sabotabby | Your daily moment of nerdraeg

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fengi: New Tomb Raider prequel gives us Lara Croft's backstory, and surprise! It's rape!

Because there was clearly a shortage of Strong Female Characters^TM whose backstory involves rape.

I've never played Tomb Raider, but I do appreciate the character a bit. Yes, she's fanservice, but she's also fun. She gets to run around and do stuff, and, sad to say, there are still very few female characters in mass culture who get to run around and do stuff in a traditionally male dominated field simply because it's fun. I don't even see why she needs a backstory, any more than the backstory we get for Indiana Jones (difficult relationship with father, snake trauma, moving on to the adventures now). Lara Croft is basically Indiana Jones with boobs, and that's just fine, really.

But enough with that. On to the justifications!

Rosenberg brings up Die Hard, another movie where we begin a relationship with a human, vulnerable character and through an intense experience he emerges as a hero. It was important to show her as an innocent, vulnerable character at the beginning of the game. “People really identify with that,” Rosenberg said.

Right. I forgot the bit where John McClane gets raped, despite having seen Die Hard more times than I can count. Maybe because John McClane doesn't need a rapey backstory to be seen as a hero or for the audience to identify with him.

“I would say that the outcome is closer to something like Batman Begins or Casino Royale, where the character at the end is certainly Batman or James Bond, but not necessarily the one from before,” he said.

You know what else I missed? The part where Bruce Wayne gets raped. James Bond got some electrodes to the balls if I remember correctly, but I don't think he got raped either. And somehow they both managed to become kickass without a rapey backstory. In fact, I can't think of a single male pop culture character whose backstory involves rape. But pick a Strong Female Character^TM, any Strong Female Character^TM, and someone's gotten rapey with her somewhere. Because obviously no woman can be Strong without trauma in her background, and there is no trauma but rape.

I didn't read the comments but I bet they're full of neckbeards defending this, er, creative decision. Am I right?

ETA: A couple of you raised a good point, which is that most women experience some form of sexual violence in their lifetimes, and why should SFC be exceptions? My objection to this line of reasoning:

1) My problem is not with saying that rape happens (otherwise I wouldn't be hugely obsessed with Game of Thrones right now), it's with rape as a motivating factor. I spent a miserably large percentage of my early adolescence being groped by horny boys on the playground. This did not make me into a superhero. It made me self-conscious about my developing body.

2) As a motivation, rape is incredibly cliché. Want to create a heroine? Can't she be motivated by, I don't know, concern for poor people being forced out of their homes because of gentrification? Or maybe she's a fangirl who wants desperately to be a superhero, so she deliberately alters her body until she has incredible abilities (okay, this idea was already used in The Authority, but I still think it's fantastic). Or, like, anything other than rape. Male heroes have all kinds of motivations, from the death of their parents by violent crime, to getting bitten by a radioactive spider, to girlfriends getting fridged, to loyalty to queen and country, to coming from a family in the hero business, to rationally thinking about it and deciding that it would be a good idea. Why can female heroes be only motivated by one thing?

3) If we're going for realism, why is it always violent stranger-rape? Most rape victims know their attacker. It's usually a family member, friend, or lover. If you want a rape story because it's realistic, maybe make the rape a bit more like what most women experience.

4) But I don't want realism because this is a videogame. Videogames are for escapism and wish fulfillment. Just like I don't want to see a movie where John McClane gets shot in the face by Hans Gruber in the first 10 minutes because that's what would happen in real life, I don't want to see the character I'm pretending to be get raped.

5) So if videogames are about wish fulfillment, then why include rape? I can only conclude that those playing aren't identifying with Lara Croft; they're identifying with her attackers and getting off on it. And that's frightening and disgusting.

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I don't have a lot of energy today so I will respond simply -

Head.

Desk.

Indiana Jones shouldve raped by snakes. Or nazis. Or history. Or all of them at once.

