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You can't censor my bondage slavery fic! Part One.
I haven't posted here in years. Well, until I finally found something definitely worth preserving over here. This wank is reported in two parts, primarily because the wank itself is spread over two sizeable threads on the same forum.

Today's new flavour of wank comes to us courtesy of the SpaceBattles forum. The site originated as hosting for several fanmade 3D movies. From there, the site added a forum, becoming a place for science fiction fans to come talk about their favorite shows. Today, the site enjoys a userbase of almost 75,000 members, with subforums dedicated to roleplaying, fanart, and arguing over whether Superman could beat Goku, or the Enterprise-D could fight a Star Destroyer.

None of those, however, are what concerns us, today.

Spacebattles also possesses a creative writing subforum. In practice, this is mostly filled with fanfiction of varying levels of quality, plus another subforum dedicated to recommendation and handing out plot bunnies. For the most part, the content there consists of various flavours of gun porn, power-gaming, and a phenomenon known as "Humanity Fuck Yeah", in which plucky humanity triumphs over a variety of alien invaders out to enslave/destroy us. (Popular candidates for this role include the Minbari of Babylon 5 and the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, after two very popular an influential fanfics first posted on that board.)

All this is background to the events recorded in this post.

Forums user Lord Charon makes a post in a plot bunny thread for Harry Potter fanfics describing an idea he just can't let go off:

When Hagrid goes to get Harry, he introduces him to a girl on a leash, whom Hagrid calls 'Ermione, and says is going to be Harry's guide and servant due to having been raised in the muggle world, but also having lived a few years in the wizarding world. When Harry sees (or perhaps touches) the crest on her collar, he gets a feeling similar to the one he gets when he first holds his wand, and when he asks about the collar and leash, Hagrid explains that the leash is just to show who's responsible for her, while the collar keeps her under control, and connects her to her Master (Harry). Hagrid looks on her fondly, like one of his 'interesting creatures' (well, she's probably less dangerous than a dragon, at least), but reluctantly admits that she killed three people, even if it wasn't her fault.

Responses range from stunned incomprehension to, "This is just wrong." Some time later, a mod arrives to berate Lord Charon and ban him for the contents of his post. Lord Charon's post, however, is left intact.

Shit immediately begins to fly:

"The ruling was shit. Sure it was dark. Very dark in fact. But not worthy of an insta ban. I could somewhat understand a temp band but this.... This is just a mod going on a power trip to lord his own values over others using the vague rules of the site."

"I'm not even sure it's worth a temp-ban. It could have gone very inappropriate places, but merely discussing potential 'slavery' in a setting that actually has it (House Elves) even if it is vaguely sanatized."

Among the voices loud in their disapproval of the mod action is arthurh3535, who is equally loud in denouncingt he perceived arbitrariness of the mod action:

So, basically, it maybe/sorta alludes to something so isn't worth deleting, but bring down the ban-hammer so that everyone know that you ban even thinking of writing something uncomfortable because 'girl slavery' automatically equates squicky sex-slavery.

There's at least two sets of double-standards in that...

Despite (or perhaps because of) a mod stepping in to clarify the administration's position, other posters continue to echo arthurh3535's paranoia of mod oppression:

"What I dislike about this recent slavery issue is that it de facto cuts off a huge avenue to establish why a person / race / polity / religion / custom / nation deserves to get it's shit stomped in unless I take an alrready well established example which exihibits the feature I need in my antagonist(...)Now let us take an reader who has never heard of Draka and is now wondering: "Who are these Draka guys and why is everyone else in thread cheering that they're about to be invaded by walking sharktopus ?". So when he asks the thread, what answer should he get, according to how I interpret this recent application of moderator interpretation of the relevant rules ?

I think it would run along the lines of "Oh we can't tell you, we would get banned for it". "

(Note: The Draka mentioned above are a villainous race of Mary Sues from a pulp book series by S.M. Stirling. The series describes the slow conquest and enslavement of humanity by this race of genetic supermen, with the exception of a small remnant that flees for outer space. Understandably, they make somewhat popular villains for crossover fanfiction on Spacebattles.)

