Why the snide comment? It’s not as if applying legal protection to one sex is somehow disadvantaging the other.
Yeah, probably. There’s been a few high profile cases of women intentionally falsely accusing a man of rape to ruin his life, though. Not sure if there’s been quite the same number of accusations of false poaching or burglary.
Perhaps one of the lawyers can speak to this, but it has been my understanding that (in the U.S.) the only anonymity for criminal defendants is for those under the age of 18.
Even if the police have what they think, or you assume, is plenty of evidence, it may not be enough for a conviction.
Why murder, rather than (say) art theft?
Because murder is more of a transgression against social norms, right?
Same reason some novelists harp on rape - it’s a transgression, meaning instant drama. The more big a deal is made about it in society as a whole, the greater the transgression, the more “instant drama” it creates.
Your theory sounds a trifle thin, to this SF/fantasy reader. Can’t say as the SF/Fantasy I read has rape in it just to fill pages. Perhaps some examples of such gratuitous fare could help?
Also, does any event “have” to be there? I’m reminded of people who get mad at books where the dog dies because they claim authors only put it in there to get an emotional response. I mean…isn’t that the point of a book? To make some kind of impact?
Plus, in real life, rape sometimes just happens, randomly. It doesn’t “develop” us or explain who we are. It just is.
Personally, I always thought that authors had dogs die in their books to desensitize us to doggie deaths, and perhaps subtly enourage us to go out and kill dogs.
Having a dog die just to generate an emotional response is cheating. It’s like making a movie called The Littlest Holocaust Victim. You’re not creating an interesting story or demonstrating any kind of skill, you’re just dumping things in that are likely to generate the desired Pavlovian response.
I dunno about science fiction, but in the romance genre rape happens but is often not called rape. There are many, many romance books where the male protagonist rapes the female protagonist and she not only suffers no trauma, she falls in love with him. I seem to remember a survey that found this to be a main plot event in over half of romance novels.
I am of the personal belief that we must be able to make a distinction between fantasy and reality, but if we’re going to have this discussion I think we should talk in realistic terms about the way rape is often portrayed in fiction compared to murder or robbery. Whereas murder often drives a plot, rape is often used as a drama mechanism that is absent any serious repercussions. There are many reasons that could be true (women’s natural fantasies being among them), and it doesn’t point to a ‘‘rape culture’’ necessarily, but it is nonetheless true.
The only time I ever read rape in sci-fi was Robert Heinlein’s Friday (I think it was called) and the victim, much like the character raped in Blade Runner, was not a ‘‘real person.’’ The author implied that she had been psychologically prepared for rape and therefore it did not affect her much at all. Her character was unrelatable and unrealistic, and I’m told she later hooked up with one of the dudes who raped her, so I’m not sorry I didn’t finish it.
Incidentally, I’ve read almost everything by Bradbury. No rapes.
If by “fiction” you mean “romance novels”, then sure, rape doesn’t have repercussions. But then, in romance novels, what does? Piracy also lacks reprecussions in romance novels - the male lead may be a nasty pirate at the beginning, but through the love of a good woman, etc. [The romance meme that bad boys may be ‘tamed’ by love is more insidious by far than the notion that rape is harmless and fun for everyone - after all, pretty well everyone knows the latter is pure fantasy … ] Rarely in romance novels is the theme of piracy seriously explored, the harm that piracy causes, the economic and social damage.
I disagree that rape lacks repercussions in other genres, or rather, that it lacks them to a greater degree than other comparable events. Rape may be used as a melodrama cheat by lazy authors, sure.
<starts scribbling furiously> I’ll be giving you a shout out when I get my Oscar, Grumman. But none of the box office, you hear!
4 off the top of my head - Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Russell’s The Sparrow, Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, Bank’s* Player of Games*. All four award-winning and much-cited as great SF. There’s a lot more if I actually start thinking about them.
But the dog dying is only going to generate an emotional response in a book if the audience cares about it. If you’ve managed to make the reader care about your character, then the pay off is that people are upset when a character dies. I mean anyone can write, “Once there was a dog. It died. The end” but no one without severe emotional problems is going to burst into sobs at it.
I feel the same about a rape. Anyone can just throw in a rape–if I actually care about the character and don’t just turn the page, then I think the author has done their job. Just putting it in doesn’t give me an emotional response.
Certainly, but citing Atwood and Russell doesn’t exactly advance the notion that rape in SF is taken casually and is a mere “page-filler” unrelated to the plot, which was the original allegation.
So if you might enlighten us – how was it treated? Realistically? Sympathetically? As just another plot mechanism? I’m guessing the answer varies widely.