With the caveat that I've not clicked a single link, I find it hard to be mad at a female character's backstory including rape because roughly 95% of all the women I know have rape or rape-ish like things in their personal history. I just made that statistic up, though, I wouldn't be surprised if it's actually more like 98%. I would eat my shoes if it were anything less than 85% though.

You can't have a strong female character without rape because it's the neckbeards' way of subjugating said character.

I forgot the bit where John McClane gets raped

Its in the deleted scenes or the extra-special edition I think.

The one where he flashbacks to nam where captured in a NVA dungeon pit, he has to drink the semen of his fellow captive soldiers to sustain himself, and then they just get carried away, rape the guards and escape.

Gotta be it, no?

I think Davy Crockett was raped by a bear when he was seven.

Edited 2012-06-12 20:34 (UTC)

This.

that's what I thought too.

Tomb Raider was one of the very few video games I played and loved when I was a kid. Depressing.

And considering how much of male gaming culture uses the word/threat of rape as casual slang or against women (fictional and real), I find the claim of the same male gaming culture "identifying" with rape plot lines very, very suspect. It's lazy, exploitative writing.

To be fair, a high enough percentage of women in general are sexually assaulted and raped that it makes sense that a high percentage of Strong Female Characters are. But not 100 bloody percent.,

I thought you might find this interesting:

As well as this. (In regards to the above video):

http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/internet/2012/06/dear-internet-why-you-cant-have-anything-nice

I think the usual figure one sees is is one in four in the US. (Actually, I'm equally likely to see 1 in 5 or 1 in 6, but since I think people are more likely to underreport than overreport, one in four is believable to me.)

I can say for myself that I have no rape in my personal history, nothing even borderline maybe rapey, and yet I am a strong woman who accomplishes things. Astonishingly, I have not had any trouble coming up with compelling motivations for my actions, even without having been raped. My parents are also alive. I must have been bitten by something radioactive at some point, I guess.

That's a pretty vague dynamic to prop up an inflated statistic.

Rape-ish like thing? What is that? Getting your ass grabbed? Having a creepy dude look at you too long?

It just feels too much like the "me too" dynamic in bad grief counseling. Like when you tell a friend that your grandmother died and instead of listening to you, he tells you about his cat that died last year. So now you're depressed about your grandmother and this cat that you never met.

You mean like -

Please. Knowingly and intentionally belittling by deliberately choosing examples which are absurd? Take your psuedo-intellectualism and mansplaining ass asking me for more information you've absolutely any right to and respond to someone else's comment.

I don't give one single FUCK what women talking about their experience with rape feels like to you.

Well I guess it's a step up from when Starsky or Hutch's girlfriend got raped and it drove the entire revenge plot of the episode. And then she disappeared.

Then there's the episode of Too Close For Comfort Where Monroe gets raped. Complete with a laugh track. That's one that everyone wants to forget about.

But seriously, that's just terrible. Granted, if we started Mario Brothers with Luigi raping Mario, that would be cool - ok I'd laugh.

Or the guy from Grand Theft Auto could get raped by a penguin - http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/12/the-perverted-penguins-that-scandalized-the-scott-expedition/

Thanks for the statistic about what it is for women overall in the US. I'm not sure if you were offering it to correct me, but if so, please note that I said women I know. I'm happy to admit that I run in circles where that statistic is likely higher (LGBTQ, sex workers, etc) *shrug*

Please also note that I never said that people who have rape (or grey-area possible-rape) in their history accomplish awesome stuff because of it. Me? I accomplish awesome shit because I'm awesome. I said nothing which ought to have cast aspersions on your character or your motivations. I'm sure when you accomplish awesome shit, it's because you're awesome too, no radioactive biting necessary.

Edited 2012-06-13 05:39 (UTC)

Purely providing info. 1 in 4 sounds really high to me, much higher than I think is acceptable. Although I haven't been raped, I do certainly have friends who have, or who nearly were but escaped. And you're right that there's evidence that it's higher among both the LGBTQ community and sex workers. Which are also both categories least likely to be believed/be able to prosecute.

