{"id":3101,"date":"2010-01-21T01:11:28","date_gmt":"2010-01-21T07:11:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/?p=3101"},"modified":"2010-01-23T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T16:49:13","slug":"words-matter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/news\/words-matter\/","title":{"rendered":"Words matter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today I waged a word battle at work and I lost. It was over this story<\/a> on The CA<\/i>‘s site. The headline: “Third ex-Memphis police officer pleads guilty to forced sex with prostitutes.”<\/p>\n

“Forced sex,” huh? Like, sex you don’t want to have but that someone else makes you have? So … like … rape?<\/p>\n

After seeing my pal Amanda’s complaint about the euphemism on Twitter, I read the story and agreed totally with her. I appealed to the web gurus and asked if there was a reason we were using other terms than “rape,” since the officer in question had openly admitted to forcing a woman to have sex with him. (Which is, say it with me, “rape.”) We kicked some e-mails back and forth and around the newsroom to other editors and the story’s reporter and eventually I guess I got outnumbered. It happens. These kinds of discussions happen (or should happen) in newsrooms all the livelong day and, sadly, because I have not yet been crowned Queen of the World, I don’t always<\/i> get my way. (I successfully argued against the “big-bellied rapist” moniker<\/a> several months back and got us to downplay a flippant and silly phrase in a very serious context.) That’s fine; part of working at a mainstream news organization is accepting that other people will have vastly different editing opinions and news judgment.<\/p>\n

But this time I was outnumbered and eventually stopped bugging people about it (despite really, really, really wanting to push the issue), so I will make my appeal here in my little corner of the internet because 1) I’m really worried that people don’t quite get the point I’m trying to make when I say that I don’t give two shits in shiny shoes about the legalese mumbo jumbo that has resulted in this news report of “forced sex” 2) I want it known for the record that I disagree with the paper’s wording and 3) I would like people to know that there are always<\/i> dissenting opinions behind any decision made at a news organization. Always.<\/p>\n

Anyway, for this case, here’s mine.<\/p>\n

The prevailing argument that defeated my own is that the aggravated rape charge was dropped, leaving the officer to plead guilty to some lesser charges (“official misconduct and official oppression”). Therefore if the officer is not going to be charged with or convicted of capital-R Rape, we aren’t going to call it “rape” in the story.<\/p>\n

To which I call shenanigans. I can speculate all night long about why the rape charge was dropped (could it have anything to do with the difficulty of actually prosecuting a rape case?), but here’s what is real: The rape charge was dropped as part of the negotiated plea. And the officer admitted to, according to the story, “forcing prostitutes to have sex with him while on duty and in uniform.”<\/p>\n

This man forced someone to have sex with him. That is rape.<\/p>\n

We need to machete through all the bullshit and call it what it is \u2014 regardless of what the attorneys settled on calling it for the purposes of moving the trial along<\/i>. Why? Because words matter<\/i>. And not calling forced sex with a prostitute “rape” implies all sorts<\/i> of things that maybe we didn’t intend (or, more terrifying, did<\/i> intend), that we need to think carefully about.<\/p>\n

Like the unspoken and somewhat common notion that it’s impossible to rape a prostitute, because a prostitute’s default state is consent. Despite how disgusting an opinion that is, a lot of people have it<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Like the idea that police who commit crimes in this city get treated differently than other citizens who commit those same crimes.<\/p>\n

Like the notion that sex obtained through coercion is somehow not rape just because it doesn’t necessarily involve total jump-out-of-the-bushes physical violence and instead employs mental and emotional abuse and intimidation.<\/p>\n

Like the notion that there is a kind of rape that is more acceptable than another, so much so that we can give it a different name and doubt its power to hurt (or else why would we shy away from the very serious R-word?).<\/p>\n

These are just a fraction of the problematic things people can infer from the language used in that story. I’m not saying that stuff is purposely implied. I’m just saying: Words matter, and I think the paper chose the wrong words this time. Not everyone agrees with me. And while my life would be a lot easier if everyone did, I recognize that the difference in opinion is okay. (Even though I am undoubtedly completely right this time.)<\/p>\n

An additional thought because I know someone is going to try and use the murder\/kill analogy here:<\/b> We’re not talking about the same semantic difference that exists between “murder” and “kill.” You can kill someone accidentally and it’s not murder. Murder is premeditated, or at least purposeful. You can’t accidentally rape someone. You can coerce someone to have sex, yes. It’s still rape. Because the definition of rape is sex forced upon someone who does not want it. I really can’t see how that could be any clearer. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today I waged a word battle at work and I lost. It was over this story on The CA‘s site. The headline: “Third ex-Memphis police officer pleads guilty to forced sex with prostitutes.” “Forced sex,” huh? Like, sex you don’t want to have but that someone else makes you have? So … like … rape? After seeing my pal Amanda’s complaint about the euphemism on Twitter, I read the story and agreed totally with her.… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[11,57],"tags":[2153,2154,537,2242,1328,700,446],"class_list":["post-3101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","category-work","tag-memphis","tag-news","tag-newspaper","tag-rape","tag-semantics","tag-the-commercial-appeal","tag-words"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1jWWl-O1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3101"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3116,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3101\/revisions\/3116"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theogeo.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}