Surprisingly, despite comments from various posters explaining exactly what the problem is, arthurh3535 recalcitrantly fails to understand the reasoning behind the original mod action. In desperation, forums user Harry Leferts posts snippets from a particularly dark fic he wrote, pointing out that he never sustained any mod action from these posts, only for arthrh3535 to sneer:

"If the Mod had decided that it was too much for that moment, you'd be banned because he felt it was 'too much' even if it was not a deep or disturbing imagery per se.(...)Tomorrow he might decide that your story is too far and ban you, because you should be an amazing mind reader with precognitive powers to know that he can just decide something like that so arbitrarily.

Finally, not one but two mods step in to declare an end to the discussion:

"...if you are writing up a story(or even a story idea) which has an underage child being a "slave", and you don't think to yourself "wow this could go horribly in the wrong direction, maybe I should make it absolutely clear of what this is, and more importantly, what this isn't", because finishing it off with "'Servant' might or might not mean 'slave', it's up to the writer." tells me the poster didn't care. And that is not going to fly.

Now seriously, drop this derailment. You now have a second mod confirming what the first did(which shouldn't even be needed in the first place!). This goes double for all the people needlessly bitching about Kensai; we have a Complaint Procedure, check the news forum and follow it, before I start handing out temp-bans.

"The key issue is that we have found we can't trust this sub forums judgement at all.

You want to complain about us cracking down on stuff, but we're trying to contain this thing by stopping people from driving the Creeper Monkey to the Little Girl International Airport. If you have a problem with that, blame the people who buddy fucked you, assuming you're not the person doing all the buddy fucking."

This effectively ends the argument in this thread. Discussion moves on to more pleasant topics. The wank however, has not died. Elsewhere in the forum, it is brewing. That discussion, the fallout from the whole affair, will be discussed in my next post.

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	seiberwing 2013-02-11 04:35 pm UTC (link)
	girl slavery' automatically equates squicky sex-slavery. Um. In general, yes? (Reply to this)(Thread)

	quantumreality 2013-02-11 04:42 pm UTC (link)
	This. I've heard of a number of Zutara fanfics, for example, where Katara becomes a slave of Zuko's, and the way the authors write 'em it's only by virtue of the flimsy content regulations of ff.n that they don't go to full-on Zuko using Katara for sexual purposes. But you can tell they'd totally go there if they could. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	seiberwing 2013-02-11 04:46 pm UTC (link)
	I have yet to find an instance where a male writing about an enslaved female (excluding historical stuff and so on, of course) has not turned into a fetish fic. Ever. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

ekaterinv
2013-02-11 09:05 pm UTC (link)

It has to exist, right? A man must be able to right about female slavery, even rape, without being fetish-y about it. And yet, every recent published example I can think of... doesn't. Even Jim C. Hines ended up disappointing me, though I could tell he was trying not to be gross. Didn't work well enough for me to finish the book, though.

Actually, Bioware did an okay job with Dragon Age 2. I don't know who wrote parts where it was clear mages were being raped, though. And they did not do an okay job with Star Wars: ToR. (Tip: if you are not allowed to say the word "rape" or even "sex" in your media, do not put rape in it all over the damn place.)

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	seiberwing 2013-02-11 09:08 pm UTC (link)
	Didn't DA2 have actual ladywomen on the team to provide ladyinput? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ekaterinv 2013-02-11 09:18 pm UTC (link)
	Yep. About half the writing staff, iirc. Bioware's usually been pretty good about it generally, though (unless I'm forgetting things, entirely possible), which is one reason ToR is such a big disappointment to me in that area. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	white_serpent 2013-02-11 11:57 pm UTC (link)
	Wheel of Time? The constant dwelling on whippings in Tar Valon struck me as fetish, but the specific examples of female servitude or slavery in the Wheel of Time (gai'shain, damane) didn't. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	cinnamonical 2013-02-12 01:11 am UTC (link)
	Even Jim C. Hines ended up disappointing me, though I could tell he was trying not to be gross. Didn't work well enough for me to finish the book, though. Which book was it? Was it from the Princess novels? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	ekaterinv 2013-02-12 05:08 am UTC (link)
	Libriomancer. He tried, he really did. Any maybe it worked out okay for some people. But not for me. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	cinnamonical 2013-02-12 05:11 am UTC (link)
	Aww, I was looking forward to checking out that book! Well, I'll keep it in mind whenever I get around to it. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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	uldihaa 2013-02-12 03:17 am UTC (link)
	Can you tell me where in SW:ToR the rape stuff is? I'm playing it, and I'd really like to avoid that if I can. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

ekaterinv
2013-02-12 05:03 am UTC (link)

It is all over the place, so I will likely miss many things in this list.

