughters were nearing adolescence.
I told her that if she faced the same issue with one of her daughters (they were 8 and 11 at the time) that she would have to make the same choice for them as her parents did. I told her that what we owe a child we carry is good nutrition and a healthy life. We discussed the birth defects that can be caused by poor nutrition and a woman's stress level.
I told her that all of God's laws are aimed at creating more healthy life, and not less, and that it was a parent's duty to preserve the full potential of a child's future life, and that by forcing a child to carry a child conceived of rape a parent would be quite likely to prevent the child's ability to marry and raise healthy children.
We discussed the meaning of Jesus' statement that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. We talked about the fact that it would be terrible to force a child in this situation to undergo an abortion she did not want if that was her feeling about it. I told her that I was certain that children miscarried were not abandoned by God or sent to hell, and not surprisingly, it turned out she had had a miscarriage as well.
Let me say that I don't know whether this was religiously correct, I only knew it was the right thing to tell this woman in this situation and that she needed to hear this in order to be able to take care of her daughters wihout too much anxiety.
The second confession came from a young women in her middle twenties. She was extremely attractive but had no boyfriend. She had been raped when she was 20 by a longtime non-romantic friend of hers, a DEA agent no less, after he walked her home from a party and she passed out drunk on his couch. When she woke the next morning she found her panties missing and her shorts on - after some confusion she asked him about it. He denied it.
She also became pregnant and had an abortion. Her mother went with her to confront him originally and then afterwards to tell him about the abortion, after which he got a posting to someplace outside the US. They did not report it to the authorities - this sort of thing is probably unprosecutable, given that there was no evidence of physical abuse and she had gone home with him.
This girl was afraid of all authority, afraid to go out to parties, acutely restless, and unable to hold a job for very long. She seemed to be one of the most isolated people I have ever met. She had cut herself off from all her male friends locally and seemed to have no female friends. She did maintain long-distance friendships with some men she'd known from high school, but I wondered if she would not cut herself off from them if she ended up close to them geographically. It turned out that I was the first person she had ever told about this story outside of her mother and the doctor. She was tough, and she was going to get through it, but I will never never forget the expression on her face.
...please understand that there is a human reality behind the term of rape and that it is not a kind one. By using such an archetypal expression in such a way you are invoking a lot of dimly understood cultural beliefs, and you are doing so in a way that reinforces the worst of them.
Plus, it is almost impossible for a woman (or a child, or a man) who has experienced this to contradict you in conversation, so you further isolate the victims from society and make them feel unable to protest without giving up their privacy.
Please let me be their voice. This is an unfair tactic. It is not your fault that you don't understand the harm, but please open your mind and understand that there is real harm here.
SC&A, I apologize for taking over your comments this way, it is probably wrong but I could not walk away silently. A feeble protest is no dang protest at all.
Sorry, but not.
Now our culture has fought a long and bitter battle to remove this stigma, but you reinforce it by comparing literal actual damage (the destruction of a viable ecosystem) to a cultural stigma. That's the first danger you don't seem to see.
In our culture, when you use the term rape in combination with "Mother Earth" you are using the emotional impact of the fear, suffering, isolation, powerlessness and loss the act carries for women and trying to map those emotions onto an ecological concept. SC&A objects to this rhetorical flourish because he feels it dehumanizes women. I agree. Women are not some mythical womb-bearing archetype of maternal fecundity and sexual satisfaction. In our culture, we defend their rights as autonomous individuals who can be independent of males altogether. I also object to the use of emotional arguments about objective, scientific problems.
Second, I think the emotional implications of the argument you make are wrong. Individuals do have rights in the earth - we are part of the ecosystem, not some alien invaders from outer space. Destroying the environment is a crime of degree, an imbalance, an improper usage of resources. But the same is not true in our culture.
But the same is not true in our culture of a rapist and his victim. We decry the crime of rape because it is an absolute violation of the rights of the victim.
If you are going to use the analogy, a more accurate way to use it would be to compare ecological irresponsibility to marital rape, in which the trust of the relationship is sabotaged by the violation of consent. I still think it is a bad emotional and scientific argument, but it is at least a slightly more accurate way to make it. A much better analogy to use is people in a space ship destroying their own life support system.
..."Mother Earth" is often used to describe this planet, so destroying the ecosystem, which we very much need in order to survive, in this instance, is indeed, a rape of Mother Earth."
