Countless rape victims face this exact sort of "reinterpretation" when they come forward to report the crime committed against them, told by family and authority figures that they were probably at fault, probably wanted it, or are probably lying. There's been a lot of talk about the "interpretation" of the scene, which is itself a dangerous idea. Seeing men write comments like that about a scene where a woman is forced into sex-particularly since I know multiple women who have heard the same sorts of comments about their real-life rapes-is absolutely terrifying. I've already seen multiple comments, both on my recap of the episode and others, that said she wasn't fighting hard enough for it to be rape, that it seemed like deep down she was really into it.
Watching the subsequent reaction to the Game of Thrones rape scene has been a further education in exactly how pervasive this mindset still is. It is a dysfunctional, dangerous way of looking at sex and consent, one that is based on the idea of forcing women to give it-the literal opposite of consent.
Guess he didn't really mind them coming in. If the homeowner fails to repel someone trying to invade his house-well, maybe he just should have fought them harder, or shouldn't have had such an inviting-looking house. Imagine if we defined trespassing not by whether someone had been invited into a home, but by how well the homeowner was able to fight off any intruders who tried to break in. It reinforces an idea that is already terrifyingly pervasive in our society: that consent is not something that women give but something that must taken from them by force or coercion. (Also, it's worth pointing out that while this scene happened in the book, Cersei was a willing participant.)Įncouraging people to imagine that Cersei secretly wants it, even as she is pinned down and screaming "no" next the to corpse of her son, is encouraging people to think like rapists.
That if a man simply persists, it might "turn" a rape into something consensual, or at least into something less than "legitimate rape" or "rape-rape," the words we have invented to make certain sexual assaults sound not so bad. And worse, they made one that encourages the most dangerous thinking about rape imaginable: that when a woman is held down on the ground, screaming for the man to stop, that deep down inside her she might still really want it. Whether or not the creators intended this to be a rape scene is irrelevant they made one anyway.
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