were not Caylee. Neither were the children described in this post.
Signal Boost: CeCe needs books!
Signal Boost: Cast your vote for Plant a Row!
Signal Boost: The Florida Great Pyr Rescue has some dogs available.
Signal Boost: Pablo Wapsi needs some help!
SIGNAL BOOST: FLY MY PRETTIES! DEFEND JANE YOLEN!
Queer youth beaten to death.
Is it bad that this makes me want to watch Pretty Little Liars?
Oh sweet merciful Jesus…!!! SLAVE EARRINGS?
More on Libya.
NO TOUCHING.
We need to train more abortion providers.
Images of kids with some neat historical context.
From MC:
I know you guys already linked to the documentary “My big breasts and me”, but I think you haven’t linked to the MTV version “I don’t like my large breasts”:
http://www.mtv.com/shows/
While I prefer the first one, I found it very helpful that the second mentioned that there are stores with clothes for different cup sizes.
And for something else completely: Circumstance!
http://www.takepart.com/
That movie? It looks AMAZING.
From Kim:
Hello, I came across these today, one is a forum topic asking male gamers who choose to play female characters to discuss why they do so, after the first few comments with the typical answer (staring at a girl’s ass is preferable to staring at a guy’s) it starts to get
really interesting:
http://www.escapistmagazine.
“When playing as a male avatar, I almost always project myself through them. Even if I make a middle aged heavily scarred black man, I still project my own personality into them and it can be difficult to do especially evil things. I keep thinking “What would I do?”
But when playing as a female, I feel much more disconnected from my avatar, and feels as if she is her own character who makes her own decisions. In this case, it’s much easier for me to think “What would SHE do?” “
The second link is a brief article regarding relationships in games, it manages to quickly touch on objectification, fridge women, and
token female characters. I was quite impressed with how much Yahtzee managed to pack into this article considering how brief it is:
“There are the games that depict the commencement of a relationship, but this is rarely shown as anything other than an appropriate ”reward” for the hero’s actions, which is just objectifying the love interest again. Rarely is time given to the compatibility of feelings between the two or to explore the feasibility of a partnership in the long term.”
Interesting link on geek girls and self objectification… not a lot of talk about race, tho.
What’s missing from “pro-feminist” hip hop? Swagger, apparently.
How to write about aboriginal Australia.
LGBT couples and Star Wars
And then it got weird.
I forgot to say this yesterday, but….
RIP Aaliyah.
More on rape and the military
{ 56 comments… read them below or add one }
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Sylvia Sybil,
Yep, I hear ya.
Yes, but you’ll notice in fiction other than historical, kids are NEVER born from rape. I was just thinking the other night, the “mom won’t tell me who my dad was” trope has been done a million times, and the only example where I can think of that it’s even hinted that maybe that’s because it was rape is in a 90s movie called “Secrets and Lies” where – when the mother finally convinces her daughter to stop asking – the mother gets this really traumatized look on her face for just a few seconds. It’s certainly not crystal clear what’s being implied, but that’s the first time I ever even saw room to interpret it that way. And COME ON, like that doesn’t happen? Even outside of slavery, that’s got to happen – I doubt it would even qualify as rare. Just “uncommon” would be my guess.
And SW was a kids’ movie, so I’d come closer to giving them a pass than fiction targeting older age groups. But a virgin birth? C’mon.
My biggest beef with Anakin’s arc is that it’s psychologically impossible. He doesn’t have the right background for becoming an adult who has no empathy, but he sure does things that people with empathy couldn’t cope with, including… well, just think about the scenes in Bespin between him and Luke from his point of view. “Can I use this kid? Is he powerful enough, yet not powerful enough to overtake me? Can I get everything I want by using him? Yes, now how do I manipulate him into siding with me? Ah, this isn’t working, fuck it, I’ll slice his hand off and force him to side with me? …oh, damn.” That’s pretty fucking empathy-free. AND YET we’re supposed to believe that by the end of Jedi something has changed and he’s capable of giving a damn about his son. NO HE IS NOT. He kills Palpatine not to save Luke but because that’s what he’s been trying to get Luke to help him with for ages, and hey, Luke frying like a piece of bacon is just the distraction he needed. Then he puts on an act to get Luke’s sympathy, because what else can he do to survive? Then when he doesn’t, somehow in Lucas’ theology, he’s redeemed by all this? WTF?