This statement humanizes the natural world, but you don't seem able to understand the suffering of a victim of rape as anything but an abstraction. Please understand that I am not accusing you of being a bad person. I'm pointing out what I think is a blindspot in both your objective thinking and your emotional understanding of what victims of rape might experience and the baggage that they have to fight against as a result of societal stigmas.
Let me humanize the victims of rape for you. I have never been raped, although I still think that the time I encountered a man late at night in the parking lot behind the building where I worked at the time and pulled a socially unacceptable instrument out from under the car seat might have ended differently....
For some reason I don't understand people I sometimes know not at all or very slightly will walk up to me and tell me about something that is troubling them. At one office where I worked, with a grand total of 7 women, 2 of them approached me and told me about having been raped.
One of these happened when the woman was 14, in school in a restroom after regular school hours. She was beaten and strangled to the point where she passed out. She was also impregnated. Her family was religious and consulted the family doctor. After he determined she was carrying twins he told her parents that in his medical opinion it was unsafe to give birth, that she was too small and too lightweight to endure the pregnancy safely or give birth to healthy twins. They took her for an abortion.
At the time I met this woman she was 38. She was not thin, not slender, but gaunt, almost emaciated. She looked at least 50. She had married and truly loved and admired her husband, but she had had problems with both her pregnancies because she didn't eat enough. She was afraid to leave the building alone or be alone in the building. I thought her eating problems stemmed from the subconscious belief that her only acceptable "out" to the fear of another rape and resulting pregnancy was literally to be unable to carry the pregnancy. I thought she was unconsciously keeping herself on the borderline of health in order to maintain that escape route, but that this strategy was failing now that her daughters were nearing adolescence.
I told her that if she faced the same issue with one of her daughters (they were 8 and 11 at the time) that she would have to make the same choice for them as her parents did. I told her that what we owe a child we carry is good nutrition and a healthy life. We discussed the birth defects that can be caused by poor nutrition and a woman's stress level.
I told her that all of God's laws are aimed at creating more healthy life, and not less, and that it was a parent's duty to preserve the full potential of a child's future life, and that by forcing a child to carry a child conceived of rape a parent would be quite likely to prevent the child's ability to marry and raise healthy children.
We discussed the meaning of Jesus' statement that the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath. We talked about the fact that it would be terrible to force a child in this situation to undergo an abortion she did not want if that was her feeling about it. I told her that I was certain that children miscarried were not abandoned by God or sent to hell, and not surprisingly, it turned out she had had a miscarriage as well.
Let me say that I don't know whether this was religiously correct, I only knew it was the right thing to tell this woman in this situation and that she needed to hear this in order to be able to take care of her daughters wihout too much anxiety.
The second confession came from a young women in her middle twenties. She was extremely attractive but had no boyfriend. She had been raped when she was 20 by a longtime non-romantic friend of hers, a DEA agent no less, after he walked her home from a party and she passed out drunk on his couch. When she woke the next morning she found her panties missing and her shorts on - after some confusion she asked him about it. He denied it.
She also became pregnant and had an abortion. Her mother went with her to confront him originally and then afterwards to tell him about the abortion, after which he got a posting to someplace outside the US. They did not report it to the authorities - this sort of thing is probably unprosecutable, given that there was no evidence of physical abuse and she had gone home with him.
This girl was afraid of all authority, afraid to go out to parties, acutely restless, and unable to hold a job for very long. She seemed to be one of the most isolated people I have ever met. She had cut herself off from all her male friends locally and seemed to have no female friends. She did maintain long-distance friendships with some men she'd known from high school, but I wondered if she would not cut herself off from them if she ended up close to them geographically. It turned out that I was the first person she had ever told about this story outside of her mother and the doctor. She was tough, and she was going to get through it, but I will never never forget the expression on her face.
...please understand that there is a human reality behind the term of rape and that it is not a kind one. By using such an archetypal expression in such a way you are invoking a lot of dimly understood cultural beliefs, and you are doing so in a way that reinforces the worst of them.
Plus, it is almost impossible for a woman (or a child, or a man) who has experienced this to contradict you in conversation, so you further isolate the victims from society and make them feel unable to protest without giving up their privacy.
Please let me be their voice. This is an unfair tactic. It is not your fault that you don't understand the harm, but please open your mind and understand that there is real harm here.
SC&A, I apologize for taking over your comments this way, it is probably wrong but I could not walk away silently. A feeble protest is no dang protest at all.
Sorry, but not.
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