Hickey: Be considerate, watch your triggering language

Watch your language.

No, not THAT language — I don’t really give a &$@^% how you use that language, as long as it’s not around kids. Watch your language.

No, not THAT language — I don’t really give a &$@^% how you use that language, as long as it’s not around kids. I’m talking about the kind of language that co-opts other peoples’ traumatic experiences, alienates those with mental illness and otherwise turns people into punchlines.

How many times have you heard this during finals week: “Ugh, I just got raped by my OChem test.”

People who say that aren’t actually trying to trivialize sexual assault. They’re not actually trying to argue that failing a test is a trauma on par with being sexually assaulted. They’re just using the word, which is visceral and attention-getting, to make their speech more colorful. The handful of Occupiers who think it’s okay to say corporations are “raping the country” or that the one percent is “raping the middle class” defend the metaphor as an apt means of illustrating an injustice that deprives a victim of power.

But there are countless words in the English language. You could say you were crushed, trampled or flattened by your OChem test, and that the corporations taxpayers bailed out are parasitizing the middle class. The only reason to choose the ham-fisted rape metaphor over more appropriate phrasing is to elicit the maximum shock reaction. And since we live in a country where a woman is sexually assaulted every two minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey, your unfettered shock-rocking comes at the price of an overwhelming likelihood that a survivor of sexual violence is going to overhear you, or see your poorly-worded protest sign and feel like complete crap. Is it worth it?

Rape survivors aren’t the only people who’ve been casually used in metaphor.

People with mental illnesses have suffered as many of their diagnoses slide dangerously into colloquial use. Ever hear someone say “I must have ADD” because she keeps getting distracted from her homework, or “my ex-girlfriend was totally bipolar” because he found her mood swings unpredictable? Using mental illnesses that people actually live with as shorthand for personality traits that, let’s be honest, aren’t even abnormal — everybody gets distracted from their homework — is lazy communication first and foremost, and also promotes ignorance and makes it more difficult for legitimate sufferers to speak about their experiences and be heard. How does a person actually living with obsessive-compulsive disorder speak about his experience when his friends understand OCD as a vague descriptive term for anyone who cares whether or not his socks match? How does someone really suffering from an eating disorder find the courage to admit it to people who deadpan, “don’t be so anorexic” whenever someone skips a couple of meals? This kind of careless usage discourages people living with mental illness, or it makes them into a punchline.

One troubling phenomenon that’s been turned into a joke on an alarming scale is self-injury, especially cutting. Maybe someone remembers the middle and high school days when “emo kids” were a thing and there was a joke that went, “I wish my lawn was emo so it would cut itself.” About four percent of Americans reportedly self-injure, according to a Journal of Clinical Psychology study, including people from all backgrounds, but self-injury is still many peoples’ mean-spirited shorthand for teen angst or unseemly whining. I’ve even seen people make sarcastic slashing motions over their wrists to indicate they think someone is being melodramatic. In fact, I’ve seen my close friends do this in front of me at a time in my life when they knew I was struggling with self-injury.

Were my friends openly mocking me? No, I don’t think they were. When I called them out on their hurtful behavior, they were mortified. They’d gotten into the habit of using self-harm as a joke, and they failed to break the habit when it really counted.

That, more so than all this hurtful rhetoric being an unimpressive shortcut to really evocative speech, is my argument for cutting this crap out right now. I used to use language carelessly, and I stopped first and foremost because I knew that if I kept saying that I was sexually assaulted by a homework assignment, I wasn’t going to remember to edit myself when I was around someone I knew was a survivor of sexual violence.

If this all sounds a little too Politically Correct for you — if you think I’m stepping on your free speech — please take a moment to think of what you’re really saying when you say, “I have a right to call this corporate abuse rape if I want to” or “I have a right to joke about being OCD if I want to.” You’re saying to millions of trauma survivors and people who live with mental illness: “My right to toss around these words supersedes your right to feel comfortable and safe, and I have the right to be disrespectful in order to make my point.” And I have the right to call you hurtful and your language disrespectful.

Contact Tracey at tbh15@pitt.edu