[ SECRET POST #1612 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #1612 ⌋


Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.


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TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 31 secrets from Secret Submission Post #230.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 2 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - hit/ship/spiration ], [ 0 - omgiknowthem ], [ 0 - take it to comments ], [ 0 - repeats ]
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

Okay, the thing about that is as follows:

1. It's a slim few people who think torture and murder are okay in any circumstances. The same cannot be said for rape. Perhaps in fandom, yes, but in society at large, rape is largely considered a less hurtful crime than murder. Not only that, but perpetrators are rarely held accountable for their actions, since victim-blaming abounds. Fandom hypercompensates in this regard for this purpose.

2. Torture and murder aren't implicitly gendered acts. Yes, it's true that men are capable of being raped, and yes, torture and murder can play into gendered abuse and hate crimes. But the fact is that rape is nigh-universally acknowledged as a way to victimize an oppressed gender (maybe not in those words). For this reason, those of us who are into feminist activism, or even just women at large, find it a more sensitive topic. This proceeds into my third, and perhaps most important point...

3. Torture and murder aren't matters of personal impact for many of us. It's a slim few of us who will ever be brutally tortured. Those of us who are murdered... are not going to be around to be traumatized by the experience, however callous it is to phrase it like that :| One in three women, though, will be sexually assaulted sometime in her life. And the threat thereof affects 100% of women in every aspect of our daily lives. So when we see a character rape someone, especially when it's a character we liked, we are struck by the potential reality (or actual reality, in the case of many) of someone we love doing something like that to us. It's... upsetting, to say the least.

[penumbra.livejournal.com]

I understand that it's upsetting and real and personal. But I don't like the way it's framed as worse than torture or murder: it's more personal to a lot of female viewers and the fact that it affects so many of us is an argument for why rape should be more delicately handled by television with a focus on the victim's point of view or just not depicted at all -- but I don't think that it's a more damning behaviour for a character to engage in than torture or murder; and I think that to frame it as such, as if there is some invisible line of redeemability between murder or non-sexual violence and rape perpetuates an idea about rape which I find pretty insidious and problematic, which is that rape so completely destroys a person that they may as well have been murdered. I have a problem with this framing as a woman and a feminist.

[penumbra.livejournal.com]

I understand that but that's not really what my problem is; my issue is the way I often see characters getting passes for being murderers but having them revoked the moment they become or are revealed to be rapists -- and all I can conclude from that is that people consider murder more forgivable than rape and somehow not as bad. It troubles me when I see people squeeing over rapist characters or trying to deny that what they did constituted rape but it also troubles me when I see the converse: people condemning characters only for rape and then squeeing over other characters who are guilty of murder and/or torture (which I don't think is as rare as anon tried to suggest, given the prevalence of physical and psychological abuse which I would consider a form of torture). It's not that I think rape needs to be condemned less; I just think that murder and torture need to be condemned more.

[penumbra.livejournal.com]

Yep. :\

[(Anonymous)]

Ugh, late reply is late.

That makes sense. I don't think I considered it from that angle because, well, I never really considered anti-rape sentiment in fandom to be an expression of judgment against the victim. When a character is revealed to be a rapist, fandom will read him not only as violent and loathsome, but also as, consciously or subconsciously, a misogynist bigot (owing, again, to the gendered nature of the act). Expressions of bigotry and *ism have a very special knack for raising fandom's collective hackles, even from villains - let alone supposedly sympathetic characters.

I guess the thing about rape specifically is that it does have that kind of fallout for all parties involved, though. We could all do to be more cautious in the way we express these things.

[judo-creature.livejournal.com]

This is an amazing comment.