`When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, `it means just what I choose
it to mean -- neither more nor less.'
`The question is,' said Alice, `whether you can make words mean so many different things.'
`The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, `which is to be master -- that's all.'
Rape is one of those words. We need to be master of what we mean when we say rape. It has meant abduction -- remember the Rape Song from "The Fantasticks"? In the 1980s, feminist scholars thought it was useful to broaden the meaning of rape as a way of illustrating how the entire culture was bent on violence against women -- the musicologist Susan McClary wrote an infamous paper in which she describes the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth as an act of rape, the "pelvic thrusting" of his first subject obliterating the more "feminine" second subject. Meanwhile, women who have experienced actual unwanted forced sexual assault have to fight through all this semiotic crap in order for the truth of their specific plight to be heard. In this atmosphere, it seems inevitable that a few women would use this as license to lie or stretch the truth about their own regrettable encounters in order to get attention.
I know "forced sexual assault" doesn't have the same ring to it as "rape" does, but the word rape has always had a multiplicity of meanings and resists the temptation to put it in a linguistic and legalistic box. Perhaps in this way, when someone is forcibly sexually assaulted, we can give the victim the treatment and justice she deserves instead of having discussions of semantics we should have left behind in our college dorm rooms.
I also think that if we make our language more specific, there will be fewer women who would be tempted to lie about it. The term "rape victim" has taken on an iconic meaning of its own. (In a cosmic sense, all women are rape victims; I get it.) Let's narrow our terms so the system can better serve everyone.
