reviewed for my other blog<\/a>, spanning all genres and styles, as well as the two I have yet to write a review for, the majority are rather rapey. In fact this is how they break down: five had no mentions of rape, two had implied rape via dialogue, three had attempted rape, five had a full on rape scene that was negative and one had a positive rape scene being in a romance novel. That’s a fuck ton of rape and some of these…. were very cringey. <\/p>\n\n\n\nSo the worst seems to be heterosexual white male writers. Sorry, y’all just miss the mark A LOT. Most of you seem to add rape to a book to ensure empathy for a female lead but here’s where that gets sticky – introducing a female lead during a rape scene and then making no mention of it later and not fleshing out this female character anymore as a human doesn’t evoke empathy. It just turns a character into an event and grates on the reader for the rest of the book. Rape is not a thing that happens and then you immediately forget about it like it was a sideways glance and get on with your life. It has long term consequences… and so many of you have NO IDEA what these are or how to write them so please if you’re a heterosexual male writer make damn sure you’re adding rape for a good fucking reason and please have a woman or two go over it with you! <\/p>\n\n\n\n
And for women writers who want to add a bit of romance…. there are soooo many other ways to show sexual attraction from a male lead than having him rape or imply rape to the female lead! SERIOUSLY. That’s fucked up. And it’s very much reinforcing rape culture which I don’t believe we actually want to be doing! I am so beyond this right now that I am actually thinking about purposely trying to find queer romance books in the hopes some of the characters have a healthy, happy, functional relationship. You know without the trauma bonding, because I want to read about love not manipulation! Love is beautiful in all its forms, manipulation… I’ve had my fill of that and would like to move on and I don’t think I am alone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
In conclusion I don’t think readers generally mind rape being in a story as long as it’s actually important to the story and depicted in a compassionate or realistic way. otherwise it’s just so much click bait and noise. Who needs that? <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rape is not something to add to a story to sucker punch your readers – think long and hard about what is really needed. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":147,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,1,91],"tags":[137,140,146,138,144,139,141,142,145,143],"class_list":["post-145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-books","category-uncategorized","category-writing","tag-rape","tag-rape-culture","tag-rape-for-empathy","tag-rape-in-literature","tag-rape-in-media","tag-rape-in-writing","tag-sexual-assualt","tag-sexual-violence","tag-the-normalization-of-rape","tag-violence-towards-women","wpcat-2-id","wpcat-1-id","wpcat-91-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2019\/06\/caution.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paRChu-2l","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145\/revisions\/151"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theophanesavery.com\/an-authors-journey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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