It’s been a long time since I saw the 2006 action movie Crank, in which Jason Statham plays a man who will die if his heart rate drops to a normal level, but I still vividly recall the scene in which Statham’s character grabs his girlfriend (Amy Smart) in the middle of Los Angeles’s Chinatown and demands sex, right there, right then.
Smart’s character doesn’t know that her boyfriend believes he will literally die if she won’t acquiesce, so her perfectly logical response to a request for midday street sex is no. And instead of, say, doing jumping jacks while explaining his predicament, Statham’s character just forces himself on her.
If you Google “Crank rape scene,” you’ll find what I’m talking about, but not under that name. Instead, it’s labeled “Amy Smart has sex in public” and captioned: “You either hate this scene or love it but I think it’s a very hot scene and if I were in Statham’s shoes, I would have done the same thing. Enjoy this awesome clip of Amy Smart getting some lovin’ in ‘Crank.’”
Here’s what happens in that clip, after Smart’s character first says no. She struggles with Statham, and they both fall to the ground. She tries to crawl away, screaming, “Get off me! No!” as he clings to her ankles. Finally, she screams “Stop it!” and smacks him in the face. That actually does slow him down a little, but then she feels guilty and goes to him, apologizing as she caresses his face, which gives him a chance to grab and kiss her. She’s still struggling and screaming “NO!” as he flips her on her back and penetrates her.
Cut to a shot of a Chinese lantern, while some tinkly music plays. Cut back to Smart’s character, pinned on the ground by her boyfriend, who just stuck his dick in her after she screamed, fought, tried to get away, and begged him repeatedly to stop.
“Fuck it. Take me right here,” she says, moaning with pleasure, as though he was waiting for permission. See? All that screaming and trying to get away wasn’t because she didn’t want to have sex on a public street with her coked-up boyfriend! It was just foreplay.
Reframing consent as a gray area that’s always open to interpretation affords plausible deniability to pop culture makers who present criminal assaults as normal sexual behavior. In the 2009 comedy Observe and Report, Seth Rogen’s character jams his penis into a passed-out, vomit-covered Anna Faris—but when he pauses moments later, her character wakes up and slurs, “Did I tell you to stop, motherfucker?” Just as in Crank, retroactive consent is meant to relieve the audience’s tension, reassuring us that no matter what she said or did before, she wanted it.
When the extended trailer featuring that scene was released, it didn’t go unnoticed by people with strong opinions about feminism, comedy, or both. On the excellent blog Sociological Images, Occidental College sociologist Lisa Wade wrote:
Discussion on the internet is centered around two questions: (1) Is this rape? and (2) Is this funny? . . . If the trailer doesn’t convince you that we live in a rape culture, then the fact that we are actually debating the answers to questions (1) and (2) certainly should.1
And if you have any doubt that the people behind this know exactly what they’re doing, Rogen cleared that up in a now-deleted YouTube interview, transcribed by Amanda Hess at the Washington City Paper:
When we’re having sex and she’s unconscious like you can literally feel the audience thinking, like, how the fuck are they going to make this okay? Like, what can possibly be said or done that I’m not going to walk out of the movie theater in the next thirty seconds? . . . And then she says, like, the one thing that makes it all okay.2
Nope, sorry. That really doesn’t make it all okay. Playing a rape scene for laughs doesn’t turn it into something other than a rape scene. All it does is add more normalized imagery of sexual violence to the cultural stew.
“Why Didn’t You Just Say ‘Bad Date’?”
In a 2008 episode of Mad Men, secretary Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) gets a visit from her fiancé, Greg, at the end of a workday. Joan’s already uncomfortable when he lures her into her boss’s office, but when he pushes her down on the floor, her protests shift from a lighthearted “Not in here,” to a more emphatic, “No, I mean it,” and then finally to “Stop, Greg, no!” She physically struggles, but eventually resigns herself to lying still until he’s finished, while the man she loves clamps one hand across her face.
