A while ago, I posted a version of this essay on r/fantasy and it got a lot of conversations started. Here is the original essay/post if you’re interested in checking it out. I decided to refine some thoughts, add on, and repost the essay now.
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.
Obligatory pre-essay notes: we are going to be talking all about sexual violence, things like rape culture and victim blaming as well. Because of the way that this conversation is usually framed and the way that this violence is mostly used in fantasy, most of the time people will be talking about survivors as female and violence against women etc. With that in mind, I want to acknowledge that anyone of any gender can be a survivor. Also, I recognize that 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.
PART 1: COMMON ARGUMENTS
I wanted to start this off by exploring some of the most common arguments I see about the depiction of sexual assault in spec fic and what I think about them.
Argument 1: Sexual assault is gross and upsetting and I don’t want to read about it in my spare time.
In response to that, I say okay, that is 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 (she is the author of a book called The Pattern Scars that I will talk about later), and she stated my thoughts about this perfectly: “Personal aversion shouldn’t constitute a sweeping proscription.”
Saying that people just shouldn’t write about sexual assault bothers me a LOT, maybe more than it should. Because when people say fiction shouldn’t contain SA point blank, it’s hard not to see that they’re saying at least in some part that “we shouldn’t talk about SA in one of the main ways that human beings communicate ideas.” “Just because I don’t like reading about something or because it is personally difficult for me, no one else should be able to” – with the implication that it is morally wrong or harmful to do so. From my perspective, it would be infinitely more wrong and harmful to invisibilize and further stigmatize a societal issue that is already taboo, stigmatized and misunderstood. Sexual assault is something we need to talk about – the fact that some people don’t use it well in fiction doesn’t mean that we should simply stop doing so altogether. And in saying that we shouldn’t, we would also be silencing the experiences of survivors who already often have their voices silenced, derided, or ignored.
This also feels like a very limited way of understanding fiction and empathy and understanding other’s experiences of the world. And I think it gets even more deeply entrenched because of how emotionally charged this topic is. Take me, for instance. I love some books about this topic because of how resonant, thought-provoking and cathartic they are, because they have something meaningful to say about this complex, difficult topic that I am passionate about. It is a topic that I believe needs to be explored because, like I just said, it is a huge societal issue rife with stigma, shame, apathy, and misunderstanding.
So, that is how I feel. But I can understand that not everyone is going to feel that way, and that different people will have different opinions about the same works – that’s fine. But it’s only fair to acknowledge the existence of the diversity of relationships with this kind of fiction, purposes for writing/reading it, and subjective opinions about particular works.
For every person who reads for escapism and adventure and pure enjoyment, there’s another who reads to explore dark issues, whether for catharsis, to gain an understanding of something they haven’t experienced personally, or because they simply see beauty and meaning in art about darkness and suffering. All of these relationships with art are possible, valid, and no more right than another. There is space for all of them. I am going to refer back to this idea often – that different people read for different reasons and have different feelings about the same books – so to save time and spare you repetition, I’m just going to say “Argument 1” when doing so.
Argument 2: books about SA are misery porn.
To this, I say: they can be, but it’s all about execution and interpretation. I have absolutely read fiction about SA that feels exploitative and gratuitously horrible with no actual meaning, which is basically what people mean by misery porn. 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. Argument 1. 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 (I will talk about this later), while writers would only want to write about it to titillate.
I am reminded of an argument I saw on an old BookRiot article about the book Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, which is a very renowned early YA book about a teenage girl dealing with her rape. There was this man in the comments who adamantly believed that the book was child porn. People were trying to help him see otherwise but he just could not be swayed, and was a very long comment thread. I think this shows once again how strong feelings can get about this, and it also really demonstrates this “misery porn” mindset with an emphasis on the porn.
Speaking just about the porn element specifically a bit more, I think it’s important to recognize that not all detailed depictions of sexual content, including sexually violent content, are intended to be erotic/pornographic in nature. That being said, I know that a lot of people have very strong feelings about highly detailed blow-by-blow graphic assault scenes. For me personally, it’s not something that I would feel comfortable writing in one of my books and I think it is going to be more challenging for more readers. It can be very jarring to read in detail about sexual acts performed in a nonconsensual context when we are mostly used to sexual acts in a book being consensual ones, and I do think there is room for things to be misconstrued by both readers and writers here.
