Rape and "Realism"
Via giandujakiss, here is an excellent blog post about the (over)use of rape/sexual assault in fiction, and the complete logical fallacy that is the argument "but it's realistic!"
The Rape of James Bond
[Excerpt - cut for triggers]Excerpt:
You can have the victims and potential victims refer to [rape]. Not necessarily at great length or in much detail - if it’s such a huge presence in their lives, a daily risk, they won’t need to. They’ll know what goes on. You can have characters who are less likely to be raped worry about the ones who are more vulnerable. We do not need to watch every rape that happens or can be assumed to have happened in the course of the story. And though from time to time, it may be interesting and revealing to show us how the rapists think about it, if you depict rape mainly from the view of the male perpetrator, the vengeful male lover of the victim, the male witness-and rarely or never from the perspective of the victim - there’s a strong risk you’re reinforcing a social narrative in which rape is fundamentally a power exchange between men (rapist and husband… male author and male reader).
Or, if you’re writing another kind of text, and you use rape as your motivating crisis for a female hero again… well, it can be done brilliantly, inspiringly - but as it has been done so often, you risk adding to a cumulative implication that women’s lives revolve in smaller, more sexualised orbits than men’s, that there’s only one kind of bad experience they can have, the whole rest of the world of potential risk and response is closed off to them. You risk implying that female lives are defined by the presence of rape; almost that an un-raped/unthreatened woman is a boring woman.
Emphasis mine. Are you paying attention, GRRM?
The Rape of James Bond
[Excerpt - cut for triggers]Excerpt:
You can have the victims and potential victims refer to [rape]. Not necessarily at great length or in much detail - if it’s such a huge presence in their lives, a daily risk, they won’t need to. They’ll know what goes on. You can have characters who are less likely to be raped worry about the ones who are more vulnerable. We do not need to watch every rape that happens or can be assumed to have happened in the course of the story. And though from time to time, it may be interesting and revealing to show us how the rapists think about it, if you depict rape mainly from the view of the male perpetrator, the vengeful male lover of the victim, the male witness-and rarely or never from the perspective of the victim - there’s a strong risk you’re reinforcing a social narrative in which rape is fundamentally a power exchange between men (rapist and husband… male author and male reader).
Or, if you’re writing another kind of text, and you use rape as your motivating crisis for a female hero again… well, it can be done brilliantly, inspiringly - but as it has been done so often, you risk adding to a cumulative implication that women’s lives revolve in smaller, more sexualised orbits than men’s, that there’s only one kind of bad experience they can have, the whole rest of the world of potential risk and response is closed off to them. You risk implying that female lives are defined by the presence of rape; almost that an un-raped/unthreatened woman is a boring woman.
Emphasis mine. Are you paying attention, GRRM?