Stop calling everything “rape”
There is a world of difference between a total stranger pinning you down in the street, and giving in to your partner just to shut them up.
The second scenario is obviously not ok, but to call it rape is to trivialize the experience of all the people who have experienced the first scenario.
I don’t know how many times i’ve seen posts on Reddit, with young unexperienced girls telling stories like:
- My partner pulled off the condom without me knowing
- He kept begging and I finally said yes
- I gave consent but I was really drunk
- He put it in my ass without consent but I also didn’t really mind
The comments under these posts are always:
- He raped you, I’m so sorry this happened to you
- Your boyfriend is a rapist
- Honey, you are a rape victim
Let me first clarify that these experiences can obviously be horrible and terrifying, sometimes the guy really is a horrible person and someone you should get away from. But other times it’s much more complicated and confusing. Hence the asking for advice on Reddit.
It’s always the same story in the comments though. People confidently, without a second thought and with very little context, tell these poor girls that they are now rape victims, that their boyfriend is a rapist and that they should break up immediately.
It’s wildly irresponsible and insensitive. You don’t want to tell a young inexperienced person that the bad thing they experienced is “terrible and traumatic”, if it was indeed just “bad”. And potentially just a misunderstanding with their partner.
You also risk causing an unnecessary breakup. It’s possible to forgive your partner if they did something sexual without your consent. But of course you can’t stay with someone that raped you.
Part of the problem is that people feel that calling it “rape” (instead of e.g. sexual assault or non-consensual sex) is somehow more compassionate, in that it validates them and takes their experience seriously. The other part of the problem is that we don’t have great terminology for the full range of sexual misconduct.
And for those 2 reasons, “rape” has had a bad case of “concept creep” where basically any unwanted sexual attention is now called “rape”.
And that’s fine… but then we need a new word for the thing we used to call rape. That thing, that’s the first thing 99% of us think about when we hear the word “rape”.
Because otherwise in the future, when someone comes up to you saying they were raped, you will have very little sense of how serious the situation actually is. And if you are raped yourself, you will have to clarify to everyone that it wasn’t the “mild kind of rape” but “rape rape”.