I actually expect the characters with a history of abuse to have occasional dissociation coupled with an extremely dark humor. Basically the opposite of one-off tv rape victims.
I always wondered about this but was too afraid to ask, being a man. Wouldn't it be like any other trauma in that people (in this case women) would respond to it in different ways? Some would be ruined, some wouldn't. Some would remain crying in the shower, some would be like 'wow, that was HORRIBLE, let me see if I can get the cops after this guy so he doesn't hurt anyone else'. Some would do something else.
Not quite like other traumas. It often comes with a unique sense of the world being tipped on its axis because this was not an event that ever could have happened to "me." Whether it was a stranger "I live in a good neighborhood! This doesn't happen!" or someone she already knew "He seemed so nice! What else am I wrong about?" And then the self blame inevitably sets in. Men (from my perspective) also blame themselves for other kinds of trauma like getting mugged (I wasn't watching my surroundings), but women don't. We know we're vulnerable to casual crimes. Rape is the one we've been trained to have our head on a swivel for. So when we "fail" to prevent it, the combination of self-recrimination combined with shock that this happened at all is a unique category of emotional impact.
Well said, Kristin. I don't watch a lot of movies but this trope of women being 'ruined' by a single case of sexual abuse appears to be a modern reappropriation from the Victorian era, with echoes back to Thomas Hardy and earlier.
Women suffer plenty of abuse, not because they're natural victims but because abusers are cowards and abuse follows opportunity.
How they deal with that is individual and personal. Physical assaults, whether sexual or not, are not always the worst abuses that a human suffers.
No form of abuse is excusable or excused, but it's nobody's right to say what the impact will be on any individual and take control of their story.
I agree that at times, the casual disrespect after the incident can be more harmful than the incident itself, and that at times, this disrespect is gendered.
When an incident is turned into political hay without a victim's consent, then that disrespect is virtually assured.
There are a lot of Victorian aspects of modern feminism--sexuality as evil, strict standards of propriety, the idea of women as morally superior beings corrupted by the evil of men, playing up the woman as victim as Ms. McTiernan describes...
It's easy for the communications sector to perform moralistic extraction on anxious parts of the human condition. They do it with health, diet, sexuality, career and parenting and it works because of our underlying anxiety.
Moralistic extraction is shame-driven. It works by gaslighting who we are, to gain authority over who we should be. The humanities are very poor at understanding how the world works, yet compete for influence over it regardless. Their doctrine is irrelevant and can be secular or religious; what they compete over is influence, and influence requires shame.
So in one era we had ignorant religious busybodies telling women who they must be; in another it's ignorant social commentators from the humanities.
Accurate studies on the status of women use hard data: women's incomes, job security, workloads, relationship status, safety measures, health outcomes. Commentary that doesn't check the data makes stuff up instead, in a race to shame and virtue-signal until it runs off the rails of reasonable.
The rate of sexual violence in society is unacceptably high -- around 20%, and that doesn't include sexual coercion, which pushes the stats up to one in three. Everyone knows a woman who has either been raped or who has suffered attempted rape, and our young people are especially vulnerable, with the first incidence usually occurring before age 25. [https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/index.html]
Kristin is right to say that the 'crying in the shower' mythology is misrepresentative, exploitative and fundamentally extractive.
The reality is far worse because of its sheer commonplace banality, but yes we are still seeing Victorian-style histrionics because that's the best cash-grab.
Overall, this is so very important just from the standpoint of examining the issue of 'The Real World Damage That Fiction Causes'. It's not just limited to especially thorny issues such as rape. Look at the social damage the unflinching acceptance of the factual nature of The Color Purple did. Or of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And that's to say nothing of the degree to which modern romance fiction has had a crippling effect on real world expectations and perspectives of intersexual dynamics.
