Rape in literature (warning may be triggering)

That is a really good idea Elephants.

If your friend wants to write a near-future dystopian novel, then he could do with reading more of the canon. Margaret Atwood deals with similar subject matter in her "Flood" trilogy, and writes very intelligently and empathically.

The 'Hardboiled' style displayed in your excerpt is all a bit old hat now. Alice Sheldon was doing it in the early '70's.

You know, if he wants to help fight rape culture in his writing, he could write a book where the main characters/most of the characters are women and they are not just there as something to rape OR to have sex with.

Women are human, is the message that too often gets missed.

You click 'report', which is in the blue bar above the post, to the right-hand side.

I can see why you want to help your friend. But I do find it difficult too - you're very defensive of his literary ability, you seen keen that he should continue this project. To be honest, the more I think about this, the more I feel that really, the response he needs to hear is 'no, please stop writing this, it is offensive and ill-informed and harmful'.

I'm sorry but there is something about this that I find very disturbing. I also think you motives are questionable.

Sorry, I hope nobody thought I was suggesting that any of my proposals would make him a suitable candidate to be writing about this; clearly he is very far from that. I was chiming with all those who say that he really needs an awakening, and it will require him to work, to listen to other voices, and to humble himself. Not to look for it within his own head.

And exactly what leaf said.

It is actually not rapists that people have difficulty sympathising with. It is rape victims. Automatic response to a woman telling someone she was raped is still too often cynicism.

He should think about that.

He could really really do with reading Sexual Politics.

I haven't read the extract and I'm not going to - even the comments here are too triggering. I really appreciate your warning in the thread title, and the warning before you posted the extract - thank you for being considerate about that.

But here's the thing that strikes me: it's not rapists who need humanising, in literature or anywhere else in our culture. It's their victims. And that does mean not using rape victims, even fictional ones, as a means of 'understanding' the rapists who violate them.

If he wants to think about rape in literature he should also read other novels which deal with the topic, as well as of course reading feminist writing on rape. If you want to help you could read the same texts as he does and talk about the ways in which the topic is treated. Which position is the reader encouraged to identify with? How/why? What are the text's implications on questions of blame? How does the literary depiction correspond to testimony from rape victims? What ideologies might it be promoting? I'm not suggesting that this is deeply ground breaking, but it seems that he is struggling to articulate himself in all kinds of ways, and to do this he needs to leave his writing and do some reading and thinking. Keeping his blinkers on to carry on plugging away at this particular exercise isn't going to generate any meaningful advances.

Sorry if that sounds snippy, I just know that a lot of people on this section are bringing personal experience to bear here, and we are all giving our time to help your friend.

If he wants to write about someone who commits rape while feeling hatred for himself as an ageing person or whatever, fine. But he will be committing that rape because he wants to feel power over someone, to feel that someone - a woman - is lower than him, because he despises them. Not because he wants to show them love or "have sex".

Just FYI Carey it's quite polite to thank people for their input, when you've asked for it :)

It reads like a fourth-rate John Courtney Grimwood; who himself is guilty of producing badly-written misogynistic drivel posing as cyberpunk.

Lit. crit. aside, it looks like an attempt to clumsily shoehorn some rape porn into the narrative in order to fit the meme. Maybe your friend could look to Gibson and Sterling for inspiration. They are both capable of producing intelligent cyberpunk without resorting to porn, and even have female main characters.