A whole lot of time whenever slavery is mentioned. On Tattoine, in multiple quests, slavers kidnap ONLY women. This is so lacking in plausibility in a galaxy in which slaves are openly used in construction and such, that it is very fetishy. Also one quest, Republic side, treats the women who were kidnapped as secondary to the nearest male character's concern for them.

All of Nar Shadaa, both sides. All those "dancers"? Sex slaves. The Sith Warrior is the only one who can do anything about it, and that is only the smallest dent.

The Sith Warrior quest line. You have a decision over whether or not to kidnap a woman and take her to a man who is going to rape her. (Again, the word "rape" is not used, which is what really grosses me out about this -- that the game uses weasel-words. You do get to kill the man if you want, btw.) If you are female, you can order one of your male companions to have sex with you. It's obvious that he's very much fine with this, and he's the kind of guy who would likely blow up your ship if he wasn't. But there is, as far as I can tell, no way to start a romance with him without ordering him to sleep with you. As you're Sith and he's not and you're his commander ... yeah. If you want, you can also sexually harass the other male companion who joins the Warrior, though happily this is not necessary to his romance. Unhappily, he will still romance you even if you do this. (The beginning flirting with him isn't sexually harassing, but there comes a point where he makes clear it is unwelcome, and you can keep doing it.)

I have played Knight and Inquisitor to their conclusions, and seen Consular to the end, and if your character is a woman, there isn't any rape or dubcon within those questlines that I can remember. (But if you're a Knight, you get darkside points for romancing your one romance interest, and some of the lines you can say slut-shame yourself.) If your character is a man, your romance interest is your padawan/apprentice, you have even more power over her than you'd expect just knowing that, and she calls you "master" the whole time. This is also true of the male Consular and dark side male Warrior. But not of any of the romance interests for a female PC, who are better-written and altogether less squick-making, even counting the one you can order to sleep with you. It's obviously not written to be rape, but I don't see how any of the female companions in question can be said to have freedom to withhold consent, either. The male Consular's romance story particularly squicks me out, though technically she probably has more freedom than the other companions I've mentioned.

I know I'm missing things, both because I can't remember it all and because I haven't played all the class quests. Avoiding it just isn't possible. I got to the point where I was constantly ready for rapeyness, and it turned out to be kinda necessary. To avoid it as much as possible, I'd say: 1) Play a female character 2) Avoid the Sith Warrior questline. Overall, I do like the Sith Warrior questline, and I very much enjoy the romance with Malavai Quinn... but the whole thing needs trigger warnings. The whole game needs trigger warnings.

Basically, there is a ton of rape all over the place, in a game in which you can put female characters but not male characters in sex slave outfits, in which there are exactly zero male exotic dancers but female exotic dancers/sex slaves in nearly every cantina and sometimes other random locations. They did an absolutely terrible job with this, though the romances for female characters are much more varied and just plain better overall than those for male characters. And someone at Bioware has such a severe male master/female student fetish, it infected half the romances for male PCs in the game. (Or they were severely lazy and copy-pasted.)

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	ekaterinv 2013-02-12 05:06 am UTC (link)
	Holy shit that was a long comment. Sorry for all the Thoughts. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

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	franzen 2013-02-12 07:06 pm UTC (link)
	I had to keep noting JEDI because this gave me so many flashbacks to ASOIAF. (Reply to this)(Parent)

tw: discussion of works that deal with rape.

franzen
2013-02-12 06:05 am UTC (link)

Going with some litfic examples first:

(1) Ian McEwan has written a non-fetish rape scene. It's in The Innocent, which is set in Germany during the '50s and the plot centers around counterintel operations. It's not sexy, for the reader or for the character, and it's a break from the standard "stranger rape" trope -- the book's third person limited, the protagonist is meant to be easy to identify with, he's been morally clear until now, and then he rapes his girlfriend. It also avoids the classic "rape in warfare" or "rape of a captive population" card that writers play to excuse themselves from dwelling on the atrocities -- the sexy, sexy atrocities -- in the name of world-building.

