one was following up on whether it was more or less acceptable to write rape/SA scenes if one is a survivor of SA. it was tuoched upon but lost in the BSG commentary i think.

Another was to point out that about 1/3 of women and something like 1/20 men experience SA as children or adults. Obviously a life experience this common is going to crop up in fiction, so its interesting that so many people would prefer it wasn’t there. thoughts?

And the third was more of an open call for queries into how a rape revenge story would be written “correctly” or, more saliently, what is necessary for a story to have both a character who experiences SA and a “woman warrior” character be the same without have the one be the reason for the other?

(…as a footnote, I’d like to say both seriously and with a sense of humour, that yeah I’m a guy and no its none of your business whether I’ve experienced SA, and that’s part of the trouble with my first question …)

Exactly. That’s the elephant in the living room. I was just jumping over that to wonder that IF the writers had some compelling reason to introduce rape as a story element, then had they been thinking in the larger gender equity set they would have . . . oh, you know. So right about the “woman president” business (although I liked that she was a kindergarten teacher, even if that in itself totally hits our cultural triggers in so many ways).

I’ve wondered about that a lot. Rape has traditionally been the reward for putting your life on the line for your — country, your people, your hero, whatever. Rape as accepted part of pillage, pillage which also saves the bother of actually victualing and paying the troops. Yes, I do believe that is why rape and pillage happen post a battle, a war, not because that’s what men do and there’s nothing you can do about it. It’s what some persons will do because there always twisted, ugly folks, and the military is a place where their behaviors are accepted. But if a commander doesn’t condone the behavior, it doesn’t happen. But rape and pillage are two more weapons in the arsenal — as what happens every day in places like Darfur.

If we take these motivations into account in writing our stories of our principals’ rapes, we also have more interesting as well as deeper and ‘truer’ stories, methinks. (I do have a lot of opinions, I know!)

But really, from the beginning it was clear the BS-G is anything but an equal, gender neutral universe. Could they have had the interesting arc about a woman as President, otherwise? Creating interesting, compelling stories is never easy. Doing so while disgarding all our standbys, the archtypes upon which our stories have always been built, is far far far more difficult, if maybe, still, at this time, for mass media, impossible. But then, one shouldn’t claim that one has done so, when one hasn’t.

I’ve been wondering for a long time what our stories will be when / if reproductive technology and human development changes so much that tales of lost virginity, infertility, inability to produce the MALE heir or any heir, inappropriate marriage partner — since much of marriage is still about handling the transmission of property — no longer are part of our daily lives.

We’ve already seen here in a few places that the typical lost virginity, born a bastard trope has fallen by the wayside in fiction. However, alas, in much of the rest of the world these aren’t merely issues, but still matters of life and life.

Love, C.

Well yes, but is the usage limited to male authors? I recall an Ursala LeGuin short story using rape (inter-species) to demonize colonial forces.

It’s WAY OFF TOPIC, but I thik Weber deserves some credit. He created a very strong female character in a gender neutral universe: women and men both equally cast as heros and villians, strong and weak. Then he explored interaction/contrast with both an exploitive radical religious patriarchy and a culture that socially had cast different roles for women but was capable of evolving. I’d be interested in the opinions of anyone else who has read them.

I cannot believe the reason for this is anything other than that the creators of the show, for all their blather about how feminist they are, just never thought about it. They went with the o-so-pleasing to themselves knee jerk of the guys to the rescue of the hapless maiden.

It was with this episode I began to believe this show was not as brilliant as we might have thought previously. Subsequent episode confirmed this, and I haven’t watched the last seaons.

If the women had gone on Boomer’s rescue, there would have opened automatically all kinds of interesting paths, but they chose the cliché of masculine heroism and rescue in a world that was supposedly far more equal than that.

The gruesome voyeurism of one of the Sixes’ incarceraton and rape, on a craft commanded by a woman, also seemed never to have been examined for character or story. Thus, they boxed themselves ever more strongly into ‘the box,’ while loudly touting how ‘out of the box’ they are.

If this had been handled even a bit differently, with more of the subtance of thinking about women in an equal gendered world, the show would have been better, and not then so trapped in the intellectual, story and metaphysical muddle they made for themselves.

Love, C.

Daomadan: you can use the search function to find past references to BSG on this blog, if this is the blog you’re thinking of. (Here’s a comment that I posted on the topic back in 2006.) The Angry Black Woman followed that thread with a discussion about rape as a plot device on her own blog, here.

And what boggles my mind is that there are so many ways to write about how a woman might be distrustful of males in a culture and it does not only need to be shown through the threat of rape. Perhaps it is because some writers don’t operate under the knowledge that we live in a patriarchal culture where women are socialized differently and where many of us learn early on that if we don’t have the car keys out before we’re to our car we are going to be robbed/assaulted/raped/etc and it’ll be our fault for not having been “more aware”. I have some distrust of males because I was in an abusive relationship for many years and because I was almost raped, but I also feel that I learned more about the “threat from men” through the media and movies and my culture, than I did through some of my own experiences. My experiences just solidified what I’d already been told about my chances of being assaulted, etc. If that makes sense.