ADAM PRICE
Nexus (Camosun College)

VICTORIA (CUP) — Some words and phrases make the transition from subculture to popular culture; a classic example is Shakespeare’s “fashionable.” But some words should remain rarely used. “Rape” is one of those words.

“Rape” is now a word heard weekly, if not daily, and often with casual indifference to mean something other than sexual assault. This is highly problematic.

Popularization of the word can be traced back to the gaming phrase “pwned” and gaming subculture in the early 2000s. Warcraft III birthed the word, a typo of “owned,” but didn’t popularize it; the highly influential first-person shooter Counterstrike did.

By the time Halo 2 and Counterstrike Source arrived in 2004, some people in the gaming community used the words “pwned” and “raped” frequently and interchangeably. “You just got pwned” meant the same thing as “you just got raped.” Within the context of the games, “rape” meant that a player beat his or her victim rather mercilessly and with little effort.

“Rape” has moved from a gaming-subculture phrase to mainstream vernacular, and this must stop. A rape victim goes through an extreme amount of physical and emotional stress, to say the least. This stress is commonly compared to that of post-traumatic stress disorder. Having a rape victim’s experiences equated to minor, everyday hardships is completely unjust, if not an irresponsible comparison.

People argue that they don’t use the word “rape” intending sexual abuse. People that argue this also argue the difference between what rape means and what they really meant, but the use of the word normalizes sexual abuse. It dulls the meaning.

Casual use of the word further demonstrates dominion over women by males, who do the majority of raping. If everyone uses the word “rape,” the meaning changes to accommodate a variety of uses.

Words have tremendous power, but if rape victims don’t have exclusive ownership of the meaning of the word “rape,” they don’t have power over it.

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image: Bridget Ames/Flickr