CONSENT ISSUE: A Distinction Without a Difference: Rape in the Twenty-First Century by Eric Walton

The English language is remarkable for reasons far too numerous to mention. Though estimates vary widely, most authorities agree that English contains over a quarter of a million words; and that it lends itself to nuances of expression that are quite impossible in many other tongues is beyond question. As a native speaker, it’s easy to take for granted the subtlety and refinement of expression afforded to me by the accident of my birth in an English-speaking country. And many of the ambiguities and idiosyncrasies of English, which so delight scholars and men and women of letters, are notoriously confounding to non-native speakers attempting to master the language. English even has an entire category of words that have not just multiple definitions, but two completely opposite meanings. They are called contranyms and include the enigmatic words sanction, oversight, refrain, garnish, and (my personal favorite) cleave.

As with so much else, context is the key to parsing the intended meaning of these Janus words, appropriately named after the two-faced god of Roman mythology. If I were to write that, “the infant cleaved to her mother’s breast”, you would be unlikely to infer that it was act of violence on the part of the child, unless I had given you some extraordinary reason to think so. Mercifully for us all perhaps, contranyms are relatively few, whereas English abounds in perfectly unequivocal words that are almost impossible to misconstrue: words such as rape. I qualify the word impossible with the word almost because there seems to be some confusion among some elected officials of the United States Congress regarding the precise definition of this word, which, until quite recently, I had never regarded as particularly unambiguous.

If Republican vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan and his feckless colleague, Todd Akin (R-MO), the original sponsors of the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act”, have any credentials as professional lexicographers, they’ve done an excellent job of concealing them. And yet, very much of their own accord and on the basis of an authority that remains a complete mystery to me, these two men have undertaken the offensive, arrogant, and unnecessary task of redefining the word rape, a task for which they are wholly unqualified and a word whose meaning, I assure you, has never stymied any literate person, nor for that matter, any person who has ever been raped.

It can certainly be granted for the sake of argument that in the gradual evolution of our language, the meanings of words often change. Such is the case, for example, with word quarantine, which originally referred to what must have been an exhausting forty-day period that Jesus is supposed to have spent in the desert after his alleged baptism. The modern interpretation of quarantine is obviously quite different from the original meaning of the word, but makes perfect sense in the light of its distinguished etymology. And so it goes for numberless other words in the glorious lexicon of the English language: their meanings evolve. But perhaps the evolution of language, like the evolution of our own and all other species, is too elusive or contentious a concept for senators Ryan and Akin.

I’m not entirely sure how forcible rape and legitimate rape are distinguished from rape as it is almost universally defined and understood, but the distinctions do not interest me for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that the people making the vulgar and superfluous distinctions have done so purely by fiat and not out of necessity. And though I myself am no lexicographer or etymologist, I do not think I overstep my professional boundaries in the least by saying that what distinguishes rape from sex is not the stultifying language of an ill-conceived piece of legislation written by a couple of sanctimonious blow-hards who have virtually no chance of ever being raped themselves, but consent.

Anyone who wishes to complicate the matter any further than that, does so not for the sake of clarification, but in the blind pursuit of an ideological end that further victimizes those who have already suffered the pain and humiliation of being raped. Let us not defer therefore in these matters to the whims of politicians and patriarchs, who wade quite beyond their own depths when they distinguish between rape and forcible rape. What sets rape apart from forcible rape is the same thing that sets many politicians apart from one another: distinctions without a difference.