I have written extensively and obsessively about freedom of speech. This essay is, unusually, a plea for self censorship.
I start from the premise that American culture is indeed very "rapey". In my formative years, in the 1960's and 1970's (I was twenty in 1974) it was openly so. When I was eighteen, and in my first year of college, having lost my virginity only the year before, I spent the night with a classmate I really liked, who stated as a condition, as she entered my bed, that she would still be a virgin when she left it. I cheerfully agreed, and when (immaturely) I told the story to two men the next day (aware of a (still sexist) moral Trope that "gentlemen do not chatter about these things"), I received strikingly similar reactions, though they were of grossly different social backgrounds. Highly educated upper middle class professional with one or more graduate degrees: "Well, you know, with women in that situation, 'no' really means 'yes'". High school drop out street friend: "You shoulda just ripped her off".
Less than a decade later, I dated a woman who had been raped, and (still talking too much) mentioned this to a male friend who had never met her (and probably wasn't going to). I was startled by his immediate intense reaction: his pupils dilated, his nostrils flared, and he wanted every detail of her experience.
In the 1970's, television, pushing its limits, began telling rape stories, and I, in those murky times, sensed that Late Capitalist media were trying to have it both ways: impress part of the audience with their social responsibility, while titillating the rest. The first "rape movie of the week" starred an actress known up to then for chaste family comedies, and there was Chatter about her "courage". But the rape was protrayed relatively graphically, with a degree of nudity as yet unknown on TV-- and it was certainly done in a "prurient" way-- a word I usually abhor, but which seems applicable here. In movies and television, rape victims are almost always young and beautiful, think about that. In Oliver Stone's Salvador, despite his left wing politics, the scene in which the four American churchwomen are raped and murdered is also graphic and prurient (Stone is a Hollywood male first and a leftist second, I guess).
I remember two other TV movies (yes, full disclosure, I did not look away) which (in the first year or so of this new trend) already illustrated Late Capitalism's propensity, when colonizing something, to flip the script. One movie centered on a falsely accused white male who happened to resemble the rapist. Another, a candidate for the most inanely offensive television movie ever made, literally did "flip" the script: the rapist was an attractive twenty-something woman, the "victim" a plain-ish, pudgy thirty-something male, who testified in court how humiliated he felt, etc. It was-- wait for it-- a rape comedy.
Of course, there is a Through-line from all this to Harvey Weinstein: actresses were raped and then cast as wives or love interests in old Hollywood; today they are raped and then cast as soldiers and superheroes. Plus ca change and all that.
Watching those films in the 1970's, I wondered how a film maker could show a rape in a way that would not titillate my three men friends, the professional, the street hood, and the (independently wealthy) guy with flared nostrils. The only answer was, by leaving it off screen--and even that would transform a hot medium into a cool one, in which the male audience supplies the prurient details in its imagination. Come to think of it, that too is a Hollywood Trope: the offscreen rape which occurs in sound effects.
On a long running detective series of the 1980's, the female sidekick was raped on a highly rated episode-- watched by so many millions that a season or so later, the producers decided to have it happen again. The actress through some deft lobbying and, I believe, a threat to quit the show, put a stop to that. More recently, a story showed up in my newsfeed about a writers' room conversation planning the next season of a long-running ensemble show: "Mary gets raped!" "Wasn't she raped before?" "Yes, but that was three years ago."
A side-light, worth an essay of its own some day, is the disclaimer of responsibility or harm by the introduction of some science fiction or fantasy hand-waving: the rapist is not really responsible, because someone stole his soul, or cast a spell, or was controlling him; or the victim is not really human. There is a whole genre of android stories in which they are fair game; Westworld, which I should have realized was based on an appallingly sadistic premise and declined to watch, is the lead Instance. Oh, and there is also the "we can show it because its probably not really happening, its only the protagonist's imagination", another classic (American Psycho).
Even more recently, there has been a trend to centering sociopathic men (far more rarely women) as the antiheroes of dramas: they are usually hitmen or serial killers. On the series You which I have not watched, the protagonist conceives a crush on a woman, whom he kills by the end of the season. The actor playing this individual, as the show starts its fourth season, seems to be expressing increasing public discomfort with the show's philosophy and premise. What these shows communicate is that some people are higher life forms, and the rest of us merely the prey to which they are entitled. Back in the science fiction and fantasy worlds, vampire stories in particular advance this Trope.
I am so naive and isolated that I was shocked by Harvey Weinstein-- I had not realized that actresses were still being raped in a Hollywood which had "pivoted" to portraying powerful women. The realization that the world is, both behind the scenes and at center stage, ever becoming more crazy and cruel, allowed me, in the sinister "illumination" cast by Weinstein, to "reverse engineer" some other tropes (Unnecessary Numbering Alert):
1. Rape as world-building. In the first ten minutes of The Road Warrior, a woman is graphically raped and then killed with an arrow to the chest, simply to communicate what a fucked up post-apocalyptic society it is.
2. Rape as motivation for the male hero. This is the phenomenon known as "fridging"-- the rape and murder of a daughter, wife or girlfriend gets the hero to pick up his weapons and seek revenge. Even Ingmar Bergman offered this one, in Virgin Spring.
3. Rape as motivation for the female hero. This sub-genre includes exploitation films of the Ms. 45 genre, in which a woman is raped and spends the rest of the movie exacting revenge.
