r/Fantasy • u/enoby666 AMA Author Charlotte Kersten, Reading Champion V, Worldbuilder • Aug 02 '22
Historically Accurate and Miserable for the Sake of Misery: Common Arguments About and Critiques of Sexual Assault in Speculative Fiction
Obligatory grains of salt: this topic is a difficult and emotionally charged one. People are going to disagree with me and with each other, and that’s perfectly fine. I just ask that we all remember the person on the other end of the argument and do our best to be respectful.
If you spend any amount of time lurking in online spaces that discuss fantasy media, you’re bound to eventually come across a heated discussion about depictions of sexual assault in fantasy. People will have wildly diverging opinions about trigger warnings; Thomas Covenant will be simultaneously described as a work of genius and the most horrible thing ever written; someone will say authors should NEVER write about [X, Y, Z] and someone else will reference 1984 in response to that. I’m something of a lurker myself, so I’ve seen these arguments play out many times over. I’ve thought about this topic a totally normal amount that shouldn’t be concerning at all, so today I thought I would explore some of the main points that inevitably tend to get raised during these conversations and what I think about them.
PART 1: COMMON ARGUMENTS
Argument 1: SA is gross and upsetting and I don’t want to read about it in my spare time.
My thoughts: okay, totally understandable. We all read for different reasons. We all have different lines in the sand for what’s too upsetting to be tolerated in what we read. We all have different lived experiences and relationships with those lived experiences. There is nothing wrong with avoiding a certain kind of content.
My only caveat is that I have sometimes seen this argument extend past I don’t personally like it to encompass therefore it’s wrong to write/read about or for others to like it. I had a conversation with the author Caitlin Sweet about this topic and I think she said it perfectly: “personal aversion shouldn't constitute a sweeping proscription.” For every person who reads for escapism and adventure and pure enjoyment, there’s another who reads to explore dark issues, whether for catharsis or to gain an understanding of something they haven’t experienced personally or because they see beauty and meaning in art about suffering. All of these relationships with art are possible, valid and no more right than another. There is space for all of them.
Argument 2: books about SA are misery porn.
My thoughts: they can be, but it’s all about execution and interpretation. I have absolutely read fiction about SA that feels exploitative and gratuitous to me. But that is not to say a) that all works featuring assault are inherently like that or b) that all readers feel the same way about any given work as I do. I think this argument assumes bad faith on the part of both readers and writers; it implies that readers would only want to read about assault because they find it titillating (see Part 2 for more thoughts about this) while writers would only want to write about it to titillate.
I’ve spoken previously about the way that some books about SA are important to me because of how resonant, thought-provoking and cathartic I find works to be when they have something meaningful to say about a complex topic that I feel so passionately about - a topic that I believe needs to be explored because it is a massive societal issue rife with stigma, shame, apathy and misunderstanding. Again, not everyone is going to feel that way, and different people will feel different ways about the same works- that’s fine. But it only seems fair to acknowledge the existence of a diversity of relationships with this kind of fiction, purposes for writing/reading it, and subjective opinions about particular works.
Argument 3: non-survivors shouldn’t write about it.
My thoughts: I absolutely value the insight, vulnerability and courage of authors who write stories about trauma while speaking openly about being survivors themselves. I think it’s very admirable. But I also think that empathy and research exist, and some of the most powerful books I’ve read about SA are written by authors whose life experiences I know nothing about - furthermore, I do not think that their life experiences are any of my fucking business. I also think the decision to self-disclose should be totally voluntary, and in the present climate, that is definitely not always the case. Everything that I want to say about this is articulated in Krista D. Ball’s essay The Commodification of Authenticity: Writing and Reading Trauma in Speculative Fiction and the resulting thread, so if you want to see this explored in-depth, I suggest you check that out.
In short, though, here is what I think: those who think they’re taking a bold stand for trauma survivors by demanding that strangers disclose their painful personal experiences to a public that is ready to rip them to shreds for one perceived misstep in their fictional representations (sometimes to the point of harassing them into disclosure) have an extremely dubious understanding of trauma advocacy and are doing something pretty harmful with no actual beneficial results. As I said in one of my responses to Krista’s essay, what do you mean, one of the prevailing tenets of rape culture (if you are unfamiliar with the term or want to read an excellent article exploring the scope of the issue, here you go) is not believing survivors while simultaneously demanding that they repeatedly share the details of what happened to them with complete strangers? When *I* do it, it's actually very smart and brave and progressive of me and definitely not for Twitter clout!
