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Women Writing About Sexual Violence
This essay was originally posted in ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
itsawomansworld, as a response to a discussion about rape and sexual violence in fan fiction. The original disucssion is here and my original posting is here. I've updated this version with a couple of links and to clarify a couple of things that apparently weren't clear in my first version.
Women writing about sexual violence
Rape in fan fiction. I read it, and I write it. It's not the only thing I read, nor the only thing I write. In fact, these days, I don't write it often. But I do.
Why do I read and write rape fic? For one reason only: it turns me on. I won't apologise for that and I'm a little tired of other fen implying that I should.
Cards on the table. I am a survivor of sexual assault. Several people attacked me in a bathroom at my school. I won't call it rape because it didn't go that far, but I know it could have and I won't excuse what those people did to me. I was fifteen.
When I was twenty I got drunk at a party and woke up the next morning with someone in my bed who was most definitely not welcome. He told me he'd carried me home and I'd asked him to stay. I have almost no memory of the night and don't know for sure that nothing sexual happened. I don't think it did (he said not, and I believe him), but I'll never know for certain and I hate the thought that maybe it did. I haven't been drunk since.
My mother is a survivor of rape. Her second husband - not my father - raped her repeatedly when he was drunk. She refuses to admit it was rape, preferring to believe that, having married him, she gave up her right to say no. But her denial doesn't make it any less what it was. I always knew he was abusive. I was twenty three when I found out about the rapes.
I mention these things not for sympathy or to over-share, but because one of the first arguments that usually makes an appearance in discussions of rapefic is something along the lines of "if it happened to you, you wouldn't read stuff like that". I don't believe that is true.
A couple of years ago I learned the truth about how a cousin of mine died. He was sixteen, and he killed himself. I'd always been told it was suicide. In truth, it was auto-erotic asphixiation gone wrong. It scared the crap out of me when I learned that, because I knew how close I'd come as a teenager to being turned on by similar things.
Imagined rape and pain have been part of my sexuality for as long as I can remember having sexual feelings. It began long before any of these incidents happened to me. I do not believe my interest in rape fic is the result of my experiences. I believe it's as fully a part of my sexuality as my sexual orientation.
When I was a teenager, I had no one to tell me I wasn't alone in having these feelings and fantasies. I knew rape was wrong. I didn't need anyone to explain why it's wrong, or how horrible it can be or how far reaching its effects. Knowing how much it was part of my fantasies made me feel I was sick or disturbed. It made me feel dirty. When I was assaulted at fifteen, I thought I'd somehow made it happen to me, or wanted it.
Fuck that. Today I know better. Today I won't let anyone make me feel ashamed of my fantasies. And I won't apologise for enjoying them.
Nor does enjoying rape fic make me any less a feminist.
I have a rough idea of how this aspect of my sexuality was formed. I'm no sociologist, but I'm not ignorant of the way society influences a growing child, how we learn all unconsciously, to associate certain things. How sex and violence are so inextricably linked in popular culture and how culture tells us a female's place is to be dominated sexually. I get all that. But knowing it intellectually doesn't change that it's part of me. More specifically, I can think of certain books I probably shouldn't have read so young, and certain movies my parents might have stopped me watching if they'd realised how they were influencing me. I'm not talking about X-rated films. I'm thinking of certain classic movies that taught me suffering is entertainment and which used to feature prominently in my early made up erotic and violent stories. The ones I never wrote down because I knew they'd be found someday and I'd be in trouble.
When I discovered online fandom, I was in my twenties. That's the first time I learned I wasn't alone in having these feelings.
In fanfic fandom we're in a female dominated space. In erotic fanfic fandom women can express their sexual feelings away from the male gaze, away from the censure of a mainstream culture in which sexuality exists for the benefit of men, and men only.
Do we truly appreciate how valuable this is?
We can own our own sexual feelings. We can express them, share them, find others who feel the same way. No matter how outlandish your kink, there are others in fandom who will share it.
And none of us should be made to feel ashamed of our fantasies. None of us should feel dirty or wrong or sick for the things that turn us on.
Most rapefic in fandom tends to fall into the hurt/comfort category, but I'm not a big hurt/comfort fan. I like happy endings, it's just that the "comfort" tends to hit my saccharine filter and I skip to the end. My first slash fandom was Hercules (HTLJ). There was this story that every slash writer wrote. I even wrote my own version. Some fanficcers wrote this one story over and over again. It went like this (you'll probably recognise it from other fandoms):
Hercules and Iolaus are separated. While attempting to do something heroic or manly, Iolaus is kidnapped/injured/enslaved/made a prisoner of a god (usually Ares) or warlord (usually an OC). He is raped, probably repeatedly, and otherwise tortured (mental torture optional). Then he is rescued by Hercules, who proceeds to declare undying love and graphically fuck his friend back to health, both physical and mental, with optional help/interference from Aphrodite. Bonus points if Iolaus has been in madly love with Hercules for years but was too scared to tell him because apparently guys-doing-guys was so anathema in Ancient Greece.
