Content warning: Sexual Violence
Female Protagonist busts the door down at the secret laboratory. She strides down the main corridor, a gun in one hand and a knife in the other. She’s ready to fight—but she forgets to check her corners, and two uniformed guards quickly sneak up and apprehend her. Ignoring her attempts to warn them about Villain’s secret plan to replace all human brains with robots, the guards quickly handcuff her and start patting her down, removing all of her weapons. Guard One leers at her as he takes his time searching the inside of her top—
(or…)
Female Protagonist has decided to ignore her father’s reprimands about how a real Princess should behave. She’s seventeen, damn it, and she gets to choose her own destiny. She’s in the woods practicing her parries against a tree when out of nowhere, two young ruffians from the town stumble into the woods. They smell of sour cider and it takes them a moment to notice her but when they do, they exchange a look that makes her nervous. They walk over, looking casual, but something in their stride is predatory. She realizes that the loose, comfortable dress she wears to practice swordplay makes her look like just any peasant girl. She looks up, and one of the young men is smiling at her. He grabs a fistful of her dress and before she can yell, his companion has covered her mouth—
(or)
Female Protagonist lightly punches Male Friend on the arm as they part ways for the night. She shouts that she’ll see him on the track first thing in the morning, so they can jog together. She’s glad that she’s found a friend in Space Army Headquarters, and that the hazing—which was constant at first—seems to have died down. She swipes her arm and the chip in her ulna buzzes as the door registers her presence. It slides open, but when she turns to swipe her arm again so the door will close, a shadow appears in the doorway. She startles—but it’s only Male Jerk.
“What do you want?” she asks—but instead of answering, he steps into her room and swipes his arm. The door closes behind him, and he shoves her to the floor—
(or)
He pins her arms down easily with one huge hand and fumbles with the laces on his breeches—
(or)
She screams, and the wizard slaps her hard across the face. She’s stunned at the taste of blood in her mouth—
(or)
She lies curled on the bloodied bedsheets as the Crown Prince of the Faeries snores beside her, and she cries into her pillow because she knows that this is her future.
You’ve read these books, and you know these characters—by now, you’re surely used to the idea that a female protagonist will be groped, leered at, grabbed, thrown to the ground. If she’s raped, then there’s a good chance that it happened outside of the narrative, and she’s tougher because of it. If it’s an almost-rape, then she’ll kill the person who was trying to assault her, and that will be her first murder. Or, she’ll be rescued by a male character who will then agree to teach her how to fight, so that it never happens again. Or maybe she’ll make a quip and use her newly-formed superpowers to dispatch the attacker, and she’ll marvel at her newfound strength. It’s come to feel inevitable*.
I want to be outraged about this. I want to be furious that SFF writers seem to have an easier time imagining faster-than-light travel than they do imagining a world in which sexual assault isn’t a constant threat. I want to yell at authors to give their female characters more interesting, dynamic arcs. I want to climb up onto my soapbox and ask why it is that female characters can be subject to sexual violence but not physical violence; and then I want to answer my own question with my lips on the microphone: it’s because beating a woman is taboo, but raping her isn’t.
I love this genre, and I love these female characters, and when awful things happen to their bodies in the name of whatever the author has in mind, I want to be mad. I want to hate the fact that the rare instances of sexual violence against male characters are often treated as either humorous or the ultimate transgression—while sexual violence against female characters is to be expected. But, it’s hard to get angry at the knowledge that for so many writers, sexual violence against female protagonists is a given. It’s necessary, and it’s accurate, and it’s the first thing that comes to mind.
The truth is that the scenarios described in most genre fiction aren’t incorrect. They’ll read as familiar to most women. Even women who have never experienced rape will be familiar with the grabbing, the shouting, the threats. The constant, endless threats. Threats that are supposed to be friendly warnings about what’s safe and what’s not. Threats that are implicit in everything from school dress codes to rohypnol-detecting nail polish.
Sexual violence in genre fiction is not the only thing that reminds female readers that they are seen as vulnerable, as targets. And besides, art holds a mirror up to life, right? Why shouldn’t genre fiction present our world as it is?
But then I do start to get a little mad, because damn it, that’s not what we do around here. We talk about universal experiences, like loss and love and fear and home and family. But sexual violence doesn’t have to be universal. It doesn’t have to be ubiquitous. It doesn’t have to be constant. We write about worlds where teeth are wishes and souls are books and time can be bent in half and swallowed like a pill. We write about spaceships the size of pinheads and we write about Gods in shackles and we write about spiders that are made from computer chips and blood. We write about adults inhabiting the bodies of children and dragons that become wolves and we write about entire galaxies where everything is brighter and better and newer or darker and more broken and irredeemable.
I get a little mad, because we can imagine horrors beyond human comprehension, and yet still we insist that rape is the worst thing that can happen to our female protagonists. We can open a rift between universes and allow a tentacle to herniate through a void in the sky, but we can’t suspend our disbelief enough to erase casual misogyny from the worlds we build. We can give a wizard access to a centuries-old volcano-powered spaceship, but we balk at the notion of a woman who has never been made to feel small and afraid.
I get mad, because I don’t want to accept “that’s unrealistic” for an answer from a genre that typically takes “that’s unrealistic” as a prompt.
I get mad, because we can do better. Some of us have done better—look at N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, or Mary Robinette Kowal’s Shades of Milk and Honey, or Mishell Baker’s Borderline. Look at Maria Dahvana Headley’s Magonia, or Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway, or Garth Nix’s Abhorsen trilogy. Look at them and ask yourself why their imaginations are strong enough to let their female characters have stories that don’t include sexual violence. Ask yourself why those stories are so rare.
Ask yourself, and do better.
*But hang on, maybe I’m just overreacting. Let’s look at some anecdotal evidence:
- I’ve read 61 books in the past eight months.
- 51 of those were genre fiction.
- 31 of those featured a female protagonist. What can I say, I like what I like.
- Of those 31, 20 included a scene involving sexual violence. So: two-thirds of female genre protagonists in my little sampling alone. That’s a lot.
Sarah Gailey’s fiction has appeared in Mothership Zeta and Fireside Fiction; her nonfiction has been published by Mashable and Fantasy Literature Magazine. You can see pictures of her puppy and get updates on her work by clicking here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Watch for her debut novella, River of Teeth, from Tor.com in 2017.
You’ve chosen Ripley / Zenomorph as the picture at the head of this article. I’m sure I heard that the Alien screenplay made no mention of the gender of any of the characters and that was only decided at the time of casting.