I've only seen "Rob Roy" and "Foxy Brown," but I take your larger point about the influence of a repeated trope having a negative effect on day-to-day life. In a film class in college, we talked about socially responsible and socially irresponsible movies. To be clear, our examples were "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and a Michael Moore movie about Iraq.
We deemed both to be socially irresponsible, but what stuck in my mind is WHY Steven Spielberg thought it was okay to have a man abandon his family to go hang out with aliens. I have never seen this movie, but I gather that's what the protagonist does at the end. Per the teacher, Spielberg said in an interview that he was unmarried and not a father at the time he made the movie, and he was simply focused on the adventure. It wasn't until he married and had kids that he realized the wrongness of his protagonist's actions. I thought that was strange, because surely he had been a child himself, right?
But it stays in the back of my mind that as a writer, if your protagonist is a different demographic from you -- in this case, a married parent as opposed to a swingin' single -- then you might need to find out how members of that demographic think and behave in matters that are core to that demographic. It makes me wonder if Spielberg had parents in his test audience for the movie.
The shower-scene trope ALSO makes clear that some tropes and cliches can be socially irresponsible. I've seen articles on fantasy / sci-fi railing against rape tropes, but from the angle that these tropes were bad writing. This is the first time I've seen anyone touch on this from the angle of the negative social impact it has. Which is a reminder that some cliches & tropes should be examined, and not just copy-pasted.
As a historian on blackexploitation, Foxy Brown was a bad example.
Foxy Brown's entire motif is for Hollyweird to instill Black women as hypersexual, devious, and revenge driven. Rape, in that regard, is part of the schtick, something of a stereotype that goes back to slavery (as in Black women can't feel pain same as White women). She's not weak because she's treacherous, vicious, and expectatiously violent.
Foxy Brown is the epitome of that, and no different than the other American International Pictures films starring Pam Grier. She gets raped twice and drugged in Coffy. Sexually assaulted and molested by Kathryn Loder (Miss Katherine in Foxy Brown) in The Big Doll House. Same shit in Black Mama, White Mama (the evil prison guards trying to get at the women) and she's playing a slave in The Arena and Drum (including being a bed wench in the latter). Yeah, Pam makes it to the end sans Hit Man (in which she's playing a porn star that participates in raping someone else), but that's a remake of Get Carter with a exploitation spin so shouldn't be counted. Point is, Pam makes it to the end because the moral of the story is Black women are too treacherous to die.
Friday Foster is only slightly different in comparison in representation (since its a reverse cultural reappropriation of a white female photojournalist via the comics), and turned into a hypersexual chase that includes Friday running for her life as she's targeted for death but still has time to fuck any sexy rich black buck that smiles at her, though she ignores the pimp (played by Ted Lange).
A better example would have been Black Caeser, where Gloria Hendry is raped and how that entire scene plays out, because Black Caeser and its sequel Hell Up In Harlem is the only time I've seen a Black woman in film be raped and killed and it's not stereotypical. One could argue Cleopatra Jones isn't stereotypical, but the sequel totally destroys that premise.
Wow, you have opened my freaking eyes. I have been 100% brainwashed by Hollywood on this issue, because I absolutely bought the prevailing messaging that a raped woman is ruined exactly the way you described.
I didn’t know how else to see it, I’m a huge guy with lots of martial arts training, I can’t put myself in the victim mentality of a woman who has been raped. I just presumed that’s how it went because I saw it 100 times that way in the movies. I’m gonna read this post again and let it sink in.
The sister of a friend also did the unexpected, after she was raped: she started sleeping around with whomever she could find in response. I don’t know how common that one is, but I’ve heard of other women behaving the same way in response after assault.
There are many ways to handle an assault, and they don’t all fit the “behavior” we’re told to enact.
Trauma therapist here, it is extremely common. Perhaps at least as common as the "sexual shutdown" scenario described in the post. The meaning of the sleeping around varies from person to person, for some it is a sort of compulsion akin to self-harm, for some it is an external enactment of internal shame, for others an attempt at reclaiming a sense of sexual agency.
