To feel shocked about this on a comedy programme?

[girlfriend44]

Regarding Butterflies the comedy series written by Carla Lane in the late 70s.

It's on I player at the moment. I watched an episode and she was talking to herself loudly about being bored, and feeling taken for granted in her marriage
She expressed quite loudly that she wanted to be raped.

Should a woman ever write that into a script or was it more acceptable to say that back then?
I cannot imagine it in a script today.

I think that it's an example of applying today's standards retrospectively. Having said that it seems that today you can't say a lot of things for fear of offending people but you can do more or less what you like. Which you probably couldn't get away with then. It's a strange world.

We weren't. But the "rape fantasy" was common parlance. I think everyone was expected to know it really meant "Pulp fiction fantasy of a handsome stranger overwhelmed by his passion for me, which I eagerly return".

Acceptance that "rape fantasy" is an unsafe expression is relatively recent, I think. Certainly post 1970s.

If you weren't offended by that even in 1970 I'd say that you need to be taking a hard look at yourself

As others have said it was poor choice of words by today's standards but back then in an English middle class white woman context it would have signified glorious ravishment by a dashing stranger, and experiencing sexual pleasure without having to take responsibility for initiating it or blame for acquiescence to it, on top of all the other dulling, unrecognised responsibilities that non working wives and mothers had.

I cannot BELIEVE 47% of posters so far have voted YABU. Actually shocked by that

OP, it was of it's time....the past is a different place etc etc

I was in my teens when it was on and couldn't understand why my mum loved it so much. The main character (in my teenage opinion) needed to get a grip and get a job if she was so bored at home 😂

I'd give 'Bless this House', 'It ain't half hot mum' and Benny Hill a swerve if I were you OP unless you have some smelling salts handy 😁

@FloordrobeIsGoingToGetME i think the fact the MNHQ has deleted all the abuse from @PelvicFloorClenchReminder says all it needs to. Your interpretation about parents is up to you.

Maybe my posts are bizarre to you, but they’re my opinions. You’re also entitled to yours. I just don’t appreciate being sworn at by complete strangers.

In a Jilly Cooper romance novel from around the same time, the female lead is having a snog and a grope in a dark room (she thinks he's her ex, it'll turn out later than it's the male lead). The dialogue goes:

‘Promise you’ll speak to him this evening?’ ‘I promise! Anything, anything. Just kiss me again.’ He pulled her down on to the bed. They erupted against each other. ‘I want you,’ he whispered. ‘I want you – now.’ Any moment he’d be raping her and she didn’t care.

There seems to be use of the word 'rape' around this time that is different to what we might expect and probably has something to do with the cultural norm of the time that "good girls don't ask for it" / no means yes / forced sex means you don't need to feel guilty and all that awful stuff.

It's absolutely rife as an attitude, if not in actual use of the word, in 'bodice rippers'. The very term comes from the concept of the man just taking what he wants while the innocent maiden is overwhelmed. Yuk.

Because it's unreasonable to expect a comedy program from 40 years ago to be inline with modern social norms.

This!

If you want to go down a rabbit hole of how shocking some of the content of mainstream TV was in the 60s, 70s and 80s, you’d fill a 40 page thread almost instantaneously, but to what end? Society as a whole was rampantly classist, racist and misogynistic, and that was reflected in the culture and media of the day (and in the lived experience of those of us who were young women in those decades). The fact it now stands out as being shocking and so clearly and obviously wrong is simply a mark of how far we’ve come in the meantime. Which is a good thing, isn’t it?

Exactly as above, there's misundertanding of the term from that era, and back then the comedic landscape was totally different anyway. Racism and Misogyny were rife.

So you're fine with racism being normalised and celebrated on terrestrial state sponsored television because when it was filmed it was deemed ok?

You don't have any misgivings at all about how that might affect say young non white children or young adults watching? It wouldn't feel alienating to them AT ALL? Or are they lumped in with 'everyone is too sensitive these days' ?!