It's bullshit, right? Real life doesn't work that way. Me, I'd usually get as far as the graphic consensual sex part and just skip a few pages to the conclusion. I do enjoy a well-written consensual sex scene. In this type of fic, it's not usually that well written.
The thing is, I know it's unrealistic. It's supposed to be. It's fantasy. HTLJ is a good fandom to illustrate the point because the entire canon was sort of cartoonish: unrealistic, over the top, injuries healing overnight or even from one scene to the next if inconvenient to the plot and so on.
From HTLJ I moved on to Stargate and Highlander, both fandoms with a tradition of unrealistic healing abilities, for their different canon reasons, and later into Sentinel and now Supernatural, both more realistic in that sense, less so in others. (Supernatural is the first fandom where I've found I can't read non-con between the main characters. Dub-con, sure, but not rape. But that's more to do with characterisation than my taste in fic.) My general taste in fanfic has remained the same. I love graphic consensual sex. I love threesomes and moresomes. I love well-written gen. I love angst. If I'm in the mood, I love schmoopy romantic slash. And I love rape stories. I just do. It's got to meet the same standards as any other fic: reasonably well written, in character, in canon, but I love them.
What is it about rapefic? For me, it's about the power. I'm attracted to powerful characters in fiction: Hercules, Jim Ellison, John Winchester...and there's something about reading those characters made powerless, or seemingly so, or made to feel powerless that just does it for me. I do like to read about the violence, if it's realistic but not overly graphic (by overly graphic I mean like Saw or Hostel), but it's not the violence that's the turn-on. It's the emotion.
I love non-con/rape stories, but my real kink, especially in my current fandom (SPN), is for dubious-consent: those rare stories that dance the razor edge of consent. And they are rare: most fic labelled dub-con is either rapefic masquerading a softer label or BDSM with nothing "dubious" about the consent.
Understand me: I am well aware that there's no such thing as "dubious" consent in real life. You either have the capacity to consent, and do, or it's rape. No shades of grey. I get that. But in fiction it can happen because we recognise that it's fiction. In fiction the rules can be different. In fiction the moral standards can be different because no one real is being harmed.
Enjoyng rape or dub-con fantasies in no way makes me a potential rapist or abuser. It doesn't mean I think rape is ever okay or justified. Nor does it mean I want to be raped. Please. It's a fantasy, and I have a right to it. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. That's why it's called "fiction".
Sometimes even fiction crosses the line. When I wrote my Sentinel story Wild Justice my early drafts did not include the rape scenes, only their aftermath. It was a choice I made because in this story the scenes of violence were never intended to be erotic, and I knew some people would read them that way because, frankly, so would I, were I not the author. It was only as I neared completion of the story that I put those scenes in there. I felt it was necessary to show the villain's point of view, to underline just how psychotic he is intended to be. I've done my best with those scenes; they are perhaps the worst violence I have ever written. I trust my readers to get the point.
I understand that rapefic isn't to everyone's taste. I understand that for many survivors of sexual violence, these stories can be extremely upsetting. I'm also aware that nearly all fan writers respect that in a way that the mainstream, professional fiction industry rarely does. We put clear warnings on our fiction, we tell you that this is a story you probably don't want to read. No one in fandom is forced to read these things if they prefer not to.
But those of us who do enjoy this genre have a right to do so without being abused by fen who don't share our preferences. In fandom, we can own our sexual fantasies. And none of us shold be made to feel ashamed of them. None of us should be judged for them. None of us should feel dirty or wrong or sick for the things that turn us on.
Disclaimer: I know this is a difficult and contraversial subject in fandom. Though this is very much a personal perspective, I welcome discussion and argument, as long as you disagree with what I've actually said, not what you assume I think.
itsawomansworld, as a response to a discussion about rape and sexual violence in fan fiction. The original disucssion is here and my original posting is here. I've updated this version with a couple of links and to clarify a couple of things that apparently weren't clear in my first version.Women writing about sexual violence
- the perspective of a rapefic fan
Rape in fan fiction. I read it, and I write it. It's not the only thing I read, nor the only thing I write. In fact, these days, I don't write it often. But I do.
Why do I read and write rape fic? For one reason only: it turns me on. I won't apologise for that and I'm a little tired of other fen implying that I should.
Cards on the table. I am a survivor of sexual assault. Several people attacked me in a bathroom at my school. I won't call it rape because it didn't go that far, but I know it could have and I won't excuse what those people did to me. I was fifteen.
