So, there’s been a lot of rape on television lately, huh?
To be fair, rape has always been used by writers to up the dramatic stakes and give female characters tragic backstories. Try thumbing your way through any grade school anthology of Greek myths: most of the heroes and a few of the gods were products of sexual assault. Rape still takes center stage in our modern storytelling. It’s a rampant plot device on popular daytime soap operas — I think I was nine when my mother told me all about how General Hospital‘s Luke raped Laura and then they fell in love and got married? — and crime procedural dramas. Heck, there’s even an entire Law & Order franchise about sex crimes. Using rape as a storytelling device is not revolutionary, but the way contemporary showrunners have been depicting it lately has been instigating revolt.
Two weeks ago, Game of Thrones audiences were horrified to watch Sansa Stark brutally raped by her sadistic husband Ramsay Bolton. Furor over this story choice was intensified by the fact that Sansa has not been raped in the novels and because the scene shifts focus away from Sansa and to Theon’s horrified face. Many writers — including our own Tyler Coates — have questioned Game of Thrones‘ incessant use of rape as a plot device, while Jill Pantozzi of The Mary Sue wrote an incendiary op ed that announced they were banning all further coverage of the program.
However, Game of Thrones is not the only popular program to come under scrutiny for its depiction of sexual violence. Over the weekend the Outlander finale featured brutal, long, harrowing, violent, and explicit male-on-male rape scenes. How bad was it? Salon‘s Sonia Saraiya called them “the most upsetting scenes I’ve ever seen on television.” She even went so far as to compare the horror of the scenes to films about genocide. EW.com’s Jeff Jensen applauded the episode for focusing on “Jamie dealing with the trauma of the violence [rather] than the trauma itself.” While I’ve seen a variety of responses from people on whether or not they appreciated the show’s unique approach, almost all of the reviews I’ve read include a coda where the writer asks, “Why? Why did we need to see this?” Why all the rape?
I think that this sudden influx of harrowing rape scenes on television is the result of two major trends: one, there’s been an unparalleled cry from critics for more feminist narratives onscreen, and two, we live in an age of bonkers television. Which means that just as the media is finally examining depictions of rape with more scrutiny, showrunners are pushing themselves to shock their audiences into awe.
Even though I recap both Game of Thrones and Outlander, I’ve been loathe to share my thoughts on them because I’m incredibly torn. On the one hand, as a television fan, I think that rape is an overused trope. It’s lazy to use sexual violence to inject shock into stories without having the thoughtfulness to fully examine the psychology of the victims. Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller has even banned rape from his show, because as he recently — and correctly — pointed out, writers use it only “because it’s a horrible thing that is real and that it happens. But because it’s so overexploited, it becomes callous.” As a woman, I’m just really fucking exhausted by having to constantly think about rape. The last thing I want to do when I watch my favorite show about zombies and dragons (or my favorite show about a pushy feminist who gets to have insane sex with a gorgeous Highlander) is think about all the times that men have tried to sexually assault me. So, I get why so many people have been pushed to their breaking point by these scenes and why they find them gratuitous.
I do think, though, that there is something interesting happening in with how rape is finally being portrayed onscreen — and I think I kind of dig it. When I read about the rape of Europa as a child, there was a suggestion that the maiden was lucky to have been brutalized by Zeus in bull form. When my mother told me about Luke and Laura, there was the implication that true love can absolve all sins — including sexual assault. The victims on Law and Order: SVU are introduced and forgotten week to week like a carousel of ready-made plot devices. The Game of Thrones pilot shot Daenerys’ wedding night in front of a sunset and lingered on Emilia Clarke’s young naked body enough that many people probably didn’t realize we were watching an underaged girl getting raped. Two weeks ago, thought, the same show made it abundantly clear that Sansa Stark was being violated.
Rape scenes are upsetting people and that’s good because rape should always be upsetting.
Still, I’m not happy with these scenes. I’m nagged by the worry that these shows are only pushing these envelopes to get people buzzing. I’m concerned that both shows have illustrated that sometimes the only time we believe someone has been raped is when a man says so (i.e. Theon’s horrified face told the audience that Ramsay was raping Sansa and Murtagh says out loud that Jamie has been raped). Most of all, I’m pissed off that we live in a world where these atrocities are so commonplace that we need to have week-to-week conversations in our media about them.
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[Photos: HBO & Starz]