Oh it certainly trivializes rape. Especially when you have someone complaining about the news coverage of a individual who has actually been violated so they can hear more about their ridiculous metaphor.

For these individuals, it is all about the power of the white male. A black male usurping (in their opinion) the highest position of power in America is emasculating to them, so they simply call on the most emasculating image they can think of. Which to them is rape, because hey, "Real Men" don't get raped. That's something that happens to the feeble female gender. "Pussies" only if you will.

So I would say it's the perfect 1-2 punch of casting aside real violence and being completely misogynistic. Not to mention all the other horrid commentary they threw in there.

Simply disgusting.

I'm glad this is being addressed. It's shocking how many people throw "rape" around with about a second thought about how insulting it is. Just the other week one of my college friends, extremely giddy about our football team beating a particularly strong opponent, exclaimed, "We totally raped them!"
I flinched and felt extremely insulted, being a female and all. It was almost like he was defending rape, by using it and associating it with glory and victory. I mean, isn't this essentially what used to/still happens in war? Burn, pillage, rape? Certainly, rape is as an affirmation of empowerment by one party by the trivializing, humiliating defeat of another, usually female, party.

I agree that it does desensitize us somewhat to the act/idea of rape. The same thing is happening to the words like “ Nazi” and “Holocaust”.
On the other hand, how do you feel when someone says: “ John Doe is murdering this Heath Care bill”? Do you think it’s appropriate to use the word “murder” or is that inflammatory? How about “Chris Rock killed with his jokes”?

I think Hypatia has it. They use the metaphor because the dynamic they're representing is that they/their listeners are being dominated. By presenting this as feminization and emasculation, they are appealing to the listener's attachment to masculine dominance.

@dmitriy I worry about the same thing. I know that people who have been affected by murder are often made extremely uncomfortable by the casual ways that murder metaphors, murder fiction, murder stories, etc are thrown around even by very progressive people (including me -- I can't claim to have made any real effort to avoid this). Does this mean we should abandon murder metaphors? It seems like the answer must be yes, but that would be such an incredibly hard thing to do!

But this issue of murder metaphors is often brought up when rape metaphors are discussed -- and often by those who are trying to defend rape metaphors (I'm not accusing you of this dmitriy). But there is a huge difference, I think. Society as a whole is pretty solidly against murder, at least in principle, and at least in comparison to rape. Large segments of the population don't really take rape to be at all a serious issue when it occurs. This is not true, or much less true, of murder. So rape metaphors are I think much more damaging than murder metaphors, because this different attitude toward rape on the part of society gives those metaphors much greater power to trivialize rape. Rape metaphors help normalize rape in a way that murder, realistically, just cannot be normalized in our society.

I hope this doesn't in some way come off as apologizing for @#$% Glen Beck in any way. The fact of the matter is all of these metaphors (rape, murder, as well as commonly used "gay" "retarded" etc.) will seem insensitive and hurtful to someone (usually those who are affected by the real thing, or the over-sensitive types that fill websites like this one) but they are being used by those who are unaffected/less sensitive and therefore have no reason NOT to use language that they feel conveys what they want it to.

There will always be SOMEONE offended by just about any peice of speech these days. That is your fault, PC left-wing bleeding hearts, and the net result of your over-sensitivity is that no one cares, even when it is something as offensive as comparing your ballgame victory with gang-rape.

@Ceph - I disagree with your whole "normalizing" argument. Just as video games and Dora's new jewelry are not responsible for your poorly-raised children, insensitive metaphors do not create rapists. Rape metaphors are more of an issue for a very simple reason: more people are affected by rape than by murder. Almost everyone is somone or knows someone affected by sexual abuse. The same cannot be said for murder.

It's also a way of race-coding, especially the "gang-rape" part. For a lot of conservatives, I think, rape is (on a certain level) something that black people do to white women (a la the entire "birth of a nation" culture industry of protecting "our" women from "them") and gang-rape is something that the very, very non-white prison population does. That comes out particularly well in a few of the usages. But there's a long, long history of posing the racial other as the rapist threatening "our" women, who "we" have to protect.

It is desensitizing for one thing, but I think it's also implicitly oppressive, because it seeks to co-opt a defensive tool - the accusation and prosecution (however rarely that may actually happen) - from the toolbox of the raped. At one point, Savage even advocates for ignoring rape in favor of focusing on the "rape of the nation": Savage's nation is, of course, male, white, and Christian. A rape culture that allows for rape with impunity is powerful. A rape culture that can skew rape as something not done to actual rape victims is even more powerful.

Here we go again - people on the far ends of the political spectrum using incredibly loaded language to drive home a point. By casually throwing around words like rape, nazi, socialist and fascist - with absolutely no concern for what those words actually mean - these far-right conservatives draw attention away from the more subtle offenses they are making. Saying that homosexuals are raping the minds of children will lead many to simply say "Oh, for Pete's sake" and change the channel. Those who are primed to listen to that kind of thing, though - people, for instance, who already think that homosexuals are corrupting American youth - will simply become more inflamed ("You're right! They ARE raping the minds of American Youth!"). These people may not have the barrier of radio waves and satellite transmissions or the anonymity of internet - but they can then be so inflamed as to more subtly spread the message of hate amongst their peers.

Oh, for Pete's sake.

Well the right wing pundits love to use inflammatory language... That's always been the case. But wow, this is particularly appalling.

Sorry, I haven`t read the rest of the comments, so I am not going to comment. But I wanted to point out that John Stewart referenced the word rape recently. I think it might have been Monday night. He was talking with a guest about government loans to American banks and accountability.

