Feminism

It’s not always good for readers to get to know what their favourite writers really think, but the other way around can be painful as well. Seanan McGuire found this out the hard way when one of her readers asked why none of her female characters had been raped yet:

My response: “None of my protagonists are getting raped. I do not want to write that.”

Their response: “I thought you had respect for your work. That’s just unrealistic.”

Verity is the bastard daughter of Dazzler and Batman. Toby is what happens when Tinker Bell embraces her inner bitch and starts wearing pants. Velveteen brings toys to life and uses them to fight the powers of darkness. Sarah is a hot mathematician who looks like Zooey Deschanel but is actually a hyper-evolved parasitic wasp. The unrealistic part about all these characters? Is that they haven’t been raped.

It’s the ultimate thriump of grimdark fiction: rape is no longer optional, but mandatory for a certain type of fan. It’s the inevitable consequence of the increasing use of rape as a cheap plot motivator, either to threaten or traumatise your heroine, or to get your male hero something to avenge, to make your mediocre urban fantasy extra gritty without having to think about it too much. Rape has become the modern equivalent of giving your private dick a knock on the head at a convenient point in the plot.

But of course rape is different from a knock on the head, because it so gender unbalanced, both in real life and (much more so in) fiction happening mainly to women, can be much more traumatic or triggering for readers, while there always is that prurient element that creeps in, that makes rape look glamourous or sexy.

Rape can be used as a plot element, but not if it’s done lazily, if it is now just a checkmark for your urban fantasy construction kit.

A while ago I put up a post about techniques with which sexual harassement can be excused. That was just after the news about Genevieve Valentine being sexually harassed at Readercon had broken; it was in fact partial inspiration for my post. In the weeks since and especially since the weekend this incident has blown up into a classic firestorm, as once she had reported this harassement, the concom turned out not to be following its own zero tolerance rules for dealing with harassement. Her harasser, one René Walling (Oblegal: allegedly) was not banned forever from the con, but for just two years, with speculation online being this was because he was somewhat of a big cheese in that particular part of fandom.

Needless to say, that set the cat amongst the pigeons, as you can see from the link summation at BC Holmes’ blog, who also linked to my post which was the first I noticed about this, as suddenly my hitcounter started revving up. Reading through the assorted links, via syrens, I found the following post, meet the predators, which isn’t about the Readercon situation directly, but which goes to the heart of it nonetheless. It does so because it looks at the research that’s done about rapists and other sexual predators and what they are like and what needs to be done to stop them:

First, the stranger-force rape is a small proportion of rapes, and is all but absent from the samples of self-reporters. Other research** shows that lack of prior acquaintance and use of the weapon are the only significant factors that increase the likelihood that a victim will report the offense. Attacking strangers with force or weapons is the only pattern of victimization at all likely to lead to incarceration of the rapist, let’s face it — so those who commit rape in the way that follows the script may be already in jail, not in college or the Navy filling out surveys. The rapists who are out there are mostly using intoxication, and mostly attacking victims they know.

Second, the sometimes-floated notion that acquaintance rape is simply a mistake about consent, is wrong. (See Amanda Hess’s excellent takedown here.) The vast majority of the offenses are being committed by a relatively small group of men, somewhere between 4% and 8% of the population, who do it again … and again … and again. That just doesn’t square with the notion of innocent mistake. Further, since the repeaters are also responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of the intimate partner violence, child beating and child sexual abuse, the notion that these predators are somehow confused good guys does not square with the data. Most of the raping is done by guys who like to rape, and to abuse, assault and violate. If we could get the one-in-twelve or one-in-25 repeat rapists out of the population (that is a lot of men — perhaps six or twelve million men in the U.S. alone) or find a way to stop them from hurting others, most sexual assault, and a lot of intimate partner violence and child abuse, would go away. Really.

Recommendation

I’m directing this to men who inhabit het-identified social spaces, and I’m not really limiting it more than that. Women are already doing what they can to prevent rape; brokering a peace with the fear is part of their lives that we can never fully understand. We’re the ones who are not doing our jobs.

Here’s what we need to do. We need to spot the rapists, and we need to shut down the social structures that give them a license to operate. They are in the population, among us. They have an average of six victims, women that they know, and therefore likely some women you know. They use force sometimes, but mostly they use intoxicants. They don’t accidentally end up in a room with a woman too drunk or high to consent or resist; they plan on getting there and that’s where they end up.