Well I agree, which kind of hits on my overall opinion – it’s hard to point to specific forms of art as encouraging acts of rape because rape, as well as a number of other actions and events, may just as easily be symbolic rather than intended as a literal representation of reality. The whole purpose of fantasy (by this I mean sci-fi and romance and a number of other fiction genres) is to play with reality. While realistic fiction can be very powerful in its own right, I’m not of the opinion that art must be realistic or that every piece must have a social consciousness. That sort of takes the fun out of being creative.
So to be clear, I am firmly in the camp of those who believe you cannot point to popular fiction as evidence that we live in a rape culture. However, I wanted to state unequivocally that there are certain genres in which rape is so common, and so glossed over, that it has become a romanticized clishé. This is something very obvious to any girl who grew up reading teen novels and watching romantic movies on TV. It makes more sense, to me, to debate why that is the case rather than* if* it is the case.
Certainly, in the romance genre particularly. Which is designed to appeal to women. Men typically don’t read or watch that stuff. So the question is ‘why do women find ‘softcore’ or romanticised depictions of rape so appealing’?
Same goes for other typical romance themes. In romantic comedies (which again, men stereotypically have to be dragged kicking and screaming to watch), the male lead, chasing the woman of his dreams, does stuff that in real life would be considered horribly threatening stalking.
Hey, I was just replying to the “I’ve only seen it in one book, so it can’t occur that frequently” implication in olive’s post. It was certainly plot-significant in all 4 works.
I’d say all 4 used it the same way, to invoke horror and sympathy either for or from the main character, and usually depicted realistically. I’d say Stephenson treated it the most casually, devoting perhaps 2 or 3 lines to the act itself, but it still had plot significance. I agree that it isn’t generally treated casually, which seems to be the main point. I was just saying it does crop up frequently. More so in fantasy than SciFi, IME.
Because it isn’t really “rape” in that she is getting what she really wants - she remains good and chaste, she gets the “bad boy” hero who goes straight under her influence. Its Beauty and the Beast with a happily ever after. And there is no threat to her (the reader/viewer) whatsoever.
Its unrealistic, but its certainly part of the ‘rape culture.’ Because women, soaked in the romance, send out mixed signals - they think they want to be pursued - then find it creepy when they are pursued. And men see that women enjoy the “romantic stalking” and think its an appropriate technique - and rarely it is.
Fair enough.
Though in terms of the original allegation - that rape is treated casually - that would seem to happen most in certain specialized subgenres of fantasy. Particularly some of the swords-and-sorcery type; the best example is the Chronicles of Gor, which is pretty explicitly rape-themed erotica …
Again, men by and large don’t read this stuff, or watch romantic comedies (if they can help it - the most common reason men will see such movies, stereotypically, is because their wives or GFs want to see them, and drag them along). The direct impact on actual behaviour of men of the romance genre is not going to be profound, because they are not exposing themselves to it all that much.
Though yeah, I agree with the Beauty & the Beast analysis; the issue then is why women find the Beast so interesting.
Well, that’s easy. Because the power of THEM and THEIR LOVE redeems the Beast. The belief that a woman can “save” or “change” a man through the power of her love and his love for her alone - that’s a huge part of our romantic culture.
Completely unrealistic, but how many women marry believing that their husband’s will grow up and get responsible - when they showed no signs of that sort of development or desire for it when single.
My short answer would be, ‘‘Because it’s not really rape. It’s fantasy. Even though it operates under the pretense of non-consent, consent is implied by willful participation in said fantasy. It’s no different than asking your lover to pretend-rape you in the bedroom. Everything is under control.’’
I’m not ready to say this is just a woman’s fantasy either. There are a fuckton of porn sites out there targeted at men who get off on the sexual domination of women–everything from throwing women in rape dungeons to torturing them sexually. This is not evidence to me that we live in a rape culture. It is evidence that there is an inherent power dynamic in sex that people like to fantasize about.
Though there is one thing I do question – which is how much a steady diet of this stuff growing up actually shapes our desires and attitudes about sex. The first time I ever encountered rape in a novel I was eight years old – it was highly explicit and sensationalized. Since I encountered this meme, this deification of the ‘‘bad boy’’ and the sexiness of danger and rape as an act of love, every freakin’ place I turned, to one degree or another, I imagine it had a pretty big impact on my sexuality. The message you pick up at that age is that this is how romance works in real life. And while I’m now aware, as an adult, that it is not at all a realistic depiction of a healthy sexual relationship, I am still obviously affected by those images I encountered growing up, in that they tend to dominate my own fantasies.
Was I socialized into viewing sex as a power exchange? Was I born that way? What would happen if I had been offered more vanilla depictions of romance instead? What if we all were? I don’t know the answer, I just think it’s an interesting question.