My snark was definitely for the comic book culture that says women are "activated" by rape, that if they're heroic, it means there's rape in their past and without that rape, they would not be heroic. Which seems to me to ennoble rape.

*nodsnods* I absolutely agree w/ all that. The "activated" thing seems really bizarre to me for precisely the reason you mention. I think it's one of those very bad things that sometimes your mind wants to scitter around and not actually touch, so it's likely that I hand wave and go "lazy cliche story telling because of some element of plausible truthiness, can't be too mad at just that" when it's much more endemic than that and it is something I should be mad at.

Chuck Wendig (of my favourite writing blog, Terrible Minds) wrote a good post about this earlier today. Which includes some details that make it even worse. Check out this choice bit he quotes from a interview someone else did with one of the game developers:

“When people play Lara, they don’t really project themselves into the character,” Rosenberg told me at E3 last week when I asked if it was difficult to develop for a female protagonist.

“They’re more like ‘I want to protect her.’ There’s this sort of dynamic of ‘I’m going to this adventure with her and trying to protect her.’”

Chuck's comment on that:

Well, sure. Because who could possibly relate to a — snerk, gasp — female protagonist? Better instead to assume that we’re just helping the poor dear along.

So yeah, not only did the developers feel the need to throw rape into it, they're also working on the assumption that "people" can't actually identify with female characters, so instead they just had to turn her into a victim so that "people" could feel the need to protect her instead. On the basis of which I can only assume they don't consider women to fall into the category of people...

You are not distinguishing between rape and rape-like activity. And I would like to see where this 95% statistic is coming from. You're the person who is belittling rape by including "rape-like activity" in the mix. You then purposefully left the term vague and when you're saying 95%, it's very easy to be dismissive of it.

Granted, you stated that these were the women you knew but you even admitted that you made up the statistic. And as the above discussion points out, you are taking this stat from sex workers, so that explains some of what I had misgivings about.

Still, I treated you like someone capable of explaining your questionable statistics and the appearance that you are defining rape so broadly that it becomes meaningless. If that sounds like I'm belittling you, then I got nothing.

I already knew you had nothing.

Yes, I did not distinguish between rape and rape-like activity. I don't give a fuck what you'd like to see. I am not belittling rape by including "rape-like activity" 'in the mix'; I am demonstrating that I understand that women are often socially conditioned to deny certain behaviors/events as rape despite them being a violation of self, and that there are differing legal definitions (molestation, sexual assault, etc) and that often times a very clear cut definition of if one women's experience is just fucking impossible to provide. I purposely left it vague because I fucking grok that in a deep and meaningful way.

Yes, I made up the statistic on the basis of a quick mental count in my head. I am not taking this stat "from sex workers". Some of the women that I know are sex workers. Again, I seriously do not care what you've misgivings about.

I don't care what you find questionable.

Edited 2012-06-13 06:53 (UTC)

Ok. That was unfair.

here's my perspective. Rape is a horrible crime. Sexual assault is just as bad. People who survive rape and sexual assault have enough problems without a bunch of non-survivors jumping on the bandwagon claiming to have experienced "rape-like activity". There's a point where rape gets trivialized in the rush to "raise awareness."

You volunteered the information. I just questioned its veracity, because it sounded like you were trivializing rape in order to make a point.

No, it really wasn't. You deserved every bit.

Here, let me fix this for you: People who survive rape and sexual assault have enough problems without a bunch of ~~non-survivors jumping on the bandwagon claiming to have experienced "rape-like activity".~~ men explaining what is and is not counted as 'rape' and about how they are trivializing rape by acknowledging that it's not always clear-cut.

OMG, you are such an ass. Every where elseweb I've seen you, you've had a raging fucking case of Privileged White Dude, but bloody hell, this takes the cake.

