Animal Metaphors and University Rape Culture: A Look at Violence against Women on Campuses in Canada, Spain, Australia, Mexico, and the USA
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article focuses on animal metaphors in real cases of rape culture in universities in the Anglophone and Hispanophone worlds. To this aim, it analyzes the animal metaphors permeating several episodes of violence against female students perpetrated on campuses in Canada, Spain, Australia, Mexico, and the USA in the last decades (2000-2024). A total of 6 cases are studied. Apart from reflecting the (ab)use of animal metaphors in cases of rape culture in the higher educational system, this selection was made considering the different types of contexts and media where the metaphors are encountered within the university setting. Some of the animal metaphors are found in the names of parties that portray female students as «bitches». Others belong to WhatsApp groups where male students self-identify as predatory animals planning a gang rape. They are also part of dorm’s publications and emails that label female students as prey to be hunted. Even bathroom graffiti display metaphoric fauna that renders female students as pigs. Through the lens of Conceptual Metaphor Theory, which underscores the pivotal role played by metaphor in both cognition and action, and Critical Discourse Analysis, which highlights how language (re)produces ideologies, social inequalities and power relations, the paper shows how college students resort to the zoomorphic scenario to promote and legitimize (sexual) violence against women. Male students describe their female peers as «cows», «seals», «pigs», «bunnies», «kittens», «bitches», and «chicks» to sexualize and deride them physically, morally, and intellectually. They also cast themselves as predatory animals— «wolves», «studs», «eagles», and «hawks» —to make sense of heterosexual relationships, explain their sexual urges and violent behaviors. These animal metaphors that permeate students’ college life are ultimately part of university rape culture in the English and Spanish-speaking worlds.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".