Clearly this was not a fun experience for Kitsch, and you feel for him. Doing badly on an audition sucks. But it does not suck as much as sexual assault, something that happens every two minutes in America.
My dictionary defines rape as "The unlawful compelling of a woman through physical force or duress to have sexual intercourse," is experiencing a dangerous shift in meaning.*
My first and major objection here is the apparent equivocation of "rape" with "sexual assault." Yes all rapes are sexual assaults. No, all sexual assaults are not rapes. Yet this, and a great deal of other writings on the subject continuously (and I believe purposely) exchange the two. Clearly it is easier to, and more "shocking" to make a statement about something that happens every two minutes (a statistical argument) rather than one that may happen, statistically speaking, once every five minutes (and that's a quick hack up based on 1996 numbers 71/100,000 females and using the current US population of 300,000,000 divided in half. the rates of rape have dropped since then).
Also given that a great deal of rapes occur between people who know each other, it's not likely that on average a woman outside of a war zone is going to be grabbed up by a man.
So that 'quibble" aside, we get to the next problem. The use of rape by people to describe bad situations they've found themselves in. While I can see the point of the author that the random use of the phrase "raped" to describe a non-sexual intercourse situation, I think it also is a recognition of rape as a power play by the rapist imposed upon his or her victim. If one says one feels "raped" by a certain situation, one is saying that one felt powerless and victimized by the other party. Usually when I've heard the term used, it is in connection with the taking of something valuable or a great defeat. So in a sense those wishing to get the point across that rape is about power have succeeded.
I think that if the author is serious about keeping rape "serious", then I think it should start with not exchanging the general category of sexual assault (which can be an unwanted pinch on the ass), with rape.
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