My personal preference is to see the fallout of trauma in detail as opposed to the physical details of the act itself. Focusing on the physical side of things doesn’t really add anything for me that can’t otherwise be conveyed with good writing of the aftermath. That being said, I don’t think it’s just inherently wrong to do. I said I was going to talk about The Pattern Scars by Caitlin Sweet again, and that is a book where the sexual abuse is described graphically, and it worked for me. In one review, I saw someone describe it as BDSM, which was fairly upsetting to me because it so clearly ignores the entire heart and message of the story, which is about the horror of abuse, and also the core tenet of BDSM is that it is between two consenting partners. If there was a BookRiot article in this case, I would be the one replying 50 times and getting more heated each time…
Going back to the overall idea of misery porn, though, this is a tough one because argument 1. Sexual assault is a miserable thing and it’s going to be hard to read about in most cases – there is probably going to be pain and suffering involved. But to me, that doesn’t inherently equate to misery porn. When I think of misery porn, I think of gratuitous and non-stop suffering that doesn’t really exist to say anything insightful about the nature of violence and/or suffering. It doesn’t aim for any interesting characterization or themes or growth.
An example of misery porn in fantasy, to me, would probably be the book Melusine by Sarah Monette (who later wrote the beloved book The Goblin Emperor and sequels under a different name). One of the main characters is a wizard named Felix, and his story is….. a lot. He is sold by his mother to be a kept thief and is abused by his Keeper, his only friend dies in a fire, and then he is sold to a brothel. Then he is sold to a sadistic master who abuses, rapes and tortures him for years, and he then returns to in a moment of self-loathing and is raped by him again. His magic is taken away, and he becomes insane, is locked in an asylum, is abused by the asylum staff and is then tortured by an evil staff member.
To me that’s just an unrelenting, nonsensical slog of horrific stuff – we don’t ever get to stop and really think about any of these events or see Felix grow and change as a character. But even in this case, that’s just one person’s opinion! I‘ve heard from other readers that the book resonated differently for them, and that the way that Felix progresses in the rest of the series is really worth reading. I do plan on reading on, for what it’s worth, because there was a lot of other cool stuff in the book and I want to see for myself how it develops.
Argument 3: non-survivors shouldn’t write about it.
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 and I do it too. But here is the thing, everyone: 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. The decision to self-disclose about trauma should be totally voluntary, and in the present community, that is definitely not always the case. Everything that I want to say about this is articulated in an r/fantasy essay by the author Krista D. Ball. I would definitely recommend checking out this essay, The Commodification of Authenticity: Writing and Reading Trauma in Speculative Fiction and the resulting thread if you want to see this explored in-depth. I’ve linked it below.
In short, though, this is what it comes down to for me: if we say that only survivors should write about it, how does that get verified or enforced? In the current day, it seems to happen via crossing online boundaries with authors, questioning their legitimacy if they haven’t already bared their trauma to the world, and sometimes even harassing them to the point of disclosing those experiences. Here is my hot take about this: those who think they’re taking a bold stand for trauma survivors by insisting that strangers disclose their painful personal experiences to the public are…not taking a bold stand for trauma survivors. At best, they’re being deeply inappropriate and at worst they’re retraumatizing someone. Either way, they are reinforcing some of the really harmful ways that our society treats survivors. Survivors do not owe you their stories, and authors do not owe you personal disclosures about their lives in order to justify their work. This is especially frustrating to me in those circumstances where people are questioning someone’s “authority” to tell a particular story because they have problems with the author’s representation or depiction in the book. It’s fine if you want to analyze and discuss a book’s content, how it handles a certain topic, but it is never justified to demand (often, as I said, to the point of harassment) that someone divulge vulnerable personal information about their trauma because of it.
This doesn’t just happen with trauma stories, of course. I want to take a bit of a detour that I swear has a point. I will forever be fucking furious about what happened to Isobel Fall, a trans women who was harrassed by readers on Twitter because the title of her sci fi short story “I sexually identify as an attack helicopter” referenced a common transphobic joke. From there, Twitter spiralled into dissecting the story to prove that no real trans person could have written it and that the author was clearly a horrible transphobic monster. Some people didn’t even read the story but still weighed in. The ensuing dogpile of harassment led to Fall requesting the story be deleted. She had to be hospitalized for suicidality and eventually detransitioned because of the damage done by this abuse. To me it’s one of the most horrible things that has come out of this trend of demanding “perfect representation” from authors, questioning their right to tell a particular story and harassing them, sometimes with the purpose of disclosing vulnerable personal information, if their story is deemed flawed. This article describes the event very well. Fall’s harassment was because of her gender, to be clear, not because of a story about trauma. But we’ve seen very similar things happen to other authors who wrote about sexual assault. Most recently that I know of, Ava Reid wrote a Twitter thread about the harassment they experienced after writing the book Juniper and Thorn. I have searched everywhere I can for the thread but I cannot find it anymore, so if anyone can provide the link, I would appreciate it.
