I meant to write about this last year after reading a post about the attempted rape scene in the Divergent movie, but never got around to it. But now I've restarted work on my massive femslash Little Mermaid retelling Surface of the Deep, and so it's time to write this post.
Because much as I hate how much rape there is in fantasy fiction as well as in slash (whether fan fiction or original), I wrote a rape scene in Surface of the Deep.
*SPOILERS*
Toward the end of the novel, one of the characters is married against her wishes, and her new husband has sex with her, which she also does not want. She goes along with it because she's trying to lie low so that she can escape from the household later. There's no physical coercion involved, and it's in keeping with and sanctioned by the Ancient Greek-like society of the novel - but she doesn't consent, so by our modern standards it's rape. And I knew that going in, and hated the fact that it had to happen to her, but I wrote it anyway. It had to happen for plot reasons, because that sex act caused something else to happen that was a crucial part of the plot.
*END SPOILERS*
I hated it not just because of the pain and unfairness inflicted on the character, but also because it made me a part of a trend of rape scenes in fantasy and slash fiction, toward which I feel squeamish and uncomfortable.
Reading Beth Lalonde's post on Medium started to clarify for me why I felt that way. I haven't seen the Divergent movie myself, but I don't think that's really required to understand the point of the article. (I haven't read the book, either, and I know there's a debate about the differences between them, but it's a little beside the point here.) *SPOILERS* Ms. Lalonde describes how the main character, Tris, fights off a would-be rapist in a sort of training simulator, and then is applauded by her trainers for successfully defending herself. "Have you ever seen anything like this?" Ms. Lalonde writes in amazement. "Have you ever seen a teenage girl fight off a rapist on camera, let alone be congratulated for it?"
Crucially, the rapist in the training simulator is a simulation of Tris's boyfriend. *END SPOILERS* So we're not just talking about an attempted rape, but an attempted date rape, which is an area where some people seem to find it difficult to understand what consent is. Ms. Lalonde compares the scene in the movie to her own experience: "I had been there, in that bedroom, with someone I liked, and I had been too afraid to hit back. Too afraid to say no." And, well, this is hard for me to say publicly, but I've been there, too.
When I look back on it, why the hell didn't I fight back? And I know that were I in that situation again, now, I would fight like hell. But it took me years of processing not just to understand but to really believe that I was not at fault for "putting myself in that situation," for letting things progress and saying no pretty late in the game - to know that no fucking means no, no matter with whom, or in what state of undress, or whether I said yes to something else five minutes ago. That every inch of my body is mine to control, and that I can tell someone stop if and whenever I feel uncomfortable.
And I can enforce it.
This was what I took away from Ms. Lalonde's post about Divergent. That far too often in the media - fantasy fiction being my preferred segment of it - women are depicted as the passive victims of rape culture, whether it's our culture or a made-up culture loosely modeled on some past period. Ms. Lalonde points out:
Divergent marks the first time I have ever seen a teenage girl articulate, in no uncertain terms, that her body belongs to her. That she gets to decide who touches it, and how, and when. That her yes and her no are final, and unambiguous, and worthy of respect.Fantasy fiction, my own writing included, seems to have accepted that it's the sad lot of women to be victims of sexual assault, that no doesn't mean no, that consent will not be asked and that women's refusals will be trampled on, or even considered irrelevant, as in the socially sanctioned marriage rape in my novel. There may be some token struggle, but by and large, fantasy women don't really fight back when they are sexually assaulted, never mind kicking ass and leaving their attackers as the broken ones. (There are surely some exceptions, though, and if you know one I'd love to hear about it!)
Take my character from Surface of the Deep, for instance. Given her personality, would she really take a sexual assault lying down? (OK..sorry..terrible pun.) Hell no! She's tough, determined, and oh, she trained as a soldier for a while and was ready to go to war to find her fiance, and she just happens to be armed with a knife during the rape scene. How could I be so stupid? She would fight like hell, she would win, and then she would find some other way to escape.
By the same token, as well as characters (often women, but not always) who enforce their consent or refusal, we also need other characters (often men, but not always - in Surface, this actually happens with a female character) who ask for consent and respect refusals and boundaries. We need visions of societies that are past the problem of rape culture, where respect for everyone's bodies is the norm. That's not to say that rape can never happen in fantasy fiction - after all, we shouldn't ignore the problem either - but it shouldn't be a constant, unavoidable fixture, which fantasy women are helpless to resist.
That's not all, though. There's a much worse issue with rape that especially comes to the fore in slash fiction, though it's pretty common in regular fantasy fiction, too, and that's the eroticization of rape. There seems to be a whole subgenre of slash fiction devoted to "questionable" consent and even unquestionable rape, and the way it's written is intended to arouse, rather than to horrify. This was the second reason why I was uncomfortable writing a rape scene in my femslash novel - I definitely did not want to be seen as someone who was writing about rape in an erotic way.
I was so uncomfortable writing about rape that I had it happen off-stage, and to make it clear that it was in no way erotic, I depicted it primarily by describing the character's distress at what happened. In this way, she is the subject rather than just a sex object - the reader sees the rape through her eyes, feels the trauma of it. In eroticized rape scenes, the character who is raped becomes an object, and even if they cry out or struggle, this is portrayed in a way that contributes to the sexual fantasy, rather than a way that brings us into the character's mind and engenders sympathy for them and horror at what's happening. And a lot of this is coming from women writers, like Mercedes Lackey, Anne McCaffrey, and Tanith Lee. How does that make sense? I would think that women would have a pretty clear idea that rape is not sexy. But I guess rape culture is so entrenched that even when women write about rape, they may find themselves making it erotic, perhaps unintentionally. After all, I couldn't sort out my own mix of arousal and squeamishness toward these sort of scenes until recently. Rape culture is a well kept secret.
Some people think that rape has no place at all in fantasy fiction. In a way that's true, in the sense that rape should have no place in our world. But it is a problem that exists in our world, and as such, it shouldn't be ignored, either. Writing about it can be used as a way of calling attention to it, standing up to it, and encouraging changes in thinking and action that can bring an end to it. These things won't be accomplished, of course, if fictional characters are mainly portrayed as the passive victims of victims of inevitable attacks, or if sexual assault is eroticized. To overcome rape culture both on and off the page, we need to do the same for our characters as we'd do for real people: listen to their consent or the refusal, know that they mean it when they say no, and enlist them to fight back.
This may not work for every character or story. Sometimes sucky things have to happen in a sucky way. But the deluge of uncontested, eroticized rapes in fantasy and slash fiction ought to be turned around so that these situations are the minority of cases; they shouldn't be the status quo. And it's up to us on the front lines, us writers and our characters, to do it.
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