self-rape

English

Etymology

From self- +‎ rape.

Pronunciation

• (General American) IPA^(key): /ˈsɛlfˌɹeɪp/, /ˌsɛlfˈɹeɪp/

• Audio (US):

  (file)

Noun

self-rape (countable and uncountable, plural self-rapes)

1. An act of rape where the rapist identifies with or is the same as the victim.
   • 1975, The Washingtonian - Volume 10, page 210:

     Tubby transvestite star Divine still manages to provide some fine, ghastly moments, including a Christmas tantrum (she fails to get shoes with cha-cha heels), a hilariously gross trampoline act, and, through the magic of cross-cutting, a self-rape, which must be a movie first.

   • 1987, Arts Magazine - Volume 61, page 126:

     Read literally, that "as" means that Stephan renders the oft-depicted scene from Ovid as follows: Leda, the raped, has become the metamorphosed Zeus, the rapist, and is therefore caught up in a hopeless knot of self-rape.

   • 1999, The Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese:

     It thus follows that if Ryuji and Noboru are two halves of one person, Ryuji's murder is a "self-rape" or self-killing, a "suicide." (It is perhaps in this sense that every murder is a "suicide."

   • 2003 January 31, HppyButchr, “Thought for you”, in rec.arts.sf.starwars.misc (Usenet):

     Well, not docile per sai^[sic], but without a constant urge, or at least an appropriate way for 1million male clones to relieve their tension without resorting to self-rape, er clone-rape... nevermind.

   • 2014, A. D. Cousins, Shakespeare's Sonnets and Narrative Poems, →ISBN, page 84:

     For a start, it feminizes Tarquin by drawing on the conventional gendering of the human soul as female (Donne's 'Batter my heart . . .' offers an obvious but interesting comparison), and implies that his physical assault on Lucrece has both offended against his own body and contaminated, almost violated, his spiritual and 'female' self. Rape has almost been self-rape.

   • 2016, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel, Ben. Sifuentes-Jáuregui, Marisa Belausteguigoitia, Critical Terms in Caribbean and Latin American Thought, →ISBN:

     The poem's shocking conclusion (envisioning self-rape) benefits from an analysis of the unconscious that Marta Lamas and Nelly Richard highlight.

2. Submission to an unwanted sexual act.
   • 1965, Gerald Kersh, A Long Cool Day in Hell, page 14:

     If I forced myself to let myself be made love to against my inclination I'd hang myself for a rapist. There is self-rape, isn't there?

   • 1968, Gershon Legman, Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor, First Series:

     This ever-ready willingness not only to be raped but to like it too, is of course the wet-dream ideal of womanhood — that is to say, of all other women but one's own — remarked upon bitterly in Ruth Hersch- berger's Adam's Rib (1948) chap. 3, "Is Rape A Myth?" It represents a fantasy escape by men from the rigorous female chastity demanded by patriarchy. These jokes of female self-rape, by 'mistake,' may be lumped with the endless novelistic tales of adultery written by men in which the woman is always at fault.

   • 1982, Peter J. Casagrande, Unity in Hardy’s Novels: ‘Repetitive Symmetries’, →ISBN, page 202:

     Seduction of a male is here a metaphor for self-willed corruption, better described as self-rape; it carries with it all the sneaking dubieties of suicide, which happens to be an inherited tendency of Jude Fawley. Rape is violent intrusion, a kind of murder; enticement requires self-violation and is therefore akin to suicide.

   • 1987, Health - Volume 19, page 6:

     Teens can be made to feel that their "no" sounded like a coy "yes." In all these cases, the victim is reacting with self-blame. This is anger turned inward; this is self-rape.

   • 1992, Norman Rush, Mating, →ISBN, page 19:

     Pretending to be hot bears a distinct resemblance to self-rape, but it's a rape accompanied by boredom instead of fear.

   • 1994, A. David Moody, The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot, →ISBN:

     It is the women who, suffering a kind of self-rape (they consent to be violated?), are victims of evil and, in the play's terms, carriers of it too, revulsed and yet intimate with corruption, while the Knights – for all their blustery self-exculpation –are merely a murdering machine.

   • 1996, Thomas Foster, Carol Siegel, Ellen E. Berry, Genders 23: Bodies of Writing, Bodies in Performance, →ISBN, page 25:

     This rhetorical reversal whereby rape becomes self-rape made some resisting suffragettes feel that to write about their experience of forcible feeding at all was to do themselves violence on top of that which had already been done to them.

   • 2014, Karli June Cerankowski, Megan Milks, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, →ISBN:

     As a result of societal pressure, Williams engaged in unwanted sexual intercourse when she felt no sexual desire, an act she describes as "self-rape."

3. (by extension) Behaving contrary to one's own nature, usually as a result of outside pressure.
   • 1972, Paul J. Stern, In praise of madness: realness therapy--the self reclaimed, page 46:

     Only when he desists from his self-rape and gives his animal side its head, no matter how "unnatural" its aspirations, can he finally transcend it and grow into a human being.

   • 1985, Woman of Power - Issues 2-7, page 28:

     Another parliamentarian, Gabi Potthast, agreed that the situation is destructive. To go into patriarchal politics and adapt to their ways is self-rape.

   • 1989, Eva Kolinsky, The Greens in West Germany: Organisation and Policy Making:

     Thus, a first generation woman member of parliament for the Greens reported that she needed regular breaks from an atmosphere which she described as self-rape and in which she could only function by shutting out all emotions or personal expectations and functioning like an automaton (Spretnak and Capra 1985: 142).