To summarize, it’s just an insane overstepping of boundaries whether or not the person is a survivor. And if they are a survivor, they have probably already had this boundary crossed many times before and it can re-open wounds in a very real way. As I said in one of my responses to Krista’s essay, some really big parts of rape culture are 1) punishing people who speak about the topic 2) specifically punishing people who do not conform as “perfect, unproblematic victims” and 3) demanding that people share the details of what happened to them with complete strangers because those strangers feel entitled to pass their own personal judgment on the validity of those experiences. But for some reason, when people on book Twitter do these things to writers or creators who have written a story about trauma, it’s actually very smart and brave and progressive of them!!!!! It’s definitely not just bullying hiding under a facade of moral righteousness!!!!
Argument 4: but it’s historically accurate!
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.
First of all, I am not going to really go into whether or not these depictions of misogynistic cultures are actually historically accurate here; that’s a whole different can of worms and I felt like it just distracted from the point I really wanted to make here. If you’re interested, I will link a couple of essays about that subject here and here.
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. To quote medieval historian David Perry on this topic:
“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 this “picking and choosing” is that stories may justify their inclusion of SA because they’re set in wartime and SA is a tool of war. However, these stories rarely if ever feature male survivors of SA, even though SA as a tool of war absolutely has targeted and continues to target men at significant rates. It’s worth exploring why this authorial choice gets made so often. Is it, perhaps, because certain types of assault suit the author’s goals while others do not? For example, a book targeted at a male audience might be enjoyable to that audience because it’s easy for men to put themselves in the shoes of the protagonist and imagine themselves doing rad shit too. A world full of misogynistic violence might contribute to that, while a world where men are also assaulted might detract from it.
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. But in order to make the claim that the incorporation of brutality against women in a story 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 think that is happening. Again, though, this is with the caveat of argument 1.
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 Sarah 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’m not denying the existence of authors who don’t know what to do with their female characters and consequently throw in half-assed assault plotlines as cheap character development, and that’s worthy of criticism – in fact, I’ll talk about it later. I agree that one of the most powerful things about speculative fiction is that it can show us alternatives to our own world. Argument 1 applies here, and I agree that sometimes speculative stories free from oppression can help open our minds and allow us to see how things could be different in reality.
But for me there are elements of overgeneralization and assumptions of bad faith at play here. While I said that I could see some authors only write SA plots because they don’t know how to write fully fledged female characters, I think it’s disingenuous and actually fairly insulting to say that was the case when Robin McKinley wrote Deerskin or when Ursula Le Guin penned Tehanu, 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.
I also strongly believe that presenting an ideal, violence-free world is not the only way to inspire us to make a better world. Stories can also be inspiring if they write about the current world’s flaws in thoughtful and meaningful ways so that people can understand those problems better, think about them from different perspectives, and see how we could respond to them effectively now.
Let me say it again. 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 r/fantasy AMA of theirs, and I really appreciate their response, where they basically said that they would phrase their argument differently now. They clarified that they do value stories about assault but have problems with how it’s often done lazily/cheaply right now and would like to see other types of experiences explored.
To summarize my thoughts about Arguments 4 and 5: “it needs to be based on the real world’s past” or “it’s SFF so it shouldn’t resemble the real world” aren’t valid arguments for including or excluding sexual violence from stories on their own. It depends on the purpose of the story and what you do/don’t do with the sexual violence in it.
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 Zed says in her video essay “Fandom’s Biggest Controversy: The Story of Proshippers vs Antis.” It’s one of my favorite video essays ever, and I definitely recommend that people check out Sarah’s stuff. In this part of the video, she’s talking about the video game Boyfriend Dungeon, which features a plotline where a character stalks the protagonist. People online criticized this because it could be triggering to some players with trauma related to stalking. Here is what Sarah says:
“There are a lot of people talking about it as an accessibility issue. The idea is that, by virtue of the game 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.”