Uh-huh. And that’s not even touching on the third ep, which I never saw, but have heard about.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
My basic issue with Anakin’s story arc is this: It makes sense within the context of the SW universe, where being corrupted by the Dark Side of the Force has a clear physical and psychological effect on people. But the story is TOLD in the same way many a non-fantasy story has been told about redeeming sociopaths and narcissists.
By itself, I think Anakin Skywalker’s story holds together well. But in the context of the society in which the story is being told? It winds up reinforcing a lot of crap.
Patrick McGraw(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
I can honestly offthe top of my head think of only one fiction with a child born from rape and she is one of my favorite characters ever. Onyesonwu from Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor.
As for Star Wars, I hated the new trilogy, and I couldn’t keep watching the first update of the new one. I miss my old VHS tapes of the original ones without the added special effects and changed editing. Lucas gets no love from me. StarWars will always be a childhood love of mine but someone just needs to take back all of Lucas’s creative control.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Sounds like something I should check out.
BTW, you can see restored versions of the original SW movies – before he added CGI and stupid screams and so on – via Netflix. They were extras in one of the new sets. The quality isn’t quite what I expected, compared to re-mastered DVDs of similarly aged stories, but they ARE the original versions. I re-watched SW and ESB recently and was unable to keep the prequel bullshit out of my head and hated them. I’m thinking I’ll try them again sometime, with a deliberate attempt to forget everything that came post-1983.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Raven from the Teen Titans comic books was born from rape, I think. The demon Trigon raped her mother. Of course, they didn’t do that in the kids’ cartoon version.
(I totally give SW a pass with that too, I was basically just ranting. The rape aspect was just one of the many ways Anakin’s family’s slavery was glossed over. And, I’m the last person to advocate for more rape as womens’ backstories, but in this case it would have been believable.)
Not only was Jedi’s “redemption” arc unbelievable, but his growth from childhood into complete monster was too, if we are to believe what we are shown. We have a happy, “golly gosh!” kid without a hint of darkness who becomes an emo teenager and all of a sudden he’s able to kill innocents and “turn”? It would have been so much better if the boy had been portrayed as very troubled to begin with, yet charismatic and talented enough to fool Obi-Wan and Yoda into thinking he was the second coming. Basically, a sociopath. But I think that was beyond Lucas’s writing ability.
And I think his and Padme’s relationship should have turned abusive, forcing her to flee with the kids (and hello! It would have jived with Leia’s memories of her mom, der!) I think he should have ultimately caught Padme and killed her for daring to leave him. What is this death-by-childbirth crap?
JT(Quote) (Reply)
Patrick McGraw,
Well, I never bought the ending of ROTJ, not even when I was 10. I already had the life experience to tell me people don’t go from cynically using you like a tool to giving a damn whether you live or die just because you show them you’d rather die than turn out like them.
For a long time I tried to buy that the Force made things work differently there, but there were problems with that view. (1) The Force just happens to make it work exactly like the Pope says it does? Um. (2) Yoda said “once you start down the dark path”, that’s it. I assumed that was based on a long history of nobody coming back from the dark side, and nothing (by 1983) indicated Anakin was so extraordinary that he could pull that off. (Besides, I think we’re supposed to think Luke redeemed him, and that would mean Luke was the really special Force badass.)
If, in hindsight, the whole point was that Anakin was so very special that he COULD go to the dark side AND return, AND there was some reason this had to happen, it got lost in the vague murmurings about “imbalance in the Force” and how the chosen one was supposed to fix it. Also, the problem with that version of the story is it renders Luke nothing but a tool Anakin used to redeem himself… and then we are right back in sociopath territory.
I respect your take on it, I just can’t agree.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
I know there are probably a zillion problems with how they handle this dramatically, but Olivia on “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” was born of rape, at least for the first however-many seasons until they decide to start complicating it.
Ara(Quote) (Reply)
This is the first example that popped into my head, too. Olivia’s mother is an alcoholic and while drunk lets it slip that she never wanted a child, Olivia is the product of rape from a serial stranger rapist. Olivia tracks him down and learns he’s been paralyzed from the waist down, rendering him unable to rape again (?! You’d think a rape cop would know one doesn’t need a functioning penis to rape). Then she learns he has a son, also from rape. This half-brother is suspected of being a serial rapist, making Olivia all angsty about innate evil (switching back and forth between “having the genes of a rapist” and “somehow the stain of a violent conception can get into the soul”). Even for a show about rape, there is a metric shit-ton of rape in Olivia’s backstory. Especially since I hear she gets raped herself in prison in a later season.
