A Question Worth Answering
Earlier today a friend asked on facebook if women get tired of the trope of “abuse survivor” in the same way a black person, such as himself, might get tired of some often mined stories such as civil rights and slavery. He asked if women struggle, like he does, to balance the value of the importance of the story with the frequency it is used as source material. This question, along with yet another sportsball playing rapist getting a minimal punishment so as not to get in the way of his “college experience”, found me in a very wordy place. The result is below.
A bit off topic perhaps, but I have a very visceral response to rape survivor stories and it speaks to your question, I believe, eventually. It often feels to me like rape is used in a story line to make the raped person unique and give them a reason to rise to greatness through revenge fantasy blood and gore - or to (more often) give the male lead "hero" character something to get righteously indignant about and set off a chain of brutal and violent events. Because nothing says growth as a person so well as a brutalized and all but forgotten - bonus points if murdered - woman in your recent past, double bonus if she was in a compromised position explaining how the rape was a result of her own actions in some way, triple bonus if she is a woman of color or outside the mainstream of gender "norms". The truth is nothing like that, with the rates of sexual assault being as high as they are if it were true there would be far fewer humans walking this earth after all the revenge killings.
What actually happens is more mundane. You wake up the morning after and work like hell to put one foot in front of the other, keep breathing, and not completely lose your mind. Too often the point of putting a rape or sexual assault in a movie is to make victims/survivors the "other", a cautionary tale, provide a false sense of security that at least the audience members aren't THAT person, didn't invite THAT horror into their lives. It leaves people free to judge those who are assaulted, free to embrace those non-existent grey areas where sometimes it’s not so bad to be sexually assaulted, free to believe in the "false accusations" story often told when someone we like is the accused. But rape and sexual assault touch a large majority of all women. No one is safe. No one asks for it, no one is to blame for the assault they experience. The movies will keep coming, I will like some and loathe others, I guess I've reached the acceptance phase. It feels a bit more like giving up. Not being a person of color, all I can say is that I can see similar trends in some of the stories put out about slavery and the civil rights movement.