I think that @PelvicFloorClenchReminder's C-bomb being removed whilst your 'sweetheart' jibes at her and your post that sparked it being left up says more, to be honest.

This was the 1970’s - don't try to apply the sensitivities of today’s world on back then.

WTF?!

You obviously weren't around then and it was as bad back then as it is now.
A friend was raped in the 1970's.

They should be left as is with content warnings so that they can be avoided should you wish to do so.

Meant to add, I think Carla Lane (clumsily, even for the time) is trying to portray the character wanting good sex that she's not getting at home but not wanting the guilt of being actively unfaithful to her husband. If it's "taken" rather than "offered" then it's not her fault.

I am NOT condoning it and I'm very glad that it's not an acceptable point of view now.

They'll have a warning at the time stating viewer discretion, reflects the themes when filmed etc. Are we just supposed to erase history because Ronnie Barker said "dont give me a black look" to someone? No, we should watch it as it was or not watch it at all if it might cause offence. Pointless cutting programmes to ribbons to reflect todays standards.

I mean there’s a scene in Peep Show where Mark is literally ‘raped’ by a woman, and I think everyone finds that funny and not offensive. Any topic can be made to be funny really - murder, rape, suicide. I’ve never seen Butterflies before but I just watched the clip to get some context and I didn’t find it shocking. Just pretty boring and not funny, but not offensive. Isn’t the joke meant to be that the housekeeper walks in on the character saying something really crazy. It’s not like they’re laughing at rape victims.

The fact it now stands out as being shocking and so clearly and obviously wrong is simply a mark of how far we’ve come in the meantime. Which is a good thing, isn’t it?

Absolutely. I remember The Black and White Minstrels being on every week, and I look back on a lot of comedies that we used to watch, and cringe now.

But everything we look back on with horror, whether from 50 years ago or 150, shows how far we've come.

We're all products of our time. Had we been born in 1910 like my grandma, we might well have had a black dog called n*er too. By the time she died she looked back at that with horror. In the intervening 80 years so much had changed. Just as since Butterflies was written, so much has changed.

I don't consider myself so remarkable that I'd have behaved differently from everyone else, had I lived in different times.

It’s obviously bad just not surprising.

I think those saying YABU aren’t saying it because the joke isn’t terrible. I think they’re saying it as in what do you expect from the past?

It was 50 years ago. To give it context, that’s only 18 years after they closed segregated schools in America and 20 years before marital rape became illegal here…

"But... devil's advocate... isn't her choice of words also intended as a reflection of the very, very sheltered life she's leading, in her suburban gilded cage? She has no idea of what the hideous reality of rape is; she's seeing it very much through a Rupert Campbell-Black/Jilly Cooper soft focus lens."

This plus agree with PPs who reckon she meant that she wanted hot edgy sex with a hot guy but didn't want to be unfaithful to her husband.

Haha I used to love peep show. There's loads of weird sex things on it thinking back, like Jeremy giving that man "a hand" and when marks sister is shagging Jeremy and she says thats tickety boo which makes him think he's shagging Mark. And that was all in the 00's.

This is such an interesting thread. I was a teenager in the70’s and angry as fuck about the culture i lived in. It made me a life long feminist and a women's rights activist.

I recall my BF at school (having larger than average breasts) and being rather beautiful, being assaulted by boys, having a feel. Nothing was done about it. Yes it was different times and yes it was shit for women and girls. Is life any better now

Er no we just don't have offensive portrayals of the still grinding realities for women.

I have had 2 elderly women tell me about being raped by their husbands. Both giggled about it and had a ‘you know what men are like’ lighthearted attitude. One happened because she wanted to return to work because her children were teenagers and the ‘shame’ made him do it, the other one it happened because she didn’t want to have sex for the first few months after she had a baby. I was horrified when they told me, but neither of them seemed to be themselves.
I don’t understand it. But, this thread makes me think people just viewed it differently in the past for some strange reason.