I’m not certain that this photograph fits your narrative of “female protagonist subjected to sexual violence.”
Lots of characters in Alien were subject to violence. The one character in Alien who was quite definitely subject to sexual violence (he was intimately and forcefully involved in the Alien’s reproductive cycle, it didn’t end well.) was played by a male actor, John Hurt.
@1 If the zenomorph were a human male, the picture would have overtones of sexual violence. It strikes me as a compromise for a safe picture to have above the cut.
David, the photograph is from Alien 3, in which Ripley was indeed the victim of an attack and intended gang rape. She was rescued by a male character.
It extends beyond the protagonists, of course, to the backdrop worldbuilding. In most cases, if there is casual mention of whores, I’m out. Exceptions would be Elizabeth Bear’s Karen Memory or Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel series – this is not about sex work as a profession, it’s about the implicit assumption that females are sold for sex in this world as a matter of course. Tired writing.
I think things are changing in general. As a for-instance, I caught part of Running Man on free TV last night, at the point where Amber is patrolling the TV station and is attacked by “Dynamo.” It’s filmed in such a way that Dynamo could be trying to rape her (and it may have been more explicit in the original uncut-for-tv version)–I don’t know why “bad guy is also a rapist” came to be an SF thing, but to me in 2016 it came off as gross and skeevy. (Plus, FWIW, she kills him first, so…)
I also really enjoy the Cinemasins “Everything wrong with…” series of videos and they constantly sin the “bad guy is a rapist” cliche.
Certainly it’s time has long gone, and good riddance. There should probably be something about “all my minions will be screened for sexual deviancy and anyone who can’t keep their mind on their work when dealing with attractive Hero(ine)s will be summarily dismissed” added to the Evil Overlord’s list, if it isn’t there already.
However, Alien 3 was saying some specific things about sexuality and motherhood and I’m not sure the Alien franchise should be lumped into a broader condemnation of gratuitously sexually violent villains.
By your own count, one-third of genre stories featuring female protagonists DON’T include any scenes involving sexual violence, which from the examples which start I must conclude means it’s not present even as a brief threat.
If one-third of genre stories involved spaceships the size of pinheads, or Gods in shackles, or spiders made from computer chips and blood, or any other example you’ve given, it would be a tired trope. If-one third of stories had utopian societies where nobody had to work, or where all problems could be solved without violence of any kind, almost nobody would argue that the genre needs more of those scenarios. If one-third of genre stories had no characters who ever suffered the experience of being a racial or sexual minority… well, that may actually be the case, and we’d rightly be calling for more diversity.
I mean, I get that sexual violence is often portrayed poorly, often used cheaply and wildly different than when male characters are involved, but.. it is, unfortunately, a part of life, and art’s supposed to hold a mirror up to life. Sure, it changes things down and then, but those changes are choices and shouldn’t be obligatory.
You can’t have it both ways, to tell the world that sexual violence is not only something that women universally have to be on guard for, that a frighteningly huge proportion of women have directly suffered, that it’s one of the worst things that you can do to someone, so horrible that it often changes who that person is forever–something I’m all on board with, by the way–and then say that this ubiquitous thing appearing, even as a threat, in a story is inappropriate, that using it to define a major change in a character’s history is out of line, or cliche. It’s cliche because it actually happens, because real people have it in their history and realistic characters probably will too.
Now, there’s plenty to talk about involving portraying sexual violence, and especially the consequences, in more sensitive or realistic ways, to do it better, and that would potentially be an interesting conversation, but suggesting that writers are unimaginitive for using prominent negative aspects of the real world to add drama and realism is more than a bit daft.
SFF stories (and genre fiction in general) incorporate exaggerated colour and drama. They tend to have vastly more of every sort of violence (not just sexual) than a typical person would encounter in real life. I’ve never been menaced by a villain with a gun or other deadly weapon, but I think it’s safe to say that the protagonists of most of the SF novels I’ve read experience such menacements for breakfast, dinner and supper.
The other part is that even if there are laser toothbrushes, FTL travel and gods in microchips, SF authors are generally writing about *people*. People as they are, usually, rather than people as progressives or other interest groups wish they would become. Worlds in which gender has somehow been dissolved just don’t seem to be all that interesting to most writers…
Nicely put. I was listening to Rebecca Solnit talk about how the stories human beings tell ourselves matter when we approach the world. If we think people are going to be violent animals when disaster strikes then “preparation” is getting a gun. If we think that human beings band together to rebuild barns and donate canned goods and help people get back on their feet when disaster strikes then “preparation” is putting up extra food up when we have it and chatting across the fence.
A nice break from the “women are vulnerable to strangers” narrative is Bujold’s >>Shards of Honor<<. It is about many things but the theme of the book might be why rape by military officers mostly would *not* happen. It makes more sense to have them align and cooperate than it does to put them in a victim/victor relationship.
I think this is more of reflection of the state of rape culture, the people who commit and those who it is committed against. I’ve seen statistics that say that 35% of college age women (usually the age of protagonists) have been the victim of rape or attempted rape. 80% have experienced some form of sexual harassment, which brings along with it fears of being assaulted in many cases. Most of it comes from people they know, which makes it even more terrifying.
I don’t know if there’s an easy answer, but the experience is tragically near universal.
I realized earlier this year that a lot of the stories I’ve written over decades past feature sexual threatening against women. (And occasionally against men.) I also realized that it’s a common trope, and an easy and simple plot element to use in a story. But I want to be more than a writer of easy simple stories, so now I’m making a conscious effort to avoid that trope in new stories. And also that, as a straight white middle class old guy, routinely using rape or the threat of rape in my writing is kinda wearing my hat on my ass.
The most heinous, despicable examples of humanity are not original or innovative. They are depressingly predictable and ignorant. If a writer hopes to realistically recreate the worst of humanity, readers should expect ugly portrayals of antagonists who do nothing to advance the literary ‘conversation’. I don’t understand why this is such a transgression if it mirrors real life and real experience.
I have to say, that as a kid who’d endured some Pretty Bad Things, reading about female heroes or even side characters who’d survived some form of sexual assault and came out of it more wary, more defensive, and more prone to violence was kind of a relief. “It’s not just me who automatically hits people who touch me, this is practically normal!” In a weird way, it was reassuring.
Still, I can kind of see where you’re coming from. I
Again, I have to be inclined to disagree.