As writer and attorney Michelle Dean wrote in a blog post after the episode aired, “Joan’s rape was not a particularly ‘hard case,’ as lawyers like to say—in the middle of it HER FIANCE IS HOLDING HER FACE DOWN.”3
Nevertheless, Hendricks told New York magazine that fans didn’t always interpret the scene as depicting a crime. “What’s astounding is when people say things like, ‘Well, you know that episode where Joan sort of got raped?’ Or they say rape and use quotation marks with their fingers,” says Hendricks. “I’m like, ‘What is that you are doing? Joan got raped!’ It illustrates how similar people are today [to the 1960s], because we’re still questioning whether it’s a rape. It’s almost like, ‘Why didn’t you just say bad date?’”4
The enlightened, twenty-first-century reader is supposed to recognize the phrase “bad date” as a shameful remnant of our past, like the overt sexism, racism, homophobia, child neglect, office drinking, and cigarette smoking that are so jarring to younger Mad Men viewers. It’s hard to say how long that term has been shorthand for “prefeminist conception of acquaintance rape,” but the first time I heard it used thusly was in an episode of the early-’90s drama Sisters, in which one main character, Georgie, dramatically reveals that she was raped as a teenager. “Back then,” she says tearfully, “we just called it a bad date.” (I’m paraphrasing from a twenty-year-old memory, but the internet confirms that there was such a scene in the October 30, 1993, episode.)
Georgie never considered what happened to her rape until her college-age niece became the victim of a similar crime; it’s clear to the viewer that she simply had no framework for understanding the violation she suffered. At least, it was clear to this viewer, in 1993, that the scene was meant to convey that point. If Sisters aired today, there would almost certainly be commenters all over the internet arguing that flashback-Georgie didn’t fight hard enough, that the scene was ambiguous, and if she didn’t call it rape for all those years, how can anyone say it was? If the internet wasn’t convinced that Joan Holloway was raped, there’s no reason to assume today’s fans would agree that Georgie was.
Before you say we’ve come too far for that, let me remind you that contemporary pop culture is still in the business of openly painting rape victims as sluts who deserved what they got. In the spring of 2013, Tyler Perry’s Temptation: Confessions of a Marriage Counselor was released to more than two thousand screens, earning $21.6 million on its opening weekend. Temptation’s title character, Judith, is clearly attracted to one of her clients but repeatedly resists his advances, up to and including telling him to stop, saying no, and physically fighting him once it becomes clear that he doesn’t intend to respect her wishes. The rapist’s response: “You can say you resisted.”
When he’s finished, Judith says she never wants to see him again, and there’s no indication that she changed her mind about whether she wanted to have sex. The logical conclusion is that she was raped. That’s not how the story plays out, though. On her blog, the writer Carolyn Edgar describes what happens next:
Harley demands to know if Judith’s husband is better in bed than he—and instead of saying, “Of course, since he’s not a rapist”—Judith flashes back to what passes for steamy lovemaking in a Tyler Perry movie. We’re then made to understand that Judith did indeed consent, or at least, gave in.5
As far as the movie’s concerned, there’s no meaningful difference.
“It would have been easy to include any detail that shows the audience . . . there was consent involved,” wrote Nico Lang at the Frisky, in a post straightforwardly titled “Tyler Perry Has a Rape Problem in Temptation.”6 Instead, after that experience, Judith begins dating the man who raped her.
What’s more, says Lang, “Perry insists on punishing her in increasingly over-the-top ways (for forsaking Jesus or something).” Oh, right, did I mention that Harley is the devil incarnate? Like, literally? Temptation, as its title suggests, is a Christian fable about what happens when a career woman cheats on her husband—with a rapist.
“Notably,” says Edgar, “Perry screened this film for 100 pastors prior to its release. They gave him their blessings. That fact may be more troubling than the film itself.”7
What About Free Speech?
In May 2013, feminist writer Lindy West faced off with comedian Jim Norton on the sadly now-canceled Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. It’s worth looking up the clip to watch it, but their conversation basically boiled down to “Censorship is bad” (Norton) versus “Censorship is bad, but I’m not censoring you—I’m calling you a jerk” (West).
Predictably, that nuance was lost on much of the audience. Less than a week later, West wrote a post at Jezebel titled “If Comedy Has No Lady Problems, Why Am I Getting So Many Rape Threats?” The centerpiece was a video of the author reading some of her recent emails and Twitter replies in a chilling, unbroken monotone:
Jim should rape this bitch and teach her a lesson no need for you to worry about rape uggo Jabba has nothing to worry about not even a prison escapee would rape her Jim raped her in this one I disagree with her point of view because she’s a fat ugly cunt fat ugly angry no man in her life this is the conclusion that big bitch is bitter that no one wants to rape her do some laps lardy holy shit her stomachs were touching the floor let’s cut the bullshit that broad doesn’t have to worry about rape norton raped this bitch in debate8
The video continues, but you get the idea. To wit, Lindy West is fat (she is and will tell you so herself) and ugly (subjective, but I personally think she’s gorgeous), so (a) her views are meaningless, and (b) she needn’t fear rape. In fact, she probably wishes she could get raped.
