I'm wondering if it's best not to use the word "rape" when vegans are talking about dairy. What do you think?

I don't know, this is a tough one. This is something that I've spent quite a lot of time thinking about (and I expect my comment to be rambling and maybe a little incoherent). I'm a guy who was raped a few years ago by a close (also male) friend. I no longer consider him a friend, obviously. He moved to the other side of the country a couple weeks later, and he and I haven't spoken since.

So, as you can probably imagine, I'm pretty sensitive to jokes and flippant remarks about rape. And since I'm male, no one really ever worries about making rape jokes in front of me. Once you start paying attention to it, it's pretty shocking how common they are; you hear things like "prepare your butthole," "bend over and assume the position," and things like that quite a lot. Lots of prison rape jokes. And the word gets thrown around for stuff like, say, needing to pay a larger-than-usual credit card bill. "The credit card company really raped me this month." Occasionally I'll hang out with old high school friends (who play a lot of video games), and they'll talk about "raping" people in online matches.

And this is something that almost no one knows about me, so I'm typically not very eager to steer conversations in a direction that will put this (and me, and my opinions) under a microscope. I am not at all ashamed of what happened, per se, but it seems to me that inevitably it will change the way that people see me and think about me. I don't want anyone's feelings toward me to be colored by pity, or anything like that, and I don't want my friends or anyone else to think that they need to tiptoe around me. So I pretty much just keep my mouth shut about it, most of the time.

So in any case, I'll try to bring it back around to veganism. Having experienced this really brought the horror of that particular aspect of animal exploitation into focus for me. It's very difficult to watch people who are otherwise very good and thoughtful and kind order a cheese pizza and say "I could never be vegan like you." I know that really it's comparing apples an oranges to compare something that happened to me, a male human, on one occasion, to what the dairy industry forces on its millions of cows over and over again. But it's impossible for me to forget what had to happen to a cow and her calf for my friend to have that pizza, and I can't help but relate to it in some way. I can't help but feel personally attacked, almost, or maybe made invisible, by their decision to participate in that violence. It's a hard feeling to describe. And articulating my revulsion and disgust for the cruelty of it has a very good chance of putting me in a position socially that I do NOT want to be in. Not only do I not want to complicate my social life in that way, but a very large part of this is that I never, ever, ever want to see anyone I love or care about eat dairy in front of me AFTER they learn this about me. It's very easy to forgive ignorance. But I'm very afraid that I wouldn't ever be able to forgive that.

And personal history aside, I'm not really convinced that describing the forcible impregnation as "rape" is very constructive, even if it is an accurate way to describe what happens (which I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of either.... as similar as they might be, they aren't quite the same thing, I don't think). In any case, I do think that it tends to make someone stop listening immediately when they hear that dairy cows are "raped" to get milk. I think it's probably much better to sort of dance around it a little bit and make it clear that what is done to dairy cows would absolutely be considered sexual abuse, if not rape, if the only difference were that the victim were not a cow.

So, like I said, I don't know. It's a tough one.

/r/vegan Thread