Other than that…well, The Iron Duke has multiple characters conceived during rape, all of them from the enslaved population. Only the biracial character gets any shit for it, and really it’s about her race not her conception.
Other than that…any retelling of the King Arthur myths that are true to the original (Uther disguised himself as Ygraine’s husband because Ygraine wouldn’t commit adultery with him, and sires Arthur in the process). But a disturbing numbers of retellings don’t seem to realize that it is rape. *blech*
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
ACTUALLY, she gets “Almost Raped ™” when going undercover in a women’s prison to investigate a rape by a corrections officer. He takes her down to the basement, roughs her up, handcuffs her to a door or something and ALMOST~!11one orally rapes her but then Fin busts in and she’s rescued.
Does Carrie from the Stephen King novel count? Her mom said she was conceived when her father came home drunk one night and she hated herself for liking it or something…I think that maybe counts.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Casey,
Almost Raped™! All the drama of rape-rape without any of the pesky side effects! Now you too can be a helpless damsel waiting for your male coworker to rescue you without enduring any of the lasting trauma that might mess up your Marriage ‘n’ Motherhood™! What, you don’t have any Marriage ‘n’ Motherhood™ yet? For a limited time only, get Almost Raped™ and we’ll throw in Marriage ‘n’ Motherhood™ for free! While supplies last.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
This weeks links of great interest reminded me that Voldemort/Tom Riddle was born because his mother raped a man while she put him under a love potion or the curse for a year. And as I am looking forward to retracing the whole series soon, I am very interested in allthose links. I am looking forward to criticizing the series at the same time I enjoy it and am thinking of blogging my way through it.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
Ara,
Ah, I never heard that. That’s something.
Sylvia Sybil,
I didn’t know that about Arthur! Hmm, I’d forgotten for the moment that it was kind of source material for Star Wars, too. Hmmm.
I’ve never read it, but King gets some of what it’s like to be a woman in this world. Given Dolores Claiborne, I wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right.
I’m actually working on an article about how attempted rape is not necessarily a bit less traumatic than what’s legally called “completed rape.” People seem to think there’s no psychological scarring unless you are penetrated in some fashion.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
IIRC, after Olivia gets “Almost Raped(tm)” she starts experiencing PTSD and goes into therapy and “Rape Survivor’s Anonymous” meetings and generally beats herself up for having been so traumatized despite no “actual raping” taking place.
Casey(Quote) (Reply)
Jennifer Kesler,
(In case I wasn’t clear, I was mocking TV’s messed up version of rape, not real rape.)
That will be a good article to read. I’m a survivor of domestic violence and sexual assault, but not rape, and everybody up to and including a domestic violence clinic seems to think “no penis, no foul”. I can’t even begin to describe how helpless it feels to sit in a DV clinic and listen to a DV counselor tell me that since Asshole stopped halfway, I don’t really need their services.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Re: characters born from rape:
Octavia Butler’s Kindred’s main character is the descendent of an act of rape that defines the novel, as is the narrator of Gayl Jones’ Corregidora. The Conqueror’s Child features slave rape as well, and one of narrators is the product of slave rape. Raef is the product of slave rape in Cecelia Holland’s Varanger, and it’s heavily implied that Maria in the Great Maria is the product of rape as well. Jon Snow in GoT is *probably* the result of rape, as are Cersei’s children, and the children of that strange guy Robb Stark needs to ally himself with.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
The first four examples are all feminist sf.
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
I went to tv tropes and found their article on it. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChildByRape
There’s quite a few, and WAY too many of them are villains IMO. This trope is something I want to do more research on. Considering how so much of rape isn’t taken seriously IRL, it’s interesting (in that wtf sort of way) that being a child of rape would be seen as cause to become a villain or be super angsty. I would consider it justification to be angst, but when 11 and 13 year old girls are victim blamed I just can’t fathom why then a child produced by that in fiction is given more victimhood allowance than real people in the real world. I guess it’s one of those things where “real” rape is bad and in fiction we get to “know” if it’s rape or if a character is lying, but in reality too many people like to think of the default for women as lying about it with the man being the “victim.” which is obviously BS to anyone with any knowledge of rape and rape statistics but….