I only noticed his usage because he made such a big deal out of it. H hesitated, and then said something like, "you know, it's sort of like..." Actually, now I can't even remember if he actually said it or simply implied it. The joke was that he knew it was inappropriate, and was trying very hard not to say it. Anyways, there's an example of a lefty using it, but clearly in a different way.

Rape is useful to these arguments in ways rape should never be useful to mankind.

There's one part where some the guy says, "Obama thinks the private sector is always going to be there to be raped".

Yeah, because Rape is Opportunity. Lucky Obama.

He has the good fortune to be able to rape.

That's the sexy private sector for you, you think it's always going to be there to be raped.

Well, I have news for you Obama. This private sector is past it's rape-by date and you may rape no longer.

Maybe it doesn't address male vs female, but definitely the notion of power. It's still awful to see it trivialized, by anyone...just like it's awful to hear someone called a Nazi or a fascist or what-have-you by their opposition. It's just more distracting and counter-productive language to elicit visceral reactions.

One thing that I haven't seen addressed in the comments yet is the fact that this clips binds together a number of different usages of the word.
Most of those are indeed metaphorical (X is raping the people/nation/etc.), but I noticed at least two cases that I feel were different:
1. 'Homosexuals are raping the minds of our children' - still a metaphor, but used as more than that. When he says that, he is building on the fear of homosexuals as pedophiles (i.e. that homosexuals are raping children), an accusation that you see very often in homophobic propoganda. In fact, what he is implying is 'the homosexual media is raping the minds of our children, metaphorically, just like those nasty homos are raping real children in reality'. So there is more than trivialization of rape; I might even say it is the opposite, in a way,since he is using the power of the act of [child] rape in order to drive home his point.
2. 'Immigrants are criminals and rapists' - this one is definitely not a metaphore. He is actually saying that [foreign, dark, Other] immigrants commit rape [of white women]. Like what some people said above, this is the classic image of the Black Man raping the White Woman; it is also a very classic accusation, that foreigners 'polute' the society they come into, being some kind of inferior criminal element. So it does have all those undercurrents, and you can see there a larger implied accusation that the very existence of these immigrants is 'raping' society, but on the surface, it is very concrete: in this case he is talking about factual rape as a crime, not about rape as a metaphore.

I defaced someone on facebook recently for saying "my wallet was raped when I bought... [whatever item]"

I thought about posting back something like "Yeah, that happened to me and it was just like having my testicles sawed off with a rusty knife" to try to get him to see that his casual use of 'rape' was violent, gendered, and offensive but instead of being told to "Liiiggggtennn uuuuuup laaaady" it was easier to just delete him.

Others have made many good points, so I would just like to add that rape metaphors are also commonly used by high school and college students when describing exams. The metaphors (in away messages, status updates, and in person) could get quite gruesome. I was guilty of participating in high school, but in college started to realize that I could express myself without resorting to such offensive hyperbole.

I really hate the implied passivity of whoever is being 'raped'. When someone says "Obama is raping America," the implication is that America 'wanted it' when they voted him to office. When the minds of our children are being "raped by the homosexual mafia," it's happening on account of their childish, malleable minds, and the fact that we (their parents/community) are letting rape happen. The fact that the media uses these metaphors to try to illumine the passivity of their audience sheds a hell of a lot of light on the assumptions that our country (or at least the white American men of our country) make about (female and racially diverse) rape victims as well. The messages do make an enemy of the 'rapist,' but they also take the tactic of essentially saying, "Yes, we're being raped, and it's OUR FAULT because we got ourselves here."

Sick.

I wonder how often these media commentators use the word 'rape' in its literal sense - i.e., sexual assault - and in particular, how often they refer to women being raped. I'd guess from these clips it's much less than they use the word metaphorically. So when they talk about rape, they don't mean 'a violent crime' but a kind of generic act of domination/humiliation; and its victims are not women, but 'ordinary, decent, hardworking Americans' (or so these clips imply).

Basically, they're changing the meaning of the word, and triviliasing actual rape in the process.

Also - my brother uses the word 'rape' in this sense, when talking about computer games (e.g. 'I really raped Dave the other day!' or 'Our team got raped by the other team'). It pisses me off, but I don't think it's even occurred to him that there could be something wrong with it.

Reminds me of a spoof news article on uncyclopedia.org with liberal (or should that be conservative.. hehe geddit!) helping of inappropriate rape-based phraseology and innuendo.

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/UnNews:%22I_love_rape%22_declares_George_Bush

Also a pundit on a UK football TV show ended up being dropped after opining live on air that a player had 'raped' an opposing player with a particularly misjudged tackle (no pun intended).

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/mar/16/alan-pardew-rape-comment-apology-motd

This acceptance of the trivialisation of rape, however disgusting, isn't overly surprising in a country where violence and hubris are generally lauded attributes.

http://aqseersodhi.blogspot.com/2009/12/rape-as-metaphor.html

Devaluing the word,oh that's just lovely.

Rape metaphors, just like Hitler comparisons, are universal symbols of the ultimate evil. There is no worse person one could be compared to than Hitler, and there is no worse crime anyone could be accused of (even metaphorically) than rape.

Sounds like standard radio pundit hyperbolic techniques to me

These guys are using it in a way that is synonymous with the worst offense imaginable. That may be triggering for victims of actual rape, but, if anything, it reinforces the horrible nature of rape....for their particular audience. To understand this, you must put yourself in the mental position of their audience. The last thing it does--when viewed in this context--is to trivialize rape. It is not trivializing rape; it is, however, an extreme form of hyperbole.