So, I've volunteered for a rape crisis hotline for the past two years (www.barcc.org). I get some calls from people who were raped a long time ago as children, but sometimes it's much more recent and I'm the first person they've ever told. I was thinking about the transhuman mindset, and it seemed like it might be interesting to look about rape from that persepctive. Let's start with a question that's less obvious than it seems: why is rape bad? Why is it much worse than getting stabbed, beaten up, or suffering similar types of painful-but-temporary injury? There are several different ways to answer that question, but I think that most answers gravitate toward the argument that rape is worse because it inflicts extraordinary emotional damage that can last a lifetime. This naturally leads to the question of why that emotional damage occurs. You could imagine an AGI in a skin mask might be raped and feel nothing more than confusion and annoyance. This suggests the harm of rape is rooted in a human understanding of the meaning of the act. So when you start thinking about how humans know what something means, it's useful to view the problem in terms of memetics. For contrast, we can think of language as a memetic operating system, partially learned and partially inborn, that translates soundwaves in the air into ideas in our heads. For some reason, perhaps partially biological or partially cultural, humans almost always translate the experience of being raped into some very toxic memes like "I'm nothing," "I'm an object," "I'm their property," "I'm worthless," "I'm defiled," or "It's my fault this is happening." Some memes are definitely more common based on the rape survivor's gender identity; women are more likely to feel ugly, and men are more likely to feel weak. The trauma of the rape sears the memory into the survivor's mind and helps those toxic memes take root, but social conditioning also makes a substantial contribution. Compared to outright torture or other extreme acts, rape is very simple to perform and easy to hide; on any given day, it probably causes more damage to more people worldwide than any other type of memetic assault. So what do we do about it now, and what can we do in the future? Well a memetic perspective makes a hotline counselor like me a sort of antibody to help protect a caller's ego from the memes that are infecting them; I'm certainly no "cure," but a supportive person to talk with early on can help put the rape in a context where the survivor doesn't blame themself for what happened. Edjucating young people about rape is like an innoculation that can help them resist an exposure that hits later on. Our vulnerability to rape seems related to other hang-ups about gender, and that's just one more reason to get rid of those outdated ideas. It becomes even more interesting to speculate on how increased understanding of the mind works will change how we guard against memetic assaults and mitigate their aftereffects. I'm certainly leery about what will happen when we start hacking our brains, but how can you say "no" to something that might help a child rape survivor develop a healthy sense of self-worth? Less optimistically, it's very frightening to think about how much damage could be done with new avenues of memetic attack. For nothing more than a fleeting sense of power, a rapist will callously inflict damage that takes a lifetime to heal; just think of how much damage that someone like that could do with a mind-virus. Broadly speaking, this is why I'm pessimistic about the future: if we have the power to hurt each other, it's inevitable that someone will make a grab that power; and it's so much easier to play offense than it is to play defense.