Crying in the Shower: Hollywood's Rape Victim Script

And the Women Who Refuse It

Family Guy has been on the air for so long, people forget how divisive it used to be, how “problematic” it was in certain circles. In the early days, announcing Family Guy was your favorite show was a sure way to out that “friend who’s too woke.”

“That show is racist and misogynistic! Do you know they make fun of RAPE?! Do YOU think rape is funny too??”

And then you, with the patience of a saint, would have to explain to your shrieking, nose-ring friend that rape wasn’t the joke. Sometimes, the tactical uselessness of fictional superhero, Aquaman, was the joke.

And sometimes, the preposterousness of Lifetime movie melodrama was the joke, as seen in the (infamous) Peter the Strawberry cutaway.

Seth McFarlane, who is my age and has an astonishing pop culture knowledge library, was taking the piss out of the one-note portrayal of female rape victims across almost all media. Television, movies, and books. If it was created between 1985 and 2010, any and all female sexual assault victims responded to their attack in the same way.

She went home and got into the shower. She stayed there long after everything was washed away, often curling into a ball and crying on the shower floor. When she finally did get out of the shower, she stared blankly at her reflection for a long time, knowing nothing would ever be the same. Her life is ruined. SHE is ruined.

Audiences instantly recognize these beats. We’ve been trained for decades that this is the correct behavior for a female rape victim. When men are raped in fiction (much more rarely), there’s less of a formula in how they respond. It depends on the character and the story being told.

Not so for the women.

The portrayal Gen X, Milllennials, and Zoomers got is as formulaic as the training montage or the airport chase scene, except we’re supposed to treat this particular formula as sacred.

Women Did This

Who would benefit from spreading the pervasive lie that experiencing unwanted sex (with or without other types of physical assault) completely shatters women? Who would benefit from the lie that seven minutes of dick and a punch in the face is enough to unravel even the strongest of women? Surely a cabal of misogynists, right?

No. It was the feminists. The “shattered victim” portrayal emerged from second-wave feminists. I’ll be kind as I can in assessing their motives; it’s likely they couldn’t have forseen how valuable and attractive being a victim would become.

But in trying to dispel the idea that rape was just a young man being overcome by passion or, worse, something a woman secretly wanted, they went full Victorian era/third-world morality on us and portrayed it as something that utterly ruins women. Every time, no exceptions.

Worse, their success in programming three generations of movie watchers calcified into a new problem: there’s now only one “correct” way to be a victim.

And every cop, every juror, and every shit head on the internet with an opinion has recieved that programming. And they can’t wait to call victims liars because they didn’t respond to their rape the “right way.”

The Rape Recipe

This singular narrative follows these predictable beats: after her hours-long shower, the woman retreats into herself, unable to live a normal life. She can’t bear to be touched, she obsessively showers, she spirals into depression or substance abuse, her relationships crumble, and she remains permanently marked by the experience.

Even more recent movies like Promising Young Woman have this same formula, requiring a friend or family member to seek justice on the victim’s behalf.

The victim certainly can’t do it herself. Because she’s broken.

(As a note, I’m not considering rape-revenge horror movies like I Spit on Your Grave or Last House on the Left because I consider those fetish movies. Yes, I’m judging the hell out of you).

The modern rape narrative in fiction has become so standardized that deviating from it seems almost transgressive. The victim must be destroyed for the crime to be taken seriously. She must perform her trauma correctly: immediate collapse, long-term dysfunction, permanent alteration.

The formula serves multiple masters poorly. It gives writers an easy shorthand for “serious drama” without requiring actual character development. It provides actresses with Oscar-clip moments of breakdown and anguish. And then a platform to make a VERY SERIOUS Oscars acceptance speech.

But what it doesn’t do is reflect the genuine diversity of human responses to trauma, nor does it respect women enough to grant them the resilance or autonomy, or even baseline adulthood, that comes with telling good stories.

Three Films That Actually Had Something to Say

Foxy Brown: She’s a Whole Lotta Woman

Pam Grier’s 1974 blaxploitation classic Foxy Brown came out before the shower-crying death spiral trope became mandated and I remember being puzzled the first time I watched it.

Wait, Foxy is sold off to traffickers, pumped full of heroin, then raped… and then she just escapes (burning her attackers alive) and continues on her mission of revenge?

AND she lets the female pimp responsible for all this live?

It didn’t compute. It didn’t match everything I’d seen up to that point.

At the end of the film, I thought Foxy would finally acknowledge that she was indeed destroyed by being raped. “I want you to feel how I feel,” she said to her nemesis.

But that’s not what happened. “What I feel” referred to her grief, emptiness, and rage at the death of her man. A federal informant this woman pimp had murdered. THAT was what drove her.

Not the unwanted four inches through a haze of heroin. That wasn’t even a consideration.

To be fair, the blaxploitation context matters. These films, whatever their flaws, gave Black women a type of agency that mainstream cinema denied them. They couldn’t afford to show their heroines permanently destroyed—the audience came to see Black people who fought back and won. And women weren’t left out of that.