As a writer of female characters, and as a female myself, I feel that it is counterproductive to not include sexual assault in our artwork. It is a part of women’s daily lives, and if we suddenly exclude that from our art, we cut off a vital part of the conversation we need to be having. When my niece and nephew or stepson bring me their questions about scenes of violence, I explain the violence to them, and then I tell them how to prevent it and how to spot it. I can’t do that if the media or genre fiction stops talking about it. How can I answer their questions if no one raises them? How can I point to powerful female leads who are sexualized, but not sex objects? How do I show them a good example if I have nothing to compare it to. I’ve never written a single story in which a female was violated that a male was not equally made vulnerable. Even in my most recent novella, the violence against the female is secondary, and she’s not my protagonist. I included violence towards a woman to illustrate that even all the power in the world is useless if no one is willing to use it, to call out the futility of the system that protects abusers and punishes victims.
Should violence be exploited? No. Should victims of violence be exploited? No. Should violence against women be present in the media and literature industries? Yes. Should violence against women have a poignant purpose in a story? Yes. If not, it’s violence for the sake of violence and any editor will know to cut it or reject it. As much as we blame authors for violence against women in genre fiction, we must also look to editors who approve violent rape, but might censor other violence against women. In this buyers market, there is a systemic issue with the treatment of women from the written word to the published novel. There is no one finger to point, and no one person to blame. Removing violence against women from fiction (at least in some cases) is not the answer. It obfuscates and misdirects more than it vindicates.
Damn you, phone! I meant to say:
It does get a little old when the whole jumping-off point of a female character’s. . .character is rape or sexual assault. Like someone’s ticking boxes on a list. People are more than one experience. They can be driven by more than one motive.
And I absolutely hate it when, in settings where mind control or personality overwriting is possible, mental violation is not treated more seriously than physical violation.
Shocking number of point-missers saying “but it’s part of the human experience, so of course it has to be there”. You know what’s not part of the human experience? Time travel. Intergalactic spaceships. Fairies. SFF is about imagining a world where things are different. If we can imagine worlds in which alien races work together to solve problems, why can’t we imagine a world where women aren’t constantly living under the threat of sexual violence? Maybe because then writers would have to come up with more creative motivations for female characters. You know, like they do for male characters all the time.
“I am mortal – stories with people getting hurt or killed are offensive and shocking to me.
Please lets get writers to focus on more stories where at most the conflicts resolve a harsh talking to.”
@15 I think you miss the point of SFF, it isn’t to just make up worlds. The best sff provides a better lens with which to view our world. An SFF book which in addition to time travel or orcs, space ships, then goes on to change human nature, would have a lot of heavy lifting to do to connect with its readers. Its possible, but its a lot of world building to expect from every writer.
So, there’s a lot in this to respond to. It would take a column much longer than the one that Sarah (I don’t know her, just using her first name for shortness purposes, no intent to offend) wrote to answer her, and that would be silly to write as a comment. I’ll establish a principle, then focus down, and leave the rest of the examples to the reader.
The principle, and the basic answer to her question, is pretty much her. Why does Sarah read so many books with violence against women? Because Sarah reads so many books about violence against women. The Average American ™ hasn’t read a book since High School. Sarah bought 50 this year.
It is tempting to imagine that there is a struggle going on here, with Tor.com, TheMarySue, etc…feminism in general on one side, pushing constantly for the better, and against them various hate sites (not gonna list them, but you know the kind of places I mean) pushing for the opposite. And authors/publishers have to decide between light and dark. That’s how it’d be in a story, anyway.
But, authors/publishers are just capitalists. Sarah buys 50 books. How many does Buford HatesLadies have delivered to his trailor park? A fight between the readers/agreeers of Tor.com and whatever antifeminist site you want to talk about should be a walk over. Beyond that, readers tend to be writers, so many authors are explicitly feminist. If this was a fight between light and dark it would be over by now.
No, the fight is between light and light. Or, to remove the metaphor, feminism and feminism. That’s the general principle. Only feminism, in the world of lit crit, is strong enough to push back feminism.
Now, to apply to something chosen at random in Sarah’s article, let’s take the scene where our lady protagonist kills her first man. Why is it necessary (if I’m right, and there is no dark side to placate), that she be threatened with rape before she does so?
Well, let’s take a few scenarios.
1. She walks up to someone, chosen at random, and cuts him down as he sleeps.
Well, that’s not working, right? Like, our protag is now more powerful but she’s also loathsome. Next!
2. She walks up to an Ork/Jewish Person/Debtor, and cuts him down.
Woah! That’s no good. Tolkien’s day has come and gone, and the time when you could just have your heroes slaughter unpersons is happily confined to the past. If your heroine kills someone because of what they ARE, then she is a bigot, full stop. This is worse than 1.
3. She walks up to a guy, he tries to rape her, she cuts him down.
Bingo. Nowadays the only thing that excuses power exerted against someone is that they deserve it by their own deeds. He can’t be an orc, he must be a criminal. In particular, in order for her to kill him and not forfeit our sympathy, he has to be a particularly heinous criminal, and ideally (this scene has to be handled extremely delicately. If the audience loses their identification with our protag we are done, nothing that follows will land right and they’ll bail.) she should be made more sympathetic in the same scene.
So, if this scene happens at all, it ought to be about the way we’ve described. It can be altered slightly (he can be attempting to victimize someone else instead of her), but fundamentally he has to be trying to do something deserving of the death penalty, generally rape or murder.
But why must the scene happen at all? Why must she be a killer?
Well, presumably there are killers in the story, our protag isn’t just a random murderer. Let’s imagine that this is a story with killers, but our lady protag can’t. Well, that’s pretty sexist, yeah? The boys can kill but Trinity can’t? Absurd! Hope could totally pilot the Ant-Man suit, she’s just too precious, too beloved!
TL:DR: Authors are in a catch 29. If they don’t have violence vs. women, they are erasing the patriarchy. If they have it but not vs our heroes, it is a Buffy setup, chosen women to whom the rules don’t apply, honorary man and so forth. If they have it vs our heroes, “do better”. It isn’t that something is signal boosted past feminism, it is that feminism (which is mostly the only game in town.) has many different strands. Alternate world this article is about something different (do-better, women aren’t being allowed to be active protagonists, do-better, Authors are afraid to have women protagonists, do-better, Authors are writing women as men and erasing the patriarchy), but the general theme (Sarah buys lots and lots of books and feels that they need to be adhere more to her strain of feminism than Sarah.2 does) is the same story that it always was. It isn’t that there is an anti-Sarah out there, it is that there are a hundred of her with contradictory orders.