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 backdrop SA is often closely tied to the argument that a world needs to be “historically accurate.” To me, it can feel exploitative and trivializing when authors throw around a lot of random references to brutalized girls and women just to set the tone of the world/story, especially when that story mainly focuses on men and doesn’t really think about those women’s experiences or how sexual assault is related to society or culture or values at all. Survivors’ experiences, needs and voices are already frequently dismissed and silenced in the real world; sexual violence is already normalized. Backdrop SA in fantasy really brings that to mind for me. Like it’s worthy of mentioning (up to 214 times in Game of Thrones) to show that this world is a harsh, cruel place, but we’re not actually going to talk about it, are we? It’s just going to…be there. I use the word “exploitative” because authors who use this approach are treating these painful, complex, stigmatized lived experiences as nothing more than aesthetic for a story, to add some darkness and convince people that your story is really very mature and serious after all. I don’t necessarily mean that every story that so much as mentions SA needs to have it at the absolute forefront, but that it is worthwhile to consider its purpose and framing before it is included as a background reference, especially to the extent that we often see in some dark fantasy.
Critique 2: Fridging, or the use of violence against women to spur male character development
To provide an example for this critique, there is a subplot in The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss where the protagonist Kvothe saves two girls who are basically being held as sex slaves by some bandits. This encounter only exists to show how clever Kvothe is for outsmarting the bandits, how badass he is now that he’s mastered the martial arts he was training in, and how much of a troubled protagonist he is as he stalks them and brutally murders them one by one through the woods. He even gets to have a truly epic gentlesir moment where he corrects the girls after rescuing them by saying – and I kid you not – #NotAllMen and that the women who standby in these situations are worse than the male rapists because men who rape are just wild animals who can’t be held accountable for their actions or feel empathy, while women are the only ones who can “know what it’s like.” Yeah, I don’t have any repressed rage about that book at all!!!!!
So when I see this particular point brought up, I will usually also see someone argue back that there are lots of real-world examples of men being motivated to [do X, Y, Z] because of violence against women!
And sure that’s true… 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 or pain or revenge or consequent heroic 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; the real world attitudes that suggest otherwise shouldn’t just be reiterated in fiction without thought.
Critique 3: SA that is used by the narrative for cheap female character development, specifically to “teach her a lesson” or make her stronger
Probably the most famous example of this is Sansa in the Game of Thrones TV show. She is forced to marry a man named Ramsay Bolton and is then raped by him. She feeds him to his dogs, some other stuff happens, and she eventually makes it back to her home in Winterfell. At this point, someone acknowledges the assault and all she says is that it made her stronger, that without it happening she would have always remained a little bird. To be clear, we never see Sansa process the experience, talk about it, or deal with it in any notable way beyond feeding Ramsay to his dogs and then this one scene, also at Winterfell, where her brother Bran invades her mind to see memories of it happening.
So to be clear with this, I am not NOT criticizing stories that depict the complicated journey of working towards healing where, by the end, the survivor is empowered or has recovered to some extent. Post-traumatic growth is absolutely possible, and stories that depict it are absolutely valuable. What feels worth criticism to me is a situation like Sansa’s where we see a kickass Strong Woman butterfly emerge from her traumatic chrysalis with no meaningful journey or character development involved. Different people respond to trauma in different ways, of course, but our representations feed into larger narratives. This trope feels so cheap and trivializing because it glosses right over the deep, devastating impact that assault can often have and the incredible amount of work that recovery can take. Our world largely does not have patience for survivors with prolonged, messy, inconvenient trauma responses; most survivors I have worked with have been told to “get over it” in one way or another. It wasn’t that bad, you’re making it into too big a deal, lemonade from lemons. When I see these narratives where authors skip the messy experience of having trauma responses and going through the complicated recovery process that many people have to struggle through, I can’t help but be reminded of all of this. Again, though, Argument 1.
Critique 4: The sexualization/romanticization/normalization of SA perpetrators/scenes of assault
Okay, this is where my hot takes get the hottest.
Argument 1, yes, but those who wield this critique without discernment about all works featuring SA are just plain wrong in my opinion. I remember once seeing a Goodreads review of Deerskin by Robin McKinley that said it romanticized sexual assault??? To be perfectly honest, I don’t really know how you get that from that particular book unless you are just deeply uncomfortable with or ignorant of the subject matter yourself.
I think the argument of “real world harm” is unspoken for a lot of the points I’ve talked about here, but it really tends to come to a forefront here. There is a wide variety of opinions regarding fiction impacting reality. 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 people are fully capable of differentiating fiction from reality, and fiction is a safe place to explore dark topics that we would not actually want to be involved with in real life. This is a very controversial conversation, and I’m going to do my best with it.