When I was twenty I got drunk at a party and woke up the next morning with someone in my bed who was most definitely not welcome. He told me he'd carried me home and I'd asked him to stay. I have almost no memory of the night and don't know for sure that nothing sexual happened. I don't think it did (he said not, and I believe him), but I'll never know for certain and I hate the thought that maybe it did. I haven't been drunk since.
My mother is a survivor of rape. Her second husband - not my father - raped her repeatedly when he was drunk. She refuses to admit it was rape, preferring to believe that, having married him, she gave up her right to say no. But her denial doesn't make it any less what it was. I always knew he was abusive. I was twenty three when I found out about the rapes.
I mention these things not for sympathy or to over-share, but because one of the first arguments that usually makes an appearance in discussions of rapefic is something along the lines of "if it happened to you, you wouldn't read stuff like that". I don't believe that is true.
A couple of years ago I learned the truth about how a cousin of mine died. He was sixteen, and he killed himself. I'd always been told it was suicide. In truth, it was auto-erotic asphixiation gone wrong. It scared the crap out of me when I learned that, because I knew how close I'd come as a teenager to being turned on by similar things.
Imagined rape and pain have been part of my sexuality for as long as I can remember having sexual feelings. It began long before any of these incidents happened to me. I do not believe my interest in rape fic is the result of my experiences. I believe it's as fully a part of my sexuality as my sexual orientation.
When I was a teenager, I had no one to tell me I wasn't alone in having these feelings and fantasies. I knew rape was wrong. I didn't need anyone to explain why it's wrong, or how horrible it can be or how far reaching its effects. Knowing how much it was part of my fantasies made me feel I was sick or disturbed. It made me feel dirty. When I was assaulted at fifteen, I thought I'd somehow made it happen to me, or wanted it.
Fuck that. Today I know better. Today I won't let anyone make me feel ashamed of my fantasies. And I won't apologise for enjoying them.
Nor does enjoying rape fic make me any less a feminist.
I have a rough idea of how this aspect of my sexuality was formed. I'm no sociologist, but I'm not ignorant of the way society influences a growing child, how we learn all unconsciously, to associate certain things. How sex and violence are so inextricably linked in popular culture and how culture tells us a female's place is to be dominated sexually. I get all that. But knowing it intellectually doesn't change that it's part of me. More specifically, I can think of certain books I probably shouldn't have read so young, and certain movies my parents might have stopped me watching if they'd realised how they were influencing me. I'm not talking about X-rated films. I'm thinking of certain classic movies that taught me suffering is entertainment and which used to feature prominently in my early made up erotic and violent stories. The ones I never wrote down because I knew they'd be found someday and I'd be in trouble.
When I discovered online fandom, I was in my twenties. That's the first time I learned I wasn't alone in having these feelings.
In fanfic fandom we're in a female dominated space. In erotic fanfic fandom women can express their sexual feelings away from the male gaze, away from the censure of a mainstream culture in which sexuality exists for the benefit of men, and men only.
Do we truly appreciate how valuable this is?
We can own our own sexual feelings. We can express them, share them, find others who feel the same way. No matter how outlandish your kink, there are others in fandom who will share it.
And none of us should be made to feel ashamed of our fantasies. None of us should feel dirty or wrong or sick for the things that turn us on.
Most rapefic in fandom tends to fall into the hurt/comfort category, but I'm not a big hurt/comfort fan. I like happy endings, it's just that the "comfort" tends to hit my saccharine filter and I skip to the end. My first slash fandom was Hercules (HTLJ). There was this story that every slash writer wrote. I even wrote my own version. Some fanficcers wrote this one story over and over again. It went like this (you'll probably recognise it from other fandoms):
Hercules and Iolaus are separated. While attempting to do something heroic or manly, Iolaus is kidnapped/injured/enslaved/made a prisoner of a god (usually Ares) or warlord (usually an OC). He is raped, probably repeatedly, and otherwise tortured (mental torture optional). Then he is rescued by Hercules, who proceeds to declare undying love and graphically fuck his friend back to health, both physical and mental, with optional help/interference from Aphrodite. Bonus points if Iolaus has been in madly love with Hercules for years but was too scared to tell him because apparently guys-doing-guys was so anathema in Ancient Greece.
It's bullshit, right? Real life doesn't work that way. Me, I'd usually get as far as the graphic consensual sex part and just skip a few pages to the conclusion. I do enjoy a well-written consensual sex scene. In this type of fic, it's not usually that well written.
The thing is, I know it's unrealistic. It's supposed to be. It's fantasy. HTLJ is a good fandom to illustrate the point because the entire canon was sort of cartoonish: unrealistic, over the top, injuries healing overnight or even from one scene to the next if inconvenient to the plot and so on.