I dunno. I’m hypothesizing. It’s also murky because not all on screen rape is viewed as rape by people. I had an awkward conversation with an old friend who didnt think Daeneries (sp?) was raped on her wedding night. I don’t really know how that can be anything but rape.
The Other Anne(Quote) (Reply)
The Other Anne,
I’ve had a couple of days to ponder my original comment and what prompted it. I’m finding that what specifically bothers me is the lack of adopted children of rape. When adopted kids set out to find their birth parents in fiction, they always find that Mommy had sex she shouldn’t have, the slut – usually it’s the much stigmatized teen pregnancy. It’s never that their mother was raped by anybody. And let’s face it: we are a society that only 20 or so years ago began to admit that date rape happens, that male relatives rape little girls in their homes, etc. I don’t have stats how often those situations lead to pregnancies, but it’s far from infrequent enough to warrant no mention in fiction at all. Girls impregnated by their own fathers make headlines every few years, and date rape’s probably far more common than that.
But because these victims are invisible to us – erased by our unwillingness to see Nice Men as rapists, so much so that many rape victims don’t recognize themselves as such because they believe the myths – we don’t put them in our fiction. Nope – women who give up babies are either whores or Madonnas (literal virgin births), never victims of rape culture.
This might be left over from the stereotype of The Bastard who’s usually either a villain or very angsty?
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
The thing that bothers me about fictional rape babies is that it’s never just a part of their life. As you say, The Other Anne, it’s always cause for great suffering or great evil or something. I have both friends and relatives who are the product of rape, and given the great numbers of rape in our society there must be plenty more in my life. And you know, I was there when one of my relatives learned. She scrunched up her face, said “Ew. I’m sorry, Mom,” assurances of love all around, and then the topic changed.
Obviously some people will be more impacted by the revelation, and that’s valid – but not changing is also valid. That was your entire life ago. If your mother has recovered (or never shows you her pain), and you know that you are wanted and loved, why would every single person be screwed up by the knowledge?
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Sylvia Sybil,
I wonder how much of that is connected to the “Grandma Got Hit by a Bus” principle. (This is seriously what my writing professor called it.) Basically, you don’t write about normal days and people; you write about unusual days and people: you don’t write about the day someone went out to the store to buy bread, you write about the day someone went out to the store to buy bread and got hit by a bus on the way.
So if you write about rape, you write about the really screwed up ones that mucked up everybody’s life because “what point is there in including it if it isn’t going to be a big deal?” This could also be a misapplication of the second part of the Chekhov’s Gun principle, “don’t put the gun on the mantlepiece in act one unless you’re using it in act five”– if every mentioned facet of a character’s background has to either be useful or come back to bite them later, including rape means that it must therefore come up and be a big deal.
Combine the two writing principles and it might explain a lot, especially given that rape is such a polarized subject these days that writers might not want to deal with the outcry about it if it was just a background detail. (Because I guarantee that some group of people, somewhere, would get really upset at the writers for “just tossing in a rape as a backstory for no good reason” if it was in there and didn’t dramatically alter the life of the character when they found out.)
Not that this excuses them but it might explain the thought processes…
Ara(Quote) (Reply)
Ara,
I understand what you’re saying, and maybe that even is the rationale behind the absence, but it’s an excuse not a reason. Look at the number of teen protagonists with married parents vs. divorce, for example. Sometimes it’s a story about divorce and how it turns the child’s life upside down, but sometimes it’s just a story about finding a magic sword where the teen has to ask Mom and Stepdad’s permission to save the world, not Dad’s. Even if the divorce is an integral part of the backstory (Buffy the Vampire Slayer – parents’ divorce provides impetus to move to new town. The Princess Diaries – parents’ divorce explains why she doesn’t learn about her royal ancestry until high school.) it’s still backstory.
So why aren’t there more characters with rape explaining their absent parents instead of always death and divorce? Especially if they’re peasants or slaves or some other underclass historically used and abused?
