Aug 232012
A new ‘merican collocation has entered my vocabulary that I wouldn’t have thought possible just a few days ago: ‘legitimate rape’.
What…? But how…? Surely…? I don’t know where to start. I’ve been living in and listening to this variety for fourteen years now but I can’t fathom it. How could those words be collocates? <sigh>
It’s political and nothing but. It’s meant to imply that rape by deceit, drugs, or coercion short of force is not really rape at all, and to allude to the claim that lots of rapes are really consensual sex acts that the woman turns into rape the day after. The people who say it believe, or wish others to believe, that only if you are raped by force are you truly a rape victim.
John, thank you for responding. Here’s my problem (which I’m sure you already understand, but just so I’m clear to other readers): I’d have thought force was implicit in the term ‘rape’ so how could it be qualified. Your statement that “it’s political and nothing but” seems entirely plausible to me and to lie at the heart of it. But I’m really struggling to understand the politics. How can the meaning of the word rape morph so much that it can be applied to something consensual?
Vickie:
The term “legitimate rape” has the same legitimacy as Orwell’s “All are equal, but some are more equal than others.” It’s a political obfuscation meant, to cloud the minds of the targeted audience. It has the same value as a euphemism like “pass away” for “died.”
The last time I looked, to paraphrase Gertrude Stein, :A rape is a rape is a rape. It’s a crime of violence, like assault and battery. I don’t know of any legitimate cases of assault and battery.
It’s lack of consent rather than force that’s key to the definition, and “consent” is a legal term. For example, people under a certain age (which varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction) can’t give legal consent, no matter how willing they are. Certain drugs, notably alcohol, impair the ability to give consent, so no force need be involved there at all; the same story with being asleep.
Similarly, the mere threat of violence means there is no consent: the threat need not be carried out. The threat need not be aimed at the victim but may be aimed at someone close to her.
In the bad old days when husbands had a right to sex with their wives and never mind what the wives thought of it, a defense to rape was that the man honestly and reasonably believed the woman to be his wife; by the same token, a woman who consented to sex under the honest and reasonable (but false) belief that the man was her husband could prosecute for rape, on the grounds that she would not have consented if she had known the truth.