From HTLJ I moved on to Stargate and Highlander, both fandoms with a tradition of unrealistic healing abilities, for their different canon reasons, and later into Sentinel and now Supernatural, both more realistic in that sense, less so in others. (Supernatural is the first fandom where I've found I can't read non-con between the main characters. Dub-con, sure, but not rape. But that's more to do with characterisation than my taste in fic.) My general taste in fanfic has remained the same. I love graphic consensual sex. I love threesomes and moresomes. I love well-written gen. I love angst. If I'm in the mood, I love schmoopy romantic slash. And I love rape stories. I just do. It's got to meet the same standards as any other fic: reasonably well written, in character, in canon, but I love them.
What is it about rapefic? For me, it's about the power. I'm attracted to powerful characters in fiction: Hercules, Jim Ellison, John Winchester...and there's something about reading those characters made powerless, or seemingly so, or made to feel powerless that just does it for me. I do like to read about the violence, if it's realistic but not overly graphic (by overly graphic I mean like Saw or Hostel), but it's not the violence that's the turn-on. It's the emotion.
I love non-con/rape stories, but my real kink, especially in my current fandom (SPN), is for dubious-consent: those rare stories that dance the razor edge of consent. And they are rare: most fic labelled dub-con is either rapefic masquerading a softer label or BDSM with nothing "dubious" about the consent.
Understand me: I am well aware that there's no such thing as "dubious" consent in real life. You either have the capacity to consent, and do, or it's rape. No shades of grey. I get that. But in fiction it can happen because we recognise that it's fiction. In fiction the rules can be different. In fiction the moral standards can be different because no one real is being harmed.
Enjoyng rape or dub-con fantasies in no way makes me a potential rapist or abuser. It doesn't mean I think rape is ever okay or justified. Nor does it mean I want to be raped. Please. It's a fantasy, and I have a right to it. I know the difference between fantasy and reality. That's why it's called "fiction".
Sometimes even fiction crosses the line. When I wrote my Sentinel story Wild Justice my early drafts did not include the rape scenes, only their aftermath. It was a choice I made because in this story the scenes of violence were never intended to be erotic, and I knew some people would read them that way because, frankly, so would I, were I not the author. It was only as I neared completion of the story that I put those scenes in there. I felt it was necessary to show the villain's point of view, to underline just how psychotic he is intended to be. I've done my best with those scenes; they are perhaps the worst violence I have ever written. I trust my readers to get the point.
I understand that rapefic isn't to everyone's taste. I understand that for many survivors of sexual violence, these stories can be extremely upsetting. I'm also aware that nearly all fan writers respect that in a way that the mainstream, professional fiction industry rarely does. We put clear warnings on our fiction, we tell you that this is a story you probably don't want to read. No one in fandom is forced to read these things if they prefer not to.
But those of us who do enjoy this genre have a right to do so without being abused by fen who don't share our preferences. In fandom, we can own our sexual fantasies. And none of us shold be made to feel ashamed of them. None of us should be judged for them. None of us should feel dirty or wrong or sick for the things that turn us on.
Disclaimer: I know this is a difficult and contraversial subject in fandom. Though this is very much a personal perspective, I welcome discussion and argument, as long as you disagree with what I've actually said, not what you assume I think.
no subject
On air of disclosure rapefic isn't one of my things, so I wanted to take a couple of thoughts you put down and broaden them out a little.
I think one of the important issues that your post raises is that there is no hierarchy of kinks in fandom, or at least there shouldn't be. It's perfectly okay to say I don't read X where X is whatever thing that is morally dubious kink that doesn't turn you on. But it is not the same to imply that no one should write it because it is in your view much sicker then anything that you find erotic.
I also think that with almost any topic with a darker side mental illness/rape/incest and so on, there will be survivors and that any sort of fictional portrayal can raise issues for them. I'm not sure how much "that's my real life" is a good reason for anyone to write what they want to write. After all especially on-line you never know what experiences lie behind the name. I do think it is a really good reason for people to warn and take warnings seriously.
The other big point is that fantasy and reality are not the same thing and that someone can fantasize about something without thinking that it is desirable/acceptable or whatever in their real life. I offer up for consideration the problem here that so many pieces of fiction have internalized racism/misogyny/the rest of the list where it is a real reflection of the authors view as opposed to a view or act committed for some specific purpose that people have a tendency to jump the gun and assume fiction is representing the authors view on the world. Which is rather silly, it can be but it doesn't have to be.
Final point is that I agree with you that people should not be judged by the kinds of erotica they like. Even if some of them make me personally squirm and feel deeply uncomfortable.
no subject
no subject
(Anonymous) 2010-05-23 01:22 am (UTC)(link)