Man-Made Evil
Contrasted Meanings and Definitions are Far From Benign
Setting: A quiet, timeless chamber where shadows and light blend, and the air smells faintly of parchment and ozone.
Sophia: Welcome, Christine. You look upon this world with a gaze both sharp and sorrowful. You've long contended with the twisting of truth, haven't you?
Christine: I have, Sophia. It is wearying. What truly troubles me is the human tendency to redefine suffering as desire—to claim a woman’s desperate protest is merely a prelude to pleasure, a thin veil over some secret longing. How can we stand by while willful malice is rebranded as misunderstood affection?
I am ... troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped by men even when they verbally protest. It would be hard to believe that such great villainy is actually pleasant for them.
— Christine de Pizan (1364-1440)
Sophia: Ah, the dark magic of language misused. The way a word or a concept, once clearly understood, is inverted until its opposite seems plausible. When you say, "I am troubled by men who argue that many women want to be raped," you are pinpointing this very corruption. The act of rape, which by its very nature is the violation of will, is being defined out of existence by those who benefit from its perpetration.
Christine: Precisely. It’s not just an error in judgment; it’s an active, dangerous lie. To suggest that a woman’s cry of "no" is an invitation—that her fear is a form of delight—is to create a perverse new reality where violence is rendered benign, even desirable. And in that new reality, the villain is protected, and the victim is doubly abused: once by the act, and again by the monstrous re-definition of her experience.
Sophia: The implications of that lie are enormous. If we allow that core definition to be so perverted—if the clear line between protest and welcome is blurred and erased—then the very foundation of justice crumbles. The benign-seeming words used to frame the argument are anything but. They are the instruments of a profound moral injury. The true villainy lies not just in the deed, but in the calculated effort to make the deed appear pleasant or deserved.
Christine: It makes the fight feel endless. We must labor not only against the injustice itself, but against the elaborate philosophical structures built solely to deny the victim’s reality.
Sophia: And that, Christine, is why your clear-eyed refusal to accept that corrupted definition is a form of true wisdom. Wisdom is often just the firm, unyielding insistence on calling things by their proper, honest names. You refuse to let "suffering" be called "satisfaction." And that refusal is where the light begins to push back the shadow.
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