But because of the dynamics the author described, because this response is not part of our internal imaging and understanding, these actions are used to discredit the survivor's integrity.
I agree with this; in part, I think (societally/culturally) people reject this element of assault and rape victims, because it also calls into question the social mores of widespread promiscuity. If there are many women who engage in the behavior as a response to being raped, assaulted, or molested, then it delegitimizes free love and hookup culture, as well as the consequences of hookup culture -- Louise Perry has had some great work exploring the nuance and difficulty of this topic. Suffice to say, there are many facets to the diamond, on multiple ends, and none of them ties into a neat package for us to wrap our heads around.
Absolutely, I agree. Every experience is as unique as every human mind, and there are some people doing some very good work around how sex industry/hookup culture delegitimises this particular response for its own ends. There are no tidy answers, which makes the task of seeking some sort of sense all the more vital even if it is ultimately impossible.
Don't forget she can't stand for anyone to touch her even on the shoulder until years later when that one special guy heals her by making her Feel Safe again
There is a really interesting shower scene in a movie titled, STOKER, with Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman that flipped the script on the whole violence/rape trope and made me sit up and take notice. It was edifying to see a very different take on the victim, expectations subverted. It's a worthy watch.
I actually expect the characters with a history of abuse to have occasional dissociation coupled with an extremely dark humor. Basically the opposite of one-off tv rape victims.
I loved Rob Roy. Great characters.
And the bad guy was played perfectly. I fucking hated that guy and cheered when he died.
That’s how you make a movie.
Yes it’s so great. Braveheart sucked up most of the oxygen but Rob Roy was just as good imo
You’re the only other person to say that
💯
I always wondered about this but was too afraid to ask, being a man. Wouldn't it be like any other trauma in that people (in this case women) would respond to it in different ways? Some would be ruined, some wouldn't. Some would remain crying in the shower, some would be like 'wow, that was HORRIBLE, let me see if I can get the cops after this guy so he doesn't hurt anyone else'. Some would do something else.
Not quite like other traumas. It often comes with a unique sense of the world being tipped on its axis because this was not an event that ever could have happened to "me." Whether it was a stranger "I live in a good neighborhood! This doesn't happen!" or someone she already knew "He seemed so nice! What else am I wrong about?" And then the self blame inevitably sets in. Men (from my perspective) also blame themselves for other kinds of trauma like getting mugged (I wasn't watching my surroundings), but women don't. We know we're vulnerable to casual crimes. Rape is the one we've been trained to have our head on a swivel for. So when we "fail" to prevent it, the combination of self-recrimination combined with shock that this happened at all is a unique category of emotional impact.
Interesting, thank you!
I wonder if a health nut who gets cancer would have a similar response then? But you don't have the social shame aspect to that I guess.
This is the essay I didn’t know I needed. Thank you. It’s unraveled a lot of bad stuff in my head.
Well said, Kristin. I don't watch a lot of movies but this trope of women being 'ruined' by a single case of sexual abuse appears to be a modern reappropriation from the Victorian era, with echoes back to Thomas Hardy and earlier.
Women suffer plenty of abuse, not because they're natural victims but because abusers are cowards and abuse follows opportunity.
How they deal with that is individual and personal. Physical assaults, whether sexual or not, are not always the worst abuses that a human suffers.
No form of abuse is excusable or excused, but it's nobody's right to say what the impact will be on any individual and take control of their story.
I agree that at times, the casual disrespect after the incident can be more harmful than the incident itself, and that at times, this disrespect is gendered.
When an incident is turned into political hay without a victim's consent, then that disrespect is virtually assured.
There are a lot of Victorian aspects of modern feminism--sexuality as evil, strict standards of propriety, the idea of women as morally superior beings corrupted by the evil of men, playing up the woman as victim as Ms. McTiernan describes...
