Jessica: “the issue of heroine rape as a shortcut to character (to her character, a kind of super speedy chaarcter builder”

I can understand a rape being necessary to a story, but to cast it as the woman needing it to build character? Oy. That’s not only squicky but, if it’s really as described, it sounds like iffy character and plotting.

I’m not sure whether these rapists are full characters or if they’re presented more as an external force/random calamity. If they’re not characters in the rest of the book(s), that’s a whole different discussion. (E.g. there a hand-of-fate theme in which no one has any agency?) If they’re characters with power to act, though, the usual common sense of characterization rules probably apply.

We call characters Too Stupid To Live when they appear to act irrationally, i.e. not of their own motivations but simply to help out the plot. Similarly, if a character must commit a rape, shouldn’t it be because that action is part of HIS trajectory? Not because another character is stagnant and “needs” to be acted upon?

I think that’s a common characterization problem in romance: if the actions of one character are based on another’s lack of growth, it can leave both characters with unclear motivations. Sometimes that makes me doubt both the sincerity of the characters and the intentionality of the writing. Rape is one of those topics where I doubt most romance authors want to look thoughtless.

We have rape now, too, of course, but you’re right that in the US in the 00’s a different set of sex acts is considered rape. It was conceptually and legally impossible to define sex b/t white woman and a black man as anything other than rape in the antebellum south, and it was conceptually and legally impossible to define even the most violent and forced sex between a husband and wife rape at that time, too.

I agree with you that authors ought to try to be true to the times, so, if you had forced sex in a historical between a husband and wife, it would have been unrealistic for the woman to call the police and tell her friends and assume everybody is going to go after her husband. But that’s different from writing it as though she loves rape and isn’t rape wonderful once you get used to it.

Also, as to the tenor of the times, you had the introduction of the pill in 1961, which, for the first time, gave women significant control over their reproductive lives (they didn’t need participation of male partners to avoid contraception). And I’m sure lots of other things I can’t think of at the moment contributed.

And remember Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask) came out in ‘69. I’m not sure that had anything to do with anything romance-y, just lead to a more open general discourse about sex.

I shouldn’t have phrased it as a direct causation. It sounds like we’re on the same page. Anyway, it’s a good thought: Nancy Friday was certainly part of the gestalt of the times–whatever that achieved.

When I was 16 and reading Harlequin Presents, Carole Mortimer with her 36-year-old filthy rich heroes and 18-year-old ingenues, I thought that was SOOOOOOOO cool. A couple of years ago, I went on a Carole Mortimer glom for my birthday and went, “Shit, that’s rape. What was I THINKING???”

In the book I’m finalizing for print right now (like, at this very moment), I started in 94 with the main hero being very cruel and he did actually rape the heroine (although not entirely on purpose). I knew that wouldn’t fly then and I certainly didn’t want it to fly now. The scene is still in the book, but it’s changed in tone so I got my forced seduction but didn’t let it bleed into rape. (I hope.)

I can take rape in historicals. They did that then. Women were property, etc. etc. etc. I don’t judge historicals on today’s mores and I’ll throw a historical that does cater to today’s mores at the wall.

MoJo, that’s an interesting connection. Do you mean rape fantasies (perhaps expressed as questionably consensual sex) started showing up explicitly in romance after Friday’s books?

Uhm, yes? No? I don’t have it in my mind that it was cause’n'effect, exactly. I’m thinking it was more like serendipity, butterfly/chaos theory, something like that. The Flame and the Flower was published in 1972, so it can’t be all cause-and-effect.

MoJo, that’s an interesting connection. Do you mean rape fantasies (perhaps expressed as questionably consensual sex) started showing up explicitly in romance after Friday’s books?

I’ve read My Secret Garden and Men in Love, but it’s been a while. I think in her early interviews she discovered how common these fantasies were, and how many of her subjects thought their fantasies were so strange that they must be unique. My impression (I think from reading an interview) was that over time she hoped to remove the shame and isolation, in order to make it possible to explore the basis for those sexual attitudes. If that type of consensual/rape storyline started becoming explicit after Friday’s books, perhaps she accomplished precisely that: the conversation came out into the open.

I was referring to SHOAH, the nine-hour documentary by Claude Lanzmann, which was presented as a miniseries on PBS.

I figured that out when you posted about having seen SHOAH. It was when I first read your first mention of it (“What’s next? SHOAH: THE MUSICAL?”) that I thought you were using the word in a more general way.

Laura and Janine’s questions about the relative power of the hero and heroine are good ones. In some ways that speaks to how much fantasy there is in romance. It wouldn’t bother readers to have a hero who is not a catch FOR THEM if they weren’t using romance as fantasy. I hate the idea, actually, that I read romance for fantasy — I want to say it is literature and I read it mainly for the same literary values I get out of nongenre fiction — but I keep coming back to that point.

I think most if not all genre fiction has some basis in fantasy. That doesn’t mean it can’t *also* be literature. Shakespeare’s plays are literature, and at the same time, much of his work has elements of fantasy.

Janine, I agree with you about flawed, immoral, or even evil characters. I love to read them. My interest in the post isn’t in those per se, but in the specific use of rape to titillate or as a fictional shortcut.

On the question of flawed characters, though, I can’t resist adding that I am finishing up Linda Howard’s Death Angel and the heroine is musing about whether she can love an assassin who tried and almost succeeded in killing her. And her thought process: “There are a lot worse things than murder. And he’s only taking out the bad guys, after all…”, is priceless! (Review to come, eventually)

Also, going back a few comments: no, I don’t think the rapes in Gaffney, at least not the first one, qualify as problematic in the ways I outline in the post and comments.

Laura and Janine’s questions about the relative power of the hero and heroine are good ones. In some ways that speaks to how much fantasy there is in romance. It wouldn’t bother readers to have a hero who is not a catch FOR THEM if they weren’t using romance as fantasy. I hate the idea, actually, that I read romance for fantasy — I want to say it is literature and I read it mainly for the same literary values I get out of nongenre fiction — but I keep coming back to that point.