Subverted in that at the end of the novel, many decades later, we learn that the girlfriend has forgiven the protagonist, although I think McEwan was deliberately drawing parallels to the fact that "old" and "new" values are identical and, essentially, that history repeats. (It's one theme in the book.)

(2) Jonathan Franzen's Freedom: Patty, one of the three or four major characters, was raped as a teenager. This information is narrated by her, in an autobiographical piece she writes that's part of the novel. I read Freedom when it came out (summer 2010) and was -- just past a series of shattering revictimization experiences c/o Structure, Inc. I can't remember any details of the rape itself (I'm not even sure Franzen provided them, short of establishing that it occurred); Patty's parents talk to the parents of the rapist, but they're too politically powerful to move against. There's a scene in which her father asks her if a private apology would suffice and Patty attempts to explain that it was the way he looked at her afterward, as if she was nothing -- I'm paraphrasing wildly here, but that specific bit of writing was one of those moments in reading where the reader's reality and the text merge until there's a sense of not alone. I was stunned by how well he pulled it off.

The rest of the novel is absolutely godawful with its treatment of female characters (it doesn't even pass the Bechdel test), which enraged me to no end, as Franzen is completely capable of writing strong women when he feels like it (see: Strong Motion). That being said, he swung and hit the ball out of the park, as he managed to write about, again, a common, unreported, unsexy kind of rape and the most salient part of its aftermath (as well as societal failures in dealing with rape, i.e., lack of family acknowledgement and/or the rapist continuing as a valued member of society) and it was -- authentic, both to the character and to real life, at least in my opinion. Certainly, it wasn't sexy.

(3 and 4) And from the fail end of the pool: Michael Chabon wrote a short story in which a woman gives birth to a child conceived during rape (it's not in A Model World -- it's one of his earlier pieces) and fails, hard. The best part of that story? The narrator is the woman's husband (or boyfriend, I can't remember), so, yeah, it's "rape of women as male character development" hour. I don't hold Chabon in particularly high esteem, period, but that particular short story stuck in my craw and was my you and me, we're fucking done professionally moment.

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(con't.)

franzen
2013-02-12 06:05 am UTC (link)

David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews With Hideous Men is the Rape Power Hour, with men talking about women and rape at length to an unknown narrator. Interspersed with these segments are a few actually good short pieces, including a vignette that's stunningly beautiful and elegiac. (That's at the front of the book. It goes downhill after.) This is also the book with the short fiction piece that's based on Elizabeth Wurtzel (and, man, that piece is nasty, not that I'm a particular fan of Wurtzel's). There "hideous men" portions are bad -- one has a man interrogating the (presumably female) researcher and getting abusive at the idea that rape and abuse is an inherent bad, because the woman might become a better person for it. It's much, much worse than my paraphrase can render it, because I've done my best to delete that from my mind; I was triggered while reading, so not much stuck. The final entry in the book is a never-ending monologue from a man in which he details how a woman he once slept with was kidnapped and raped by a serial killer but managed to live and how that enabled her to "save" him. I was hoping the serial killer would show up to finish Monologue Guy off, but no such luck.

David Foster Wallace can't write female characters, period, and his interviews and biographies do not make him more sympathetic. I realize that most people consider him to be Saint DFW (and have no love for Franzen), but Wallace -- comes across as a genuine misogynist in his interviews; I don't think it's an act on his part. Franzen has many faults as a writer and a human being, the gender problems in Freedom killed my ability to enjoy the book in total, but I've read his entire body of work and I have yet to see something that creeps me out. Franzen disappoints me (as does McEwan, in some works), but DFW is ... a truly special case of "entitled privileged white dude saves world, uses privilege to deal massive damage in real life and in his work."

