Sunday, June 01, 2008

Passions

I've never been one for soap opera, except for a brief flirtation with Victoria Principal (not to be confused with principal Victoria) when I was a kid. But I got a little curious about Passions because it was mentioned repeatedly on Buffy. And it apparently has a lot of supernatural elements. But frankly I don't think I could stand all the romance and all the melodramatics.
Also, who has the time: five hour-long shows per week?! Man, it's gotta be junk, no? I can't imagine anybody producing quality storytelling at that pace.

From wikipedia:
"In 2005, so many plotlines came to involve an element of rape that fans began to refer to that year as the "Year of the Rapes".[citation needed] Early that year, Paloma Lopez-Fitzgerald was sexually assaulted and nearly raped during a club raid. The show then carried a plotline over whether they should do a rape test while Paloma was in a coma (at the time she was a virgin) and Jessica Bennett was also raped a few weeks later while at a club. Also early in the year, Alistair Crane repeatedly raped his wife, Katherine Crane, while at the Crane Compound. Late in May, heiress Fancy Crane was nearly raped by a man in Las Vegas who demanded "payment" for letting her into a party after she lost her invitation. During the tsunami and later in November, Liz Sanbourne attempted to rape Julian Crane at knifepoint. In August, Theresa Lopez-Fitzgerald was raped by Alistair Crane when she refused to pay him (with sex) for helping her with visitation of her infant daughter, Jane; Theresa later married Alistair, and he continued to rape her throughout their marriage."

Gee! Saucy stuff for the housewives!
I've heard from people in the know that rape is de rigueur in romance novels. And not only that, but it's the hero who rapes the heroine, and later gets her in the end, as it were. Not sick at all. No wonder these women freaks out if their husband likes to look at naked girls on the Internet, they are so morally superior.

4 comments:

Hannah said...

Heh. Touché.

Cliff Prince said...

Jared Diamond or Richard Attenborough or some other evo-psychologicst might suggest that "consensual" rape probably makes a large portion of pre-historical human mating. Hence the female learns to "like what scares her," hence the continual and current confusion over "what do women really want," and since the act leads to procreation, the genes with similar predilections and confusions are likely to be perpetuated ... et cetera.

NotGuyGoma said...

Yes, rape... but it isn't what it seems, apparently.

Real rape isn't what it's about; it's "giving yourself permission" and it's quite a common fantasy, especially with women who would utterly hate if someone actually put pressure on them to have sex, never mind rape them.

The rape fantasy (and I have a friend who works in this area as a counsellor) is not about rape, but guilt.

If you are imagining yourself having sex but don't feel entitled to, or empowered to, because sex is forbidden, then the only way you can imagine yourself having sex is if "it's not my fault; I couldn't help it, he made me..."

I gather a similar escape clause applies with bondage fantasies. You can find many women who love being tied up, symbolically, after agreeing to go to bed. The knots don't need to be tight enough to hold a kitten, the ropes needn't be strong enough to catch a cold! What matters is that "I can't help it, it's not my fault" and therefore, there's no obligation to try to stop it.

A "good girl" would say: "No, no, stop stop, I'm not that sort of woman, a couple of kisses is all..." and this woman thinks of herself as a good girl, not dirty, not naughty, not nasty. But sex is all those things. So there has to be a get-out-of-jail excuse. And if you're tied up, you can let yourself go.

This has nothing to do with genuinely abnormal pain-and-humiliation fetishes. That's not the same thing. But weird or abnormal though most of us would find it, it's not that rare...

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Ah, interesting.