To be clear, I’m not really talking about kink here. I think some people assume that just because something is fictional and meant for consumption/enjoyment and it features sexualized/romanticized rape, that means that it’s kink, but that isn’t necessarily true to me. To me, the key thing is that kink is about non-normative sexual pleasure that is highly aware and informed. What I really take issue with is when authors speak directly to or from rape myths that already exist in the real world with no acknowledged insight into what those myths are or what they’re doing. There is no meta level awareness of what is going on as there so often is with kink, at least from what I have learned and in the experience of my friends who practice it.
Like, am I personally going to read a dark erotica that is labeled for an adult audience? No, not necessarily. It’s not really for me. But it knows what it is and clearly conveys that to readers. Compare that to something like my ancient mortal enemy, A Court of Thorns and Roses, which is frequently miscategorized and marketed as a YA novel. In it, the male romantic lead Rhysand is continuously framed as an ideal feminist lover, an extraordinary man 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. I hope this example makes my personal delineation between the two clear. I know that there are people who would extend the conversation to whether that dark erotica is morally objectionable in some way, but that’s just my personal take on this.
That being established, back to the debate around impact. One of the things I said in my ACOTAR essay/video is that people don’t hesitate to talk about how books can impact us positively and expand our minds, and I don’t really see why that wouldn’t be true of books impacting us negatively and potentially putting damaging thoughts in our heads.
I also love my psychology research, and I thought I’d point out a few studies about this debate.
One meta-analysis by Ashley Hendrick (which is basically an analysis of the content of a bunch of research studies all at once to determine overall effects) found a small but statistically significant relationship between certain types of media consumption and rape myth acceptance, which means the extent to which participants endorse false beliefs about rape that are incorrect and usually damaging to survivors. The most helpful thing about this article to me is that it describes the different theories about how media can affect us.
Cultivation theory argues that people may gradually start to cultivate worldviews informed by the media they consume, specifically television in this case. Some researchers believe that the mechanism by which this happens is sexual scripting theory. A script, according to cognitive psychology, is basically a mental shorthand that people have for different ideas or situations. My professors would always use a birthday party as an example – my script for a birthday party involves blowing out candles on a cake, opening presents, and playing games with friends. So people may develop this kind of shorthand for what is expected in different kinds of sexual encounters and proponents of cultivation theory argue that media is one way that these scripts can develop. Some other psychologists look at this from a social cognitive perspective, which means that people may look to the media they consume for observational learning, which is what it sounds like, we are social creatures who learn by observing how others behave, including through examples in our media. Meta-analyses like this are really helpful sources of information because they gather many studies that have explored these theories and results that support these theories.
I also thought I’d mention at least one experimental study by Christine Marie Naber . In psych research, an experiment means that the research is strictly controlled to be as sure as possible that the variable you’re studying is actually the thing that is causing any changes you see. So one relevant study measured women’s RMA after viewing romance novel covers and written scenes from romance novels that either reinforced rape myths or did not. They then read vignettes of sexual assault where the survivor either resisted a lot or a lesser amount and were asked to rate the victim’s credibility, responsibility, harm experienced, and the seriousness of the act. As the researchers predicted, exposure to the fictional rape myths prior to rating led to greater rape myth acceptance of the fictional vignettes.
All of that being said, I need to give a few caveats and explain a few more things here. First of all, you may have noticed that I used very cautious hypothetical language – this is the norm in research psychology, because it is really important to remember that knowledge is always growing and evolving, and the results of a study cannot prove anything on their own. Most of the studies I’ve found the different times I’ve researched this topic have had fairly similar results to the ones I described above, but there were some studies that showed no effect or relationship. There is never going to be a 100% consensus in research results, that can be the case for a lot of reasons, and that is part of the scientific process. It takes a long time and a lot of replicated research to be confident in making larger claims.
Another key thing to note is that these studies are studying the effects of media on beliefs, not actions. I’ve often seen people compare the fiction/reality debate over this topic with the debate over video games causing mass shootings – with that particular topic, most research indicates that video games do not cause violence, as I think most people are aware by now. So I have seen a lot of people compare these two issues, but an accurate comparison would be the consumption of these kinds of media and sexual assault perpetration.To be clear, there is research on whether consumption of media, especially things like violent porn, can affect rape proclivity, but that is a separate issue from what I am talking about here. And it is a very very different claim than the proposal that media can influence our beliefs about sexual assault in detrimental ways, which is what I believe is most relevant to this particular conversation. Accepting that, you could then of course make a very plausible argument that increased rape myth acceptance could go on to impact how people treat survivors and perpetrators in their lives, view themselves if they are assaulted, contribute to the general discussion around this issue or engage in things like police reform activism or the #MeToo movement. Going back to gun violence, a more comparable example than video games directly = shootings that actually does have research backing would be the way that the US military embraces and supports first-person shooters to enhance their recruitment and encourage more positive perceptions of the military and wars.