@18 Why can’t the guy just be trying to kill our female hero? For a male character, that’s sufficient justification for the first kill, isn’t it?
ETA: Oops, I just read more closely: but men don’t need their kills to be particularly heinous, in most cases, it just needs to be a reason convenient for the narrative.
Alos, its interesting how dudeslash fanfics re-purpose these tropes. Sometimes it’s a cheap trick to create an increased sense of danger or villainy. Other times they are used to assign gender markers, which can be squicky. But they also actually transform them, to talk about survival and endurance and empathy.
It may be more in the Fantasy than Sci-Fi realm but check out the books about Tortall written by Tamora Pierce. The series are: Song of the Lioness (4 books), Wild Magic (4 books), Provost’s Dog (3 books), Protector of the Small (4 books), and Daughter of the Lioness (2 books). Though the stories are written for adolescent readers, each series is based on female protagonists, and as many times as I’ve read them I can’t remember one instance when any of them are sexually assaulted. Better, they are all fierce, intelligent, awesome characters. I ADORE these stories. I listen to them over and over again with my son. :D
Somewhere on Tumblr there’s a list of things a writer can do for character development besides having their female character get raped. From memory, and extremely incomplete:
*Burn down their house with everything in it. Everything. Vital documents, data storage, irreplaceable keepsakes, work clothes, everything.
*Make them spend a year or so trying and failing to maintain a family member through a debilitating illness. Miraculous rescue by Gandalf optional. No Wormtongues please.
*Have them live under suspicion of having committed an act that puts them beyond the pale, anything from plagiarism to child abuse.
*Guess what? Your boss is a criminal. There goes your career!
And so on. Rape is realistic. Stories about rape and revenge (one of the early Sword and Sorceress volumes was nothing but this) have their place. Stories about rape and healing certainly do; Deerskin was a book that needed to happen. But using rape all.the.time is lazy. It’s like, men have lives; women get raped.
Am I reading the “wrong” (i.e. right) SFF books? I read a lot of SFF, and can’t remember the last
one where a female protagonist was raped. But then, I am insanely picky about books.
Maybe the OP should read more books by women?
“…it’s because beating a woman is taboo, but raping her isn’t.”
This strikes as wrong. Sexual violence strikes the deepest revulsion for a antagonist and the utmost sympathy for a female protagonist. If anything, with more female action hero characters, mere violence against a woman has become less of a taboo because any chivalric notion of men refraining from hitting a woman because she is a woman denies her capability to do violence. It may be an overused trope, but it is a trope because rape is viewed as a grave evil.
I agree with this article. I don’t think sexual violence necessarily needs to be absent from stories, but there are better and worse ways to portray it. The worse ways include framing it as edgy, funny, or sexy, or using it as a go-to method of character development. Sadly, I’ve encountered all of the above in fantasy, sometimes in good books by probably-good people.
I’ve also enjoyed fantasy where sexual violence and exploitation are Things Which Happen in that setting but aren’t happening at every turn. Things which heroines and other characters are wary of and might or might not experience and/or be threatened with, but which aren’t an expected or typical driving force of a plot or character arc. Things which are treated seriously by the narrative when they occur, but not inserted just for drama regardless of plot logic. Tamora Pierce’s books, in both Tortall and Emelan settings, are good examples of this. So is the Stormlight Archive series, IMO.
But I haven’t personally experienced sexual violence to the degree that many readers have, so my feelings about it may be different.
@22, Anne McCaffrey wrote Dragonflight, where women were violated, in the late 60’s. It is (or was, anyway)generally regarded as a fairly feminist book. Her Ship Who Sang books also have sexual violence. It was, I think, the first exposure I had to that sort of thing in SF. I started with Asimov and Clarke, who barely wrote women, sex not at all, and not too much violence, either. It’s also rare in Star Trek fiction, or at least in the Trek I’ve read.
I hear you, but you have a strange definition of “sexual violence” if you think Jemisin’s The Fifth Season doesn’t have it. The central character is given to man after man. That’s not sexual violence?
My only complaint about that novel is that Jemisin is a tireless fighter for people of color and for women, and yet she still did that…
and, btw, it’s “Xenomorph”. Doesn’t anyone learn Greek anymore? ;-)
Jo Walton’s piece on this very blog of Cherryh’s use of sexual violence by women against men is a counterexample:
http://www.tor.com/2008/12/10/a-need-to-deal-wounds-rape-of-men-in-cherryhs-union-alliance-novels/
Another example is Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, which features sustained sexual slavery, torture and rape of the male protagonist (a Jesuit priest) by aliens who celebrate rape. It may be an extended metaphor and commentary on or deep anger toward religious missionary work, but still…
I agree with the general point of the article that sexual violence in stories should be reduced, but I don’t know if it will happen in our culture. We still tolerate massive violence and high body counts in pop culture and squeal at the merest peek of healthy sex.
Side note: I’m anticipating reading Alan Moore’s new novel Jerusalem, but also a little worried, given how often Moore has leaned back on the rape tropes.
Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I’m just glad that all I have to do where books are concerned is; enjoy reading them. If I learn some profound truth or have my thinking expanded, that’s an awesome plus, but not the reason I read what I read.
Personally I lean toward a more liberal way of thinking, so if an author tries to sneak in a conservative or religous message, I’m not gonna like it. For that matter, any any heavy-handed preaching of any idealogy in a genre fiction book is a turn off for me.
But you know what? If I’m not enjoying a book, I stop reading it. That doesn’t mean I expect the whole genre to change to suit my own sensibilities.
I guess that’s a luxuary of not haveing any formal learning in literature. I don’t have to pick apart the nuiances or underlying themes. All that analysing would ruin reading for me.
If authors consider rape to be holding a mirror to the real world, then why isn’t it happening more to male characters? Men get raped, a lot. But you rarely see it used for character or plot development for men. To me that means that raping female characters is just lazy writing. Not for every author of course, because some truly explore what the rape means. But for most, yeah, I think the author can’t think of any better motivation, or they’re too lazy to try.
@Kate- I don’t know of a single case where an adult male was raped, except maybe in prison, but I have seen on the news in the last few days at least 2 or 3 reports of women being raped or attempted rape. That said there are a lot of boys being sexually abused, is that’s what you mean by”men get raped alot?
I’m sure it does happen on occasion, and most likely not reported. But I’ve been a man all 49 years of my life, and not once have I been sexually assulted, or even sexually harrased, unless I was and I didn’t realize it. I don’t personally know of any other men who have been either. Granted I’ve live my whole life in USA, it may be different elsewhere.
