Date: 2013-02-07 11:06 pm (UTC)
/Rape in a fantasy book completely takes away part of the escape element for me, and says 'even in this awesome fantasy world, you being a woman still makes you a target just by virtue of that alone, and out of all the bad things that can happen to you with zombies and fae and skinwalkers, rape is still the most likely.' Screw that./

I agree. The frequent and gratuitous use of rape in fantasy book just drives that nail in deeper. It says to readers, “It doesn’t matter if this story takes place in a fantasy world. The female (and it’s mostly female) characters will always have to worry about rape, will always have to watch out for it, just like women in the real world have to, because of REALISM. Because rape is something that happens to a lot of women, therefore *every* single fictional female character should encounter it at some point.” Even though there are countless women in the real world who have *never* been raped or threatened with rape or suffered any kind of molestation or sexual assault. No, for some reason, in a lot of fantasy, rape is the quintessential female experience, is just “something that happens to women.”

Strangely, I’ve never seen anybody clamor for countless scenes of urination in fantasy books despite the fact that urination is even more true to real life than rape is, because literally every person does it and on a daily basis, no less. If an author repeatedly wrote scenes of urination in graphic detail just to be realistic, I doubt that many people would be as willing to defend him/her. Why? Because urination, along with defecation, is widely viewed as disgusting and gross. Well, guess what, rape is also disgusting and gross. But for some reason, many authors just can’t stop themselves from describing it in lurid detail or using it as a plot device.
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