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Re: (con't.) -

khym_chanur, 2013-02-12 06:19 pm UTC

	tunxeh 2013-02-12 04:29 am UTC (link)
	Does Una in Stardust count as not a fetish fic? (To be fair, many of the examples I can find of female writers writing about enslaved males also come off as a bit fetishy. C.J. Cherryh's Cyteen is a case in point, much as I like it.) (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	pyratejenni 2013-02-17 12:46 pm UTC (link)
	Cherryh's always had a fetish about enslaved/powerless men. Look at the Morgaine Cycle. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	ekaterinv 2013-02-11 08:55 pm UTC (link)
	Considering irl slavery for girls and women pretty much always means rape as part of it, um... yeah. And in the antebellum South, for boys and men too, though more often at one remove: a master forcing two slaves together so he could "breed" them. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

franzen
2013-02-12 07:52 pm UTC (link)

Which is why I think that no matter what is written, the idea is inherently fetishistic and it's going to take skill beyond what most authors have to write the issue without sliding into fetish conventions. It doesn't help that many authors/creators will add in a character who's shown to "enjoy" the hierarchy, because only really obviously evil people enjoy rape. (This is also almost always one that shows up with child slavery and pedophilia, although in my anecdotal consumption of media, women are underrepresented as child sex abuse victims and the "evil, therefore a remorseless pedophile" plot tends to use men. (I'm not even counting fandom works.) This is -- problematic on so many levels and reflective of rape culture, unfortunately, which conditions us to accept the shockingly high rates of abuse of women and ignores the idea of abused men.)

Skyfall had a child-turned-adult sex slave have sex with Bond, completely with an incredibly creepy seduction shot and Bond having noted earlier that she was terrified (which erases consent, you fuck). The first encounter was actually good at dealing with sex slavery and featured none of the "evil empires love rape" fetish -- the victim was in a country where people could easily disappear and her slavery was much closer to the real world than fantasy elements. Then things went to a sex scene that was so triggering that I left the movie having completely dissociated and with no idea why I was in a non-specific sort of trigger space (I didn't realize I had been triggered until the next day -- the way Bond meets the woman for rape is staged so that she knows someone has entered but he waits to reveal that it's 'the hero,' so he's playing with her fear and it's highly sexualized, because who DOESN'T find terrifying their partner before sex a total success move?). So, yeah, I don't know how creators can separate slavery from fetish, even halfway.

I think the biggest roadblocks are: (1) totally not understanding slavery and the genesis of the phrase 'the banality of evil' -- there were sadistic slave owners but there was also Thomas Jefferson, who hated slavery but loved the economic advantage and who educated his slaves in certain trades because that created a valuable class of workers and meant he could sell "x" uneducated slaves (and reduce his own costs in terms of having to provide at least minimal food and shelter); this is horrifying but it's not easily short handed in world building. Problem (2) is rape culture and how rapists are presented in media. I wish I could forget what I studied of offender psychology, but admitting to non-stereotyped rapists and pedophiles would lead to the uncomfortable truth that sex crimes don't require slavery to flourish, only indifference.

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ekaterinv
2013-02-12 10:09 pm UTC (link)

Thomas Jefferson also had a longtime sexual relationship with a slave. This was, obviously, rape. And yet she returned to him, when she could have stayed away, and lived as a free woman -- so things can get really complicated. (Though she might have just returned to him because he still "owned" her children, which is not so complicated.) This was also before slavery in the antebellum South reached its worst pitch of abuse. Not that it wasn't already incredibly horrible and abusive before, of course, but in Jefferson's time it was more like slavery had been in the past, rather than the outlier that pre-Civil War racial slavery became.

I'm trying myself to write about rape within a culture with slavery, and related to slavery, in an okay way. Any rape scenes can be fetishized by some people; that can't be helped. But I think simply not addressing it at all would be worse. Thinking about times when I believe it's been done well, I think one thing that's important (besides calling it what it is), is to make it important to the work, but to also show that it does not entirely define the victim's life. Also to show it from the victim's perspective.

Can you say what was triggering about the scene? Was it that someone who was supposed to be the hero was doing something so terrible, and that the movie did not admit it was terrible, or was it that it was there at all?

