A NY Times op-ed piece by Kristof discusses mass rape after wars. While he points out that sex crimes are often a strong element of war, it would be a mistake to infer that these crimes would not also be taking place without war.

This was particularly disturbing:

In Liberia, sexual predation during the civil war was “normal.” One major survey found that 75 percent of women had been raped — mostly gang-raped, with many suffering internal injuries.

Feministe weighs in on the using-rape-as-metaphor trend. In this case, a blogger used a lengthy metaphor in which a television show is likened to a daughter who is about to be married to the viewing public. She is suddenly raped by the groomsmen (network executives), to the despair of the creator/father. I wrote a blog entry a few posts back about using the the word out of context, and this is yet another example of how easy it can be to play down or desensitize actual rape.

The F word discusses the disgusting video game RapeLay, in which the player must rape a mother and daughter until they begin to “enjoy” it. Talk of this has been circulating the blogosphere for months, and Amazon Japan has final agreed to remove the game from their website.

Equality Now launched a successful campaign to stop Illusion Software from carrying the game, but now they are asking the public to write letters to Amazon Japan to stop the sale of other sexually violent games, as well as to Japanese government officials to ban the sale of computer games like RapeLay.

If you’d like to participate, names and addresses are available at the Equality Now link above.