![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
Not my favorite cake, but I do make it sometimes.
Absent for awhile, I know! Lots of RL stuff happening. And at least TEF ch10 got sent off to beta.
Most of you guys are here for the fic, and some of you are here because I'm a dork, but there are occasional moments where I want to take a moment to actually be kind of serious for a moment, despite what my overuse of the word “moment” in a single sentence may tell you. And if it's too serious!cakes for you, particularly since I'm choosing a really weird day to do it (the fact that it is V-Day is pure coincidence, I swear!), then I will not hold anything against you for skipping this.
But.
Because it is important, and because I know that not everybody who reads my lj is necessarily an lj user, I am taking the chance that I'm getting the occasional reader who is underage, and female, and writing fic. And, in light of a recent e-mail I was forwarded, I have something to say that I feel is especially important.
Please think twice before you write stories or fic that portray rape as love.
I don't mean to imply you're not thinking. I know you are. I know you spend a lot of time figuring out how to write the best story in the world, one that's going to get lots of glowing reviews that will fill up your inbox and inspire you to write more. I know it's important to you. But. If your story is centered around at least one pairing, is presented as a romance or has romantic aspects, and involves a character raping another to either a) get her/him to fall in love with him/her, or b) express just how much he/she loves someone, I implore you to please, please, please think about it again. And then some more. And then go have a hot chocolate or a smoothie, depending on the time of year, and then think about it some more.
This is why I am asking you to do this: rape does not equal love. =/=. Certainly not for more than one person. And I know that rape is dramatic, and passionate—all the bodice-rippers say so, after all—and you want to write a dramatic and passionate story, I know! I know you want to write a serious story, with a serious plotline and lots of angst, because it gives your story emotion and emotion is key when you're writing a dramatic and passionate love story. I know. But rape =/= love.
No girl or woman (and I say girl/woman, because the majority of the fic I see in my particular fandom that employs this type of plot always portrays girls/women being raped by boys/men) should be portrayed as falling in love with her rapist. It is extremely harmful to present rape as something done out of love, just as it is extremely harmful to present abuse as something done out of love. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen in real life—sadly, it does. But your story gains nothing by perpetuating the idea that the only way a male can express his love for a female is by sexually attacking her, and that it is okay to dismiss the physical and mental damage that being raped does to her because “he is doing it out of love.” No male can use that as an excuse, and if he does—if he rapes you, or hits you, or verbally tears you down and treats you like shit—he does not love you, no matter how much he apologizes for it later or tells you otherwise when things are “fine.”
I have tried to tiptoe around my gender in an effort to remain semi-anonymous on the interwebs (though if you've been around these parts for awhile and pay attention you already know I do a pretty bad job of it) but in babbling about this I feel it is fairly obvious that I am female and in being female I carry some baggage about rape and sexual abuse. No, I have not been raped. But I personally know two women of my generation who have been raped, and depending on your definition of rape that number may be three. That is three more than I would expect or hope to know in my lifetime. In as many as two cases the women involved absolutely could not have helped their situation. Not one of them deserved it.
The statistics are scary if you look them up, but the point is rape is a scary thing and it happens and it =/= love. It does not just happen to women, although the numbers are overwhelmingly skewed in that direction. And in all types of fiction, rape is too often used as a plot device to insert cheap drama into a story. (I acknowledge that it can be done effectively, but the stories that manage such a thing are in the minority here.)
I have never mentioned it outright, but my biggest regret about the “Skirt” series was the attempted rape scene. It was a cheap plot device I used to bring Butch and Buttercup closer together because I was young and I wanted drama and an attempted rape gave me drama and an excuse for them to love each other more. It is a different case than that which inspired my entry, but I wanted to give that as an example. You knew the characters loved each other. You knew they were close. The attempted rape scene served no other purpose than to get a rise out of my readers and make the audience want Butch and Buttercup to get together even more. It was unnecessary. And most rape in a romance fic is unnecessary.
Most of what you want to portray—be it drama, or passion, or love, or all of those things at once—can be done without resorting to writing it as rape. Rape is about one person wanting to exert power, or expressing love in a psychologically damaged way, or just being a terrible person whose kneecaps should be blown off with a shotgun at point blank range. It is an extremely complex psychological thing. And so is love, but that doesn't make them equal. Love—or, at least, the love story you want to write—is about two people who, at their core, want to be happy with each other. Rape is about one unhealthy person who can't get over him/herself, and another who has to suffer at his/her hand for it.
I don't know what more I can say on the subject, and as always I went all over the place and very well may have gotten away from my point. I hope I didn't. It's not my intention to be dismissive or make anybody feel bad. But it is something that is important to me, and it especially scares me when I hear about (very) young women wanting to write rape-as-love stories. On the off-chance that any of them out there are reading this right now, I hope you chose to read a little of what I had to say or, even better, can at least take a part of what I said to heart. If nothing else, good luck with your writing. And, um, well, at risk of sounding inappropriate, Happy Valentine's Day.