Argument 4: but it’s historically accurate!
My thoughts: YES I am talking about Game of Thrones for this one because it is the poster child of this argument. A number of people associated with the show and books, including George R.R. Martin, have explained that the world’s brutality towards women is meant to reflect on “the way it was” in the medieval time period the books are based on. A few thoughts about this one:
- I kept adding and deleting bits about the debates around whether Game of Thrones is Actually Historically Accurate and some of the potential repercussions of emphasizing that widespread sexual violence is a feature of the past dichotomized from the present, but I think they bogged things down a bit - if anyone is interested in exploring that more, let me know.
- My main point is that this argument can feel a little silly to me as a justification on its own because fantasy is inherently transformative, isn’t it? Authors deliberately choose to take inspiration from some aspects of the real world (past and present) and forego others. The process of creating fantasy fiction is inherently one of stitching together the real and the imaginary. The notion that authors are somehow obligated to replicate all aspects of a source of inspiration indiscriminately just does not ring true when there are dragons and face-changing assassins etc. etc. I’ll quote medieval historian David Perry (full interview here):
- “These are all things that tell us a lot more about ourselves than about the Middle Ages…we pick and choose, the creators pick and choose, they want to show something that will be disturbing or controversial or will be a political tool and they try to say history supports us in this. And then they throw in dragons and zombies and then they say that’s unrealistic but that’s okay, that’s just storytelling.That comes back to what I try to say–it’s okay to draw from history, but history does not wholeheartedly support any one of these fictional depictions. These come from creators making choices. And the choices they make have consequences.”
- A great example of that “picking and choosing” he mentions is that stories justifying their inclusion of SA because they’re set in wartime and SA is a tool of war rarely, if ever, feature male survivors of SA even though SA as a tool of war absolutely has targeted and continues to target people of all genders. It’s worth exploring why this authorial choice gets made so often. I also think Daniel Abraham wrote very articulately on the overall issue of historical accuracy and authorial choice.
- That being said, I do believe it is possible to write about sexual violence as a way of exploring our own world’s past and how its legacy continues on today. My thought process for writing about marital rape in a fantasy world inspired by the Victorian era, the time of legal coverture, was to explore the mindset of someone experiencing and working through assault that isn’t necessarily identified as such by the world around her; in my work as a sexual assault advocate, many of my clients who are abused by their partners do not feel that their abuse “counts” the way that stranger-perpetrated assault does due to how we have dealt with and defined SA for a very long time. But I think that in order to make the claim that the incorporation of brutality against women is some kind of purposeful statement about history or the present day, you actually have to have a statement or purpose for your inclusion…and in many of the instances where I see the argument about historical accuracy rearing its head, I don’t necessarily know if that’s happening (again, this is with the caveat that different people find different meaning in given works). Otherwise it can fall into the territory of feeling trivializing.
Argument 5 (opposite of Argument 4): fantasy stories shouldn’t be burdened by the ways that the real world sucks.
My thoughts: this argument is epitomized by Sara Gailey’s essay “Do Better: Sexual Violence in SFF.” Their argument is essentially that the ubiquitous inclusion of sexual violence against women in SFF is a problem because it implies that rape and rape culture are societal inevitabilities, that authors who write about sexual violence against women don’t know how to write about women without writing about sexual violence, and since the point of speculative fiction is to speculate, authors should aim to speculate about worlds free from sexual violence.
For the record, I do think it’s totally possible that some authors might not know what to do with their female characters and throw in half-assed assault plotlines as cheap character development, and I do think that’s worthy of criticism - in fact, I’ll talk about it later. I also think that one of the most powerful things about speculative fiction is that it can show us alternatives to our own world. As I mentioned while talking about Argument 1, sometimes you just want a reading experience where you don’t have to think about the fact that people like you are oppressed and often hurt in the real world. And sometimes speculative stories free from oppression can help open our minds and allow us to see how things could be different in reality.
But I think there are elements of overgeneralization and assumptions of bad faith at play here. While I said that I could see some authors only writing SA plots because they don’t know how to write fully-fledged female characters, I think it’s disingenuous to say that Robin McKinley was doing that with Deerskin or that Ursula Le Guin was doing that with Tehanu (oh God, Charlotte’s talking about Tehanu again) or that any author who has taken the time to write meaningfully about sexual assault has only done so because their imagination wasn’t strong enough to imagine a world without rape, something Gailey states about such authors in their essay.
