>>3814096

I appreciate your politeness in speaking about a very emotional topic, though I doubt my answer will satisfy you. I don’t know how personally painful the issue of rape is to you. Possibly you should stop reading this now. I don’t want to hurt you, but I’m not here to help you. The issue of whether society should tell authors what to write or how to write it is painful to me, and I’m here to say my piece about that. It took me six hours to write this, and the only reason I wrote it was that I didn’t want you to feel that I was ignoring you. So please take that as a sign of respect and concern.[page_break]

1. Rape is a real thing and should be treated like other real things

Was it because you as a writer are ready to treat this painful subject with the great compassion, sensitivity, and gravity that it deserves, or are you simply using it as a plot device in order to quickly generate sympathy and drama?

Short answer: I didn’t “treat” rape. I used it as a plot device. I needed some triggering event drastic enough to cause the mayor to finally intervene.

We can usually only focus on one thing in a short story. Everything else leads up to or points to that one thing. If you’ve read my blog posts, you’ll know that this story bothers me because I don’t know what its purpose is, and I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what that one thing is. It even has a warning up front advising you not to read it! The story came to me and demanded to be written, but I still haven’t figured out what it’s about. But I know it’s not rape.

Stories are about characters who go through horrible things. We write about people giving up on their dreams, suffering from prejudice, losing loved ones, dying, and, yes, being raped. And often those horrible things are merely there in order to talk about something else. Because that’s how stories work.

Take, for instance, orphans. Harry Potter was orphaned in the backstory of that series. Was that treated compassionately in the story? Yes, I think so. The author worked Harry’s feelings about it into the story many times. Okay, now how about Batman? We all know that Batman watched his parents being murdered. Was that treated well? Some people would say it was used compassionately, to help give Batman a vulnerable side. Some people would say it was a cheap writing trick, playing the orphan card to win sympathy and excuse his bitterness and self-isolation. In the Little Orphan Annie comics, the orphan card is played to win sympathy for Annie, and as a plot device to pair up a plucky, sympathetic, lower-class American with a jaded, wealthy capitalist pig industrialist; if she misses her parents, we never hear about it. In The Pirates of Penzance, the orphan card is lampshaded and played for laughs, as characters repeatedly claim to be orphans to take advantage of the pirates’ soft-heartedness.

But I’m pretty sure neither D.C. Comics, Tribune Media, nor any acting group staging The Pirates of Penzance, have gotten letters from orphans complaining about them treating orphans without compassion.

But rape doesn’t only happen to women, and it’s not the only thing that happens to women. You can lose your job, your house, your car, your kid, your best friend, your business, your family, your faith, your following, your office. If men are reaching for the worst thing that can happen to women and choosing rape out of a deficit of imagination, then that’s having a character be sexually assaulted for shock value. If you want to tell a story that’s about the worst thing that happened to a specific woman character, you should be thinking very specifically about her and less about your and the audience’s default answer to a question.

If you believe that, then you should accept that rape can be a story element, just as losing your job, your house, your kid, etc., can. If every problem as traumatic and as important as rape were treated as sacrosanct, writers would be unable to write anything at all.

2. Telling people not to talk about rape is bad, not good

I have a story about racism that one reader said struck close to home for him. I have a story that takes place in a war, and it upset one person who'd been through a war, to the point that he still sometimes has nightmares about it. This present story has a character who's mentally unstable, and I've gotten private messages from people who have their own experiences with or fears about that, who found it very upsetting. But none of those people said I shouldn't have written what I did because it hurt them.

And yet, it’s common for male writers who write about rape to get letters complaining about it, no matter how they write about it.

Why is that? Is it because being orphaned, or an oppressed minority, or going through a war, or mental illness, is so much less traumatic than being raped? I don’t think so.

The reason, I think, is that our reaction to rape is screwed up. An orphan can admit in public to being an orphan, and it isn’t nearly as awkward as for someone to admit to having been raped. An orphan isn’t tempted to blame themselves, or feel “tainted”.

Being a bastard, not an orphan but an unacknowledged child, in the Middle Ages, was probably similar to being raped. It was considered shameful to be a bastard. The problem wasn’t that people talked carelessly about being a bastard. The problem was that society had social roles defined by inheritance, and weird religious beliefs that sin could be inherited and that your virtue determined your social role. Bastards were conceived in sin, and both that and their loss of their inheritance and social standing proved their lack of virtue. “A bastard” meant “a child born out of wedlock,” and also, “inferior, adulterated [notice the root of that word!], untrustworthy”.

The solution to problems like that is to get people to think about these beliefs, and about real bastards. The way society does this is gradually, accidentally, by telling stories that have some of these elements in them and are not false.