So not sure I get what you mean by men are raped alot.
@32 It happens more than you think. You just don’t hear about it because men don’t usually report it. Why would they, if people are going to react to them with disbelief or scorn?
I have often thought about this a lot and I am often on both sides of the issue – so I won’t say anybody here is wrong or right. On one hand, I can appreciate works that show this aspect of society and explore what it does to a person and what women (or men) are going through, or even that women in what could be considered ‘victimizing’ situations (forced marriage, a brothel, etc) can still have personalities and agency. This is not to say I appreciate it being used as easy thrills, shock value, shorthand character development (this is how you show the bad guy is a BAD GUY, or that the woman is a broken bird/strong lady or the dominant facet of her motivations/personality is her sexual trauma) etc. But even with the amazing world building in so much genre, we are still usually trying to say something about human nature, the human condition, human experience, etc (obviously not every SFF work is about humans at all, but I’m just making a generalization) and sexuality and the way it is enjoyed, celebrated and abused is all part of that. I can also appreciate stories where, if it is done, the rapist isn’t necessarily an over the top, leering villain who is trying to take over the world, or grabs you in an alleyway somewhere.
On the other hand – I completely agree with you in that we are in some ways constructing a cultural narrative where it’s just taken for granted that part of a woman’s story is sexual violence/abuse, and that any woman who ventures out of her safe zone (and even the ones who don’t) are going to experience it. And you know…I don’t know – I’ve appreciated various social media campaigns like ‘yes all women’ that do shed light on these things and that for many women it – or at least the threat – IS a reality – but I can also understand the desire to branch out a bit and show worldbuilding where it’s just not the case. One of my favorite authors is Sharon Shinn and I really appreciate the wealth of interesting female characters she puts in her books, but there was a point where I had read several of them in succession and I did notice that in pretty much all of them, the female protagonist experience some form of rape (either historic, threatened or implied) or sexual violence.
I also freely admit to falling back on the Rape as Trauma/Villain Establishing trope sooooo much when I was a teenager (or even young college student) writing my own stuff. But looking back at some of that stuff I can see that I was just working through a lot of my own stuff and my own fears regarding that, and how it would (or wouldn’t) define a person – so I give 14-20 year old me some slack ;) Not to mention that I was purposefully trying to create extreme, high melodrama and to me that was the most melodramatic thing that could happen.
Thanks for writing; I’ve appreciated the comments and discussion too!
@33- I’m sure you’re right in that it isn’t often reported, but still, I have a hard time believeing its not a rare occurance for adult men to be raped. Again the only exception being in prison, or maybe in less modern countries, or cultures.
Just curious, if its not reported, where are you getting info that it is more common?
@34 I tend to see these articles not as calls for the complete eradication of a topic from fiction but for authors to recognize what choices they’re making and to consider them more carefully. So it’s not that authors can’t write about sexual violence but that they shouldn’t include it by default or unthinkingly.
@35 I wouldn’t be surprised if it happened more or less at the same rate in the gay community that it happens among straight people.
I have to wonder about a moderation policy that screens on-topic comments that don’t break the rules in any conceivable way.
Regardless, my original point stands. I’ve never read a SF novel in which the above mentioned scenes take place, or anything similar. Those scenes read like they’ve been cut from the pages of a Dark Matter or Killjoys script, the usual SyFy fare, or maybe from self-published ebooks.
Reading this post makes me wonder what kind of books OP is reading. As a whole, SF has become much, much more conscientious in the past decade, and I’d like to think SF is ahead of regular society in terms of looking at things from other perspectives — because most of the time it is. (Again, I’m talking about books, novellas, short stories, etc., not television or movies.)
I know OP said she’s talking about books, but for people who see these things in TV and movies, I find complaining about that is like complaining about your local newscast that does nothing but chase car accidents and fires, reporting things with no context in between weather updates. Then the question is: Why are we getting our news from TV instead of respected print/online sources? With TV vs books it’s the same thing.
@37: Not sure what you’re referring to, in terms of comments being screened. Our moderation policy is detailed here, and none of your comments on the site have been held up for moderation or unpublished. If you’re having trouble commenting, please contact our webmaster account.
First, I want to thank the author for highlighting this. We can do better.
(I have replies I want to make to a couple of the comments, but I’m heading down to Bremerton in a couple of hours for higher-level-than-EKG cardio testing, and I doubt I’ll be up to following further discussion when I get back. I already end up too often starting to participate in conversations, then vanishing because migraine spikes or fibro flares or other equally boring things get in the way, and feel guilty about that, so…)
@35: Per RAINN’s website 90% of adult sexual assaults are against women with the remaining 10% against men. They also state that 1 in 6 American women have been the victim of an attempted or completed rape in her lifetime as compared to 1 in 33 American men. (They appear to have gotten those numbers from Department of Justice studies.)
As a female SF reader, college professor, and writer, this topic hits very close to home, especially in regards to some of the “apologist” comments above. I’m going to try very hard not to be bitey or offensive in my comment and I apologize in advance if I come off that way.
Yes, rape and sexual assault/threats against women are, very, very sadly, a part of the current human experience. I don’t think that “excuses” the fact that two-thirds of the author’s recent SF reading used that as a plot point. I’ve been reading since I was three years old and a lot of my reading was in the SF genre. Tolkien, Lewis, Bradbury, Zimmer Bradley, John Norman, Wells, Mary Shelley, Piers Anthony, Ellison, Wolfe…I’ve kind of run the gamut. (This is not a full list of the authors I have read but a complete list would be very, very long and very, very boring.) Of course not everything I read portrayed male-on-female rape or sexual threats against women, but a LOT did. (Listen: I don’t want to go through a comprehensive list in a blog comment but if anyone desperately needs me to defend that statement please PM me and I’ll be happy to send you a VERY long list of examples from my extensive reading experience.) It was hard enough, as a woman, to identify with characters in the narratives I loved (Lucy always bugged me on some level, for example). It was worse when I saw these characters in whom I was trying hard to see myself being raped.
Of course there are SF books out there that don’t portray women being raped or sexually assaulted. In the corporeal world, there are women out there who haven’t been raped or sexually assaulted. Does the fact that *some* women aren’t raped mean that we shouldn’t be arsed about the women who ARE raped – “Well, a lot of women aren’t raped, so we shouldn’t make a big deal out of the women who are?” There’s also the ever-popular, “Well, I’ve never known a woman who was raped or assaulted/(I’ve never read a book/haven’t read many books with sexual assault against women used as a plot point), so your point is invalid!”