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tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:55 pm UTC (link)

True, but I used Jefferson as my example because American history has a blind spot with regard to just how unwilling he was to let go of his slaves while decrying slavery. When a friend called his bluff by offering to pay -- "I can't free my slaves, it would be economic ruin" -- Jefferson still refused. As you said, he also had a sexual relationship with a slave, which actually doesn't tend to be sensationalized in media so much as underplayed, because it doesn't fit any trope. There was a recent non-fiction biography of Jefferson that goes into just how unwilling he was to free his slaves and to let go of slavery of an institution, despite all the pretty words he wrote. Which is what makes him so fucking horrifying, at least to me, and goes back to Eichmann in Jerusalem and the core of what any work dealing with slavery is going to have to address. I haven't seen Tarantino's film (you can tell because I can't even remember the name) with DiCaprio and Waltz, but I remember reading articles debunking the idea of slave owners forcing their slaves to fight, which was apparently what DiCaprio's character was doing. (Based on the trailers, the scenery was pretty delicious, as he was going to town.)

There's "slavery is evil, and to demonstrate, let me show you the rape," which ends up as fetish regardless of intent (this is the most generous I'm willing to be regarding George R.R. Martin). Then there's "non-sadistic slave owners, who are wrong, but you can feel okay for liking them because they know not what they do/it's excused by context and/or history," which also tends to fall into fetish territory. Sometimes creators don't even bother detailing why human trafficking and/or slavery are allowed; I was stuck on Italian national rail and wound up reading The Kite Runner in one go -- it's an awful book on so very many levels, but perhaps the "best" part is when a villain randomly becomes a pedophile to demonstrate his truly evil nature. It's not fetish, but it's one storyline/presentation of slavery that's incredibly common and a long way from reality.

As far as Skyfall is concerned, this is the problem: in Scene 1, Bond talks to a very attractive woman he's seen before, who is employed by the antagonist Bond is after. While seated at the bar, Bond remarks that it takes a certain kind of woman to wear a backless dress and a thigh holster (can't remember what kind of gun she had -- it doesn't matter), there's some banter, but the scene's relevance hits when Bond examines her wrist and notes that she has a tattoo denoting who "owns" her. He says he knows enough about women to know when a woman is terrified (as the woman in question is), tells her her life history (she was abducted or otherwise captured as a child and turned into a sex slave at a young age, so from childhood on, she's been in the employ of the antagonist's forces), and he offers to rescue her. She tells him that the two men who have been watching them are her guards and will attempt to kill him after she leaves, but, should he survive, she's set to leave the current location at midnight (or whatever) and then tells him where the boat is docked.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:56 pm UTC (link)

She exits, followed by an action sequence. When that's over, the next shot is of the woman in question in her room on the boat (still docked), wearing a nightgown and examining herself in front of a mirror. A random man opens the door, she startles, he announces departure and leaves, and the camera pans to the table, where the woman is looking forlornly at the two champagne glasses she had readied. She sips from her own and sighs, then starts a shower.

The camera is filming her from behind the (steamed-over) shower glass at first, and then -- okay, here we go: the camera moves to inside the shower, and I think she's humming to herself as she lathers either her hair or her shoulder, but a noise very obviously startles her. She stops moving. The camera shows that the noise is, yes, the shower door opening, and it focuses on Bond's face (and naked torso). Bond -- says nothing and does nothing for a very long moment, during which his face can be read any number of ways, but "anticipatory" is one inarguable element. So: he's watching her in the shower, she's been spooked (and has no reason to think it's him and not, say, another one of the men who are holding her captive, as we saw moments ago); there's a very long moment in which we have a woman who is clearly scared (not moving, refusing to look behind to see who's there) and a "hero" character who is obviously enjoying the sight before him but also the cause of her fear, and, in fact, prolonging it. After that pause, he steps behind her and says something about how she looks better without the gun, she murmurs about feeling naked without it, they start kissing, and the camera moves back behind the shower glass.