Rob Roy: Mary Queen of Scots

The 1995 film Rob Roy contains (for me) the most radicalizing deviation from The Formula. It was especially powerful because it was released at the shower-sobbing trope’s peak.

Archie Cunningham, villainous English Dandy, comes to the MacGregor house in search of Rob. Not finding him, Archie decides to teach Mary MacGregor (Jessica Lange) a lesson for her defiance by raping her. Every second of it, as well as Mary’s response of walking into the water and scrubbing what she can out of her, elicits pure disgust at Archie. He’s not even a scary villain, but a revolting one.

The shame is his from outset, not Mary’s.

She also tells her husband what happened. And his response to it is not to blame her or recoil from her as something that has been contaminated.

Their relationship strengthens rather than fractures. His honor has indeed been damaged, but not by Mary. And it’s Archie’s death that will restore the dignity of his house.

The film presents Mary as morally and psychologically intact while showing Cunningham as degraded by his own actions. Mary, standing by her husband’s side in a fight for freedom, didn’t have the time to sit and cry over what had been done to her.

In a way, it laid bare the indulgence of the shower-sobbing trope, and how feminist activists have so little going on that marinating in victimhood seems like a worthwhile pursuit.

Elle: That Girl Ain’t Right

Paul Verhoeven’s 2016 Elle is an interesting one because Michèle Leblanc (Isabelle Huppert) is already a longtime sufferer of trauma when she is attacked in her home. Her response is almost businesslike: she sweeps up the broken dishes, takes a bath, and orders sushi. She doesn’t call the police or collapse. She goes to work the next day and excoriates the video game designers who work for her for not making a scene rape-y enough.

Elle is a French movie and in watching Michèle, it is very clear she is NOT like other girls. We come to learn that she suffered a childhood trauma and that has made her responses to things… slightly off her whole life. There were some parts of the movie I yelled out loud “What the hell kind of autism is this?”

But the thing about her methodical response—changing the locks, buying mace, and later a gun, telling her friends what happened to her in a straightforward way—is that if she HAD gone to the police, or to the public, with what was done to her, the response would have been one of blame. And she knew that.

There’s a lot going on with Michèle in this movie, but one thing that never wavered was her agency: No, I’m not going to jump through hoops and perform for people. I’m not going to plead for acceptance or understanding. I don’t need your help, your sympathy, or your judgment.

Elle works because it’s honest about something uncomfortable: not all women respond to trauma identically. Some compartmentalize, some seek revenge, some simply continue. The film’s refusal to make Michèle perform victimhood correctly makes it more truthful than a dozen weeping-in-the-shower scenes.

The Real-World Damage Fiction Causes

The monopoly of the “shattered victim” narrative creates genuine problems beyond artistic laziness. Prosecutors report that juries expect victims to behave certain ways—to cry on cue, to seem appropriately destroyed. Women who remain composed or who don’t immediately report are deemed less credible. The fictional template becomes a real-world standard.

Friends and family, educated by decades of Lifetime movies, may doubt victims who seem “too normal” or who continue their daily routines. The pressure to perform trauma correctly becomes another burden on top of the actual assault. Women question their own responses: “Why am I not falling apart? What’s wrong with me?”

The artistic damage compounds the social damage. Writers reach for the shower scene and the spiral because it’s safe, expected, and requires no actual thought about character. We get endless variations on the same story while other truths go untold.

Better portrayals would recognize rape as a crime of violence. The man raping her is commiting violence, not stealing her life away from her. What kind of message is that, anyway? Hey fellas, if a woman done you wrong, you can utterly destroy her with this one simple trick. It’s actually worse than murdering her and you won’t risk a life sentence. Easy money!

Seriously, these writers unwound everything feminists said they wanted by making rape the most heinous crime imagineable, including murder. In their activism, these lazy writers who used Hollywood as their pulpit regressed us back to stone age morals, where any “good girl” would fling herself off the balcony before “allowing” herself to be raped.

This narrative is why a girl I knew in the Marines marched into the First Sergent’s office to tell him she had been punched in the face, unprovoked, by a male Marine. But said nothing about what happened after the punch. And a good thing too.

Reporting the punch meant her attacker was given an NJP (Non-Judicial Punishment). He lost money. He lost rank. He lost reputation. “You dishonorable, woman-beating piece of shit.”

If she had reported that he’d raped her too, the shame would have been hers. Especially since she had the nerve to go to PT the next morning. Take a shower afterward (no crying though) and work as normal the next day.

That’s just not how victims act. Obviously, she’s lying, right.

We’ve all been trained too well on what a rape victim is supposed to act like, and far too many of us treat it like gospel.

That’s the power of fiction, the power it has over real life.

Because the only way to know what you’re seeing onscreen is wrong it to experience it yourself, or to observe someone who has. How many times does that happen for the average person? How many decades will it take for most people to even suspect the popular narrative is wrong?

And do you want to risk having someone who hasn’t quite lived long enough making judgments about you, or your daughter, or your wife?

I know I don’t.