On Tuesday night, at a speech in St. Clairsville, Ohio, Donald Trump used some harsh words to describe the Trans-Pacific Partnership. "The Trans-Pacific Partnership is another disaster, done and pushed by special interests who want to rape our country," he said. "Just a continuing rape of our country. That's what it is, too. It's a harsh word. It's a rape of our country." This is not the first time Trump used terrible rape metaphor. In a speech about China in May, Trump said, "We can't continue to allow China to rape our country. And that's what they're doing. It's the greatest theft in the history of the world."

As the Intercept pointed out, Trump has a particular fondness for using the word "rape" to "demonize his political targets." He is not alone, however, in making horribly offensive rape comparisons. A few weeks ago, Bollywood actor Salman Khan drew outrage from feminists when he compared preparation of his role as a professional wrestler to being repeatedly raped. "During those six hours of shooting, there'd be so much of lifting and thrusting on the ground involved. That is the most difficult thing," he said. "When I used to walk out of that ring, it used to be like a raped woman walking out." Two years ago, actress Charlize Theron drew criticism for comparing the invasiveness of the press to "feeling raped." In 2011, actor Johnny Depp apologized when he compared photo shoots to rape in an interview with Vanity Fair. "You just feel like you're being raped somehow," he said. "Raped... It feels like a kind of weird... just weird, man." Increasingly, high schoolers are using the word "rape" to casually describe challenging tests.

The impulse behind making these metaphors is to highlight how awful an experience is through hyperbole and exaggeration. But "rape" is not a colorful substitute for something that's feels unpleasant or exploitative. Rape has a very specific meaning — according to the FBI, rape is def "Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or
anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without
the consent of the victim." And like rape jokes that mock victims and make light of a violent crime, these comments that use it to mean something else almost always betray a lack of understanding and empathy around sexual assault and further trivialize a crime that's already so overlooked in society.

We live in a world where mainstream magazines like Men's Fitness publish guides about how "no" secretly means "yes," when athletes at private elite colleges spend just three months in jail for brutally assaulting an unconscious woman because a judge is worried for the boy's future, where police interrogate and dismiss victims of sexual assault, where media outlets focus on what a victim drinking and doing instead of the alleged attacker's behavior, and where victims who come forward with claims are promptly slut-shamed and victim-blamed and harassed and told to stop partying or drinking or staying out late. All these things show how we diminish rape, and when people use language about rape so casually, it's just further proof that our society doesn't take this crime seriously or understand the life-altering trauma it can cause. As Blogger Tilly Grove eloquently stated, "The word 'rape' is used everywhere to mean things that aren't rape or anything like it, but it's near-impossible to get people to talk about rape when it happens….Clearly, rape means everything except for what it is, sex without informed consent, and people would rather ignore its occurrence and prevalence than acknowledge it as the widespread, every day reality that it is."

If you are able to compare really crappy stuff to rape, you are fortunate enough to have probably never experienced sexual assault. But remember that one out of six American women has been a victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime, and 99.4 percent of rapists go unpunished. So next time you want to say you "raped" a test, or say another nation is raping America, please don't. It only adds the the many overwhelming obstacles that rape victims have to overcome.

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Prachi Gupta

Prachi Gupta is an award-winning journalist and former senior reporter at Jezebel. She won a Writers Guild Award for her investigative essay “Stories About My Brother.” Her work was featured in The Best American Magazine Writing 2021 and has appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post Magazine, Marie Claire, Salon, Elle, and elsewhere. PrachiGupta lives in New York City.