I have to say, the apologist arguments (and I’m talking about not just comments on this post but discussion on this subject in general), to me, smack of the “White lives matter!” response to the Black Lives Matter (now Movement for Black Lives) activist group. Yeah, lots of Black people are not racially profiled, assaulted, and/or killed because of their skin colour. But a lot ARE. It’s insulting and dismissive to suggest that we should ignore a real problem because it doesn’t happen to every single Black person. Analogously, it’s insulting and dismissive to say that we shouldn’t worry about the SF trope of rape and sexual violence/threat against women because it doesn’t happen in *every single* SF narrative.
To the male readers/commenters on this post, I have a question: how would you feel if 2/3 of the SF books you’ve read and loved portrayed sexual violence against MEN? Imagine a majority of the SF narratives you’ve read over the course of your life contained scenes where a man’s p3nis (numerical character because I don’t want this post automatically deleted for “offensive” language) was cut off, burnt, lacerated, kicked or punched, or even simply mocked or belittled by other characters in the narrative. Would you be upset? Would you want to write about and discuss the problems with that trope? Would you call for more thoughtful, less stereotypicall SF narratives?
@25: Yep. Consent is very often dubious in the Pern books, When dragons mate, the humans psychically bonded to them uncontrollably have sex as well. It happens in other situations, too — a man non-consensually dosed with an aphrodisiac by a woman, a peasant girl with little power to refuse her Lord Holder when he drops by for sex, and IIRC at least one occasion when a woman was physically overpowered while somewhat incapacitated. This all wouldn’t necessarily be Problematic — except that the perpetrators are often framed as the books’ “heroes” or “heroines,” the act is often framed as hot-sexy and/or romantic, and the word rape is rarely if ever used to describe it.
I admit I’ve written scenes of dubious consent, e.g. magically-induced seduction, and considered them sexy and romantic, not realizing that they could really qualify as rape even if both people “enjoyed it.” I’m trying to do better.
@David in comment #1 and Louisa in comment #3…
Learning that the script was not originally written to have a female lead, and that Ripley was a target of sexual violence in movie #3, makes the point in this blog all the more valid.
When the writers saw the lead as being potentially male, Ripley was at risk of regular, old violence. When the script writers knew she was female, it became sexual violence.
That makes the image this blog uses more perfect than the author/editor may have even intended.
NB
Doing a story and had to backtrack a few times in the first few drafts because there felt like an awkward amount of sexual violence or played into the sexual vulnerability of women a bit too much. It takes place 1000 years in the future in space. Sure there’s a lot of war and conflict and where there’s war there is a lot of abuse, including rape of women, but a lot of it felt forced a must say, I’m glad I caught most of it. As likely as it is to happen in that scenario I must say we should able to look past rape as the worst thing that could happen to a woman. Much like men can be destroyed when what they love the most I would assume women in roughly the same position would feel the same shock. I think it goes back to “dirtying” a woman or rendering her impure or some crap, which, of course, plays into how we as a society still see women as objects to be preserved and protected as a matter of pride for men, and of course we also conclude that when it does happen we imply it was somehow by fault of her own. “If only she had listened to me I could’ve ‘protected’ her.” Sounds wonderful, being the savior for the damsel in distress but I don’t like it as much as I don’t like pretty much every movie about black and brown people conveniently placing an inconceivably progressive white person fill the pivotal role in a story. Too often a woman’s character is anchored to how she looks, her sexual history, her love life, or as this article stated using rape or near rape as a mean of expressing imminent danger for a female character, protagonist or side-character…
“Those scenes read like they’ve been cut from the pages of a Dark Matter or Killjoys script…”
37. Plan: that seems like an unfair dig on those shows. Sure, they are not high art, but both feature women who are unquestionably in charge and without a sexual violence history. Both 2/Portia and Dutch enjoy sex and it’s sometimes the men who have hangups or are immature.
So, I love N.K. Jemisin soooo very very much and The Fifth Season is my favorite book on the planet, and maybe I missed something in your article, but The Fifth Season featured rape…but instead of being a violent one where a man or group of men or something that is obviously representing men rape or threaten a woman, it was a societally structured rape. Syenite and Alabastor both experience rape at each others hands, but neither is responsible for it, they were both forced and coerced into having sex with each other. Syenite cannot advance beyond her position and her life is threatened if she does not sleep with and breed a child with Alabastor. If Alabastor had refused his life and well being were also on the line. They immediately ceased having sex with each other when she became pregnant and Alabastor is at the very least read as gay. Rape means a lack of consent given without coercion, both of them were coerced to have sex with the other, it just wasn’t the person they were having sex with that was doing the coercing.
I agree with parts of what you’re saying. Though, I think women should be free to write what they have experienced. The same goes for men, that being said, I do not think most men should write rape (of women) or most expressions of misogyny because they do a horrid job at it and can not write from personal experience….and often perpetuate the very things they are writing.
For me a big deal of how I feel about it is how about how it is betrayed. In real life rape isn’t about sex but about power, when a story shows that aspect of it I am more inclined to give it a pass. On the other hand when the story tries to portray rape as just horney people crossing a line I get FURIOUS.
@48 – That seems like one of the truisms that gets thrown around but it seems to me that in at least some cases (especially the ones that end up debated and viewed as ‘controversial’ – although to me they are not) it IS about some horny guy (or woman – I do personally know a man who was taken advantage of when drunk even though he had previously told the woman (while sober) he did not want to have sex with her. I highly doubt she considers herself a rapist, or was even thinking about it in terms of having power over him. She probably figured he just changed his mind or was going along with it because we really do not do a good job in our culture of teaching that consent is not implied/the default) who wants access to a person’s body combined with a complete lack of regard for another person’s thoughts/feelings/desires, or some assumption that he’s somehow entitled to it. Which his not to say that’s not about power, but it’s also about sex. Maybe we’re saying the same thing; but it seems like it’s not an either/or thing.
I personally like the Star Trek mentality towards woman and in the he Star Wars world….both showed elements of violence to woman in equal measure to the men and the violence was not sexual in nature. AND guess what Star Trek and Star Wars are great franchises in movie and television…..
So we have done better we just have to do MUCH BETTER per your stats you mentioned at the end of your article.
I commend you on writing this article. Thank you.
