Thursday, January 29, 2009

Rape in Cyberspace?

First off, the article makes a good argument on the subject of where the body ends and where the mind begins. There could possibly be a version of rape, a cyber kind, where the mind is tormented and violated as much as the body is in rape's usual terms. This cyber kind of rape should not be called "rape" though--especially because the victim has the option of closing the screen or "gagging" the violator. In rape, there is no option, there is but the utmost will to escape--a will i'm not convinced legba or Starsinger had. I would give it other names, such as abuse, or (to add a little modern slang) creeping. Did Bungle rape these girls? No, but he was certainly a creep. As for his false accusation, how could one think that he had raped? Especially after the statement: "...the extremely public nature of the living room meant that gagging would spare the victims only from witnessing their own violation, but not from having others witness it." Yes, it is true that others may witness this gross form of communical abuse--but they wished to avoid that at the expense of feeling violated and "raped"? I agree with Laura Miller's statement: "...the menace in sexual harassment comes from the underlying threat of rape of physical violence." The type of cyber abuse that Dibbell argues could be a species of the Rape genus, but it is not rape itself.

1 comment: