Rape in fiction: a rant

[la_marquise]

So I'm supposed to be fixing typos in Death and the Madwoman and I have No Time and, and, and...
But I am sick unto death of this notion that, in order to be 'helpful' or proper or decent or supportive to women, SFF Must Not Mention Rape.
Go and read it.
Okay? Read it?
I am mad as fire. Here's why
I understand where this idea comes from, I really do. There are far too many books out there where a rape is used lazily, slightly, harmfully, as a way of indicating villainy. There are far too many which use rape as a back-story, to explain and justify why a female character is strong or vengeful. Women, in our culture, aren't supposed to be tough or violent, there has to be a *reason*. Strong women are unnatural, odd, wrong, and thus we justify. And rape is an easy shorthand.
Let's be clear. Rape used this way: as a plot device, to excuse or prop up bad writing, lazy writing, poor characterisation, pandering to cultural discomfort -- is damaging and inappropriate. It's playing into rape culture, it dehumanises and exploits.
However...
Let's be very clear. There is more than one way of writing about rape. And rape, however much we don't like it, is part of our daily cultural experience. It's real, it affects real people, men, women and children. It matters.
Calls for rape to be banished from fiction are no help whatsoever. When we remove rape from our writing, we silence women. When we say 'writing about this isn't helpful', we tell women that their experience must not be spoken off, must not be shared, must not be made public, must be discussed. When we banish rape from fiction, we banish female reality. When we banish rape from fiction, we silence women, tell them that what has happened, might happen to them is too shocking to mention, too shameful, too dirty and bad and wrong.
We uphold patriarchy. We uphold doctrines of shaming and blaming. We uphold male right to dominate public discourse. We uphold the status quo.
Rape must be talked about and written about. It must be discussed and debated and depicted. Women, in particular, must be allowed to write about what rape means, what it does, how it affects us, changes us, trammels and traps and frightens as shames us. Women must be allowed to write about rape, because rape is real.
Sometimes, what we write about rape makes uncomfortable reading. kateelliott's King's Dragon is a case in point. It's very hard to read about how a rape can reshape a woman's life. And that is what kateelliott does in that book. She puts the reader in that space and makes them think it through. She makes us live it. The rape is not an excuse or a justification, used to explain female 'abnormality'. It's about real experience.
We don't want to think about it, we don't want it to be true. And yet is *is* true, it does happen, globally, to millions. The easy option -- the option that makes us feel comfortable -- is to label things that make us uncomfortable as wrong and to forbid them.
But...
There are different ways to write about rape. And, as I said above, using rape lazily, in place of thought and care and decent characterisation, is damaging and trivialising and unhelpful. But writing about rape with thought, with care, with attention to the very real experiences of very real women and men is the opposite.
Writing mindfully about rape is essential. If we don't write, we deny it altogether, we collude in rape culture, which undermines and denies female experience daily, which silences women daily, which props up, fosters and supports those who rape daily.
I don't care if reading about rape makes some people, male and female uncomfortable, when it's done well. It should do that. That's the point. Such writing is there to make us aware, to make us think, to make us confront the nasty areas of our culture, ourselves.
And, you know, when I see a man recommending that rape be banished from fiction, I don't see an ally, though I know he probably means to be such. I don't see someone who wants to help me. I see someone who doesn't want to be made uncomfortable and who has found what looks like a fix based on his lack of knowledge and experience. I see someone who wants women to make him feel safe. I see someone telling women what to write, what to think, what to feel.
I see yet another attempt to silence me, to silence my female friends and relative, to silence women on this subject which affects every single one of us, everyday.
I want to live in a world where my sever-year-old niece never, ever in her life has to say what I have heard myself say over and over: "I'm lucky. I've never been raped." It should not be a question of luck. It should be basic, it should be assumed. Rape should be unthinkable.
It isn't. It's everywhere.
And when we banish it from our books, we help keep it there.

ETA: Ian and I have discussed this elsewhere, and he has made it clear that he didn't intend to be silencing, and that he was not trying to lay down rules. Rather, he was targeting unthinking writing, that reaches for the easy option without contextualising or care or respect. And he's right to do that. I'd like to thank him for his patience with my short fuse.

Comments

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm pretty miffed about the abolition of the "tart with a heart", too. Here's what's said about that, for the avoidance of doubt (and ex post facto editing):

4. the tart with a heart
It’s not just that it’s a horrible cliché centuries past its sell-by date. Think what it says about your invented world. If prostitution exists, or even flourishes, then it is not an equal society. It is patriarchal. And that makes it sexist. Is the human race – one half of it, at least – doomed to be sexist until the heat death of the universe? Biological apologists are no better than creationists. Leave regressive crap like this where it belongs – in religious books.

So - either one has to leave out prostitution altogether or make everyone involved in it heartless? Unpersons? Because I can imagine prostitution - in one form or another - indeed existing until the heat death of the Universe. And you know what? I'd rather believe that than that the working girls I've known in one place or another, or the ones my mother knew or whose mother my mother knew - including the one killed by the Yorkshire Ripper (not an accredited death and none of the police could be arsed to investigate) have their stories written out of history as "centuries past their sell-by date."

Because, Mr Sales, when you tell me that the story of the tart with the heart is centuries past its sell-by date, and I turn round and say, "I see you outside for that" and you say, "You and who's army?" I say, "Empress Theodora's army, that's whose." Because the day stories like Theodora's stop being told, then that's the day to die.