I think rape is a sacred cow. (Bear with me as I feel my way through this thought process.) “Rape” is socially constructed as the virgin walking home from church who’s grabbed and held at gunpoint by an unknown man of a minority race. Anything less than that, and we start demanding questions. Was she White? Was she straight? Was she rich? Was her skirt long enough, her neckline high enough? Did she actually say the word “no”, because crying and shaking your head doesn’t count? Well, there you have it, she’s not a rape survivor, she’s just a lying slut.
So we already put rape on a pedestal like it’s expensive and rare and must in each case forever warp the lives of everyone around the survivor (especially her husband and/or father, charged with protecting her; their pain is ten times worse than hers, for hers is the pain of mere rape and theirs is the pain of utmost failure. *blech*). We fail to recognize that our normality is already rape-warped and expect rape to warp our lives further. (This trope leads people, including police officers, to dismiss the stories of survivors who don’t look traumatized enough to satisfy an arbitrary standard.)
So if it shows up in fiction, maybe people do expect it be a Chekhov’s Gun. But that shouldn’t matter. Unless you’re writing about Utopia or an alien species, rape should be a part of your world. In historical or contemporary fiction, rape should be a normal part of your world. Maybe not a prominent part of your plot, but you as the author need to be aware of it and plan around it. Anything less is shitty worldbuilding.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
Going back to Star Wars for a minute: wasn’t it hinted that Anakin Skywalker’s “virgin birth” was actually caused by the manipulations of a Sith Lord (Darth Plagueis, who was the predecessor to Darth Sidious/Palpatine)? Judging by Wookiepedia, the canonical explanation seems to have been left somewhat ambiguous, but I think one could make a fair argument that Anakin was a product of mystical Force-based rape (since it’s rather unlikely that his mother would have consented to have her body used in that way by a Sith Lord).
It’s certainly not something that the canon likes to dwell on, though, considering the dearth of solid information.
Ikkin(Quote) (Reply)
I do want to point out that this isn’t the case in every genre of fiction. The banality of rape is pretty present in a lot of feminist/womanist black fiction (again, check out Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, Zora Neale Hurston, etc), the fictionalized biographies of WOC produced during slavery (like in Clotel, the President’s Daughter), and black feminist biographical writing (thinking here of Maya Angelou’s stuff in particular). I mean, in The Bluest Eye, one of the main male character’s inability to protect his partner from rape (and his unwillingness to acknowledge his own rape) lead him to rape his daughter.
The reason I’m bringing up these examples in particular is because when things like the Color Purple come out, and indict patriarchy in the continued physical and economic exploitation of black women, they get a lot of controversy for being angry, anti-(black) man films/books. They also get canonized as THE black book you have to include in your Diversity in American Lit class or whatever. I think this illustrates two things:
1. Talking about rape as an everyday thing is DANGEROUS. Their Eyes Were Watching God got lost, Alice Walker got death threats, Toni Morrison as well, and the story told in Clotel (based on Jefferson’s treatment of Sally Hemings and her children) was widely disbelieved.
2. If it IS considered a valuable story (Their Eyes Were Watching God, Beloved NOW, Color Purple NOW, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings NOW), they’re removed from a larger sociopolitical context… so even tho they don’t PUT rape on a pedestal, the rape they DESCRIBE is put on a pedestal.
Anywho, here’s some links:
http://www.theroot.com/views/color-precious
http://www.thegrio.com/entertainment/the-color-purple-25-years-later-from-controversy-to-classic.php
Maria(Quote) (Reply)
Ikkin,
Agreed. There is room for some very interesting interpretation in many elements of the SW trilogy. But like you said, the canon doesn’t dwell on a lot of that interesting stuff, and the obvious interpretations remain… well, obvious.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
Maria,
That’s a good point. I haven’t read any of the books you mention, but I’ve heard of them and my pop culture osmosis has them tagged as “inspirationals about extraordinary circumstances”. So while I am adding these to my TBR, I think you’re absolutely right about what the larger society is teaching about this genre.
Sylvia Sybil(Quote) (Reply)
And I wonder if it would be more or less dangerous to talk about rape as an everyday thing among white middle classers. On the one hand, white men can brush off “demonizing” portrayals by women authors, because those portrayals don’t have the power to put a dent in white male privileges. On the other hand, white men are capable of creating a much bigger backlash than black men can, because of their relative power. But it’s going to be a quiet backlash: no outrage in the media, just quiet arrangements to have much bigger news overshadow the book’s promotion, etc.
Jennifer Kesler(Quote) (Reply)
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