This is a very good discussion! I admit I skimmed some of it, but it seems nobody has yet mentioned Sherri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance. The world of the book is in some ways built around these themes: assumptions of victimization, gender norms, and the stories people tell themselves.
Maybe I’ve been influenced by recent paranormal reading, but the female characters have been kicking ass lately … which is a lot of fun for the most part. It’s as if the writers in that genre said en masse “screw the gender expectations, the motifs, the literary standards, my female characters are not lying down for anybody unless they’ve jumped them, in which case, all bets are off … and either way, they’ve got nothing to be ashamed of”. Worth importing into Spec Fic?
@49 — This. Rape is often an expression of power and cruelty, not sexual desire, which is why it’s not a compliment and doesn’t only happen to “attractive” people or people of the gender(s) the rapist is attracted to. But someone can genuinely have desire, affection etc. toward someone else and still unknowingly rape that person if they don’t fully understand what does and doesn’t signify consent. Both messages are crucial for fighting against rape culture.
@18:
Have you actually watched Buffy? From your comment, it seems like you haven’t.
Possibly there is no crime more horrific than rape. I continue to be appalled by how common it (or even just the threat of it) is in our world. I agree with the article that it would be nice to see an imagined world now and then where it was not a thing that exists, or at the very least where it does not happen to a female protagonist. I don’t think that having such a story now and then is the same as pretending that pervasive sexual violence is not a problem in our world.
It’s not just lazy storytelling for the female characters involved, but it’s also a lazy trope that the bad guys are all rapists. Or all soldiers are rapists. Or all city guards are rapists. And so on.
@jaimew – As a male reader/commenter, I continue to be frustrated that the world is so screwed up that women often assume that there aren’t men who already agree with them that sexual violence against women is horrible. It’s tragic that I can’t actually blame you for your assumption. But just so you know, there are at least a few guys on the internet who are disgusted by the prevailing rape culture.
With reference to the original Alien script I’m curious how you feel about the scene where Ash attempts to force a porno mag into Ripley’s mouth. This seems like sexual violence to me. Does it take on a different tone with the casting choices?
There’s a lot to go over here.
It’s a point well-made that in a genre where the fantastical routinely happens in ways that alter society and reflect on the human condition in relation to today’s world, that more authors should be writing about societies in which rape has become less prevalent. (ironically, that doesn’t necessarily even mean not having a female character that experiences sexual violence. In fact, if the story really does have things to tell us about sexual violence that require it to be explicitly mentioned or even occur on-camera, doing that in a society that has made more progress than us in preventing sexual violence could be more powerful as a story, rather than less)
I actually decided to take this approach in writing my first novel, (I’m tentatively titling it “Dreamspace”) in which most of the characters are female and there’s no sexual violence. I’m really glad in seeing this post that I did make that decision. The way the magic works, female mages aren’t optional, (and no it’s not sex magic) and they take a particularly vengeful and zero-tolerance view of attacks against women, wherever they work, so any place that has many female mages is more free of sexual violence than our modern society would be. (although less free of it than I think my characters would like. I suppose it also was relevant to the decision that I wanted the tone to be “heroic fantasy,” and I didn’t feel like that’s served the tone well given that both my main protagonists were female and had plenty enough issues on their plates without worrying about sexual violence)
I think also that there’s a place for some sexual violence in genre fiction, as some of the female posters in this thread have agreed. It’s just that it needs to be treated seriously and not as a plot or character gimmick, it needs to be a rarer occurrence than it currently is, (even though to be honest it probably overall happens a realistic amount in fiction for the situations characters get into) and it needs to have something to say that will make readers who don’t like experiencing constant reminders of sexual violence feel that it was worthwhile. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable ask. But I think any time a male author puts sexual violence into a story, he needs to imagine the conversation he might have with a potential reader who has experienced sexual violence, whether male or female, and think about whether he can actually look them in the eye and talk about why he wrote about this issue, and did he need to include it, and did he treat the issue seriously and accurately. Anyone who can’t have that conversation shouldn’t be writing about sexual violence full stop, especially because it’s a topic that’s better written about by people who actually have experienced it themselves and therefore are most likely to have something insightful or emotionally resonant to say in fiction, and for most male authors, that won’t be them.
@53 thank you. I knew something about what 49 said bugged me and yet I could tell she wasn’t wrong either, I just had trouble putting it into words.
The “but it’s realistic!” arguments make my eyes roll. Writers include the elements they want to include. The vast majority of women menstruate but you don’t see that in every book (even though I often wonder about the logistics in these grimy or high tech worlds). Why? It doesn’t serve most stories and guys think it’s icky. If you include casual sexual violence and it doesn’t actually serve the story in a meaningful, well-thought-out way, you’re not being “realistic,” you’re just being lazy.
Shoot, one more thought. The absence of sexually violent scenes doesn’t mean the depicted society is automatically some wild utopia in which it never happens. You can understand that things happen without constantly being reminded. Most women also have babies. Most women have sex. If I read a book that lacks a pregnancy plot or sex scenes I don’t scoff, “And how does this civilization procreate, hmmm?? Unrealistic!” I agree with many posters above–just use it wisely and, like all other tropes, in a new way instead of copying the same old scenes.
@41 If 2/3s of the books I read featured men getting their genitalia mutilated, or men getting raped, I’d probably find it extremely odd. Sexual violence against women is more common than sexual violence against men (I’m sure you already know this, so bear with me). If sexual violence against men was more common in the ‘real’ world, then maybe I wouldn’t find it so strange. Hard to say.
Here’s the thing. What the author is saying isn’t especially profound: “Writers should handle delicate situations with care.” I’m not that impressed by the message or the delivery. There are dozens of articles like this one arguing that George RR Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ books are misogynistic, but I’d strongly disagree. His male characters suffer just as much as his female characters. His female protagonists are struggling to rise above the brutality of a patriarchal society, which is kind of the point of their suffering.
I’ve read hundreds upon hundreds of books and, for the life of me, I cannot conjure more than a handful that dealt with violence/sexual violence against women in a slipshod manner. Ellis’s ‘American Psycho’ is one of them. Couldn’t finish that one. I simply don’t enjoy reading that kind of thing.
Maybe I’m reading the wrong (right) books.
