Rape: The Single Usage Word

Dictionary.com defines the word "Rape" as:

1. the unlawful compelling of a person through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse.
2. any act of sexual intercourse that is forced upon a person.
3. statutory rape.
4. an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation: the rape of the countryside.
5. Archaic. the act of seizing and carrying off by force.

Contrary to what Barry Bonds, Johnny Depp, Kristen Stewart, Kim Novak and certain acquaintances of mine think (they automatically step down from friend to acquaintance on thoughtless use of the word pending their reaction to being corrected), the word Rape used as a verb does not include feeling low-balled in contract negotiations, having your privacy invaded, having a movie score from 50 years ago recycled, or having to pay more for something that you anticipated.

I have never used Rape in any other way than to mean an act of violence and control - it should be emphasized that there is no sex involved in rape. Rape means rape.

So when I hear people use the word to describe being disrespected or short changed, I have to say something whether I know the person or not. And you should to.

According to a brief search of the web, there are approximately 100,000 reported rapes in the US every year. This figure does not include other forms of sexual assault. The federal government estimates that less than 10% of all rapes are ever reported - more under-reported than any other crime in the country. So if you include all sexual assaults (reported and unreported), the total amount in the US alone is in the millions every year. The millions! 5000 attacks every day! Can you even get your mind around that!

Something like 1 in 5 women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lives. 91% of victims are women, 9% are men, and 99% of rapists are men.

It has to be noted that Johnny Depp and Kristen Stewart did seem to genuinely apologize (I don't know them personally) when it was pointed out to him how gravely they had misstated their feelings towards the by-product of their wealth and fame. To my knowledge and from my research, Bonds never apologized for his deplorable description of how he felt about a contract offer from the San Francisco Giants.

Now we have the very tricky situation of Kim Novak describing her feelings about the score from the Alfred Hitchcock classic, Vertigo (that she starred in 53 years ago) being recycled in the recent Oscar-winning homage to the silent-film era in The Artist as reminding her of the same feelings she experienced when she was raped as a child.

"It was very painful," said Novak. "When I said it was like a rape, that was how it felt to me. I had experienced in my youth being raped, and so I identified with a real act that had been done to me. I didn't use that word lightly. I had been raped as a child. It was a rape I never told about, so when I experienced this one, I felt the need to express it."

On being criticized by rape crisis groups, Novak tried to explain. "I never reported my real rape, so I felt the need to report this one," Novak dissembled. "I felt that someone needed to speak up because the music has been taken advantage of too much. I hope that in the future, maybe somehow it will do some good."

This is an extremely sensitive issue for me to be writing about. 1) I am a man, 2) I have never been raped, 3) it is impossible to fully understand how each person who has been raped feels about and deals with an attack of such magnitude. I am loathe to criticize Novak but find it difficult to understand how the 2 experiences are similar in any way.

There are many pejoratives that have become taboo in the US in pubic discourse - "the N word", "the F word", "the C word". Rape is not one of these words. However, out of sensitivity of and respect for people who have survived the brutal, destructive sexual assault that it denotes, I believe we all need to take great care in it's use. After all, with the amount of rapes in our society, you never know who you are speaking with when you complain about, say, the current price of gas.

Paul Brindley

Super Bowl or Bust … More like Super Bowl or Sanity.

Not too long ago, this used to be a week to look forward to.  Still buzzing from Conference Championship weekend, the Super Bowl was only 7 days away. The players and fans digging deep for one more supreme effort after a brutal season of big hits, freezing contests, broken hearts and last minute heroics. The game you had dreamt about, longed for and watched, ever since you were kid. The momentum of the season thundering towards that Sunday.  Then they added a week in between and things changed....

For the uninitiated, the Super Bowl is the culmination of the professional football season in the U.S. The winners of the two conferences, the American Football Conference (AFC) and the National Football Conference (NFC) in the National Football League (NFL) play off in the Super Bowl for the right to call themselves, wait for it, the World Champion: a peculiar trait of American sports.

The NFL is played over a relatively short 16 game regular season that ends by New Year. The 3-week conference playoffs are done by the second last weekend of January. The last team standing is the conference champion, and earns the right to play for the ultimate prize in American professional sports – the Lombardi Trophy.

Football is the most popular sport in the U.S. So popular, in fact, that the NFL now has its own TV channel with 24 hour-a-day coverage, 365 days-a-year for a season that lasts 5 months. ESPN has at least 30 minutes of NFL coverage a day no matter what the season. But this popularity still doesn’t excuse the waste that is the week leading up to the Super Bowl.

The daily wall-to-wall NFL coverage ensures that every facet of the sport is reported, analyzed, synthesized, agonized, and nuanced. Stories of trades and locker room disputes are made up just to fill airtime. If a legitimate big news story related to football breaks, the sports channels are beside themselves with joy, and ring every last drop of news out of the event. With this added week of coverage, we enter the terrible world of infomercials.

The highlight of this mass waste of consciousness is the Media Day, the Tuesday before the game. All the players don their playing gear minus pads and helmets for a day of idiocracy in front of the world’s media. With everything of importance already asked and answered, irrelevant and childish inquiries into the players’ lives are all that is left. Let’s not forget grandstanding. Like the time a reporter donned a wedding dress to ask Tom Brady to marry her. Enough!

The NFL added this dreaded week in 2004. All sorts of reasons have been given. The most common reason is that everyone involved needs time to organize tickets and accommodation for their families and friends.  Really? How about the fact that it gives the NFL and the media an extra week to milk the publicity, the bookies more time to play with the odds and take bets. Supposedly it also gives more time to build the excitement amongst the fans.

Well not this fan. I don’t watch it anymore. It’s not about the game; it’s about the event. By the time Super Bowl Sunday comes around, I’m done with it. I used to love the game and the whole theatre of it. Now it’s just a circus.