There are multiple problems here: (1) The woman he's sleeping with has confirmed that she has been a sex slave for the majority of her life. This couldn't possibly be unsexy or cause consent issues for a man. What could possibly be hotter than a hot chick? I mean, yeah, you know someone "owns" her and has since she was a kid, but it's not like you have to consider that. (2) It's repeatedly stated that she's terrified. The only people I've ever known who found terror sexy are rapists. The majority of rapists want to see their victims in fear, as that's what they find sexually exciting. (3) Let's bracket the "consent" and "past trauma" issues (even though the trauma isn't past, since the woman is still currently enslaved) for a moment and pretend that this is just meant to be a sex scene. Okay. So why the hell is Bond terrifying the person he's about to have sex with and all but licking his chops as he watches her terror? And why is this presented as sexy and an unquestioned good?

It's okay, though, because the next time we see her, she's had her faced punched up, and then she dies. No one cares. This is actually stated by Bond at the time of her death. The "damsel in distress" trope is pretty common to the Bond films, obviously, but 1995's GoldenEye and then the recent Craig films had subverted it up until this point -- Bond would claim not to care about the hostage but, in fact, did, or the supposedly distressed damsel would change her own fate. Even in more straight iterations of "Bond Girl" deaths, there was some level of concern/remorse on Bond's behalf when he found the body. In the Craig era, Bond was brutally deconstructed by M and Vesper for his indifference to women (fake or not); M actually shows up to tear Bond several new orifices over the fact that he'll sleep with women who have nothing to do with the mission, leaving them to become easy targets for anyone looking for Bond. So not only does the woman in Skyfall die during a sick game of William Tell, Bond explicitly states that he absolutely doesn't care. She's never mentioned again.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse.

franzen
2013-02-12 11:57 pm UTC (link)

I wasn't triggered because something in the scene directly related to my real life (... does anything in a James Bond movie have anything to do with real life?) or past sexual abuse experiences. It was the more "atmospheric/situational/cultural" kind of trigger, where superficially I had no reason to be upset but, thanks to trauma, my brain began to check out and I just waited for the movie to please fucking end. It took me until the next day to realize that (1) I had been triggered; (2) that was the source of my current "something feels off" mood; and (3) what the mechanics of it were. For me, it was seeing "terror" presented as sexy, even a natural stop on the way to bed. The staging, the expressions of the two characters, and the way Bond had complete control over whether or not to announce himself (and free the woman from the worry that she was going to be raped by one of the ship's crew) -- not to mention the fact that no one invited him into the fucking shower anyway -- was what threw me for such a loop.

Having been on the receiving end of that tactic -- "I JUST TERRIFIED YOU, LET'S HAVE SEX" -- and having had to physically fight my way out of that dynamic, I can't see the sexy. I can't see it at all. My favorite allies in real life are my male ones, who were the first to understand my experiences as violent -- because if sex involves a woman who's motionless, scared, crying, "playing dead," and unable to look at you, that's the opposite of what "good sex" is (to non-rapists). In the Skyfall case, it's particularly bad, because you know (and so does Bond) that the woman is scared because this has undoubtedly happened to her on many prior occasions, as a child and as an adult, and always ended in rape. The sex scene between the two didn't have to be nearly that uncomfortable (it would have been problematic, to say the least) but, for whatever reason, someone decided to stage it using rape tropes. I suppose you're supposed to cheer when Bond reveals himself and the two of them begin kissing passionately. Anticipation! Buildup! Screenwriting 101!

Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse have discussed how showering and bathing is often when abuse occurs, as helping a young child in the bathtub is an easy excuse. Some become terrified of bathtubs, shower stalls; of not locking the door upon entry; some refuse to close their eyes while bathing. I doubt the people behind Skyfall have reason to know these things, but that's what makes the scene even more horrifying. It's not even a new use of rape tropes; it's something women face every fucking day -- but it's okay, because it's Bond, and he's the hero.

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Re: tw: detailed description of rape scene mentioned in prior comment & discussion of sexual abuse. -

ekaterinv, 2013-02-13 01:21 am UTC

	jetamors 2013-02-13 10:38 pm UTC (link)
	To be specific, Sally Hemmings stayed with Jefferson because he promised that he'd free her family if she did. The only slaves he ever freed (all 6 or 7 of them :/) were relatives of hers. (Reply to this)(Parent)

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