The article I choose is a blogger mainly discusses the tropes in television content and the topic which the chosen article is about “mind rape”. One of the scenes from “Babylon 5” was mentioned and lead to the discussion of emotional and psychological torture of human. In the article, the author thinks that although “no sexual contact occurs, but everything else is there to resemble a rape”, while “the physical attacks won’t go very far”.
The way of which the author sees “mind rape” has encouraged me to rethink about the very original nature of “rape” as a kind of attack.
Some argument deems that rape in cyberspace is not a “real rape” as there is no physical contact. Moreover, most importantly, the law, for example in Hong Kong, has defined the action of “rape” by describing the unwilling sexual intercourse between a man and woman. Regarding to this argument or definition, the injury of the body resulting from rape becomes the main concern. In other words, “rape” is not metaphysic, therefore, the term “mind rape” is only a symbolic of how a person’s mentality injury. Nevertheless, in my point of view, if “rape” is being as a tool to attack people, it must be related to someone’s mind including mentality and emotion. It is because “attack” that is being as a warning or demonstration of power is sending message to the victim. Physical injury is only one of the ways to send this message as the injury relates to the feeling of offensiveness, pain, fear, danger, etc. For example, if we are beaten to bleed, it is the feeling of pain and the fear of dead that enable the possibility of “attack”. The action of “rape” which is being an attack is never merely include physical injury, but must be related to the psychological and emotional injury.
Under this sense, “mind rape” is no long only a symbolic term which borrows the situation in the reality in order to describe what happen on the Internet, but rather an even stronger term which emphasize on the extent of the injury of mentality and emotion which result from cyberspace bully. As there is no difference between “rape “and “mind rape”, there should not be any excuse for people to take it as easy as only a kidding or teasing and regulation should protect people from being mind raped too.
Different from rape in reality, mind rape is not obvious and happens in various situations. It is hard to define mind rape and the meanings of language depend greatly on context, a flexible regulation is needed for the Internet. Although it may not be fair that different webmaster has different definition of the concept of mind rape, the flexibility helps with maintaining the freedom of speech on the world of Internet.
Tvtropes. "Mind Rape". Available on: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MindRape. Retrieved on 15 APRIL 2011.
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