Rules of Engagement: Violence and Hyperreality in the Buffyverse

[lostboy_lj]

rebcake recently posted a poll regarding the onset of Buffy and Spike's sexual relationship in the BtVS episode "Smashed."  I answered "neither" and began to post a comment to explain, but it started to get long-ish, so I thought I'd just do a long-ish blog post instead.  What I wrote turned out to be somewhat off-topic in terms of her poll, and more

Comments

[boot_the_grime]

That fact gets lost or deliberately ignored in the overheated arguments among fans about his role. I do think the writers lost sight of that too in Seeing Red where suddenly the scene is rendered in real life terms. Buffy becomes the vulnerable woman trying to fight off a powerful male. That reversal breaks the most basic law of her characterization, that she's extremely powerful and even when wounded is capable of killing any attacker.

I don't think so - if they forgot that Buffy had superstrength, she would never have been able to kick him off. It makes perfect sense to me that she couldn't act the way she would if it were some random vampire attacking her. Best-trained and strongest people can get paralyzed in a situation where they're attacked by someone they know, especially someone they've been intimate with and have complicated feelings with - not to mention that the situation starts similar to many of their earlier sexual encounters. And as I think aycheb pointed out once, Buffy gets herself together and fights back only when he goes from a confused "Let yourself love me" to an angrier, more forceful "I'm gonna make you feel!" and there is no hope he'll stop himself.

She's confused and disoriented, but so is Spike.

But Spike's confusion and breakdown is only making him more forceful - he's single-mindedly focused on "making Buffy feel" without thinking about what he's doing.

[twilightofmagic]

That doesn't negate my point that (imo) the writing and the directing slant the interpretation of her reaction to her being a rape victim, but for the last minute throwing him off with her slayer strength. Afterwards Xander and Giles treat the event as a rape attempt though I suppose as they hate Spike, they would be inclined toward that interpretation. I can't remember at that point whether they know of her relations with Spike, though I think they don't yet. However, we know they have been engaged in an extremely violent, sexualized relationship in which she has been the aggressor many times. I simply think that the writing/direction in this scene slants toward a real life set of meanings rather than the fictional ones they had been engaging up to this point.

[boot_the_grime]

Afterwards Xander and Giles treat the event as a rape attempt though I suppose as they hate Spike, they would be inclined toward that interpretation. I can't remember at that point whether they know of her relations with Spike, though I think they don't yet. However, we know they have been engaged in an extremely violent, sexualized relationship in which she has been the aggressor many times.

Xander knew about Buffy's affair with Spike since the end of Entropy, and he had given her a judgmental lecture about it in Seeing Red, before the rape attempt. Giles learned about Buffy sleeping with Spike in Grave, when she told him; I don't know when or even if he learned about the AR - though I suppose he probably did based on his line "after what he did to you" in LMPTM.

I don't see how that changes anything? They treat it as a rape attempt because it was a rape attempt. Buffy reacts as a rape victim because she was a victim of an attempted rape. How does their sexual past make any difference? An attempted rape or rape is no less so if the perpetrator and the victim had been in a relationship in the past.

[twilightofmagic]

I don't see how that changes anything? They treat it as a rape attempt because it was a rape attempt. Buffy reacts as a rape victim because she was a victim of an attempted rape. How does their sexual past make any difference? An attempted rape or rape is no less so if the perpetrator and the victim had been in a relationship in the past.

I think your last paragraph demonstrates the main point of the original post. It injects real life meanings and discourse into the fictional characterizations and meanings established in the show. 'Rape' has a certain set of meanings in the context of gender realities in everyday life. Your last sentence -- An attempted rape or rape is no less so if the perpetrator and the victim had been in a relationship in the past. -- with its emotive terms 'perpetrator' and 'victim' explicitly references real life rapes. The discourse developed around sexual assault -- victim (or later, survivor), no means no etc. -- was designed to change the historical narrative of women's inferiority and the attendant idea that women bring sexual violence upon themselves by being seductive in manner and clothing. As lostboy-lj argues, "the show's self-contained, ultra-violent hyperreality is being conflated with reality itself". Much of the argument around those two episodes, Wrecked and Seeing Red, comes from confusing the two worlds and treating the events and the characters as if they were real.

[boot_the_grime]

Huh? "Rape" means forcing a sexual act on a person, i.e. perform sex without their consent - in show as much as in real life. I'm not "injecting" anything into the show that isn't already there. The show is based on real life and, of course, when the above act happens, the characters on the show call it rape. They have called it attempted rape several times. And what else would they call it? A rape is a rape in BtVS and a murder is a murder. Warren trying to shoot Buffy is still an attempted murder whether Buffy is a Slayer or not. I'm really not following your logic.

"Perpetrator" and "victim" aren't "emotive" words, certainly not in the context of talking about a criminal act - they're formal, technical words, describing facts.

'Rape' has a certain set of meanings in the context of gender realities in everyday life

No, rape has a very clear meaning, as a criminal act. And when properly defined, as I did above*, it has nothing to do with gender realities of everyday life, since both the perpetrator(s) and the victim can be of both genders. The gender realities only come into the ways it's treated, and into the reality of how often one or the other gender is on which side (i.e. why most perpetrators are male and most victims female).

*Lord knows there have been awful definitions of rape - my country only changed its old laws about 10 years ago; before that, rape was legally defined as a man forcing sex on a woman who isn't married to him. Jesus, that was just wrong, wrong, wrong in more ways than one.

[twilightofmagic]

It's coming to the end of usefulness to respond as we're covering the same general territory on each side of the argument. But, to take up your point that rape is a criminal act in real life.--emphasis my own. Buffy and Spike, in their fictional universe of violence and supernatural beings, inhabit their own set of meanings within the ongoing metaphors of the story. It's a story, a constructed set of events and their meanings, not real life. Buffy is not going to be calling the police nor Spike showing up in the dock to answer charges. Her emotional arc is different from that of real life woman suddenly attacked by an ex boyfriend. She's a Slayer who has been involved in a tormented relationship with a supernatural creature and she herself is a supernatural creature brought back to life by a magic spell. Nothing about this suggests that it makes sense to overlay the terms and definitions of the real world onto a fictional narrative. But I've said that in my previous comments, so I think we're effectively stalemated.

[boot_the_grime]

They don't call the police, but they're still calling it an attempted rape in universe. Just like they're calling Angel snapping Jenny's neck murder, or Willow skinning Warren murder, even though they never called the police to report Angel or Willow. Or even Andrew, for that matter, a human who completely non-mystically murdered his best friend Jonathan.