I do. not. care. what your perspective on rape is.

Edited 2012-06-13 07:06 (UTC)

Sabs, wrt to your edit: I agree. I hadn't thought of it that way because I hadn't noticed the frequency with which that happens. I hadn't noticed that in pop culture women are raped and that they then use that rape as motivation (I mean, that literally makes no sense to me - people write that?)

I believe you, of course, you're much more experienced in terms of those things, but I'm curious what some examples would be (in any/all the media). When I was a teen and read comics, I don't remember anything like that being a part of it, but it's also possible that it being before I started questioning things like this, I just completely passed by it, it was so common/cliche.

It's really common in comics, but not the comics I tend to read. Here's a list from DC. Granted, the list of male rape victims looks about equal, but there's a difference in agency and how it's portrayed. Apollo's rape is not shown and is certainly not titillating (we wouldn't want to get gay all over the place), and is immediately avenged, with interest. There's a lot of date-rape/drugging—male heroes are seldom physically overpowered or violently raped. In Marvel, there's Ms Marvel, Lady Bullseye, and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting.

Other stuff I can think of offhand:

Veronica Mars
The Bride (Kill Bill)
Red Sonja
Daenerys (Game of Thrones) (Every female character gets threatened with rape at some point or another, and some of the men, but Dany exemplifies the "helpless victim takes a level in badass" trope.)
The entire genre of rape-revenge films

There used to be a whole Rape as Backstory page on TVTropes but they deleted it. Which is unfortunate as I think it's one of the more important tropes.

Yeah, I hadn't even considered that element. *shudder*

I went and watched her older videos. Feminism 101 stuff, but pretty good. I might use them in my classroom.

Why did I click that I do not need to know about penguins

Wow, that is so gross. Do they even listen to themselves?

Oh FFS.

Why are they so unoriginal and sexist? WHY!?!

It's weird they deleted it. I know it comes up all the time in male story lines as well "you raped and killed my wife/mom/sister, I must avenge them"

I heard about her because of the Bechdel Test, which is her Nom-de-Plume, as it were.

Warning. Tim thinks that the description of a penguin sodomizing a dead penguin is horrifying, but also hilarious and adorable.

Probably shouldn't mention that on my frumster profile.

I'm torn because most of your examples are movies that I like and I think they actually use the rape background story well. Especially VM which has a nice moment in a college rape storyline (the season 2 introduction) in which she counsels a rape victim (and one that saves that episode from being an "evil feminists cry rape and railroad poor innocent shmuck" episode).

Also one of the points of Game of Thrones is just how brutal and terrible the Middle Ages were (kind of love it for that reasons since it's the first Epic Fantasy book I've read that breaks with the Tolkien trope of setting everything at the Renaissance Festival) and I really liked the way book 4 delineated between one kingdom in which women were equals and the rest of Westeros which is very much a rape culture.

I think that the above example with the Video Games tropes vs. Feminism shows, they know their audience.

I chose those because they're all things that I (a woman and a feminist!) enjoy. Doesn't make them non-problematic, though. And taken collectively, the trend is disturbing as hell.

This.

What the fucking suck happened to that site?

Awesome, I appreciate that. (And on the non comic list & film, I've actually never seen anything other than GoT. Which is just bizarre. That trend IS disturbing, bah, I was just ignorant of it existing.)

*nods and ohmans about GoT* She also, if I recall correctly, is one of the few main characters who appears nude or might-as-well-be nude on a regular basis.

Okay, now I must see this. Thank you, kind soul.

Fair warning. The movie as whole isn't that great. It's Peter Jackson's second movie when he was still learning how to make movies and tried to make up for a lack of ability with gross-out humor - but it has some wonderful moments.

http://ordinary-gentlemen.com/blog/2011/08/29/alyssa-rosenberg-on-a-game-of-thrones-and-that-sady-doyle-piece/ - she has most of the points that I would make. Mostly along the lines of the fact that we do not watch Mad Men because we love glass ceilings and male dominated office politics.

