Dear Tv Industry, Do Better!
The first time I remember ever seeing a rape was when I was 9 years old watching a blonde white girl drink from a red solo cup, stubble into a frat boy’s bedroom, to then be assaulted while going in and out of conciousness. This was when I was watching an old rerun of the original Degrassi. Yes, the OG that has Drake in the show- Degrassi. This was an episode in season 2 when Paige Micheachuk is sexually assualted at a frat party.
This was the first notable time I remember feeling fear that rape was right around every corner.
And it was.
The danger that rape is a constant threat was on my televison screen constantly from Jenny Murphy in Gossip Girl to Peyton Sawyer on One Tree Hill to Naomi Clark in 90210. You couldn’t watch any white girl CW drama show without seeing rape. And it still is plaguing my screen from literally any scenes in Game of Thrones, American Horror Story, and True Blood invading my mind and body that now, unlike my childhood self, has been sexually assualted.
The narrative of seeing a female body drugged, physically lose control of one’s actions, to be penetrated violently by strangers bombards our television screen to shock us, to dare us to look away from the screen, to grimace, and is used as a tool of gore with no regard of the trigger to its audience where 1 in 6 have experienced sexual assualt in their life. It also fails to understand the dangers of presenting sexual assualt as one experience that is violent, has to be penetrative, done by a stranger, and that a female must be in a position of “prey” for this to happen to them.
“Rape-for-shock” a term coined by tv showrunners in a Variety article has never been studied in any official compacity to measure the frequency of these scenes within different genres of shows and film. The fact it hasn’t been quantified by PEW or any research center shows how the experience of rape can’t be directly defined and is presented as a tool for writers to be used to further a character that glamorizes assualt.
The conversation around the portrayal of rape scenes in media and the frequency in which they appear on screens has popped in and out of the mainstream. There have been various opinion pieces where this topic arose in 2014, but didn’t gain a bigger spotlight until 2016 at the height of a Hollywood reckoning with their negligence of allowing predators and sexual assualt run rampant. It was at this time that showrunners began to call for an end of “rape for shock”.
Showrunners spoke to Variety calling the use of rape as a narrative tool to fail to genuinely portray a life altering experience a “plague on the industry”. The showrunners confirmed the frequency of rape scenes as “always the go-to when looking for ‘traumatic backstory’ and a “lazy” cop-out to give a character a trauma.
The call for action was brief, falling from the headlines and seemingly didn’t have an impact as Scandal & Grey’s Anatomy & Vikings still turned audiences heads to avoid watching the pillaging of women.
The conversation didn’t rise to the surface again until 2018 following the terrible timing of the 13 reasons why season finale which featured a male being assaulted and penetrated with a broom. The gruesome portrayal grew criticism for the terrible timing of the airing of the scene following the rape and murder of a young woman in Melbourne, Australia days before.
Television is where one goes to get the closest to understanding or witnessing an experience of someone who is so far removed from their own life. It can teach people life lessons, compassion, and most importantly how one can begin to identify the world around them.
Think if one were only to see New York City in movies as a clean crime-free city they would deem the real NYC a place unrecognizable to the words associated with it.
If rape is only presented on the screen as violent, by a stranger, and penetrative where one leaves with physical scars than those, like myself, who left with no scars, knew the person who crossed the line of consent, and was in the light of day won’t have an additional tool to idenify what happened to them.
For a survivor seeing a rape scene glamorizing a brutal unimaginable experience turns the once safety found in the darkness of the movie theater or in the bluelight of a computer into a dangerous territory of triggers causing panic, disassociation, and other emotions directly related with one’s personal journey of recovery.
I find myself up late waiting for Harvey Weinstein, Jeffery Epistein, R.Kelly, and the countless known and unknown predators to burst through my door to take me to the world of red hoods and Handmaid's.
Simply Do & Be Better.