Most of you guys are here for the fic, and some of you are here because I'm a dork, but there are occasional moments where I want to take a moment to actually be kind of serious for a moment, despite what my overuse of the word “moment” in a single sentence may tell you. And if it's too serious!cakes for you, particularly since I'm choosing a really weird day to do it (the fact that it is V-Day is pure coincidence, I swear!), then I will not hold anything against you for skipping this.
But.
Because it is important, and because I know that not everybody who reads my lj is necessarily an lj user, I am taking the chance that I'm getting the occasional reader who is underage, and female, and writing fic. And, in light of a recent e-mail I was forwarded, I have something to say that I feel is especially important.
Please think twice before you write stories or fic that portray rape as love.
I don't mean to imply you're not thinking. I know you are. I know you spend a lot of time figuring out how to write the best story in the world, one that's going to get lots of glowing reviews that will fill up your inbox and inspire you to write more. I know it's important to you. But. If your story is centered around at least one pairing, is presented as a romance or has romantic aspects, and involves a character raping another to either a) get her/him to fall in love with him/her, or b) express just how much he/she loves someone, I implore you to please, please, please think about it again. And then some more. And then go have a hot chocolate or a smoothie, depending on the time of year, and then think about it some more.
This is why I am asking you to do this: rape does not equal love. =/=. Certainly not for more than one person. And I know that rape is dramatic, and passionate—all the bodice-rippers say so, after all—and you want to write a dramatic and passionate story, I know! I know you want to write a serious story, with a serious plotline and lots of angst, because it gives your story emotion and emotion is key when you're writing a dramatic and passionate love story. I know. But rape =/= love.
No girl or woman (and I say girl/woman, because the majority of the fic I see in my particular fandom that employs this type of plot always portrays girls/women being raped by boys/men) should be portrayed as falling in love with her rapist. It is extremely harmful to present rape as something done out of love, just as it is extremely harmful to present abuse as something done out of love. I'm not saying that this doesn't happen in real life—sadly, it does. But your story gains nothing by perpetuating the idea that the only way a male can express his love for a female is by sexually attacking her, and that it is okay to dismiss the physical and mental damage that being raped does to her because “he is doing it out of love.” No male can use that as an excuse, and if he does—if he rapes you, or hits you, or verbally tears you down and treats you like shit—he does not love you, no matter how much he apologizes for it later or tells you otherwise when things are “fine.”
I have tried to tiptoe around my gender in an effort to remain semi-anonymous on the interwebs (though if you've been around these parts for awhile and pay attention you already know I do a pretty bad job of it) but in babbling about this I feel it is fairly obvious that I am female and in being female I carry some baggage about rape and sexual abuse. No, I have not been raped. But I personally know two women of my generation who have been raped, and depending on your definition of rape that number may be three. That is three more than I would expect or hope to know in my lifetime. In as many as two cases the women involved absolutely could not have helped their situation. Not one of them deserved it.
The statistics are scary if you look them up, but the point is rape is a scary thing and it happens and it =/= love. It does not just happen to women, although the numbers are overwhelmingly skewed in that direction. And in all types of fiction, rape is too often used as a plot device to insert cheap drama into a story. (I acknowledge that it can be done effectively, but the stories that manage such a thing are in the minority here.)
I have never mentioned it outright, but my biggest regret about the “Skirt” series was the attempted rape scene. It was a cheap plot device I used to bring Butch and Buttercup closer together because I was young and I wanted drama and an attempted rape gave me drama and an excuse for them to love each other more. It is a different case than that which inspired my entry, but I wanted to give that as an example. You knew the characters loved each other. You knew they were close. The attempted rape scene served no other purpose than to get a rise out of my readers and make the audience want Butch and Buttercup to get together even more. It was unnecessary. And most rape in a romance fic is unnecessary.
Most of what you want to portray—be it drama, or passion, or love, or all of those things at once—can be done without resorting to writing it as rape. Rape is about one person wanting to exert power, or expressing love in a psychologically damaged way, or just being a terrible person whose kneecaps should be blown off with a shotgun at point blank range. It is an extremely complex psychological thing. And so is love, but that doesn't make them equal. Love—or, at least, the love story you want to write—is about two people who, at their core, want to be happy with each other. Rape is about one unhealthy person who can't get over him/herself, and another who has to suffer at his/her hand for it.
I don't know what more I can say on the subject, and as always I went all over the place and very well may have gotten away from my point. I hope I didn't. It's not my intention to be dismissive or make anybody feel bad. But it is something that is important to me, and it especially scares me when I hear about (very) young women wanting to write rape-as-love stories. On the off-chance that any of them out there are reading this right now, I hope you chose to read a little of what I had to say or, even better, can at least take a part of what I said to heart. If nothing else, good luck with your writing. And, um, well, at risk of sounding inappropriate, Happy Valentine's Day.
no subject