The thread title might appear preposterous on its face, but a good enough storyteller can make you turn your moral compass around and sympathize with nearly anything. (By “you” I mean a typical member of the audience whose emotional response is roughly what the writer intended.)
I don’t mean “Potiphar’s wife” scenarios where a guy is falsely accused of rape when the sex was actually consensual or never happened at all. I’m thinking of things like the subject of this thread on Sixteen Candles. Which is arguably not an instance of rape at all (which is what the thread is mainly about). Or the famous rape scene (Howard Roarke on Dominique Francon) in Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead, of which Rand later said, “If it was rape, it was rape by engraved invitation.”
I can think of only one possible, arguable example of this where the rape is unambiguous: In Once Upon a Time in America, Noodles (Robert DeNiro) takes his childhood crush Deborah (Elizabeth McGovern) on a limo ride and forces himself on her. There’s no doubt it is rape by strongarm force, there is absolutely no possibility that she enjoys it or really wanted it to happen – afterwards she’s horrified, disgusted, sobbing, and the limo driver looks at Noodles like he was a bug (but does nothing about it) – but the way the story has been played up to that point (she was a real horrible teasing bitch to him when they were younger, and he might have been obsessing about her all through his years in prison), you kind of find it difficult to condemn Noodles unreservedly; at any rate, he remains the main sympathetic POV character for the remainder of the story. OTOH, you don’t get the feeling Deborah in any way deserved it, either. (And it would be much easier to construct a story with a female character so hateful that you, as a typical audience member male or female, would wish for just about anything bad, including sexual assault, to befall her.)
Angus Thermopylae from Stephen Donaldson’s Gap Series. In the first book, he’s made out to be just about the worst monster imaginable: he’s a pirate, a murderer, and a rapist. By the fifth book, he’s become sympathetic not through any sort of change of heart, but simply because he’s been placed in opposition to people so infinitly more evil.
My brother and I just (as chance happened) watched Once Upon a Time in America, and I think that for both of us what had started out as a really good movie (following the kids around) but was slowly becoming not so interesting was quite thoroughly shot dead when Noodles raped Deborah and never redeemed itself. Had the scene happened more towards the beginning of the movie, they might have had a chance to repair him in our eyes, but they fairly well skip straight to him being an old man without showing his life inbetween, so there’s no reason to think he ever became someone you would care for.
Only sympathetic rapist I can think of is the guy in Seven who was forced to do it at gun’s end.
I don’t think I’ve ever been so manipulated by a strong-arm rapist (although I reserve the right to change my mind when someone mentions one I’ve forgotten about), but I did cheer when Rhett carried Scarlett up that grand staircase to his bed.
And I love, in the hands of a good cast, how much I am aching for John to just punch the shit out of Carol by the end of Oleanna. Not rape, but unjustifiable violence that I kindasorta sympathize with. Of course, she essentially “rapes” his career and marriage first.
Hm, actually, I have a vague feeling that there might have been a rape in Chthon or Pthor (by Piers Anthony) which seemed forgivable enough at the time, but I can’t recall the details or if there even was such a scene.
How about the rape by Thomas Covenant near the beginning of “Lord Foul’s Bane”? Thomas felt bad about it afterwards, but honestly, he thought he was hallucinating and that none of what happened was real. If you’ve spent the last several years impotent because of a disease that is slowly killing you, and you wake up in a magical land where your penis works and you are sure that it’s just a delusion, why not take advantage of the situation?
Huge spoilers here for Lois McMaster Bujold’s Vorkosigan books.
In Shards of Honor, the POV character and the reader are introduced to a mentally ill man by the name of Bothari. He’s borderline unstable, when we first meet him, and very touchy.
Then, some time later (I can’t recall if it were six months or a year) the main character is captured again, and finds herself about to be raped by Bothari, at the orders of his superior officer. There is no question that he’s aroused by it, and into it. He’s also obviously far less stable than he had been before this. In the end he recognizes the main character and rebels.
But there is no doubt that he’d done that before. There’s even a major plot point about him having systemically raped another young woman for months.
He remains a major character for two more books, and his actions have echoes down through the other books as well. He’s a monster, and a definate rapist.
And the reader knows all this.
And he’s still a character whom I have a good deal of sympathy for, and pity. He fought with major mental illnesses, and “politicized” medical treatment. And I know why the main character is willing to trust him with the life of her child. But, he’s one scary mofo.
In anime there is a near rape in the movie Wings of Honneamise after the main character finds that the woman he’d been looking to for a moral compass was much more selfish than she’d presented herself to be. The anger and frustration he felt having his new model for his behavior turn out to have feet, legs, and belly of clay I can understand. It doesn’t make his reaction right, but there’s room to understand it, at least.
Cerebus, as Pope, is interrogating the person who killed the previous Pope thus making him the new guy in the pointy hat. She, the killer, is also his longtime political adviser and political opponent. She’s in chains in a cell and he is speaking with her.
In an attempt to manipulate him into releasing her (she’s accustomed to calling the shots, both with him and others, though not sexually) she becomes provocative, lifting her skirt, showing him her genitalia, and mentioning that, as a good member of the church he CAN’T have sex without being married.
At that point he knocks her down and blindfolds her. The rest of the issue in black with just her narration and some sound effects (him panting and declaring them married, her being in pain and such).
It’s a brutal issue and it’s a climatic moment that’s built for about 40 issues or so. But who’s the bad guy is a weird thing. The obvious answer is ‘no one’ of course but a woman pal of mine, an ardent feminist told me once that ‘she completed deserved it’. So it’s not cut and dried to me.
Spike in the sixth season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Part of the reason might be how out of character it seemed to me. The bigger part is his obvious remorse and the history between the two. This was a relationship based on every type of abuse and violence possible, with a soul-less creature who is so upset with what he did that he goes to get his soul. I can really believe he was in a state with no idea that she really was serious. So why I can’t even bring myself to watch that episode again, still years later, I do have sympathy for both characters.
Hah. That’s exactly what I thought when I opened this thread. The first time I saw that I was actually hoping that he would rape her in the last scene. It would have been so cathartic. (She admits, sheepishly.)
Three in an Attic --The character of Paxton Quigley deserves the rapes he gets from the three girls. He had manipulated them for so long.
In the novel Sometimes a Great Notion the father character is paralyzed in the hospital (stroke? It’s been a while since I read it) and an old Native American woman takes advantage of him. I don’t know if it made it into the film version since Henry Fonda was playing the part of the father. I know I never saw that part on television when I saw it there. Anyway, you are surprised by the “rape” but you are in favor of the old Indian woman when she does it.
Is that really a rape, though? In order for one to accept that it is a rape that presupposes a level of thought that I don’t think that gorillas really have.
I know that there are animal species where forced matings are common (Ducks!) and while I don’t know for certain about gorillas, I wouldn’t be surprised for them to be among those species. But for this thread it really doesn’t count, I don’t think, unless the audience can accept that the character involved with the rape recognizes that what is going on is wrong.
I have no problems with saying that the guy in the gorilla suit was raped, I just question whether the real gorilla was a rapist.
ETA:
Aren’t we all?
Seques into a stirring, if horribly off-key, rendition of Dust in the Wind