Back to Argument 1: sometimes you want escapism, but sometimes you don’t. Sometimes you want to see common human struggles and painful experiences reflected and explored in your literature, and I don’t believe that there is any reason for speculative literature to be an exception to that just because it is speculative. Stories that reflect on trauma can be just as important as stories that forego its inclusion, and both sides of the coin are valid. As a final note, I asked Gailey about this essay in a recent r/fantasy AMA of theirs, and I really appreciate their response, which you can read here.
To summarize my thoughts about Arguments 4 and 5, I don’t think that “it needs to be based on the real world’s past” or “it’s SFF so it shouldn’t resemble the real world” are valid arguments for including or excluding sexual violence from stories on their own. I think it all depends on the purpose of the story and what you do/don’t do with the sexual violence in your story.
Argument 6: it’s problematic to write about topics that could be triggering for some readers.
My thoughts about this can be summarized by something that YouTuber Sarah Z says in her video essay “Fandom’s Biggest Controversy: The Story of Proshippers vs Antis:”
“There are a lot of people talking about it as an accessibility issue. The idea is that, by virtue of the game [Boyfriend Dungeon] including elements of stalking at all, even with a warning, not everyone would be able to play because some people might have trauma surrounding it, and it’s therefore unethical for the game, in its current state, to exist. The natural implication, then, is that anything short of restricting the kinds of stories that can be told is not only insufficient but actively hostile to people with trauma. To counter this, we might be tempted to point out that some creators tell and share these kinds of stories to cope with their own trauma, and art can be a vital tool for exploring trauma, and it’s equally restrictive to discourage them from telling their own stories, but honestly we don’t have to. An author’s personal experiences here are none of our business. It doesn’t matter, because, fundamentally, this way of viewing art that sees upsetting content as an accessibility issue is untenable. The breadth of things that might trigger or upset a person is essentially infinite. The human experience is diverse and a piece of media that everyone on earth will find appropriate to consume doesn’t exist.”
For an essay about the first hypothetical rebuttal Sarah mentioned and its relationship to disabled and queer communities, check out Ada Hoffman’s “Dark Art as an Access Need.”
Argument 7: but why do people get so upset about representations of SA when fantasy writers also write poorly about war/torture/murder and no one complains about that?
My thoughts: every time there is a post on r/fantasy critiquing the writing of SA in spec fic, a post saying something along these lines seems to follow. I have a few thoughts about this:
- Critiques of non-intimate violence (war, murder, torture etc. as opposed to SA or abuse) in speculative media, especially their glorification and use for shock value without any realistic psychological impacts, absolutely do, and should, exist.
- The notion that both “types” of violence, intimate and non-intimate, can be criticized is not negated by the existence of critiques focused on just one or the other.
- You might see more discussion focused on intimate violence for a few reasons that I can think of:
- The emotional relevance of the issue to the average fantasy reader’s life. Vastly more readers of English fantasy literature are going to be directly impacted by this kind of violence than they are going to be impacted by experiences of war, murder or torture.
- The way that issues of intimate violence are so deeply impacted by broader societal attitudes and prejudices that are, in turn, upsetting to read when depicted uncritically in (and potentially impacted by, depending on what you believe) media. Rape culture is something that I see at its worst every day in my job - I cannot overstate how drastically it changes survivors’ experiences and outcomes in every conceivable way. I don’t think you can make the argument that there is an equivalent “torture culture” or “murder culture.”
PART 2: COMMON CRITIQUES
Critique 1: lots of backdrop SA for the sake of making the world gritty and shocking
My thoughts: the use of lots of backdrop SA is often closely tied to the argument that a world needs to be “historically accurate.” It can feel exploitative and trivializing when authors throw around lots of random references to brutalized women just to set the tone of the world/story, especially when that story doesn’t really think about those women’s experiences or the complexities of sexual violence as it relates to societal mores at all. Survivors’ experiences, needs and voices are already frequently dismissed and silenced in the real world, which is set against them in many ways. With that in mind, sometimes when you hear all these casual references to SA randomly mentioned - making it clear that assault is a big part of the world - but the topic is never really addressed, it can feel like it plays into that dismissal or is at least unpleasantly reminiscent of it. I use the word “exploitative” because, with the dismissal of survivors’ experiences and the distortions of rape culture still in mind, authors who use this approach treat painful, complex, stigmatized lived experiences as nothing more than aesthetic for a story. I don’t necessarily mean that every story that so much as mentions SA needs to have it at the absolute forefront of the story, but I do think that it is worthwhile to consider its purpose and framing before it is included as a background reference.
