Well, its almost the end of the week, the end of the term, and a temporary end to school. And of course the school knew we'd want a trial exam for our VCE subjects (they really do think of everything). And of course, after the trial exam, there was the obligatory conversations:
"OMG, DID YOU SEE QUESTION 12? WAS IT C, WITH THE HAPLOID CELLS..."
"Was it just me, or was there hardly any "d" answers for the start of the multiple choice? I don't want to have gotten them wrong"
and then you get
"I WAS TOTALLY RAPED BY THAT EXAM!"
"It was worse than a touchy feely groping Santa with a sackful of Rohpynol"
"The exam paper just held me down and sexually violated me"
Which raises the question, (apart from the rhetorical one, "can an exam paper actually do that?") is it ok to take a word with such strong and horrific meaning as rape and use it to describe someone's disappointment with their performance in a TRIAL exam?
Sure, we do it all the time with murder - "I'd kill for an ice cream", and its generally accepted to be "a figure of speech". So then it would logically follow that flippant asides such as "lol, I raped that exam" will become accepted in the same vein. But does that make it ok?
I don't think so.
Firstly, its just stupid. Exams do not have any sort of autonomous will of their own. They can neither initiate nor object or respond to any sort of sexual activity.
Secondly, to connect a strong performance in an exam to one of the most evil and degrading acts a human being can commit on another is a gross trivialisation of the trauma, feeling of victimisation, and long term psychological issues which surround rape.
And by trivialising the issue, we create a subconscious acceptance of the term "rape", and we are desensitised to it - as many of us already are to hearing about murder and suicide.
So if you hear someone say it, just tell them they're idiots. And if they don't listen to you, just give them a jolly good rogering for their own benefit.
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