Comments Elsewhere

“Actually, I haven’t seen much glamorization of rape in the popular culture.”

Aeon, what about: the works of Norman Mailer, Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, John Updike’s Rabbit series, Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, A Clockwork Orange in film or print? How about Hitchcock’s Frenzy, Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, or perhaps less enlightening fare such as Revenge of the Nerds? The musical stylings of the Rolling Stones (“Midnight Rambler,” for example), 2 Live Crew, NWA, or Eminem?

Or, need I say it, Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead?

The glamorization of rape and sexualized violence is not exactly an underground phenomenon. Feminist works such as Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, Susan Brownmiller’s Against Our Will, Susan Faludi’s Backlash, Sut Jhally’s documentary Dreamworlds and others discuss the matter at considerable length and with plenty of examples from various domains and periods of the culture.

(Note also that this is also bracketing entirely the contents of pornography, which should not be set aside in a discussion of popular culture, but which is whole new can of worms to open.)

The cultural treatment of rape has improved, somewhat, since the heydey of windbags like Mailer and Thompson, or the age of (incredibly mean-spirited) 1980s sex “comedies.” But there is still a lot to confront out there, and if there have been any substantial changes for the better it would be pretty hard to say what might have caused that if not the sustained critique of rape culture by folks such as Dworkin, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, etc. for the past three decades.