4. Rape as a character-forming experience. In a large genre of somewhat realistic dramas, rape is considered as a growth experience for a female character, who becomes stronger, more independent, fiercer, etc.
5. Rape as purported feminist act of agency. This is a really strange one. In last year's Promising Young Woman, which I also have not seen, a heroine, responding to a friend's rape, trolls and destroys rapey men, until one finally kills her and is promptly arrested-- supposedly all by her plan. (I am aware, by the way, of the incipient Comstockery of my inclusion of movies and shows I have not seen.)
Incidentally, the Hays Office ending, in which the killer must be killed in the last five minutes, has long since given way to the murderer who lives happily ever after (Breaking Bad was seriously retro). So Promising Young Woman having a Hays Office finish, seems particularly suspicious.
Although the majority of all these stories were written by men, the fact that a woman wrote and directed some of them is really not conclusive evidence, in our batshit society, that a rapey agenda is not being advanced. I have not really dealt with what I would consider the only possible honorable expression, which would be works, almost certainly by women, and likely also themselves rape victims, which somehow advance the conversation and our store of knowledge. I know of written works of history, sociology and advocacy which fit this description, like Susan Brownmiller's, but not of film or television dramas. Though I cannot wholly exclude these may exist, there is also something about the visual medium which (of course) tilts towards titillation. In a recent thriller about two friends trapped at the top of a 2,000 foot radio tower, The Fall, the women became visually more dissheveled and un-cosmeticked during the 36 hours the story took place. Someone pointed out how unusual this is in film--even in apocalyptic wastelands, actresses whose characters lack food, water and medical supplies still tend to be immaculately clean and made up. For as long as that is the Imaginary Universe in which almost all our stories take place, it would not be possible to tell an honest rape story on screen.
I doubt, by the way, that most men in our sick world could tell an honest and honorable story about the rape of a woman. I will just say it and leave it there for now.
In my own arc, I have stopped watching movies and shows which center rape, though I can still get conned, as I did with Westworld.
However, in recent years, I have noticed a small countervailing trend, which is highly interesting: dystopian and brutal television worlds in which rape does not occur at all. I offer as evidence the CW series The 100, centered around two strong young women characters, in which the post-apocalyptic future included serial murder, torture and even cannibalism-- but which in its seven year run, chose not to tell a single rape story.
Years ago, I conceived of the "Neurolinguistic Translator", a science fiction device based on the one in Star Trek which translates alien languages-- except my version translated English to English. For example, a bureaucrat saying, "Is there anything else I can do for you today?" is often saying, "Fuck off and leave me alone". In some discussions of the portrayals of rape in dystopian worlds, trollish men say that it's realistic; men rape; in worlds without law and order (or potential victims with strong enough firepower) there will be scads of rape (as there is in our world). Run through the translator, such statements by men usually emerge as statements that they like patriarchy and feel it entitles them; or enjoy being stronger than most women and being able to bully and control them; and enjoy watching rape on screen. Some men are probably also saying they aspire to be a rapist, and others are likely saying that they have raped.
I have just commenced reading de Beauvoir's The Second Sex (in French, he added immodestly). In her first pages, she notes, writing in 1949, something I lived in, never questioning, like a fish in water as a child (despite my mother being a well-known physician and medical administrator): the male worldview was "normal", a baseline, and women were a variation, an "other". Unfortunately, nothing has fundamentally changed: pendulums frequently don't swing nearly so much as we imagine (I believed before 2016 the electorate had become so progressive-- and brown skinned-- nationwide that the election of a conservative Republican could never happen again, shame on me); but, physics Fun Fact, pendulums Also Swing Back. Anyway, statements that of course there is rape, just accept it, and while you're at it, show it to us on screen, are situated in the most brutal and idiotic end of the male thoughtscape de Beauvoir was analyzing seventy-four years ago.
Let's come at this from a completely different direction. I am a storyteller: in conversation, I have been called "longwinded" because I rarely resist the inspiration to tell a story brought to mind by any topic; I have to manage myself not to tell a story in response to any story someone else tells; I have written something like eight (unpublished) novels and twenty-two plays (of which I myself produced ten Off-Off Broadway). So I can say with more than usual self confidence: We do not tell every story. I will say it again for emphasis, another way: Sometimes we imagine things we have a higher moral duty not to utter. A third time: Not every story "deserves" to be told.
A weird little feature of science fiction stories is the Unnecessary Unconvincing Explanation (gosh, being didactic yet not credible, like Polonius, is really creepy!). Once Star Trek: The Next Generation established that it was medically easy to reanimate dead people, it began explaining why the technology did not work on characters the writers wanted to die for good (like Tasha Yar). In some cases, the Unconvincing Explanation, itself run through my Translator, emerges "We accept the horrendous architecture of this batshit world, so need to justify placing ourselves a little bit outside of it". If the show runners of The 100 had been insecure enough to fall into this trap, they would have offered an explanation that all the female characters were equipped with "vagina dentata" technology or the men with an implanted capsule that blew up their brain (though not if they merely committed torture or cannibalism). Instead, in the writers' room for the show, there was clearly a proud decision and exemplary autonomous act: "We are not going to tell rape stories on this show". I add one more variation on my Emphatic Trope above: Storytellers have no imaginable duty to tell rape stories. If they choose to, let us understand why.