Why is the way we talk about sex so loaded with violence?

The words we use to communicate with one another are powerful. Language, and the way we use it, directly affects our experiences and our behaviour. Calling your friend a ‘slut’ isn’t necessarily ‘just a joke’. Though it may have left your tongue with relative ease, the word, if delivered in a derogatory way, will have an impact on the recipient, who might experience acute feelings of humiliation or shame. 

‘Slut’ might trigger a loss of confidence or make her self-conscious about the way she is dressing or acting or speaking. ‘Slut’ might impact the way she is viewed and treated by others. Will she have no one to sit next to at lunchtime? Will she struggle to find a partner in drama class? Or be considered ‘easy’ by the boys in the year above? And if something happens, will it be her fault because everyone knows ‘she gets around’?

In his theory of ‘language games’, Ludwig Wittgenstein explored how words acquire their meaning from their use. He argues that actions are woven into words and that ‘words are deeds’, meaning that there are real-life consequences for the words we use. For instance, if we consider the implications of the words ‘help’, ‘fire’ and ‘no’, we know that these words provoke a response. They are soliciting, warning and forbidding. When we use words, we affect our surroundings and the lives of those who share the world with us.

For example, the term ‘violence against women’, widely used by feminists and activists worldwide, is a passive construction. The perpetrator is absent, leaving only the victim present; there is no one committing the act of violence. The result is a shifting of accountability from those perpetrating the vast majority of violence onto the group who are overwhelmingly the victims of violence. Here, victim-blaming is subtle yet profound. 

Victim-blaming is pervasive throughout society, in the structures, the systems, the minds, the courtrooms – even in the language used by campaigners for women’s rights there is victim-blaming, albeit implicit.

The media is also notorious for spinning language to shift the public’s perceptions. This can be seen in how rape cases are presented and how sexual predators are portrayed, with victim-blaming featuring heavily in media narratives and headlines. We see this frequently in the media as the perpetrator vanishes from view as acts are described with an absence of an agent: ‘Woman raped whilst walking through the park’ or ‘Man in his 40s pushed to the ground and raped on foot- path’ or ‘Woman drank six Jägerbombs in ten minutes on the night she was raped and murdered’. Researchers Linda Coates and Allan Wade wrote that doing this will ‘reformulate the victims into perpetrators (responsible for acts committed against them) and the perpetrators into victims (not responsible for their own actions)’.

Bias is often in the perpetrator’s favour as the act of rape is replaced with terms such as ‘forced sex’, ‘non-consensual sex’, or ‘sex with a minor’. Examples of this in practice can be found in the headlines: ‘Major GOP donor calls for Missouri GOP governor to resign over allegations of forced sex’ and ‘Underage girl forced to have sex with Prince Andrew, US court document claims’. Headlines like these frame the victim as an active participant, alleviating the perpetrator from his role as actor. In doing so, they soften a hard reality: the reality of rape. An underage girl is a child. Minors and children cannot consent to sex. This is rape. We need to call it rape. When rape is framed as a ‘type of sex’ we rationalise it and normalise it.