They were in Morocco.
Scarlett wasn’t raped. As with everything else in her life, she was playing games with Rhett. They had whatcha call your basic “love/hate” relationship: “Don’t! Stop! I hate you!..Don’t stop! I love you!”
That’s prostitution by most people’s definition: trading sexual favours for something you wouldn’t get if you were less pretty or, as the case may be, less female.
Tyrion in The Song of Fire and Ice series constantly flashes back to being forced to participate in a gang rape of his young wife.
In answer to the OP, the book about RL rapist Billy Milligan (The Minds of Billy Milligan) was exceedingly, and some might say excessively, sympathetic, to him.
El Gallo, from the musical “The Fantastiks”. Along the same vein, all the brothers in “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers”. Ok, this is a bit of pedantry to qualify these as rapes, but all the ones I was going to mention have already been taken.
An author with a theme of rape, or near-rape, through her books would be Anne McCaffrey. In the Pern series(Dragonflight, Dragonquest, The White Dragon) there is a race of telepathic dragons who are linked, mentally and emotionally, to their human riders. When a female dragon launches for a mating flight the female rider is surrounded by the male riders whose dragons are competing for the mating rights. The telepathic and emotional link is extremely strong at this point and the humans copulate, often very roughly and with animal enthusiasm, as the dragons do. It’s kind of a mutual rape, because neither rider consented to sex with the other, but were sort of enslaved by the dragon’s passions. Neither the male dragonriders nor the female dragonriders are stigmatized by these actions among other weyrfolk(people who live in the dragonrider communities) but weyrfolk are considered a bit loose with their passions and morals by the other communities. One of the main characters of the series takes another of the mains in this way, when she was a young virgin, and says he regretted it because he didn’t want her to feel that the rough and empassioned sex accompanying a mating flight was normal or right.
In another McCaffrey series, the Freedom’s books(Freedom’s Landing, Freedom’s Choice, and Freedom’s Challenge) the main heroine gets knocked up twice by two different guys while drunk off her legs. If drunk to the point of being barely able to remember the event(for her or the guys) counts, and it’s hard to imagine informed consent being given in those circumstances, then those were rapes of a major character by two other major, and sympathetic, characters.
Enjoy,
Steven
Another fantasy author who tried to create a sympathetic rapist character was Tom Deitz in Bloodwinter, but in my opinion he was much less successful than Stephen Donaldson or Hugh Cook.
In The Invisible Man by Ellison there’s a scene where the nameless narrator visits a sharecropper’s home. During the visit, he finds out that the sharecropper raped & impregnated his own daughter while he was asleep. The whole situtation is horrific, yet at the same time Ellison makes sure that you know how this came to be: a large number of people living in a small house in poverty and exhaustion.
The impressive thing was that he did it while he was asleep. Takes sleepwalking to whole new levels.
They slept in the same bed, so not really. The rape was cast as a product/consequence of the living situation.
He was told she was a prostitute. I’m sure for her it was a gang rape but he was lied into believing she was doing it for the money, while thats still clearly rape i wouldn’t consider him a rapist.
Oh, and yes, he was asleep when he raped his daughter. He was dreaming that he was having sex with his wife who also slept in that same bed. His daughter, of course, woke up and tried to fight him off.
Now that I think of it, Frank in Bernard Malamud’s “The Assistant”. Young (goy) guy with a crush on a (Jewish) girl saves her from being raped, but in the heat of the moment, rapes her himself. The rest of the book is his attempt to atone.
Weird. So neither partner consented. Like both partners being drunk.
I was going to say the exact same thing (except that I couldn’t remember the name of the book). He was supposed to be portrayed as sympathetic, but I thought that the book just sucked.
Exactly. Everybody is discussing the scene in question without mentioning any of the context. Remember prior to that night, Scarlett locked him out of the bedroom for no other reason than she could. She claimed she didn’t want to get pregnant again (and in fact she did get pregnant that night), but it was just a power play that Rhett went along with for quite some time. As soon as Rhett “won” her, she locked him out of his own bedroom in a pretty bratty move. In fact, all of their sexual situations up to the night in question involved some sort of power play between the two of them.
Scarlett was angry when Rhett left the next morning not because he sexed her up so good she didn’t want to miss out on a second, but because she felt like she let him win one—and then instead of participating in another volley, he simply removed himself from the situation (which actually was yet another power play, not Rhett being the bigger person. Scarlett couldn’t assert herself over him if he wasn’t there, and he knew nothing would frustrate her more). Looking at the scene in terms of “she wanted it/she didn’t want it” pretty much ignores their entire relationship and the dynamics at play between the two of them since the first meeting.
I think it’s fair to say that Tywin was the real rapist in that situation, and (as far as I can remember), he doesn’t get much sympathy.
Yeah, that’s part of the core dichotomy of the film. Deckard has to hunt down and kill without any empathy whatsoever living beings who can only be identified by their lack of empathy towards other living beings.
According to the official making-of book for Blade Runner, “Future Noir”, Sean Young HATED filming that scene, and most definitely viewed it as a rape of her character. “The whole scene reminded me of a woman getting beaten up,” she’s quoted as saying. “I didn’t see how my character, Rachael, could go up to his room after that…I was a wreck. I had three or four weeks off after that scene.”
Blade Runner’s producer Michael Deeley called that scene “the rape in the corridor”.
Sorry. Blade Runner is one of my all-time favorite films. I could go for pages and pages about it.
She needed some other reason?
Yes, it was a power play. She was making a play for power over who gets to use her body. Or did you have some other power in mind?
The brat deserved it.
Indeed. But I don’t see what your argument is supposed to be here.
None of that other stuff is relevant to the question of whether she was raped. All that is relevant to the question of rape is the question whether she gave her consent. (This is different even than the question you mention–the question whether she actually wanted it.)
You have pointed out several things that are true about the context of the incident. But you have not explained why any of those considerations should make us think the act was not an act of rape. In fact, it is very plausible to read your post as arguing that this particular act of rape was a justified act of rape. (I don’t mean to say this is what you meant–I’m just talking about ways to read what you wrote.)
-FrL-
I think, within the context of their relationship, a case could be made that Scarlett was capable of offering consent, and in fact, did. I’m not comfortable looking at that one scene as though it were in isolation, and not in the middle of a very complicated relationship with two complicated people.
You still haven’t explained (and I am genuinely interested in understanding) how it is you think the complicated relationship you described made it possible for Scarlett’s “no” to mean a clear “yes.”
-FrL-