   • 2000, Eliot Borenstein, Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1929, →ISBN:

     If there is any way in which Lyutov is punishing or hurting himself, it is in forcing himself to act completely antithetically to his own nature. If one must search for a dramatic metaphor, the action is more self-rape than self-mutilation. Peter Stine calls the killing of the goose "a violation of the soul" (241).

   • 2005, Walt Harrington, The Beholder's Eye: A Collection of America's Finest Personal Journalism:

     The worst part, they agreed, was having to pretend to feelings they didn't have because that's what the Red People expected. "We were a pair of comrades discussing a decade each of self-rape," Donna says, "a pair of prostitutes talking trade."

4. (often derogatory) Masturbation.
   • 1996 June 27, Howard L. Bloom, “COMCAST and RAPE”, in talk.rape (Usenet):

     I'm sure in your mind, that pee wee's masturbation was probably self-rape. We should cut off the offending hand. Uh oh, what if he used both?

   • 2002 November 1, Bryce, “Pornography addiction -- please help”, in alt.religion.mormon (Usenet):

     One perspective I heard when growing up was that masturbation amounts to self-rape.

   • 2003 August 24, DrWarrenKrugar, “Personality disorders and why they are hogwash”, in talk.religion.buddhism (Usenet):

     In your case, it is self-rape, pure and simple - incestual masturbation.

5. Masturbation without self-love.
   • 1975, Journal of religion and health - Volume 14, page 56:

     Masturbation undertaken with an inhibition of enjoyment, physical pain, or regrets and remorse is a genital example of self-rape.

   • 1986, The Gestalt Journal - Volume 9, page 49:

     Masturbation can also be carried out as a self-rape, in which case it becomes doing to oneself what one would like to do to another — an act of aggression, not love.

6. The act of inflicting obscene violence against oneself.
   • 1972, Raymonde Temkine, Grotowski, page 130:

     At the moment when Faustus is damned, they don pontifical ornaments to cast him into Hell. Brown monks' robes are worn by the other characters. When Faustus signs Mephisto's pact he divests himself of his vestments in a sort of self-rape.

   • 1992, The Advocate - Issues 594-597, page 68:

     "In New York" she recalls, "I could go out to clubs and get laid. That's unheard-of in Santa Cruz, where they nurture each other and have sex side by side so that no one is on top. I dated a woman there who thought that using a dildo was like committing self-rape."

   • 1996, Heather Kerr, Robin Eaden, Madge Mitton, Shakespeare--world Views, →ISBN, page 144:

     Emblematically, we have been shown martyrdom in an obscene mode, a religious 'dying' which Shakespeare hints, figuratively, is a kind of masturbatory self-rape."

   • 1998 October 29, Seraphina, “Shimon sorry”, in alt.abuse.recovery (Usenet):

     My ritual self-rape, the little poop trails I left around in my dresser and in the stable, I was trying to be noticed that something was wrong but all I got was silence.

   • 2001, Aurora: The Journal of the History of Art, page 18:

     It has been suggested that Lucretia's suicide can be read as analogous to her rape, her stabbing action taking the place of Tarquin's penetration. On Valla's account, this "self-rape" is far more reprehensible, both because it results in Lucretia's death and also because it involves her usurpation of the masculine action of stabbing oneself.

7. (by extension) Self-destructive activity.
   • 1967, Industrial and Labor Relations Forum - Volume 4, page 25:

     The shipping boom the industry had been riding since the prelude to the war collapsed in 1920. As Europe recovered from its self-rape and rebuilt its industries, the demand for American goods and the ships to carry them was greatly curtailed.

   • 1990, Laurence A. Rickels, Looking After Nietzsche: Interdisciplinary Encounters with Merleau-Ponty, →ISBN, page 38:

     ...as an act of "self-rape" by the "willingly self-conflicting soul that inflicts suffering upon itself, out of pleasure in inflicting suffering" (GM, II, § 18).

   • 1990, Linda Christmas, Chopping down the cherry trees: a portrait of Britain in the eighties, →ISBN:

     Perhaps if you put people in shit, they behave like animals. The downtrodden destroying the places they live in is a bit like self-rape, isn't it?

   • 2016, Antonín J. Liehm, Closely Watched Films (Routledge Revivals), →ISBN:

     It seemed to me that there was a wide-open field for playing up all the unfortunate circumstances surrounding physical violence, rape as punishable by law, but also for attacking the crime of spiritual rape, and, finally, the worst of all, self-rape, violence against one's own self.

Verb

self-rape (third-person singular simple present self-rapes, present participle self-raping, simple past and past participle self-raped)

1. (rare) To engage in an act of self-rape.
   • 2004 March 15, Electric Nachos, “Homophobia”, in rec.arts.fine (Usenet):

     And wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that psychiatrist's offices would be filled to the ceiling with these self-raping homos pleading for help?

   • 2011, M. Middeke, Christina Wald, The Literature of Melancholia: Early Modern to Postmodern, →ISBN, page 43:

     Satan's pregnancy repeats the theme of melancholy and narcissism: he is 'self-impregnated, or self-raped, making love to himself and then to his daughter, the product of his incestuous mind' (Mulryan 18).

   • 2012, Nick Tosches, Me and the Devil: A Novel, →ISBN:

     Sweet self-raped Melissa had extracted them from the rest of the verse in a way that gave a very different impression and conjured a very different picture.