Earlier this year saw the release of X-Men: Apocalypse. Some folks became upset about one of the movie posters, depicting the titular villain strangling Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence), the franchise’s latest poster child. Lawrence’s Mystique is totally bad to the bone. She’s one of the best examples of a super-heroine in a male-dominated sub genre. And a very good one at that. But, because it was a man strangling a woman, people accused Fox of promoting violence against women, which seems a bit absurd. People have the right to get upset about whatever they want, but getting upset, and accusing a company of ‘promoting’ violence against women are two different things. If the poster had depicted Professor Xavier or Wolverine getting strangled by Apocalypse, no one would have batted an eyelid. As a super-heroine on a level playing field, Mystique’s character should face every pitfall and threat that any male character would face, period. That includes being possibly strangled to death by larger-than-life villains.
Violence against women will always be a sensitive subject, which is the problem in a nutshell. No matter what, someone will always have strong feelings about it one way or the other. Rape and violence toward women is shocking, disturbing, and gross, even when handled with care. The problem I have with this article and articles like it is this: It strikes me as being written by an easily offended person who so desperately wants to be thought of as profound, when the point is fairly obvious. It’s been said before, and more effectively, by people who actually have something profound to say about the subject–not by someone trying to elicit a never-ending argument from its readers.
Concerning the ‘Alien-3’ snapshot at the top. Ellen Ripley is one of the best heroines in film, arguably in any genre. Yes, she was almost raped in that installment of the franchise; however, she was on a prison planet populated entirely by male sociopaths. If Ripley’s character was male, in that particular situation, there’s the chance he might have almost gotten raped, too. Food for thought.
This discussion made me think of F. M Busby’s Rissa Kerguelen series. There is definitely female rape in it. But I think I remember a description in the Zelda M’Tana book of how women can rape a man.
@30
So do you just read everything without thinking about it? Do the words just glide by? And when you put it down, you don’t talk about it? Because the instant you offer any opinion on something you’ve read, that’s interpretation – something that wasn’t in the original text, and texts are always susceptible to interpretation, otherwise they’re just inert objects. So we need to have these discussions, because our literature mirrors our culture and shapes it, and what we leave unquestioned and normalise we take for granted. Our stories are always politicised, even more so when they’re bland and vanilla and don’t have an ‘agenda’, because they’re using sleight of hand in refusing to tell us about a world where power has real effects on real people. There is very certainly a culture that legitimates sexual violence against women, and it starts with not even being willing to talk about the prevalence of lazy plot hooks that use sexual violence to drive story for female characters. It’s good that you have the luxury of returning to the real world without having to think about sexual violence – for women that’s not true.
What you wrote is the gender and sexuality analogue of the ‘I don’t care whether someone is black, white, purple or polka-dotted. I see people as human beings first’ – a claim that totally elides the deep structural inequalities that face people because of race.
@60
So, be quiet already? Because it’s been said elsewhere then it’s not a discussion worth having? Unless you can say it as well as the way that other people are saying it you don’t have a right to discuss this? Can you see how a comment like yours is the first point on a sliding scale that results in the perpetration of sexual violence?
On the texts in which you have encountered sexual violence against women: it’s not that they deal with rape in a ‘slipshod’ manner, it’s the unexamined way that they go to rape with an ease that keeps the trope path well worn. Even if you were to take only one thing away from Sarah’s post, wouldn’t it be the unproblematic idea that we can surely be more adventurous or circumspect in how we give complex backstories to female characters without reaching for the rape one, especially in a genre whose very hallmark is inventiveness?
You can say what you like, but GRRM’s female characters suffer rape more than his male characters do. He may have taken inspiration from history, and history may be ineluctably patriarchal, but that doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have bent or skewed or played with historical power structures to explore other possibilities. Westeros isn’t Western Europe.
I couldn’t agree more with this article. As a writer, I think it’s not only worth pointing out the overuse of sexual violence against women in fiction, but it’s noteworthy how pathetically lazy it is for a writer to resort to this. If a writer wants to make the bad guy truly despicable in the eyes of the reader, the easy cheat is to make them mistreat a woman. Doing this demeans both women and men.
@Aldeberan: I’m sorry for generalizing. I personally know many men who agree with you and me that sexual violence against women is rampant and horrific. I’m just SO USED to seeing it defended by so many people, many of them male. I feel like this is even worse within the SF community/readership. I’m aware this is an entirely separate discussion, but for a genre that contains literally infinite possibility, SF narratives, writers, and readers can be surprisingly conservative. :(
I see that there have been a lot of new responses on this article since I last checked it. I am too tired to respond to everything I noticed (plus, since this is an older article, the odds are pretty good that no one is going to actually read this comment).
But I do have to say a few things. YES, of course men can be raped and it does happen. About 10 years ago (as an example), a man said he was sodomized by an attacker in the NYC 33rd Street subway station. Male-on-male prison rape is so common that it’s become a trope and the punchline to a lot of jokes. And a woman can certainly rape a man. THAT IS NOT OKAY. RAPING ANYONE IS NEVER OKAY. The SF genre needs to include more instances of sexual violence against men because it does happen. But it becomes very, very wearying as a female reader to pick up (or download) a new SF book and already know there is a good chance one of the main female characters (with whom you’re probably trying to identify) will be sexually menaced, assaulted, and/or raped.
By that same token, I don’t think the writer of this article is being “too sensitive.” Female readers (and women in general) have to deal with rape culture every single second of every day. And (to forestall any protests to the contrary) YES, we actually DO. I am lucky that I’ve never been raped. Yet every single time I leave my building I have to always be aware of myself and my surroundings because I know many women who live in my city have been attacked and raped. When I ride the subway I have to choose where I sit or stand carefully – there is even a whole series of subway ads reminding people that groping women on a crowded subway is not okay. When I get dressed I have to think about what “message” my clothing is sending to people who see me – more than one female victim of rape has been told she was “asking for it” because of how she was dressed. (Google is your friend – look this up if you think I’m lying.) If I go on a date with a man and let him pay, he “deserves” something in return. If I invite a man to my apartment, it has to be because I want to have sex with him, and no one will believe me if I say otherwise. NO, I am NOT paranoid – this is how women in contemporary U.S. society are “taught” to behave if they don’t “want” to be raped or sexually assaulted Even if I become a shut-in and stay in my apartment 24/7, the internet and the books I read will provide me with plenty of images and scenes ripped straight from the current rape culture.
Yeah, after a while this kind of tends to make you “sensitive.” *angry face*
Various suggestions for writers I’ve seen over the years:
•If you use rape to show how badass and unstoppable the villain is, would you be comfortable having him rape a guy for the same reason?
•If you use rape to show how evil the guy is, would you be comfortable writing him raping a small child?
•Do you think graphic rape scenes are justifiable but graphic consensual sex scenes are not?