The harassement Genevieve Valentine suffered fortunately didn’t escalate to outright rape, which of course doesn’t make it any less awful, but we as a fan community must police this sort of behaviour better, not excuse it, not minimise it, not put the sole burden on women to make sure they’re not being hassled, or there will be rapes — if there haven’t been already. As the research in Thomas’ post shows, the good news is that the number of male rapists is limited; the bad news is that it’s the behaviour of all other men, decent, non-raping men, that either encourages or inhibits them. It’s not fair that we should be responsible for their actions, but it’s even less far that more women get harassed or worse by them because we couldn’t be bothered.

The analogy I was thinking about reading that post was about drink driving. Once upon a time, not too long ago, drink driving was something nobody really minded and getting behind the wheel with half a dozen brewskis was something to brag about. It was always only a minority of drivers who really got drunk behind the wheel, but many more who didn’t hold responsible for that or joked about it or perhaps went a little bit too far themselves occasionally as well. But once the true costs of this negligence became known and public opinion was shifted, drink driving and the deaths it caused became much rarer.

The same needs to happen to rape and sexual harassement. Most of us would never think of doing that to anybody, but as long as we make excuses for our friends or co-workers or family members who do, we keep alive the culture that makes rape possible.

Remember 1996? I do. At the time I was still pretending to work on my degree, but to be honest a lot of time in the computer rooms at the Vrije Universiteit was spent reading Usenet and playing games. And 1996 was a hell of a year for games: first we got Duke Nukem 3D, which whole computerlabs played with gusto, then a little later we had Quake, which really was the shit. Many a Thursday night was spent deathmatching to about 10:30, then quickly moving on to the local student pub to be there just before the end of happy hour, get thirty beers and spent the rest of the night drinking them…

Inbetween those two blockbusters there was another little noticed game, which you may have hear of, something called Tomb Raider. I remember getting the demo off an English game magazine, together with the Quake demo and wasting a weekend alternatively playing those. For me it was a pleasant distraction inbetween Duke nukem and Quake, but nothing more.

Sandra though loved Tomb Raider: she had the whole series, both on pc and later on PS2, every once so often replaying her favourites. I never have much patience for puzzle games and anything where you have to carefully guide your character past a series of traps; I’d rather point and shoot, but Sandra was good, very good even. She liked that sort of game anyway, but the fact that Tomb Raider had a female protagonist, who bigboobed as she was was also competent, no-nonsense and never in need of a man to rescue her, was a large part of its appeal.

So she’d be incredibly disappointed by what the developers have in store for the latest installment:

“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

“They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.'”

[…]

“The ability to see her as a human is even more enticing to me than the more sexualized version of yesteryear,” he said. “She literally goes from zero to hero… we’re sort of building her up and just when she gets confident, we break her down again.”

In the new Tomb Raider, Lara Croft will suffer. Her best friend will be kidnapped. She’ll get taken prisoner by island scavengers. And then, Rosenberg says, those scavengers will try to rape her.

“She is literally turned into a cornered animal,” Rosenberg said. “It’s a huge step in her evolution: she’s forced to either fight back or die.”

So they’re doing an origin story for Lara Croft (again) where they’ve made her deliberately younger, less competent and more vulnerable because because there’s no way boys would play a game with a female protagonist otherwise and it’s not that girls play Tomb Raider and the success of the original series with both male and female gamers, neither of which group had any problems indentifying with Lara, be damned. It’s typical moronic executive thinking, imported from Hollywood, where a supposed core demographic is pandered too while everything that made the game a success in the first place is leached out.

To use an attempted rape as motivation is just the rancid cherry on this turd cake. It’s insulting, it’s insensitive and it’s one more tool to undermine positive female rolemodels. Male heroes can go on adventures just because, female heroes need to be raped first. (And when male heroes do need a dark secret hidden in their past to spur them on, stuff their girlfriend in a fridge.) Hey, but at least her boobs are less big now!

Truth is, Tomb Raider doesn’t need an origin story, it just needs to be Lara Croft raiding tombs, preferably in interesting parts of the world filled with clever traps and nicely detailed wildlife for her to kill; having a plot is optional. Make the gameplay good, the settings lush and the puzzles hard but not impossible and people will buy it; that’s all.