There have been many societies, and there still are some, in which marriage and slavery were hard to distinguish from institutionalized rape. In the most extreme form, let’s say among Vikings, or Alexander the Great’s army, or the Mongol horde, forcible rape was the usual way of beginning a marriage. I’ve often wondered how a society functioned with so much trauma. Few people recorded how those women dealt with it, but I suspect that its being out in the open, rather than taboo, helped them.

But what is happening instead is that there is a movement to suppress writing about rape. I Googled these phrases:

“Writing about mental illness”:

- Sue Sanders wrote about her husband’s bipolar disorder. She received vitriolic letters from readers—not because they wanted her to treat the subject more sensitively, but because they thought her husband was a jerk and should man up and stop being bipolar.

- Time to Change asks people to blog about their experience with mental illness and discrimination.

- Rob Delaney explains why he wrote about his mental illness, and why it’s important for other people to do so.

“Writing about orphans”:

- Joe Bunting advises writers to have their main characters be orphans, because it’s an easy way to make their character arc more dramatic.

- An interview with the author of Orphan Train

- Sick Heroes asks why so many characters in 19th-century novels were orphans, and suggests they symbolically represented social problems.

- Several books note that Charles Dickens loved writing about orphans.

“Writing about rape”:

- Jim Hines sets out rules for when and how it’s acceptable to use rape in a story. A good piece, BTW, which I’ve seen somewhere else before.

- Rules for journalists: How to write about rape incidents in a way that shapes social consciousness about rape properly

- “How to write about rape prevention without sounding like an asshole” castigates people who tried to suggest steps women could take to reduce the chance of being raped, because they’re “blaming the victim.” It actually says,“DON'T write "how not to get raped" columns in the first place.”

Some of the articles about other sensitive topics practically begged writers to write about them. None of them implied that people should avoid writing about them. But all of the articles on writing about rape were cautions not to write about rape except in certain circumstances or certain ways.

So while I prefer to write about rape and other troubling topics respectfully, the collective message of all these requests is to shut up about rape. And that only makes the problem worse.

Instead of seeing so many people accuse authors of exploiting rape in fiction, I’d like to see people accuse bloggers of exploiting rape to push a political agenda. Anyone who writes, “DON'T write ‘how not to get raped’ columns in the first place” is not concerned about actual rapes, or they wouldn’t get angry at people for trying to prevent them. They are more concerned about the social attitude toward rape, and how they can use that. There are many Republican politicians who rave against abortion, and are secretly grateful for it. And there are strong parallels with the successful movement to forbid whites from writing about race, which succeeded in its political aim of making public discussion of race in America completely one-sided. So please forgive my cynicism.

3. A story is not an essay

Another problem with asking a writer to treat a topic respectfully will be difficult to understand if you don’t write yourself: I don't know how to tell the difference between treating something with sensitivity and using it as a plot device. I never ask myself, "What plot device can I throw in here to generate drama?" I imagine things that could happen, and some of those things grab my imagination more than others. I can't tell whether that's because they're thematically important, or because my subconscious wants cheap entertainment. A story is not an essay.

4. Asking a writer to treat a topic respectfully is a category error

I can’t treat a topic with "compassion, sensitivity, and gravity". A topic doesn’t have feelings. I only know how to treat characters with compassion, sensitivity, and gravity, and I believe I did that. This sounds flippant, but understanding this distinction is core to understanding the difference between stories and essays. Stories can only approach truth through the eyes of characters. They don’t deal with topics so much as show characters dealing with topics.

A writer’s responsibility is to avoid falseness

I take my responsibility as an author seriously, as seriously as anyone I know. I take that responsibility to be to present the world, or at least a tiny part of it, as it is, without lies. I can’t wrap this story up nicely with a quick bout of psychotherapy, or say that Twilight’s innocent and pure worldview makes her happier and wiser than us, or have a deus ex machina solve the problem. I would think very hard before writing a story about rape in which someone brought it on themselves, or enjoyed being raped, or recovered from it quickly. Not because I’m guessing at the social implications, but because it would misrepresent reality.

Even so, I may have done that. Rape is a central plot point in “Twenty Minutes”. There’s a point where the mare who’s recently been raped hugs a strange stallion out of desperation. I wondered for a long time before publishing it whether that wasn’t too unrealistic, whether she would have been able to do that in those circumstances. I finally concluded that a), I didn’t and couldn’t know, b) nobody else could know either, and c), I would publish the story anyway, because rape was not the central thematic point, not the issue the main character was dealing with, so I could tolerate some improbability.

Writing is making compromises. Everything is two steps forward, one step back. I’m doing the best I can. If you think I’ve written something false, show me. But don’t write me a vague letter asking if I treated a topic with respect because I mentioned it in a story. That cripples writers, and stories. If I’d written a story that used rape as a source of humor, a comment criticizing that would be called for. But when you ask me to justify myself for having implied in a story that there had been a rape, without having made that the focus of the story, you are just hardening me against your concerns.