I have been thinking about this for some time now but what got me wanting to write a blog post about it was Stephen King’s “Under the Dome.” [The Meaning of Stephen King in my life: King was the first adult author I have read, and I was 10 at the time. I haven't read all of his but a lot and the first of his I have read is still my favorite: IT. He has influenced not only my love of horror stories but my own writing style (I hope I have one and it includes a lot of details on character while the plot is condensed to the least necessary to tell a story).]
In “Under the Dome,” a small town is put under a dome by aliens (not the illegal but the outerspace kind) and all anarchy is breaking lose among those who should be in charge. Part of this anarchy is a raping scene by officers of the law (they are mainly just in charge because they are friends with the son of the person who sees himself as the big cheese of the town) on a single mother. This mother also happens to be bisexual which seems to be one of the reasons for the rape – she is also promiscuous (if you like the social markers we put on women in comparison to men) and the raping scene is thus explained and mainly excused – it is not the woman that is married to a doctor with two girls who live in a nice house that is raped, it is the white trash bisexual woman who has been left by her husband and lives in a trailer park.
I know what King was doing here: he showed in another example how bad it gets when law is taken into the hands of a few irresponsible people, the horror that ensues when our lives are cut off from everything we knew before, the isolation, the need to overcompensate, the want for power in a world that actually has borders, anarchy in a community that will not punish evil-doers, etc. It is strange how we always come back to the same patriarchal narratives in the face of endgame stories. I mean sure, there is a female hero somewhere in here, there are “normal” people who do the impossible, evil dies in the end. But until we get there we have to wade through a (hi)story that tells us that this is the time where women are raped – logically, inevitably, historically explained and sanctioned – I don’t think so!
There are other narratives where rape stares the author in the eye (be it a fiction writer or the screenplay writer… narratives are not exclusive to literature, after all)… can you name a crime show where none of the female murder victims has also been raped? No, you can’t. A film/book about the middle ages when the young heroine does not violently lose her virginity to some aristocratic bastard that has to prove his manhood?… I could go on but indeed raping scenes seem to have entered every kind of adult narrative – and we are hardly shocked anymore (it sometimes seems that the most shocking rape stories on “Law and Order: SVU” are the ones that actually have male victims – and that is sad because it really is not more shocking because a) it is much less likely to happen and b) just because it is a man does not make it less okay – taking away someone’s masculinity is not more shocking than humiliating a woman by rape).
Don’t get me wrong, I understand that our society has to discuss the problem. Rape has been a problem for so long and it has not been taking seriously for so long that we have to point our finger at it and say: it is wrong! It is inhumane! It cannot happen again! And yet it happens. And it also happens in the narratives that surround us. And even though we sometimes think, yeah, that had to happen now, and we are disgusted by it, we should maybe sometimes stop and think if that was really necessary in that given situation… I am just wondering if our culture does not feed us too many of those scenes that seem to make the inevitable outcome a rape and thus feeding to an audience that is looking for excuses to do what they have just seen: raping a person just because he/she/it happens to be: gay, bisexual, transgender, trash, promiscuous, a prostitute, in a dark alley after sundown, competing in a beauty pageant, wearing a sexy outfit, turning you on… the list is endless.
I was actually shocked when not so long ago I watched a German tv show where there were actually people who met for a “date rape.” They actually called it that – I don’t know if they were not aware that the term has actually another, more gruesome meaning, or if they just didn’t care. So, a woman meets a man to get raped. They said that the people had a secret password if the woman decided that it got to rough… and I wondered: are you real? I don’t know if sites exist that help people like that to hook up, or if there are actually women who want to know what it’s like to be raped… I am too scared to look into it, actually. But the kind of message this is sending is clear: another excuse for something that has held women down, is still holding women down. It’s disgusting, people.
The bottom line: There is no excuse!
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