Middle Ages Literature is VERY different than Middle Ages history and social settings. Most of the Middle Ages literature was written as a way of endorsing a misogynist worldview in which knights were able to dominate the poor and men were able to dominate women under the bullshit excuse of "courtly love". So many of these stories involve the knight being all passionate and obsessed that the woman's viewpoint is not even mentioned. Hell, Chaucer's Miller's Tale is a feminist narrative by comparison.

And right now I am reading La Morte D'Arthur and I usually am not shocked by much but there's a very cheerful acceptance of rape culture in the book that is way more disturbing than anything today. One of the stories concerns a farmer's son who seems more noble than everyone else and it's revealed that his mother was raped by King Pellinore before she was married. So that's why he's of noble lineage.

And since it happened before she was married, it wasn't adultery. So everyone is happy.

Seriously. The kid is just happy that he's a knight now and he's not terribly concerned with the fact that King Pellinore raped his mother.

But OF COURSE people don't cite LOTR as an example of Middle Ages brutality because it's a ROMANTICIZED version of the Middle Ages in which kings were noble and wonderful unless their servants got to them first, everyone lived in tune with nature, wars were fought with swords and it was all so much cleaner than the trenches of WWI. And women were shuffled off to the side until it was time for them to kill Wrights based on the technicality of having vaginas - only to be then promptly shuffled off stage so the boys can be the big heroes.

Game of Thrones depicts misogyny. It does not endorse misogyny. It depicts a world in which everyone is brutal and playing at power games. I'm not "excusing" Game of Thrones because I get off on a social order in which women and men are trapped in shitty gender roles and I'm getting off on the rape culture that it depicts. I'm respecting it for being honest in its portrayal of the horribleness of this social milieu even as I'm enjoying the ways that the female characters are able to negotiate, subvert and oppose the rampant misogyny.

Of course, I also love the fourth book precisely because that's the one that is most concerned with gender politics (introducing an egalitarian kingdom of Dorne, giving the perspective of Cersei, Briene and Arya, etc.) and most seem to think that one is the "boring one." So I can't really speak for others.

And it's usually in the sales figures.

Such bullshit.

Game of Thrones depicts misogyny. It does not endorse misogyny.

I haven't read the link yet, but I agree with this sentiment. That's not saying that it's completely unproblematic or feminist, but I also don't think it's unproblematic or feminist to depict only happy utopian worlds where women are equal and rape never happens.

The difference between something like ASoIaF and Tomb Raider, IMO, is twofold. First, we are not asked to identify with the rapists or get off on the rape or other violence in the former, whereas I'm increasingly convinced in the latter, we are. That's a major issue with video games that I think exists less (though still exists) in books and film. We are expected to see things through a character's POV in books and film, but in video games we enter the world and become those characters.

Second, ASoIaF, while one can debate its literary merit, is Serious and Dark, and treats rape as a Serious and Dark thing. It's not simply a hurdle to be overcome; it traumatizes characters over books and lifetimes. It has the gravitas to pull off these storylines and is meant as art, not simply as entertainment. TR is silly fun and can't be trusted to treat rape seriously, as evidenced by the creators' comments. /GoF defensive neckbeard

I think it is irritating to me in a way because it sort of ties into the whole "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" thing, which utterly denies that a huge effect of abuse can be to annihilate the victim's sense of self and debilitate rather than empower. It definitely makes me feel I am a pathetic, useless, weak person for not managing to leap up and pull myself together and avenge myself on the world for ills done to me (not rape, admittedly, but physical abuse and other shit).

What's bullshit about the Die Hard comparison is that McClane wasn't a "vulnerable character" at the beginning of the film, he was an NYPD cop!

Her third stretch goal (which she met, and them some!) is a classroom curriculum.

AWESOME.

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