Never mind that one can’t actually wish for something that’s defined by not wanting it.
Also, according to these geniuses, West lost the debate badly—that is, she got totally raped, har har!
I’m not even going to comment on the frequent use of “rape” to mean “triumph over a foe,” and all that implies about gender relations in the twenty-first century. I’m just going to let Dane Cook—a comic I usually find deeply unpleasant—speak for me, for the first and last time.
In his “Isolated Incident” comedy special, Cook says:
People throw the word “raped” around too casually. Have you ever played video games online and listened to the way people talk to each other? “Oh dude, you just shot me in the back, dude, you raped me!”
I’m pretty sure if I sat down with a woman who’s been through that horrific situation, and I said, “Can you describe what this was like, going through this?” she’s not gonna look at me and go, “Have you ever played Halo?”
That’s a rape joke that makes me laugh, for the record. The butt of the joke isn’t a person who’s been raped, but people who casually trivialize a serious crime to exaggerate their own petty grievances. It works because it points to something recognizably true and recognizably absurd.
But the responses to West’s appearance on Totally Biased illustrate the problem with big-name comics making weak nonjokes about rape: they have loads of fans who are breathtakingly ignorant about sexual violence, free speech, and, most important, comedy. Those fans think being criticized is the same as being censored and that someone calling out their heroes for being unnecessarily cruel and unfunny is an enemy of laughter.
Of course, if they did a search on West’s name and “rape jokes,” they would find a piece she wrote for Jezebel after the Tosh incident, in which she offers this disclaimer for those confused about the definition of “censorship”:
In case this isn’t perfectly clear yet: You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. You can say whatever you want.9
The catch is, other people can also say whatever they want—such as, “Wow, you sure sound like an asshole.” Those who endeavor not to be regarded as assholes often spend time thinking before we speak. Even before we joke.
In fact, you know who spends more time thinking about the jokes they make than anybody else? People who get paid to tell jokes. For the most part, Daniel Tosh and Jim Norton do not stand up on stage and improvise—unless forced to by hecklers, for instance, and even those responses are frequently practiced. They usually stand up on stage and perform material that has been written down, edited, rehearsed, tried out on audiences, and refined according to that feedback. They can charge you to hear them tell jokes because they’ve spent a great deal of time thinking about the nature of comedy and revising their work to achieve maximum funny.
And that’s what makes it so galling when these men go out there with jokes that make light of rape victims, as opposed to rapists or rape culture. Their defenders—and, shamefully, some of the professionals—try to pretend the controversy is about whether certain kinds of jokes should be banned, or whether offensive humor is ever okay, or whether feminists just need to lighten up. In reality, though, what we’re talking about is the art of comedy. Invoking Lenny Bruce or George Carlin to defend your sense of humor only works if you understand the difference between making pointed cultural observations and being a bully.
Or, as West puts it, “The key—unless you want to be called a garbage-flavored dick on the internet by me and other humans with souls and brains—is to be a responsible person when you construct your jokes.”10
You can say whatever you want. But you’ll have to own it.
Life Imitates Art, and Vice Versa
The same goes for artists in other media: think about what you’re doing, take responsibility, and try not to make society noticeably worse. Like, for example, don’t describe a woman’s body as something you “enjoyed” without her knowledge. That’s actually called rape.
In early 2013, Rick Ross rapped the line, “Put Molly [ecstasy] all in her champagne, she ain’t even know it / Took her home and enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it,” on the Rocko song “U.O.E.N.O.” After being called out for it by every feminist on the internet and not a few mainstream media outlets, Ross tried to clear up his views.
“I don’t condone rape,” he tweeted, as though it should have been obvious. “Apologies for the lyric interpreted as rape.”11 Interpreted! Oh, did you perceive something rapey in that line about drugging a woman and using her body while she’s passed out? I’m so sorry you feel that way.
