Two days ago, I read Seanan McGuire’s blog post about some idiot asking her What’s the matter with you, why aren’t your characters getting raped like they should be?
It was shocking, and disturbing, and dismaying. What an idiot, I thought. Why would anyone ask such a thing? What planet do they live on?
And then I went back to the book I was reading, a collection of novellas by a well known genre writer. And half the stories featured rape, and other sexual violence against women.
That was disturbing, I thought. Then at breakfast I picked up the New Yorker I was currently reading (I’m always months and months behind), and read the fiction selection in that issue, and it was about the abduction of an underage girl, and–if not technically rape, as written–a sexual encounter she was almost certainly powerless to avoid.
I’m reading too many disturbing things, I thought. It’s giving me nightmares. I’ll read a book by a well known literary writer, whose nice, rape-free books I’ve always enjoyed in the past.
And chapter one introduces a problematic female character–feisty, doesn’t get along well with other women–and chapter two describes how she was raped when she was younger.
Seriously: what’s with all the rape? Is that really all we can do as writers to make a woman interesting? To give her a difficult or complex backstory? To explain why she’s irrational or complicated or–gosh, you know–human? Male characters can be all sorts of fascinating and complicated, and they don’t have to be sexually violated to make them so. They get to just be, you know, men. People. With every backstory possible. They can even be the characters they are FOR NO REASON.
I’m with Seanan: I don’t want to write about rape. I don’t want to put my female characters through that. It’s never occurred to me to. I don’t even particularly want to read about it–and this is NOT me saying I want to pretend it away, that I am closing my eyes to the real world, the all-too-real statistics. I mean, hell yes, I wish I could MAKE rape not exist, I wish I could DECREE that (mostly male) humans Do Not Violate (mostly female) humans this way. If wishes were ponies…
Writers can–should–WILL–write whatever they want. But I’m going to read what I want, too; and thank you, Seanan, for assuring me that I will never stumble across Gratuitous Rape As Plot Device in your books.