University:
California State University, Northridge
Course:
ENGL 208 | Creative Writing
Academic year:

2020
Views:

323

Pages:

2
Author:

Lance Gutierrez

The Careless Language of Sexual Violence The titles given to news articles often stretch the truth one way or another. This is one of the main points of Roxanne Gay’s essay on sexual violence. This is evidenced in the title of New York Times article, Vicious Assault Shakes Texas Town. The Times article discusses how a town is shaken by the gang rape of an 11-year-old. The article goes on to talk about how 18 young men participated in this heinous and gruesome act, and stresses that these boy’s lives will never be the same. The author took pity on the boys stating how they won’t be able to go back to school, rather then focusing on the victim of the crime, who was mentally and physically scarred for life. The author of the Times article almost goes as far as to imply the girl “was asking for it” by the way she was dressed. Throughout the whole article, it seems as if the author beats around the bush and had trouble admitting something terrible had happened to a child. Gay believes that this way of thinking is what causes sexual violence to continue. She believes that we’ve become desensitized to sexual violence through the overuse of rape either in the media or common language. She discusses how common place it is for rape to occur repeatedly on tv shows and movies, making the audience blind to the horror of the events occurring. Gay also believes that the over usage of rape either in language or media creates a rape culture where sexual violence is the norm. I agree with the author of the essay Roxanne Gay on the idea that the New York Times article was written with little regard to the victim of the crime. The author didn’t even want to include what happened in the title of the article, calling it a “Vicious Assault”. The word “rape” is more emotional, and the author wanted to downplay the damage done. The New York Times article was seen by many as unfair to the victim. It is argued that it did not fully address the heinous crime committed by the boys against the child and did not paint an accurate depiction of the malevolent acts that took place to that young girl. However, I do not agree with the author Roxanne Gay’s take on “rape culture”. She believes that we live in a society that is okay with sexual violence, and that rape is okay. Thankfully this is not the case, everyone knows that rape is an evil act but there is a small percentage of sick people that frankly don’t care. I don’t believe that sexual violence can be attributed to the use of certain words or movies, rather a deep emotional void within the attacker. Some people simply have no conscious and refraining from using a certain word in everyday vernacular is not going to change that. However, the author is right in that the continued usage of the word does desensitize its meaning and almost makes it sound normal, the word “rape” should only be used in instances to describe a horror such as mentioned in the Times article, out of respect to the victims.