Finally, Ross said, “Apologies to my many business partners, who would never promote violence against women.” That one, I believe he meant from the bottom of his heart. Only after he lost a lucrative deal with Reebok did he release a statement that actually went to the core of the matter:
To every woman that has felt the sting of abuse, I apologize. I recognize that as an artist I have a voice and with that, the power of influence. To the young men who listen to my music, please know that using a substance to rob a woman of her right to make a choice is not only a crime, it’s wrong and I do not encourage it.12
Ross’s advice came too late for his contemporary CeeLo Green, who later that year would be charged with a felony for slipping ecstasy to an unsuspecting woman. She also reported that he sexually assaulted her, but Los Angeles prosecutors declined to file a charge of rape of an intoxicated person13 (sigh), and in August 2014, Green pled no contest to the drug charge.
In the days following his sentencing—probation and community service—Green didn’t just thank his lucky stars and move on. He took to Twitter, as you do.
In reference to the victim’s claim that she woke up naked in bed with him, with no memory of what went before, Green wrote, “People who have really been raped REMEMBER!!! When someone brakes on [sic] a home there is broken glass where is your plausible proof that anyone was raped.”14
As if that weren’t enough, he continued: “If someone is passed out they’re not even WITH you consciously! so WITH Implies consent.”15
L.A. Times blogger August Brown accurately called the latter “a statement as rhetorically confusing as it is offensive.”16
CeeLo’s people must have gotten to him shortly thereafter, because the tweets were soon deleted, followed by his whole Twitter account. He then issued an apology that implied perhaps he wasn’t even the one who wrote them: “I truly and deeply apologize for the comments attributed to me on Twitter. Those comments were idiotic, untrue and not what I believe.”17
The damage was done, though. Almost immediately, TBS canceled Green’s reality series, The Good Life. In the weeks that followed, several concert venues and music festivals dropped his upcoming bookings. Earlier in 2014, Green had already quit NBC’s The Voice, a competitive reality show on which he’d been a coach to promising young singers for four seasons. There was speculation at the time that NBC pressured him to leave because of the pending case.18
The swift, public declamation of both CeeLo’s remarks and “U.O.E.N.O.” was heartening to see, but it’s still depressing as hell to think that two successful grown men in the public eye in 2013 apparently didn’t know enough to shut up about drugging and assaulting women (a strategy that may have worked for Bill Cosby for decades) let alone not to do it. These are men who are paid millions to be, in part, savvy about projecting certain images and winning the favor of large audiences—how could they not realize how they were coming across?
Unless they did. Only a few years earlier, Ross and Green collaborated on the song “Tears of Joy,” which included the charming lyric “Life is just a pussy race / Snatch a bitch take her back to your place.” The album that song was on, Ross’s Teflon Don, debuted at number 2 on the Billboard 200 and was chosen as one of Rolling Stone’s top 30 albums that year. So maybe they knew exactly what they were doing.
Cleaning Out Hip-Hop’s Closet
In her early-nineties essay “Seduced by Violence No More,” black feminist scholar bell hooks says “it should not surprise or shock” that rape culture “has found its most powerful contemporary voice in misogynist rap music.”
Black males, who are utterly disenfranchised in most every arena of life in the United States, often find that the assertion of sexist domination is their only expressive access to that patriarchal power they are told all men should possess as their gendered birthright.19
In other words, our society teaches all men they’re entitled to money, power, and women’s bodies, while systematically denying black men access to the first two. The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow laws, entrenched institutional racism and present-day bigotry all conspire to block African American men from many of the paths to wealth and cultural authority that are open to white men. (When not describing life as a “pussy race,” the lyrics to “Tears of Joy” even address this theme: “Yesterday I read my horoscope / Tell me, lord, will I be poor and broke? / Tell me, lord, will I be dealing dope?”)
It’s understandable, then, that some black men would default to the third great American symbol of masculine importance: controlling women. As hooks puts it, “The ‘it’s-a-dick-thing’ version of masculinity that black male pop icons like Spike Lee and Eddie Murphy promote is a call for real black men to be sexist and proud of it, to rape and assault black women and brag about it.”20 Her examples of cultural leaders may sound outdated today, but as Ross’s contribution to “U.O.E.N.O.” demonstrates, the point is not.
Acknowledging this reality does not excuse misogyny in hip-hop by any means, but it does complicate it. It’s also important to note, as hooks does, that mainstream media most often amplifies the ugliest voices—stoking racist stereotypes like the practically unkillable myth of black men’s intrinsic sexual aggression—while ignoring those who use their art to promote positive messages. And in the twenty years since she wrote “Seduced by Violence No More,” at least one significant change has come to the hip-hop industry: a whole lot more women are now contributing their own experiences.
