Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

160 Forbidden Words
went on a date with him the following night), was acquitted of rape partly
because the woman did not scream: she explained, ‘I was afraid. I was
ashamed I had lost control of the situation. I was embarrassed and above that
I honestly can’t tell you why I didn’t scream.’ 44 We don’t doubt her sincerity,
but do find her behaviour ambivalent and extremely foolish. The woman in
such cases is liable to complaints of provocation and assailed by insults such
as cock-teaser, slut and whore.
Rape in marriage is at least as problematic as date rape. Until recently, the
words of St Paul (and therefore God) rendered rape in marriage impossible:
22 Wives submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. 23 For the
husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the
saviour of the body. 24 Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives
be to their own husbands in everything. (Ephesians 5: 22–4)
If a husband wished to have sexual intercourse with his wife, by God’s law
she had to submit. The hold of religion has given way to a more humanitarian,
socially aware view that has done away with one sense of conjugal rights.
One partner no longer has any right of pleasure from, or access to, the other
partner’s body.
In sadomasochistic (SM, S&M) relationships, No and Stop are part of the
game; so instead, the bottom (playing the victim) must agree on alternatives
when the dominator/dominatrix, master/mistress applies too much pain: terms
like pickle, yellow, red are used instead; 45 we guess the motivations may lie
with I’m in a pickle, I’m scared (yellow) and the red of a stop light.
Incest and paedophilia
The terms incest, paedophilia and pederasty are orthophemisms. The press,
the public and the law generally ignore incest, except when practised as
paedophilia. And paedophiles, whether incestuous or not, are the bugaboos
of today and (rightly) no longer ignored. 46 An Australian dysphemism for a
paedophile is rock spider. Theage of consent, which differentiates statutory
rape of a minor from consensual sexual intercourse, has varied across
communities and times. If there are euphemisms in English for paedophilia
(including pederasty), they are to be found in expressions such as child
molestation or the sexual abuse of children, where the nouns (derived from
the intrinsically dysphemistic verbs molest and abuse) characterize society’s
abhorrence for the adult perpetrator. There is no conventional euphemism for
incest between consenting adults, though the slang metaphor roll your own
and the dysphemism in-bred exist, and there are -IST slurs like hillbillies and
Tasmanians.