It's easy for the communications sector to perform moralistic extraction on anxious parts of the human condition. They do it with health, diet, sexuality, career and parenting and it works because of our underlying anxiety.
Moralistic extraction is shame-driven. It works by gaslighting who we are, to gain authority over who we should be. The humanities are very poor at understanding how the world works, yet compete for influence over it regardless. Their doctrine is irrelevant and can be secular or religious; what they compete over is influence, and influence requires shame.
So in one era we had ignorant religious busybodies telling women who they must be; in another it's ignorant social commentators from the humanities.
Accurate studies on the status of women use hard data: women's incomes, job security, workloads, relationship status, safety measures, health outcomes. Commentary that doesn't check the data makes stuff up instead, in a race to shame and virtue-signal until it runs off the rails of reasonable.
The rate of sexual violence in society is unacceptably high -- around 20%, and that doesn't include sexual coercion, which pushes the stats up to one in three. Everyone knows a woman who has either been raped or who has suffered attempted rape, and our young people are especially vulnerable, with the first incidence usually occurring before age 25. [https://www.cdc.gov/nisvs/documentation/index.html]
Kristin is right to say that the 'crying in the shower' mythology is misrepresentative, exploitative and fundamentally extractive.
The reality is far worse because of its sheer commonplace banality, but yes we are still seeing Victorian-style histrionics because that's the best cash-grab.
Overall, this is so very important just from the standpoint of examining the issue of 'The Real World Damage That Fiction Causes'. It's not just limited to especially thorny issues such as rape. Look at the social damage the unflinching acceptance of the factual nature of The Color Purple did. Or of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. And that's to say nothing of the degree to which modern romance fiction has had a crippling effect on real world expectations and perspectives of intersexual dynamics.
“That’s the power of fiction, the power it has over real life.” 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾 Would love more of your thoughts on this…
She just wrote a whole book about it.
Thank you. I didn't know...
Well observed. The law of unintended consequences, and a truly dire set of outcomes from it.
Rob Roy was excellent. It didn't have the flash and scope of Braveheart, yet hits harder in some ways. Will add Elle to the list to watch.
I've only seen "Rob Roy" and "Foxy Brown," but I take your larger point about the influence of a repeated trope having a negative effect on day-to-day life. In a film class in college, we talked about socially responsible and socially irresponsible movies. To be clear, our examples were "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and a Michael Moore movie about Iraq.
We deemed both to be socially irresponsible, but what stuck in my mind is WHY Steven Spielberg thought it was okay to have a man abandon his family to go hang out with aliens. I have never seen this movie, but I gather that's what the protagonist does at the end. Per the teacher, Spielberg said in an interview that he was unmarried and not a father at the time he made the movie, and he was simply focused on the adventure. It wasn't until he married and had kids that he realized the wrongness of his protagonist's actions. I thought that was strange, because surely he had been a child himself, right?
But it stays in the back of my mind that as a writer, if your protagonist is a different demographic from you -- in this case, a married parent as opposed to a swingin' single -- then you might need to find out how members of that demographic think and behave in matters that are core to that demographic. It makes me wonder if Spielberg had parents in his test audience for the movie.
The shower-scene trope ALSO makes clear that some tropes and cliches can be socially irresponsible. I've seen articles on fantasy / sci-fi railing against rape tropes, but from the angle that these tropes were bad writing. This is the first time I've seen anyone touch on this from the angle of the negative social impact it has. Which is a reminder that some cliches & tropes should be examined, and not just copy-pasted.
As a historian on blackexploitation, Foxy Brown was a bad example.
Foxy Brown's entire motif is for Hollyweird to instill Black women as hypersexual, devious, and revenge driven. Rape, in that regard, is part of the schtick, something of a stereotype that goes back to slavery (as in Black women can't feel pain same as White women). She's not weak because she's treacherous, vicious, and expectatiously violent.