In 2012, twenty-one-year-old rapper Angel Haze released “Cleaning Out My Closet,” a devastating account of childhood sexual abuse. Using language every bit as graphic and disturbing as the worst antiwoman lyrics, she turns that familiar vulgarity on its head:
My heart was pumping it was thumping with like tons of my fear
Imagine being seven and seeing cum in your underwear
I know it’s nasty but sometimes I’d even bleed from my butt
Disgusting right? Now let that feeling ring through your guts
Interestingly, Haze told British newspaper the Telegraph in 2013 that one of her musical influences was her fellow Detroiter Eminem, a white rapper often criticized for his exceedingly misogynistic lyrics. (Jackson Katz spends the better part of a chapter in The Macho Paradox arguing that “the very appeal of Eminem’s music depends on widespread acceptance of violence against women as a cultural norm.”21) The young artist, who spent her childhood in a cult and much of her teens alternating between homeless shelters and friends’ couches, says of the controversial musician, “He was so angsty and I was so angry. It was like catharsis to listen to him.”22
That’s one good reason to avoid blanket condemnation of certain genres and artists, however problematic: you never know who might be inspired in a positive direction by something offensive. Still, a young woman being fearlessly, heartbreakingly honest about the sexual violence she’s experienced is a welcome alternative to “Life is just a pussy race.” Haze’s fans, of all genders, think so, too.
“I got so many people messaging me, more boys than girls actually, who have had the same experience,” she told the Telegraph. “It really helped me and I think it helped them too.”23 As for men who want to “rescue” her after hearing all that she’s suffered, Haze scoffs, “It’s so annoying. You can’t save someone who does not need saving.”24
Writing about “Cleaning Out My Closet” in the Atlantic, American studies scholar Michael P. Jeffries argues that hip-hop’s “well-documented and inexcusable problems with sexism,” have made it a genre “ripe for reformers. Moreover, as one of the dominant, storytelling-driven art forms consumed and made by young people, rap provides a way for survivors and allies to testify, argue, and change hearts and minds.”25
Indeed. People like Rick Ross, CeeLo Green, and Eminem (among many others) may have built careers on misogynistic posturing, but they’ll soon be replaced by a whole new generation.
Especially Heinous
Back on the depressing side of the fence, even pop culture that focuses squarely on sex crimes can’t seem to resist perpetuating rape myths. NBC’s Law & Order: Special Victims Unit focuses exclusively on “sexually based offenses,” usually involving women or children. But an analysis of the first five seasons by feminist scholars Lisa Cuklanz and Sujata Moorti found that the show largely squanders its unique opportunity to subvert harmful stereotypes.
The storylines on SVU thematize and elaborate key elements of feminist understandings of sexual violence. However, paradoxically, this feminist take on the subject of rape is not carried through in SVU’s treatment of women. Some of the storylines condemn aspects of feminine behavior and character, including empathy and intuition. Female characters seldom can or do form bonds with each other. Female criminals are manipulative and use relationships to harm others; numerous storylines explore narratives of moral depravity and extreme violence on the part of women.26
At this writing, SVU has just begun its sixteenth season. Viewers can’t seem to get enough of manipulative women and their moral depravity.
The comedian John Mulaney has a terrific line about the character played by Ice-T on SVU: “What’s so great about him is that he’s been with the SVU for, like, eleven years, and he still treats every case like it’s his first, in terms of total confusion.”27
It’s not even just Ice-T’s character, Tutuola (although yeah, it’s frequently him). When it comes to cases where a female victim’s credibility is in question, a funny thing happens: suddenly, all three of the male detectives—Stabler, Munch, and Tutuola, for most of the series—act as if they’ve never met a genuine rape victim with a complicated story before, leaving only Mariska Hargitay’s Olivia Bensona to stand up for the woman.
Take, for instance, the unsubtly named 2010 episode “Gray.” Early on, the four experienced sex crimes detectives are standing around discussing a young college woman’s report of being raped while she was extremely drunk.
“What if Chuck was drunk, too?” asks Tutuola. “How was he to know she wasn’t sober enough to consent?”
Benson brings up the obvious analogy of drunk driving: the law expects us all not to commit crimes, even when booze has sent our judgment out the window. Instead of conceding the point, though, Munch and Tutuola shift into full-on, tag-team victim blaming.
