Why don't men get raped in "gritty" high fantasy?

[akashiver]

So I never mentioned Sady Doyle's George R.R. Martin piece in part because I didn't think it warranted the attention. Doyle clearly wanted to skewer the series. She makes some good points, she makes some funny points, and she also misses the mark.

Alyssa Rosenburg had a thoughtful response. To this I'd add that I have a problem with Doyle's pre-

Comments

[swan_tower]

Thanks for linking to the Rosenburg; I hadn't read that, and it's fabulously cogent in its points. There's pretty much nothing left for me to do but stand up and cheer, and then also applaud your point about "toys."

As for rape of men -- well. The people writing this kind of story are mostly guys. I'm not surprised they're so reluctant to think about male rape. But Rosenburg's point applies here, too; if something like that is so prevalent in reality, we don't do ourselves any favors by airbrushing it out of our fiction just because it's uncomfortable. (Unfortunately, just imagine the internet shitstorm that would result if an author, especially a female author, "victimized" her male characters in that fashion.)

[akashiver]

I don't know what kind of shitstorm would happen, or even if any storm would happen at all. I'm thinking the author and story would make a huge difference: if it's a well-loved character from a long-running fantasy series, then yes, shitstorm central.

If not... I'd like to think a lot of this would depend on the tone in the book, and whether readers had picked up that it would be *that* sort of novel.

[swan_tower]

I'm thinking if, say, a new epic fantasy opened with Our Hero locked in a dungeon, and then he gets raped by one of his captors. (Put it on the same page number as Thomas Covenant raping that woman in Lord Foul's Bane, for the purpose of comparison.) Presuming this is a high-profile enough epic fantasy to get widespread attention in the first place, the outcry, I think, would be huge. Because now you've gotten Teh Gay all over the epic fantasy fanboys, and their happy fantasy of being the hero has been scarred by the notion that men can be sexually victimized, and huh, it doesn't look so hot now that the tables have turned.

And if a female author did that? Ye gods. She would be a man-hating bitch, clearly. Women being raped is the natural order, but only a bitch would write about the reverse.

. . . oddly, the closest example I can think of in epic fantasy to a man being sexually victimized is in Wizard's First Rule. Unfortunately for all involved, there is not enough brain bleach in the world to erase the stain of where that

[akashiver]

I still have to read Lord Foul's Bane, actually. One of these days, when I feel like a nice dose of misogyny...

[swan_tower]

Why exactly do you have to read it? I can give you chapter and verse in counter-argument, if you want.