Rape Is Rape
One of the reasons why rape remains so terrifyingly pervasive is far too often, no one is willing to call it what it is. We've generally agreed as a culture that rape is bad, but since people want to continue to commit (and excuse) rape, they resolve that cognitive dissonance by defining rape in incredibly narrow ways that distance it from themselves and the people they know.
Rape Should Not Be Sexy
Not making rape scenes look sexy might sound like a no-brainer, yet avoiding this pitfall seems remarkably difficult. That's because most popular media looks at women primarily through the lens of sexual attractiveness. Important female characters are uniformly young and alluring, while unconventionally attractive or older women rarely make it to the screen at all. It's a troubling subtext: If women aren't sexually attracted to men, what's the point of them even existing?
Rape Does Not Have to Be Seen to Be Believed
For reasons that almost uniformly do not speak well of us as a species, when rape is introduced as a part of a character's storyline—either in the past or the present—we seem to need those assaults to play out before our eyes in order for them to seem real.
Female Rape Victims Do Not Exist to Motivate Men
There's a long and depressing tradition of subjecting female characters to harm solely to generate reactions from male characters; it's so common that comic book writer Gail Simone came up with a term for it, inspired by a scene where Green Lantern's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in a fridge: Women in Refrigerators. If you've ever heard about a female character getting "fridged," that's what it means.
Rape Is Not Just For Women
Sexual assault is experienced by plenty of men, women and LGBTQ people. But those aren't stories we often see depicted; indeed, the sexual assault of men is disproportionately ignored by the stories we tell about rape.
Rapists Are Not All Mustache-Twirling Villains
If many crime dramas are to be believed, rapists are visibly creepy villains who lurk in alleys waiting to pounce on random women. But studies show that the opposite is true: More than 80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows; close to 50 percent of rapes are committed by a friend or acquaintance, and 25 percent are committed by an intimate partner.