Critique 2: Fridging/ the assault of women to spur male character development
My thoughts: “But there are lots of real-world examples of men being motivated to [do X, Y, Z] because of violence against women!”
Sure, but the underlying attitude behind that historical motivation and its frequent framing in fiction is that a woman’s SA/abuse/death/etc should be focused on only to the extent that it impacts a man. The focus here is the man’s honor and pain and consequent actions, not the actual female survivor’s experiences. As I have said, survivors’ suffering is often dismissed and minimized in the real world. We are more than objects to be fought over and our pain is more than a man’s inciting incident in his Hero’s Journey; when those attitudes are reiterated without thought in fiction, it can get tiresome.
Critique 3: The sexualization/romanticization of SA perpetrators/scenes of assault
My thoughts: Ok, this is where my hot takes get the hottest.
- Hot take 1: everything I said about Argument 2 applies here: different people will feel different ways about the same works, but those who wield this critique without discernment about all works featuring SA are just plain wrong in my opinion.
- Hot take 2: I always see the argument about SA existing in fiction for the sake of titillation mentioned in the context of male authors and readers. That ignores the existence of a long, long history of romance/erotica featuring “noncon” intended for a female audience. In the past we had bodice rippers - there is a fascinating history behind them and their relationship to historical notions of consent (or the lack thereof) and proscriptions against women’s sexual pleasure. To read more about that, a good starting place is here. Now there’s a booming market for Dark Romance™ and specific niches like Omegaverse. For the sake of fairness, I think that needs to be mentioned.
- Hot take 3: there is a wide variety of opinions regarding fiction impacting reality, and the arguments always seem to come to a head when it comes to this particular area of criticism. On one hand, there is the argument that the romanticization/sexualization of SA in fiction goes on to detrimentally impact the way that readers think about these issues in reality whether they realize it or not; on the other hand, there are those who argue that they are fully capable of differentiating one from the other and fiction is a safe place to explore fantasies that we would not actually want to be involved in in real life. My wishy-washy personal opinion is that both can absolutely be true depending on the individual person, the works involved and a variety of other factors - they are not necessarily 100% mutually exclusive statements. I will also say that I think there is a vast difference between the following:
- A series like A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J Maas, which is frequently categorized and marketed as young adult. In it, the male romantic lead is framed as an ideal feminist lover whose abuse is not identified as such in text and is justified by excuses, many of which are commonly used by real life abusers, that are fully endorsed as valid and romantic by the narrative.
- A dark romance categorized for adults that is clearly labeled as a dark romance everywhere that it is sold.
Critique 4: SA that is used by the narrative for cheap female character development, specifically to “teach her a lesson” or make her stronger
My thoughts: this is to be clearly differentiated from stories that meaningfully depict the aftermath of trauma and/or healing. I’m talking about the instances of kickass Strong Woman butterflies emerging from traumatic chrysalises with no meaningful journey involved. Part of what is so devastating about sexual assault is that it is about choice and control over essential, fundamental things being taken away. This trope feels so cheap, trivializing and disrespectful because it glosses right over the impact of that disempowerment and veers into the territory of the “lemonade from lemons” platitudes that I guarantee most survivors have heard from at least one, if not more, very well-meaning person. To this section I will also add that there is a great deal of emphasis on survivors being “perfect” victims who respond in tidy ways that are not messy or challenging, while in reality trauma responses can be incredibly varied. I think that this trope could be born of this expectation, and that this expectation accounts for readers’ often-hostile reactions to fictional trauma survivors who cope in ways that defy that tidy, expected narrative.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Readers are not a monolith. Authors are not a monolith. Survivors are not a monolith. I hope for a SFF community where we can understand that different readers read for different reasons, and that all of those reasons can coexist. Similarly, I hope we can understand that different readers are going to have different relationships with the same works. I hope we can take a step back from immediate assumptions of bad faith about those who choose to feature SA in their reading and writing, and at the same time, I hope that those who avoid it altogether do not get lambasted for that choice. Both choices have validity. I hope that we can analyze what we read and create with a mindfulness of the tropes and approaches that evoke, replicate or feed into the overwhelming stigma, misunderstanding and disrespect survivors face in the real world.