(Edit: I just read the book Clean by David Sheff, which describes research-based prevention and treatment of substance use disorders. In it, he spends some time discussing psychology research on the relationship between positive/normalized/glorified depictions of substance use in fiction/media, attitudes towards substance use in youth who consume the media and their actual substance use behaviors. Some research he describes has demonstrated a significant relationship between positive depictions of substance use, use-endorsing attitudes in youth and actual substance use. I wanted to include this as another example of research exploring the relationship between media, beliefs, and behaviors.)
To bring the discussion back from research to people’s lived experiences in general, I have seen plenty of people talk about how books did influence their expectations, especially early expectations, for romance, sex and relationships and normalized bad treatment as romantic to them in ways that impacted their lives; when we have people saying these things as survivors, I’m not really comfortable with denying the validity of their experiences. At the same time, you see plenty of people who read the exact same books and have walked away without having their mindsets impacted that way. A lot of these people will argue that it’s oversimplifying things and, in the case of media for women, paternalistic to assume that we can’t consume media critically.
And that’s really my takeaway. I was jokingly referring to myself as wishy-washy when I was talking about it, and a friend said “I think that’s called understanding nuance.” IMO both possibilities can absolutely be true depending on the individual person, the works involved and a variety of other factors – to quote what Sarah Z says on this topic in the video I mentioned before, they are not necessarily 100% mutually exclusive statements. It just feels too black and white to say “books can never influence our thoughts without our awareness at all” OR “we are passive vessels who uncritically absorb everything we consume.”
But while I do certainly think it can happen, I don’t necessarily think that the sexualization or romanticization of assault (or any of these tropes, for that matter) absolutely NEED to cause real world harm to be worthy of criticism. That kind of content can potentially be critiqued simply as an element of the work’s overall quality as a piece of art that reflects on the real world, or it can simply be left at “Hey, this feels really tasteless to me.” If you’re interested in seeing this discussed a bit more specifically applied to conversations around fan culture, I once again really recommend the Sarah Z video I shared earlier.
The other thing I’ve been thinking about is that we can take fiction impacting reality out of the equation to look at how reality impacts fiction, and to me that’s still worth talking about. When we see rape myths perpetuated fiction, for example, it can be really telling of the author’s mindset and worldview, the kinds of troubling beliefs they may hold. Lately, Sarah J Maas has been criticized for her somewhat shallow liberal white feminism, and we can look at how that relates to and might inform her depictions of trauma and romance. R. Scott Bakker, the author of a lot of fantasy books that are well-known for being extremely dark and featuring copious amounts rape, has said some very questionable things about sexuality and gender essentialism, including subscribing to the evolutionary theory of rape which proposes that there is a “rape module” in men’s brains and not in women’s brains. I could probably spend a while going into evolutionary psychology and the problems with the evolutionary theory of rape, but the gist is that it’s a very flawed argument, and saying “men can’t help it, this is just how they were made” is not it least in my view, a helpful or accurate way of looking at the problem.
These beliefs can be harmful in the real world, and when people hold these beliefs, they manifest in their books. Whether or not that goes on to affect readers’ mindsets, I think it’s still worth talking about how they show up because of that.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Readers are not a monolith. Authors are not a monolith. Survivors are not a monolith. I hope for a book 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 and interpretations of 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 while also analyzing what we read and create with a mindfulness of the tropes and approaches that evoke, replicate, or feed into the kinds of stigma and misunderstanding that we see around this topic in reality.
- The Commodification of Authenticity: Writing and Reading Trauma in Speculative Fiction by Krista D Ball
- The Inaccuracy Of “Historical Accuracy” In Gaming And Media by Arthur Chu (David Perry interview)
- Do Better by Sarah Gailey
- Sarah Gailey AMA
- Essays about historical accuracy and GOT:
- Fandom’s Biggest Controversy: The Story of Proshippers vs Antis by Sarah Z
- Someone Figured Out How Often Rape Occurs in “Game of Thrones” by Michelle Jaworski
- How Twitter Can Ruin a Life by Emily St. James
- The Problem of R. Scott Bakker by Foz Meadows
- Psychology research:
- Clean by David Sheff
Charlotte Kersten 
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