Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

Sex and bodily effluvia 159
laws. In Australia, rape is the penetration of a person via the vagina, anus or
mouth, with any object (penis, finger, tongue, dildo or other foreign object)
which violates the body and psychological person. In the UK, rape is restricted
to wilful penile penetration of a bodily orifice, when there is no
evidence that the rapist could reasonably believe the penetration is consensual.
Penetration by objects other than a penis would be sexual assault. Rape
is necessarily inflicted by a person more powerful than the victim. 43 In most
cases of rape, and most especially stranger rape, the victim is humiliated not
only by the physical act of assault and the feeling of degradation, but usually
by insulting language as well. It is a product of hate rather than love, or even
disinterested lust; rape is a common concomitant of war just because of these
characteristics. However, most rape is committed by husbands, lovers and
dates.
It is unfortunate that:
‘No’ often subsequently means ‘Yes’. (Justice Bland in a rape case, R v. Donald,
Morwell County Court, 15 April 1993, pp. 34–5; quoted in Moses 1993: 291)
The sense (i.e. the decontextualized meaning) of the one-word sentence No is
uncontroversially negative; yet Justice Bland opined that, when a woman says
No to sexual advances, she often means ‘yes’. If you think that the judge’s
claim is absurd, it is because you believe that the woman’s utterance meaning
is the same as the sense of the sentence. For Justice Bland, the utterance
meaning is ‘yes’, on the ground that the speaker is presumed to be teasing;
consequently, the sentence sense ‘no’ is not to be understood literally.
Detaching sentence meaning from speaker meaning is not always inappropriate:
for instance, many people have said It killed me and have immediately
been recognized as speaking non-literally. Is there any truth in Justice Bland’s
assumption? A questionnaire on this very topic, distributed to 610 undergraduate
women at a university in Texas, found that:
39.3% of the women had engaged in token resistance at least once. Their reasons fell
into three categories: practical [e.g. risk of being disturbed], inhibition-related [e.g.
did not wish to appear promiscuous], and manipulative reasons [e.g. wanted the male
to beg]. (Muehlenhard and Hollabaugh 1988: 872)
The figure of 39.3 per cent represents a very large minority of cases, and the
problem for the male partner is to differentiate sincere rejections from the
teases (cf. Zilbergeld 1978: 32). If the woman means no and the man persists,
it is a legally tricky case of date rape. The difficulty arises because one party
(almost invariably the male) will claim that sexual intercourse was consensual,
and the other party will cry rape. A man who (after kissing and cuddling)
inserted his fingers into the vagina of a Canadian student in her room in a
dormitory, and whom she fellated for twenty minutes (and who voluntarily