Munch: Come on, Liv. What does the girl expect? She gets bombed, goes up to a guy’s apartment—what’s she gonna do, play Scrabble?
Tutuola: It’s getting to the point where a guy needs a permission slip to get past first base.
On behalf of all of us, Benson looks at the two of them like they’re the world’s biggest assholes.
Watching this recently, along with several episodes featuring similar exchanges between Benson and at least one of the dudes, I kept coming back to Mulaney’s bit: “It’s like, ‘You work in the sex crimes division. You’re gonna have to get used to that.’”28
In the Season 2 episode “Closure,” Benson is once again both the sole woman and the sole voice of reason, discussing a student acquaintance rape victim with Stabler, Tutuola, and Captain Donald Cragen:
Tutuola: Word on campus is, she was practicing for her oral exams.
Stabler: Witnesses said she came on to Joe.
Tutuola: A lap dance sends a pretty strong signal.
Benson: She was drunk.
Stabler: So was he.
Benson: So that excuses it?
Stabler: No, but her behavior’s open to interpretation.
Tutuola: She might have played it out and woke up with a case of buyer’s remorse.
Benson: So now we’re blaming the victim?
Cragen: Nobody is blaming her, but we all know how hard it is to get an indictment on he-said/she-said, even without any ambiguities.
Actually, Cragen, I count at least two people blaming her. And they’re detectives in the sex crimes unit.
I understand that the writers are only trying to present common reactions to claims of rape, but putting such remarks in the mouths of law enforcement characters is rape culture in action. You’d think a show that begins each episode with the invocation “In the criminal justice system, sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous” would present a criminal justice system in which sexist, slut-shaming bullshit like “She was practicing for her oral exams” and “What’s she gonna do, play Scrabble?” would only come from the sleaziest defense attorneys.
But then, these fictional characters work for the same NYPD that in real life produced Kenneth Moreno and Franklin L. Mata, who kept returning to the apartment of an intoxicated woman they were meant to see safely home. Maybe it’s just verisimilitude.
The Golden Age of Rape TV
In a 2007 essay titled “Television Viewing and Rape Myth Acceptance Among College Women,” communications scholars Lee Ann Kahlor and Dan Morrison write:
Relatively little research documents the presence of rape myths in television programming. However, the available data indicate that myths are fairly prevalent when the topic of rape is broached in programming. For example, Brinson analyzed 26 prime-time television storylines that contained references to rape, and . . . found that 42% of the storylines suggested that the victim wanted to be raped, 38% of the storylines suggested the victim lied about the assault, and 46% of the storylines suggested that the victim had “asked for it” in the way she dressed or acted (male and female characters were equally likely to make this accusation). On the other hand, only 38% of the storylines contained any opposition to the myth that the victim had asked for it.29
Not surprising, yet totally appalling.
Granted, Brinson’s study is from 1992, a rather long time ago, and Kahlor and Morrison note that subsequent research shows TV depictions of sexual violence becoming more nuanced and less victim-blamey overall. But those depictions have also become far more common. We’ve come a long way since Edith Bunker fended off a rapist with birthday cake, in a 1977 “very special episode” of All in the Family, but the increased prevalence of rape stories in popular culture has a down side.
The 2013–2014 television season brought an unprecedented amount of rape to the small screen. SVU’s Benson—already written as a survivor of attempted sexual assault, not to mention the child of a rapist father—was kidnapped and tortured for days by a serial killer, who was just about to rape her when she broke free and beat the shit out of him. FX’s The Americans, ITV/PBS’s Downton Abbey, HBO’s Game of Thrones, Netflix’s House of Cards, and ABC’s Scandal all showed major female characters being raped, in the present or in flashbacks. In spring 2013, New York’s Margaret Lyons wrote that of 135 scripted dramas on the air, 109 had featured a rape or a murder in the previous season.30
The problem with this sudden rapeapalooza is not only the desensitization to violence but the fact that—as anyone who’s ever sat through a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit marathon could tell you—one can only tell so many stories about sex crimes before being tempted to write twists involving devious “victims” and innocent “perpetrators.” After a few sensitive and moving portrayals of sexual violence, writers inevitably feel an urge to find a fresh angle, and that’s one place where things can go seriously wrong.
