rape culture

May 20, 2015

Sans Everything

Jack Graham game of thrones, misogyny, rape culture, sexism 2

Spoilers & Triggers

So, Sansa and Ramsey.

Well, it was totally necessary because it shows rape is bad, which we didn’t already know…

Oh, hang on, we did.

Well, some people don’t understand how bad rape is, and this’ll make them see that they were wrong…

Oh no, hang on, it proably won’t.

Well, it was necessary for the plot.

Er… no. And even if it had been, plots are things people make, not things that grow by themselves.

But it was in the book, wasn’t it?

Um… no, it wasn’t. In fact they had to rewrite the storyline from the books quite extensively to make it possible. And even if it had been in the book, that wouldn’t bind them to include it.

But at least it was germaine to the text, like the rape scene in, say, The Accused…

Umm… except that this is a show about dragons and magic in a fairytale kingdom.

But at least it shows the horrors of the treatment of women in the middle ages…

Except that this show isn’t set in the middle ages in the real world…

But, being set in a fictionalised version of the middle ages, the show has a mandate to cover medieval misogyny…

Um, no. Not necessarily.

Well, at least it’s broaching a topic it’s been silent about up until now?

Except that it hasn’t been. In fact, it’s looked at violence against women, sexual or otherwise, in what some might say is pitilessly and cynically unnecessary depth and detail.

But it handled it tastefully and unsensationally and in a way that nobody could possibly get off on watching in any kind of creepy, woman-hating way…

Um…

But it at least advanced the characters’ progress towards… er…

Well, at least it told us stuff we didn’t know about the characters, like Ramsey’s a sadist and a misogynist, and Sansa can put up with cruel treatment.

Um…

Well, it’s good for headlines and ratings, so that justifies it. I guess.

Er…

Well, it was edgy. ZOMG, they are so hardcore and dark, man. Yay for them.…

April 22, 2014

Unredeemed

Jack Graham game of thrones, misogyny, morality, narrative, rape culture, sexism 1

Spoilers for Game of Thrones… if the writers haven’t already spoiled it enough.

Aside from being just horribly and needlessly misogynistic (Moffat has nothing on this. Nothing.) and basically relying on the assumption that Jaime can be redeemed despite being a rapist (presumably because Cersei is such a b*tch that its okay to rape her), it also perfectly illustrates something I was banging on about in a post about The Borgias a few years back.

It illustrates what happens when you purposefully remove consistent moral thinking from narrative texts just for the show-offy hell of it.

Now, I’m not a moralising finger-wagger (at least, I try not to be because it’s a deeply unattractive and narcissistic trait) but I do believe that morality is a vital part of fiction. Not in the sense that all stories should contain clear moral messages, or avowedly support a certain moral position, or anything like that, but rather in the sense that they should be aware that questions of justice and injustice are built into storytelling, at least in the Western tradition, and that it is literally impossible to tell a story in that tradition without raising moral questions, whether one wants to or not.

Such narratives depend, for their interest, on our moral engagement. (Would I do that? How would I respond to someone who did? That happened to me, I know how I felt. Would I react the way he did? Have I ever done anything that bad/good? Would I have the courage to intervene? Does anyone I know think like that? Etc.)

The adaptors of GoT have committed to the Jaime-gets-redeemed arc that is in the books. This clashes with their increasingly evident intent to make the GoT universe as brazenly nasty and cruel and violent and hateful and abusive as possible. I realise that its pretty nasty as GRRM wrote it, but the TV has repeatedly added to his nastiness quotient. The Jaime-redemption arc has now clashed with their rather adolescent – but also, sadly, rather widespread – intent to make the show into one without much of a moral compass, to show everyone as radically morally inconsistent.

Now, on one level – fine. People are not morally consistent. People all do bad things, even broadly good people. And shitty people sometimes do good things, etc etc etc. This is all obvious, or should be. And nobody wants simplistic, moralistic storylines which give us clear goodies and baddies and reassuringly makes the goodies perfect and the baddies irredeemable, and comfortingly has the goodies resoundingly and unambiguously triumphant. That sort of thing just makes for bad stories, at any level.

But. But but butty but butty but but but. Butsworth. Buttington Buttarama.

There is still such a thing as a yardstick to judge people by. It may be fuzzy and subjective, but its there. Even in stories. Perhaps especially in stories. It’s easier to judge people in stories, and it always will be, and you can’t deny or efface that, any more than you can deny that stories inherently raise questions of justice and injustice. …

November 13, 2013

27

Jack Graham 50th anniversary countdown, class, corporations, gender, hegemony, horror of fang rock, internet, leela, olympics, patriarchy, rape culture, sexism, terrance dicks 0

Adelaide screams at the sight of Palmerdale’s dead body.

Leela slaps her across the face, silencing her.

This is horrible. It’s one of the relatively few examples of serious, realistic, non-Fantastic, gendered violence in the show. Companions are captured by monsters, etc., but this kind of thing happens rarely. It is better in some places. Worse in others. In ‘The Time Meddler’, Edith’s implied-rape is in there simply to tick a box of genre tropes. Yeurch. In ‘Vengeance on Varos’, Maldak slaps Peri across the face to assuage his bruised ego. It’s utterly gratuitous and revolting.

But this is a woman slapping another woman. (That’s not worse… except in the sense that the representation, authored by a man, alibis male involvement in violence against women by ostensibly disappearing its gendered dimension.)

More than that – it’s Leela slapping another woman. Wonderful Leela, who has never done anything like this before. Okay, she’s a ruthless killer in battle… but slapping a ‘hysteric’ like she’s James Bond or something? Normally, though she dreads weakness in herself because of her self-identification as a warrior, she is gentle and kind to the weak, to the scared. This is part of her warriors’ code. She will be back to her real self in later stories. She’s even kind to Adelaide later in this story.

What has actually happened here?

Somewhere along the line, Leela – or perhaps I should say, the character of Leela – has internalized the male attitudes of the time in which she is a visitor: the Edwardian era.

None of the male characters from that period physically abuse Adelaide, but Adelaide is secondary to almost all of them. To Palmerdale, she is a secretary and, probably, a mistress. Harker has no doubt about that, dismissing her as “the owner’s fancy woman”. Skinsale evidently desires her sexually, and also desires her esteem, yet finds her frustrating because she resolutely refuses to like him more than her boss. His delight whenever she becomes dependant upon him is evident. Vince Hawkins is the only person to whom she can feel comfortably superior, treating his bashful attentions as the services of a instrumentum vocale.

This story is all about class in many ways… but it is also about gender. In many ways, it’s quite good on the subject. It depicts male attitudes in a non-exculpatory fashion. Leela is a forceful presence, crossing gender boundaries by putting on “men’s clothes… working clothes”, etc. Leela’s actions and personality imply that Adelaide isn’t just a dishrag because she’s a woman; she’s like that because she has been trained in a particular kind of social role owing to her gender and class… a role that involves men looking upon her with varying degrees of objectification and contempt, looks which they train at Leela but which bounce off her. There are other hints at these themes. Women as property. Reuben keeps pornographic pictures under his bed, for example.

But there is still a problem with that slap… which is that it comes from someone outside the Edwardian class system (this is, by the way, a depiction of the dynamics of that system that easily outclasses Downton Abbey or ‘Human Nature’). …