Editor’s note: Jon Margolis is VTDigger’s political analyst.
Do you suppose anyone in the hierarchy of the Vermont Democratic Party has ever heard of Nanking?
It’s a city, now usually spelled Nanjing, in China, not far from Shanghai. In December of 1937 Japanese forces captured the city and over the next six weeks tortured and murdered at least 200,000 Chinese civilians, in what has been known ever since as “The Rape of Nanking.”
That’s even the title of a best-selling book, both much-praised and much-criticized, by Iris Chang, which was published in 1997.
Or what about the Sabine Women? It seems likely that the folks who work at the Democratic Party’s Montpelier office have never heard of them, either, though it is one of Western Civilization’s most celebrated tales.
Sometime around 750 BC (or so the story goes) the first generation of Roman men, apparently short of Roman women, abducted some from the neighboring tribe of Sabines. For the last few millennia, most moderately literate Europeans and Americans have known this as “The Rape of the Sabine Women.”
That’s because the word “rape” meant – among other things – “abduction,” from the Latin raptio. It also meant “the act of taking anything by force,” and “abusive or improper treatment.”
It still does. Those definitions are from contemporary dictionaries – the Oxford English and the American Heritage respectively. For thousands of years, the word “rape” has been understood to mean the violent or abusive treatment of anyone or anything.
And for at least the last few hundred of those years, that included the perceived violent or abusive treatment of the natural world. So it caused no stir a few years ago when Vanity Fair headlined an article, “The Rape of Appalachia.” Nor when the late British poet and philosopher Philip Sherrard wrote about “the rape of nature.”
But now comes the Vermont Democratic Party, specifically its director Julia Barnes but with the apparent approval of the entire chain of command, taking on the role of language police and proclaiming that Sen. Joseph Benning, a Lyndonville Republican, may not use that term in this context.
So he could have been guilty of hyperbole. But he’s a state senator. Hyperbole is among that breed’s lesser sins.
The word, she said, “means something much different to the millions of women who have experienced rape. …You only use the term ‘rape’ when talking about rape.”
In the context of her statement, she clearly meant the term can be used only “when talking about rape,” defined solely as the sexual violation of women.
The ignorance evident here is appalling enough. To begin with, many men and boys experience rape almost daily in prisons, and less (but still far too) frequently at summer camps and in church choir lofts.
But for ignorance alone, her statement would not be worth discussing. It’s the incipient totalitarianism that is troubling.
Take her outlook to its logical conclusion and professors would be banned from teaching two classics of English literature: Shakespeare’s “Rape of Lucrece” and Alexander Pope’s “Rape of the Lock.” No, come to think of it, that’s only a step on the way to its logical conclusion. The final step would be banning these works altogether. And perhaps forcing restaurants and grocery stores to change the name of either of the two vegetables going by that name – or rapeseed oil – lest seeing it on the menu of the store shelf traumatize someone.
Benning, to be sure, may have been wrong. He was describing the impact on the natural world of the Sheffield and Lowell wind power projects. According to scientists from both the state’s Agency of Natural Resources and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, those impacts on wildlife, plant habitat, and water quality were not inconsequential. Whether they caused enough ecological degradation to deserve Benning’s description is debatable.
So he could have been guilty of hyperbole. But he’s a state senator. Hyperbole is among that breed’s lesser sins.
There is no reason to doubt Barnes’ sincere concern for the sensitivities of people (although she seems to limit it to women) who have been sexually violated. And a well-placed concern it is. Rape of anyone of either sex is a horrible crime, no doubt traumatizing its victims.
To Barnes (in an essay she wrote after Benning refused her insistence that he apologize) one result of that trauma is that “each time “rape” is used as a violent metaphor in a public forum, it can lessen the reality of the act. It can send a punch straight to the gut of those who see their victimization as something that should not be diminished.”
Really? Maybe, but this is pure conjecture. Presumably there is some social science here, some studies indicating that rape victims are traumatized when they hear or read the word used to mean anything other than sexual assault. If so, Barnes doesn’t mention it.
Besides, Benning was not using the word as a metaphor. He was using it literally, as defined by every dictionary in the land.
Barnes is on even weaker grounds in that essay when she claims she was not trying to “score political points.” Like anyone, she deserves the presumption of honesty, so let’s stipulate that she believes that.
No one else should, except perhaps those who believe she would have made her initial statement (March 27) had a Democratic state senator used the same term. Besides, her statement was issued as a press release from the Vermont Democratic Party, whose reason for existence is to score political points.
“The word ‘rape’ doesn’t belong to politicians. It doesn’t belong to a dictionary. That experience belongs to the victims,” Barnes wrote, closing her essay by urging everyone to think “critically about their choice of words.”
OK, thinking critically about choice of words, that’s drivel. No one has authorized Julia Barnes to issue an edict determining to whom a word “belongs.” Words do in fact belong to the dictionary. Substituting one’s own subjective feeling for the wisdom of the ages is a step (admittedly, a tiny one) on the road to fascism.
Ideally, this would be a world in which everyone who wrote and spoke went at least a bit out of their way to avoid offending. But it would not be a world in which writers and speakers kept worrying whether using words accurately – as defined by the dictionary – might possibly give offense to somebody, somewhere. Sensitivity is desirable, but not at the cost of stifling vigorous discussion and expression.
Not, at least, in a free society. Political parties should remember that.