Even in stories where the good guys stay good and bad guys stay bad, fictional rape is sometimes used to provide little more than cheap shock value. “For all the dramatic and social good rape as a theme can bring to television,” writes feminist media critic and sex expert Jaclyn Friedman in the American Prospect, “rape as a plot device is manipulative and damaging.”31
Friedman calls the rape on Downton Abbey a “clumsy” and “cynical” effort to create drama between two married characters whose storyline had gone stale. The result is that, as the season unfolds, viewers see the victim’s husband struggling with the aftermath of her rape more than she does. The violation of her body is written as a catalyst for his personal growth. Ew.
By contrast, Friedman applauds the ABC drama Private Practice for a multi-episode arc that explored a survivor’s perspective thoroughly and realistically:
We see Charlotte at first not wanting to tell anyone, not wanting to report, not wanting to get help. We see the other main characters each trying to find their way to let her know they were there for her. Charlotte gets to make some tentative strides and then have new outbursts and struggles, because healing is never linear.32
Washington Post culture blogger Alyssa Rosenberg says the current crop of scripted dramas—Downton Abbey notwithstanding—are similarly raising the bar for thoughtful, realistic depictions of sexual violence. While older television plotlines often focused on male detectives solving the crimes,
the new breed of prestige drama has upended that convention. These shows are interested in survivors, who are often among the central characters rather than extras. The attackers are not abstract monsters but respected members of society. The male leads are often complicit in the violence or are unacceptably oblivious to the female characters’ experiences. And no one gets rescued; no one gets a day in court. The drama is less about the process of killing, jailing or confronting a rapist, and more about how these women’s lives have been inflected by their rapes, often years into the future.33
Healing isn’t linear, support and justice aren’t guaranteed, cops aren’t always sympathetic, rapists aren’t monsters, and there is no such thing as “what a real victim would behave like.” If more television writers recognized these truths, the medium could go a long way toward countering our pervasive ignorance about rape. But even that might not undo all of the cultural damage TV inflicts on us.
When Kahlor and Morrison measured the “rape myth acceptance” levels and television viewing habits of a group of college women, they found a significant correlation between watching TV and buying into victim-blaming rhetoric. Not just watching SVU or Mad Men or Sisters or soap operas in which victims marry their rapists, mind you, but “general, daily television use” (emphasis theirs). That link “is particularly problematic from a health communication perspective; it suggests that television use has the potential to erase, over time, the already limited effects that rape education campaigns have on audiences.”34
Refusing to Be Passive Consumers
Relax. I’m not about to tell you to stop watching TV—or seeing Seth Rogen or Jason Statham or Tyler Perry movies, or listening to misogynistic hip-hop. I’m not especially interested in censoring entertainment media, either. (When an Eminem might inspire an Angel Haze, who would ever be qualified to determine what stays and what goes?) I am keen on criticizing it, in hopes that people will stop writing and producing stereotypical bullshit of their own volition, because they realize it’s wrong, harmful, and above all, not entertaining.
But while we’re wishing and waiting, the least we can do is connect some dots. A culture that thinks Joan Holloway was only “sort of” raped is also a culture that believes a victim must be bruised and torn apart to be believed. A culture where “Took her home and enjoyed that, she ain’t even know it” is something a grown man would sing in public without a second thought is also one where a jury can listen to police officers describe going back to a drunk woman’s house three times to “snuggle” and think, “Yeah, that sounds reasonable.” The entertainment we consume both reflects and reifies the rape myths we cherish. We owe it to ourselves to take it seriously and expect better.
In late 2012, the British Board of Film Classification said it would take a harder line against movie scenes that glorify torture or imply that victims enjoy being raped. BBFC director David Cooke told the Hollywood Reporter that the new policy was a response to public concern about “young men with little experience, and more vulnerable viewers, accessing sadistic and sexually violent content, which could serve to normalize rape and other forms of violence and offer a distorted view of women.”35 (The concerned British public sounds shockingly feminist!)
That response arrived at the BBFC via old-fashioned market research, but we live in an age of unprecedented communication between entertainment creators and consumers. We can tweet at musicians and film directors, comment in TV forums that showrunners read, and ask our favorite actors “anything” when they visit Reddit, “the front page of the internet.” Bloggers can get press credentials and land interviews with celebrities. The walls that used to surround the entertainment industry have grown porous, and fans increasingly feel entitled to demand media that doesn’t insult their intelligence or humanity.