Any other women's myths Sales has in his sights?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

He means well, but I think he wrote the piece without thinking it through as deeply as he might.
And prostitution, as you say, seems to occur in most times and places. I think what he meant to say was that, if you write a character who's a prostitute, make her a real, fully-developed person, and not a lazy cliche. Because yes, viewing prostitution as a no go area elides another huge area of human -- and especially female -- experience.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

But that does mean writing them with hearts and lungs and voices - and, for that matter, aspirations. I mean, I've known a number of people who are or have been on the game - to say nothing of a few whose precise means of support it would have been a bit rude to enquire too deeply into, if they didn't want to say, and clearly they didn't - and of course they're real, fully developed people. But from what I can gather the whole topic's anathema, accepting some people make their living from it is something that repels him, and suggesting that people doing it can have feelings is the worst of all (I may be being a bit sensitive about thing since the heroine of the MS my agent's currently trying to interest publishers in is a mid 19th courtesan who entered that lifestyle as a result of pregnancy as a result of rape so clearly I shouldn't have bothered trying to write at all)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

I don't know what Ian thinks.
I tend to agree with you, however. I'm thinking, for example, of some of Colette's characters, and in particular Lea in La Vagabonde. She is not quite a prostitute: she's in that hinterland of unsuccessful actresses. But she's a real, rounded, fully-realised character, a well-written character. Or there's Dumas' Fernande, who is a prostitute with a heart of gold. But not a cliche at all: she's a believable, sympathetic character.
The key is definitely the writing. And no subject should be written off as overdone in this way: any subject can be valid if well-written. (Even some I find personally deeply distressing, like paedophilia. Yet Lolita is a great book.)
Very best wishes with your book. It sounds to me like a subject well-worth writing and reading about.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

It may well be because I'm a bit heartsick following the Readercon news, but I find it deeply, deeply depressing that there's this entire genre of stories that if you want to look at it that way you can write off as "Tart With A Heart" eg:

The Bearkeeper's Daughter: Gillian Bradshaw
Vanity Fair WM Thackeray
The Crimson Petal and the White Michael Faber

Basically, it's yet another of those "roles for women in fiction" which a man has arbitrarily decided mustn't be written.

[iansales.livejournal.com]

What I was thinking was that it would be nice to read about invented societies where patriarchy was not unthinkingly assumed, where power relationships between the genders were not considered normal or unremarkable. I'm not trying to stop women's stories, I was hoping to encourage people to not automatically imagine patriarchal / unequal societies. My post was about tropes, not about fiction which takes one of the points as its topic. Tropes are shorthand, tropes are lazy writing, tropes fill your writing with unquestioned assumptions.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

But why choose eliminating prostitution when encouraging people to imagine a non patriarchal society? Why not aspire, imagine a far-future society where a female author can go to a convention and not be sexually assaulted? Now THAT'S radical.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

I'm furious that your idea of inventing the future entails denying the past. Sneer, if you like, at the Empress Dowager of China or the Empress Theodora of Byzantium because they started their careers on their backs, but I'd like to see you manage that sort of achievement fro that level of disadvantage, however much contempt you have for sex workers (yadda yadda "addiction" yadda yadda "low self esteem").

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Who's denying the past? I suggested it would be nice if writers tried to invent societies which weren't filled with implicit assumptions about male privilege and male power relationships. My post makes no mention of historical courtesans or dowager empresses. It simply points out that if prostitution exists, then the invented society is not equal - and unless there's good reason for that, it should be questioned.

There are lots of writers who do write about equal societies, who do question implicit privilege. Unfortunately, there are many who don't. I had in mind Leviathan Wakes by James SA Corey when I wrote that point.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That makes sense.
There's an element of that in Jacqueline Carey's books. They don't work for me for other reasons (and I think there are some unexamined modern US assumptions and societal patterns in there, too) but she tried, which is something.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you are the person who calls your LJ account "The Marching Morons" aren't you? However much liberal credit you claim, I'm not entirely mad about those implications (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Marching_Morons)

(frozen comment)

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

It's a very difficult subject. Culturally, we're programmed to avoid talking about prostitution and to downplay or denigrate sex workers. Which is damaging and distressing.
And people feel strongly about this.
Ian perhaps expressed himself clumsily, but with the intent to highlight how harmful cliches are, how they omit and elide real experience. You, I think, also want to see sex workers treated with respect in both fiction and the real world, and a move away from the Firefly type-romantic image or the tragic whore image; to see characters written with care and thought.
Rape is a hot button for me. Prostitution is clearly a hot button for you. Ian and I have discussed my response and why I was stressed by his piece. He's taken my comments on board and been very decent about me being rather snippy with him, which I shouldn't have done. I understand that you are distressed by this, but please let's try and keep this calm.
Thank you.

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Nope, that's not me. I don't call my LJ account anything.

[iansales.livejournal.com]

Ah. That was the title of the post, not of my LJ. And it was in response to the attacks on Liz Bourke for her review of Theft of Swords by Michael Sullivan on Strange Horizons. The title fits perfectly.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That makes sense (and yes, a very appropriate title in those circumstances).

[ms-cataclysm.livejournal.com]

I agree with Ian. I for one have had enough of rape as entertainment and a token female character imported as wank fodder for 14 year old boys of all ages.

The default sex worker profession does rather suggest that these are the only women the author actually notices or comes into contact with though.

I can't say that I haven't enjoyed the debate though.

I agree that not every rape /sex worker depiction is like that - stand up and be applauded please, Jaine Fenn, Robin McKinley, Jacqueline Carey, Lois Mc Master Bujold and Kate Elliott.