Amy Schumer didn't say yes, but she doesn't call it rape — not publicly, anyway. Earlier this week, Marie Claire published an online preview of Allison Glock's interview with the actress and comedian in its August issue, on stands July 19. In it, Schumer shares that she didn't choose when she first had intercourse. "My first sexual experience was not a good one," she says. "I didn't think about it until I started reading my journal again. When it happened, I wrote about it almost like a throwaway. It was like, 'And then I looked down and realized he was inside of me. He was saying, 'I'm so sorry' and 'I can't believe I did this.''" Schumer says she has not felt the need to punish the person responsible. "This was 17 years ago. There are just so many factors," she continues. "I had another time with a boyfriend where I was saying, ‘No, stop,’ and it was just completely ignored." Yesterday, Refinery29 — along with a number reported on these comments . We did not use the word "rape" to describe Schumer's first experience of intercourse, and, for the most part, neither did other publications, save for one or two sites that questioned this move with headlines such as "Why Are Liberal Websites Like Salon Afraid to Call Amy Schumer’s Rape a ‘Rape?’" When we posted our story about Schumer's comments on our Facebook page, we received similar questions, with readers expressing their belief that sex without consent can never be referred to as anything other than rape; other readers sided with our decision to use different terms, with one commenter stating, "Everyone's coming after the person who wrote the article but Amy's the one who didn't call [it] rape." She didn't, and so neither did we. Language is powerful. We use words to capture reality, and when we do, we also shape it. That's why I, and Refinery29, default to the word "survivor" rather than "victim" for someone who has undergone sexual assault. This is not to say that someone who has experienced assault can't identify with the term "victim" and choose it to describe herself; it is to say that we do not force the label on anyone who hasn't selected it. The survivor of the rape that landed Brock Turner in jail for a repulsively short six-month sentence spoke to the power of the word in her court address to Turner, writing, "You made me a victim. In newspapers my name was 'unconscious intoxicated woman,' ten syllables, and nothing more than that. For a while, I believed that that was all I was. I had to force myself to relearn my real name, my identity." While this woman does, in fact, seem to identify on some level with the word — "I am still learning to accept victim as part of my identity," she writes — she points to how assigning someone this label without her consent can shift her self-perception in ways she did not ask for or want. Why wouldn't we conclude that the same could be true of labeling others' experiences?