Foxy Brown is the epitome of that, and no different than the other American International Pictures films starring Pam Grier. She gets raped twice and drugged in Coffy. Sexually assaulted and molested by Kathryn Loder (Miss Katherine in Foxy Brown) in The Big Doll House. Same shit in Black Mama, White Mama (the evil prison guards trying to get at the women) and she's playing a slave in The Arena and Drum (including being a bed wench in the latter). Yeah, Pam makes it to the end sans Hit Man (in which she's playing a porn star that participates in raping someone else), but that's a remake of Get Carter with a exploitation spin so shouldn't be counted. Point is, Pam makes it to the end because the moral of the story is Black women are too treacherous to die.
Friday Foster is only slightly different in comparison in representation (since its a reverse cultural reappropriation of a white female photojournalist via the comics), and turned into a hypersexual chase that includes Friday running for her life as she's targeted for death but still has time to fuck any sexy rich black buck that smiles at her, though she ignores the pimp (played by Ted Lange).
A better example would have been Black Caeser, where Gloria Hendry is raped and how that entire scene plays out, because Black Caeser and its sequel Hell Up In Harlem is the only time I've seen a Black woman in film be raped and killed and it's not stereotypical. One could argue Cleopatra Jones isn't stereotypical, but the sequel totally destroys that premise.
Wow, you have opened my freaking eyes. I have been 100% brainwashed by Hollywood on this issue, because I absolutely bought the prevailing messaging that a raped woman is ruined exactly the way you described.
I didn’t know how else to see it, I’m a huge guy with lots of martial arts training, I can’t put myself in the victim mentality of a woman who has been raped. I just presumed that’s how it went because I saw it 100 times that way in the movies. I’m gonna read this post again and let it sink in.
The sister of a friend also did the unexpected, after she was raped: she started sleeping around with whomever she could find in response. I don’t know how common that one is, but I’ve heard of other women behaving the same way in response after assault.
There are many ways to handle an assault, and they don’t all fit the “behavior” we’re told to enact.
I've heard it's not uncommon. Probably some desire to regain control of her sexuality by dialing it up to 11.
Trauma therapist here, it is extremely common. Perhaps at least as common as the "sexual shutdown" scenario described in the post. The meaning of the sleeping around varies from person to person, for some it is a sort of compulsion akin to self-harm, for some it is an external enactment of internal shame, for others an attempt at reclaiming a sense of sexual agency.
But because of the dynamics the author described, because this response is not part of our internal imaging and understanding, these actions are used to discredit the survivor's integrity.
I agree with this; in part, I think (societally/culturally) people reject this element of assault and rape victims, because it also calls into question the social mores of widespread promiscuity. If there are many women who engage in the behavior as a response to being raped, assaulted, or molested, then it delegitimizes free love and hookup culture, as well as the consequences of hookup culture -- Louise Perry has had some great work exploring the nuance and difficulty of this topic. Suffice to say, there are many facets to the diamond, on multiple ends, and none of them ties into a neat package for us to wrap our heads around.
Absolutely, I agree. Every experience is as unique as every human mind, and there are some people doing some very good work around how sex industry/hookup culture delegitimises this particular response for its own ends. There are no tidy answers, which makes the task of seeking some sort of sense all the more vital even if it is ultimately impossible.
Rough subject, and you make some good points--this shouldn't be reduced to a disempowering cliche.
I abhor explicit rape scenes in movies. I thought Kalifornia (starring Fox Mulder and Ensign Ro) handled it perfectly.
A powerful essay, Kristin. Tropes like these are if anything, lessen the impact.
Don't forget she can't stand for anyone to touch her even on the shoulder until years later when that one special guy heals her by making her Feel Safe again
There is a really interesting shower scene in a movie titled, STOKER, with Mia Wasikowska, Matthew Goode, and Nicole Kidman that flipped the script on the whole violence/rape trope and made me sit up and take notice. It was edifying to see a very different take on the victim, expectations subverted. It's a worthy watch.