Femme fatale

Further to this, this:

The episode of police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit featuring Jennifer Love   Hewitt as a guest star aired in the US last night and the scenes were highly distressing.

The former Ghost Whisperer star played a battered and bruised woman, Vicki Sayers, who has been brutally raped by the same man over a period of fifteen years.

As I mentioned in my Rape Culture post below, there is a disturbing number of rape plotlines in primetime lately.

True a lot of violent crime against women consists of rape. So I concede that it makes sense that, when women are victims on CSI or Criminal Minds, rape is almost to be expected.

However there is something very sickening about how it's increasingly fodder for entertainment, how it's depcted not so much in a horrifying way but in a kinky sexual way.

Of course, none of the shows sanction rape but they sure get lurid about it.

I don't know. Maybe I am just getting old.

What do you think?

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: I see from comments coming in -- which the Star mods have yet to post -- that some people believe that these TV rapes are instructive. Perhaps they are.

But here's the thing: The majority of actual rapes are committed not by strangers and serial killers, as we so often see in media, but acquaintancesof the victim.

Sometimes it's called ''date rape.'' Sometimes abuse. Sometimes incest. It's still rape.

So how do these gruesome TV plotlines fit in with informing viewers of men's responsibility not to rape if the perpetrators in these episodes are, more often than not, portrayed as sick, violent sociopaths?

The reality is different (PDF).

Police-reported data, which include victims of every age, indicate that the accused was a family member in nearly a third (31%) of sexual offence incidents that came to the attention of law enforcement in 2007, with extended family members (10%), the victim’s parents (10%), or some other immediate family member (7%) identified as the accused most frequently. Less often, relatives accused in sexual assaults were current or former spouses (4%), and rarely were they the victim’s child (0.3%). Similar to the proportion of sexual offences where the accused was a relative, 28% of police-reported sexual assaults involved offenders who were casual acquaintances of the victim. To a lesser extent, offenders were identified as friends (8%), authority figures (6%), current or former boyfriends/girlfriends (5%), or business acquaintances (4%) of the victims.

So I don't buy the notion that there's something ''instructive'' in the gruesome rapes (and murders) of women in entertainment media.

 

Comments

[Connie Donoghue]

Yeah, I totally agree about the lurid entertainment today. That's why I've stopped watching ALL of those types of shows. AND, because of the heartbreaking results of CNN's recent updated-2010-version-of the-1947-Doll-test-race-self-image test for kids...after the heartbreaking results of the recent DollTest, I no longer watch ANY Foxtunes - no Simpsons, no Family Guy and CERTAINLY no American Dad!! (aaaagggghhhh!!)

And, I'm going to complain to both Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that their duelling marches on Oct 30th dont have ANY women organizers nor female rally-celebrities....even tho' Tina Fey would be a HUGELY appropriate addition to their marches....
...and no those things are NOT odd segues from your blogtopic because the routine depiction of female victimness has vaulted some gun-totin' women politicians into celebrity status....

I therefore call for Less Foxtunes, less female victimness for entertainment, and more women leaders who DONT carry guns to signal their tough, non-victimness !

[Some Old Guy]

Antonia, I hear ya. I did not see that particular episode, but rape is the bread-and-butter, the raison d'etre of SVU.

And although I have not seen this particular episode, I have seen enough other episodes to believe that the aim is not to romanticize or glamorize rape, but to show it for the horror that it is and to arouse - not prurient interest - but the repulsion that the crime of rape truly deserves.

Virtually every episode or Law and Order: Special Victims Unit concludes with either the perpetrator punished, or the agony of his/her escape.

I don't see SVU as your enemy, Antonia. I see the show as your ally.

I stand to be corrected.

[Kim U]

I think I would rather they put rape out there in shows to let it be talked about. Maybe it's not always done in the best way, but people have a habit of hiding their heads in the sand about any issue that makes them uncomfortable.

Rape is an uncomfortable subject, clearly, since many different sources seem to belittle it or turn it around to the victim. The media does put it out there as entertainment in some respects, yes, but at least people have to acknowledge that it happens and needs to be addressed and don't just pretend that it never happens.

[heather]

I haven't seen the episode, but I read that it's intent was to bring more attention to the backlog of rape kits in the US. Law and Order SVU has a lot of plot lines that involve rape since that's the nature of the department being featured but I've always felt that they made the effort to maintain the horrifying nature of it rather than attempting to glamourize it at all. Yes there are storylines where the victim doesn't know their attacker but I feel like in many of them, they do. I've watched enough Law and Order SVU to know that the most likely suspect is always a family member, significant other or acquaintance. You might want to watch a show before commenting on it.

[Antonia]

Hey Heather,

Thanks for your comment. As you can see from the story from which I quote and to which I link, it's quite clear that the episode was about rape kits. (That's an issue about which I have written, by the way.)

I am very familiar with the show as, for some 17 years, I was TV and/or media columnist at The Star. I reviewed its debut, as well as the debut of the original Law & Order, and all the CSIs etc.

I have never said any of these shows ''glamourize'' rape.

What I do condemn is, the constant and systematic reliance on rape as a plot point, a ploy for ratings, a form of voyeuristic entertainment. Does it not strike you as puzzling that raped and brutalized women appear so often on primetime dramas, especially in comparison to how many male characters there are versus how many female characters?

This is not my opinion. This is a measurable fact.

http://www.thegeenadavisinstitute.org/

http://womenintvfilm.sdsu.edu/resources.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cYaczoJMRhs

[ArielT]

I agree with you. I stopped watching these shows a few years ago. They exploit rape for cheap entertainment and they portray virtually all women as victims. There are much smarter, well-written shows on TV that don't always involve a brutalized woman as the core plot element.

[Daniela]

I got rid of my cable! Can't put up with such bull. Can't believe people actually fall for it and take the bait.
GO OUTSIDE, play games, hmmmm....maybe even TALK TO OTHERS INSTEAD!

[Steve C]

I don't see there being a major increase in the proportion of sex and violence in pop culture. There was plenty of sick stuff twenty years ago. I think there is more of it in total due to the explosion in breadth of content (new cable channels and the internet). This is most prevalent in the pornography explosion of the internet. Perhaps we find this stuff more grating because of our disconnection from it in real life; in the same way we find it mind-boggling to go over the border and find people smoking in mall food-courts.

I think the sexual violence in the media is more of a sad reflection of us rather than a significant contributing factor to real crimes. We need better sexual education in our schools that teach everyone (i.e. not just the boys) how to engage in consensual relations, as well as why it is important. It also wouldn't hurt to give kids practical advice on how to have good sex, in the manner of Sue Johanson. This way, they wouldn't look to pornography for instruction, and they would be able to recognize the male power-tripping aspect of porn for what it is.

If our society as a whole had a better understanding of healthy sexual relations, pop culture would quickly change.