When a consensual sex scene from one of George R. R. Martin’s popular fantasy novels was rewritten as a rape scene on Game of Thrones, the HBO TV show based on them, the fan response was swift and thorough. The entire internet seemed to cry at once, “What the hell was that?”
Longtime television blogger Alan Sepinwall interviewed the episode’s director, Alex Graves, who claimed it wasn’t a rape because the victim (Cersei) and perpetrator (Jaime) are so attracted to each other, she eventually wanted it. “Well, it becomes consensual by the end,” said Graves, “because anything for them ultimately results in a turn-on, especially a power struggle.”36
At New York magazine’s culture blog, Vulture, Denise Martin asked Graves how the show runners decided to play it that way and why they changed the book’s version so drastically. “There wasn’t a lot of talk about it, to be honest,” says the director.37
The interviewer explains that there’s been “a lot of chatter about it online,” and reminds Graves that the scene in question “ends with Cersei saying, ‘It’s not right, it’s not right,’ and Jaime on top of her saying, ‘I don’t care. I don’t care.’” Is he quite sure, she seems to be asking, that he wants to stick with “It’s eventually consensual” as his final answer?
Yep!
It’s my cut of the scene. The consensual part of it was that she wraps her legs around him, and she’s holding on to the table, clearly not to escape but to get some grounding in what’s going on. And also, the other thing that I think is clear before they hit the ground is she starts to make out with him. The big things to us that were so important, and that hopefully were not missed, is that before he rips her undergarment, she’s way into kissing him back. She’s kissing him aplenty.38
Oh. Okay. Here’s a thought, though: If you have to explain in detail where the “consent” was for your mystified viewers, it’s possible you didn’t shoot the scene you thought you shot. It’s possible—likely, even—that what you shot was a rape scene.
A year or two ago, I would probably have been outraged and depressed to see that rationalization coming from someone who has the power to shape an extremely successful show. I’d have seen it as evidence that nothing has changed since Crank in 2006, or Observe and Report in 2009: Men who get paid to tell stories still believe that a victim’s sudden shift from terror (or unconsciousness) to consent can magically purify the forgoing rape scene. Men who get paid to tell stories still believe that a woman screaming no and trying to wriggle out from under an assailant might plausibly get turned on by the “power struggle.” Plus ça change, plus c’est la fucking barf.
But something has changed recently: the men who get paid to tell stories like that are being held accountable for it now.
“The reaction I’ve seen on Twitter, in emails and on other blogs suggests nobody is agreeing with Graves’ interpretation of the scene and are viewing it as rape, plain and simple,” writes Sepinwall in an update to his post about the episode.39 Elsewhere on New York’s culture blog, Margaret Lyons says:
If there’s a point at which we’re supposed to believe this is anything other than nonconsensual sex, I don’t know what it could be. It is absolutely not “consensual by the end”—plus, the idea that a rape could be “consensual by the end” is grotesque and dangerous. It plays into the worst she said no, but she meant yes pernicious lies of rape culture.40
Sing it, Margaret!
At feminist-flavored geek and pop culture site the Mary Sue, Rebecca Pahle is concerned about her ability to enjoy the show the same way going forward. “Did you have to make it so whenever, throughout the rest of the show, Jaime has good character moments, you’re asking us to cheer for a rapist? To sympathize with a rapist?”41 she wonders. Amanda Marcotte at Slate expresses the same disappointment:
Graves’ inability to see what he’s put out there compromises Jaime’s character and, frankly, makes a joke of a very serious, very violent act. (Graves calls it a “turn on,” as if “sexy rape” is a thing. It is not.) Prior to this rape, Jaime was a morally ambiguous character whose bad behavior, while deplorable, at least was motivated in ways that the audience could understand. Now he just comes across as another terrible man who abuses women because he can.42
I could go on, citing similar responses from outlets large and small, but you get the picture. Even if we’re still stuck watching “ultimately consensual” rapes, we have more power to push back than ever before. Whether Alex Graves ever reconsiders his interpretation of that particular scene is immaterial, because tomorrow’s directors are growing up among plugged-in audiences that are savvy, vocal, and fed up.
a Despite my criticism of the show’s writing, I should note that Hargitay credits it with raising her own awareness about sexual and domestic violence. In 2004, she founded the Joyful Heart Foundation, which has raised over $15 million for programs that help victims directly and draw national attention to issues like rape kit backlogs in police departments.