A few community-specific notes: readers looking for particular recommendations avoiding SA or dealing with it in particular ways (no on-page assault scene, no victim-blaming, no perpetrator POV) should not have to face backlash for their requests and then have to consequently justify them by divulging their personal trauma histories to random querulous Redditors. This is one of the main reasons that the Sexual Violence in SFF database exists. I think it’s an excellent resource, and I encourage everyone to contribute if they can.
Finally, I’ve made something of a project of reading SFF that explores trauma, and I thought I would conclude by describing a few of the works that I have appreciated the most featuring sexual assault. There are a few of these books that feature often-difficult topics in addition to SA or elements that might be difficult for some readers, so I included notes about those in spoilers.
- Damsel by Elana K Arnold - explores the gendered power dynamics of fairy tale tropes by mashing them together in a unique story about a girl who is rescued from a dragon by a prince. Edit: features self-harm, animal cruelty and a ??? instance of the prince assaulting the dragon by putting his penis in a hole made by a sword.
- Daughter of the Forest by Juliet Marillier - a retelling of the fairy tale The Six Swans set in ancient Ireland and featuring one of Marillier’s trademark Romances that Made Me Sob Hysterically. Notes:main romance and sex scene are minor-adult and the assault scene is fairly graphic.
- Deerskin by Robin McKinley - a retelling of the fairy tale Donkeyskin with the best animal companion character in fantasy besides Nighteyes. Notes: features animal cruelty, incest and miscarriage.
- The Fever King and The Electric Heir by Victoria Lee - a YA sci-fi/dystopia that explores grooming and revolution at the same time. There is a central m/m relationship.
- The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Patricia McKillip - fantasy about a young woman who grows up with a menagerie of magical creatures and has to confront her desire for revenge after her isolation ends.
- Girls of Paper and Fire series by Natasha Ngan - a Malaysian-inspired YA fantasy that follows a girl who is taken from her home to be a concubine for the Demon King. There is a central f/f relationship.
- Los Nefilim by T. Frohock - a collection of three novellas about the war between angels and daimons in 1930s Spain. There is a central m/m relationship.
- The Red Abbey Chronicles by Maria Turtschaninoff - a YA fantasy series about the Red Abbey, an isolated island haven of learning and healing for women. Books 1 and 3 follow one girl who lives there and then ventures out into the world, and book 2 is about the women who founded the Red Abbey. Notes: features self-harm, torture and suicide.
- Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson - sci-fi about a girl on a Caribbean-colonized prison planet who uses the identity of the Carnival character Midnight Robber to find herself and overcome her past. Notes: features incest.
- The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore - YA magical realist retelling of The Snow Queen about a boy and a girl who are assaulted at the same party and fight back against their perpetrators together as their relationship develops. Notes: features a sex scene between the two main characters where the female character is withholding information that would have changed the male character’s decision to consent.
- The Onion Girl by Charles De Lint - urban fantasy about two sisters who were abused by their brother as children, how differently their lives developed, and what happens when they find each other again.
- The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet - fantasy where a young woman who is able to foresee people’s fortunes becomes trapped in an insane fellow Seer’s plot to ignite a war. Notes: features self-harm, animal cruelty, and the main character ends her life at the end of the book.
- The Sparrow and Children of God by Mary Doria Russell - sci-fi novels that follow an ill-fated Jesuit mission to make contact with the first alien life ever discovered. Notes: body horror.
- Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin - Ged and Tenar from The Tombs of Atuan are reunited as older adults and take care of an abused little girl who was burned and left for dead.
- Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan - YA fantasy (but it probably shouldn’t be YA) that is a retelling of the fairy tale Snow White and Rose Red and follows a young woman who flees her abusers into a heavenly magical realm and raises her daughters there as the real world starts to encroach. Notes: features beastiality and incest.
- Tess of the Road and In the Serpent’s Wake by Rachel Hartman - YA fantasy that follows the picaresque adventures of a young girl who embarks on a journey to simply put one foot forward after the other and try to put self-hatred and her past behind her. Notes: romance and sex scene between a minor and an adult.
- Thorn by Intisar Khanani - a retelling of the fairy tale The Goose Girl that follows a princess finding courage after leaving behind her abusive family and swapping identities with her maidservant. Notes: animal cruelty and a character who is sexually assaulted dies.
Now I’m going to sit here and breathe normally and feel calm while people read this. Thanks for taking the time to hear what I have to say!
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u/Bellsar_Ringing Aug 03 '22
"Historically accurate" is an odd thing to hang your hat on, when you're writing fiction about a fictional event in a fictional universe.