Jillian Dibbell's essay on cyberspace rape deeply disturbed me. Dibbell recounts a series of events that occurred on LambdaMOO: a character brutally rapes others in a virtual world and the community reacts by "toading" the attacker. But the boundary between reality and virtuality is extremely murky here.
Without diminishing how awful it must have been for those virtual characters, I have to admit a disdain for the tossing around of the word "rape." The overgeneralization of this word worries me. People now use it to imply any type of violation, which minimizes the word's import in its original form. If "rape" can mean both an economic action (as in a student's proclamation that the Cal State system is "raping" him) and the physical and sexual assault on a human being, then the one type of "rape" is no worse than the other. Sexual assault and its psychological and physical effects become minimized.
So is an assault in cyberspace really rape? I have to say no. Is it a violation--the removal of safety in an environment that should be free of anxiety (especially since you are actually in your own home)? Yes. But the use of the word "rape" here is polarizing and diminishes rape in the real world.
Similarly is "toading" akin to the death penalty? Again, I understand the worries over this issue, but I cannot link toading with the death penalty--especially since users are able to "come back from the dead" and reregister under different e-mails and screen names.
I think the more important issue here is the idea of toading as censorship. My understanding is that under a democracy (and our Constitution), actions can be restricted, but words fall under freedom of expression. Since the cyberspace "rape" occurs through words (and command keys), isn't toading censoring this user's ideas and words? While there are restrictions on freedom of expression (in that threats are restricted, etc), are the "actions" directed by key strokes aimed at virtual characters really threats? I don't know. I'm sure that the more someone is involved in the virtual world, the more these threats seem real. So as our world becomes more virtual (and the virtual world becomes more "real"), the blurring of our real selves with our virtual selves will complicate these questions (and the answers that we have already offered).
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Yes, Sarah I am going to have to agree with all of the points you touched upon here. Although it was obviously very traumatic for the ‘victims’ of the ‘assault,’ applying the same language to the cyber world that is used to label very REAL physical and emotional assault in the material world seems very careless. When you start to equate rape with cyber-rape, or rape as a “rip-off” (as in “CSUSB is raping me” with tuition hikes) as similar or the same thing then the reality and potency of the word and what it represents seems fluid and slightly diminished. Some would argue that it is just language and not meant to degrade rape as we generally know it in our culture, but words and their accreted (or weakened) meaning shape the way we think.
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