Offensive Things - Number Two

2. Getting Their Attention

This half-hearted attempt at an ongoing series is an effort to put some of my scrappier thoughts into some kind of order. As such, please don’t view anything here as concrete or a final position. Comments, thoughts, and any help in imposing some sort of order are all very welcome. Frankly I’m in still in two minds about whether to post this at all, if nothing else because it’s even more self-obsessed and introspective than usual. But we’re all adults here, so let’s see how this goes.

Potential trigger warnings. I hope that means nothing to you, as it did for me only a short time ago.

The situation so far:

Item 1 –

Homare Sawa being asked if she’s afraid of scaring off potential husbands through being excellent.

Item 2 –

Monkeyfighting. Specifically Kathryn’s brilliantly perceptive first comment, which embarrassingly highlights (again) my lack of understanding of women’s experiences. It just never even occurred to me that such a thing could happen, and now I think about it further, offering people money for sex is soliciting, and that is illegal in many jurisdictions.

Item 3 –

Catelyn Stark. Googling around to find out if other people get as pissed off by her as I do, I find this, which I urge you to read in its entirety, and from which I think we can safely conclude that yes, she does rankle with other people as much as she does with me, if not more so.

Item 4 –

More excellence over at The Lobster Dance, which spirals off into other discussions about the prevalence of rape in fantasy media, and just fiction in general.

Item 5 –

I’m not above it either, shamefully. For all that I’m very willing to call it out in other people’s writing, I kicked off this whole blog with a prison rape gag, the very thing I called ‘gratuitous’ when Loco did it in his book.

Ha. Ha.

As for that first post, I honestly thought quite a lot about whether to include those lines or not, and now I can’t help feeling that I made the wrong choice. Not least because prison rape as a punchline has become such a tired cliché, and I’d like to think I’m a better writer than that (so hypocritical and pretentious then, and those are just some of my better qualities).

Most people would agree that male on female rape is Not Funny, yet somehow male on male rape is a total laugh riot, especially in prison because, y’know, there’s no possibility of the victim escaping! Hilarious.

Now, I’m a very firm believer in freedom of expression, and I do think that comedy does have a license, a duty almost, to push the boundaries of what is acceptable. And taking risks is almost always preferable to playing it safe; it’s how we all move forwards. But all freedoms have a corresponding cost – those boundaries are there for a reason, and if you’re going to make play of pushing against them then you better be willing to genuinely engage with people who have legitimate reasons to take issue with what you say.

You can’t hand wave away everyone who has problems with your ‘edgy’ jokes as ‘easily offended’, because very often the offensiveness is a large part of the humour. All comedy is transgressive to some extent, and if you’re willing to benefit from that then you need to be willing to pay the price of genuine engagement. Even if your original joke was making a valid point, there are good ways of engaging, and very definite ways not to do it.

So male on male rape, Not Funny.

However, male on female rape, whilst clearly also Not Funny, is at least Character Building. Or so a lot of fiction would lead us to believe.

Good lord. How desensitized have I become? How has it taken until now for me to recognize this poisonous little trope? As I write this, I’ve put up 33 posts in my ongoing book project. Ten of those books contain rapes or significant female characters with rape as a feature of their backstory. If we discount the eight non-fiction works, that’s 40%. Nearly half of the fiction authors I’ve read in the last six months have sat down and thought, ‘I think this needs some rape. Yeah, that’ll make this a better story.’

Of course fiction is just as much a comment on the human experience as is comedy. And unfortunately rape is very much part of that experience, but as ever, there are good ways and bad ways to deal with it. I think only in Jessie Lamb was it depicted as an irredeemably negative experience for the victim. In all the others it’s either used as an opportunity to show how tough a main character is (or how they got tough), or is an unfortunate incident with a side character which exists to demonstrate how the world is just so shitty (and even the Jessie Lamb example also falls into this second category).

So it’s not that it’s always gratuitous or handled badly. With one notable exception, all of those ten book were pretty good overall, or at least contained more positives than negatives. But I really hadn’t realized just how prevalent this rape trope was. How have I got to the point where rape is just something that slips under the radar? And if I’ve been failing to see all that when it’s right in front of me, exactly how much else have I been missing?

Update - Ah, this would be why I couldn't get to all the links I originally wanted. Once you see it, it's everywhere.

Credit where it's due.