Why is the “historical realism” thing always rape?

A couple weeks ago The Mary Sue announced they weren’t going to cover “Game of Thrones” any more after yet another female character being brutally raped. The thread is still being invaded by trolls periodically, and there are more than 12,000 comments on the article, which is a site record and probably an internet record. (12K comments because a single website said “We’re not going to recap or promote this show any more.” Baffling.)

Tons of trolls have thrown out the “but THINGS WERE JUST LIKE THAT BACK THEN!” argument ad nauseum. Which is total bullshit, of course. Now with the season finale of “Outlander” (which, spoiler, also included rape) the trolls are coming back.

I just want to ask, why is it whenever producers/directors/writers want to demonstrate “gritty historic realism” it’s ALWAYS RAPE? It’s always sexual violence toward women/girls.

You know what would be gritty historic realism? Dysentery. GoT has battles and armies marching all over the place. You want to show “what things were like back then”? Why aren’t we seeing 500 guys by the side of a road puking and shitting their guts out from drinking contaminated water while the rest of the army straggles along trying to keep going? Or a village getting wiped out by cholera? Or typhus, polio or plague epidemics? 

You want to show what it was like back then for women? Show a woman dying of sepsis from an infection she caught while giving birth. Show a woman coping with ruptured ovarian cysts with nobody know what it is. Breast cancer that the audience will recognize immediately but the characters think is some mark of the devil or some shit.

But no, it’s always rape. And we all know why that is. Because these douchecanoes that do this, though they’ll deny it, think rape is sexy. Because they can’t make a modern set story where women get raped in every god damned episode without being called monsters. So they use “but but historical realism!” to cover their sexism (see “Mad Men”) and misogyny. Then they tell us “That’s just how it was back then!” with the clear implication “Shut the fuck up bitch, because that could be you  and you should be thanking me that it’s not.”

Can we propose a rule for “realistic” historical fiction/fantasy? Twelve graphic cases of dysentery for every one graphic rape?

^^ I like this idea.

And the worst part about it is that, by their own logic, their argument isn’t even a valid one.  They’re saying that rape is “historically accurate” in Game of Thrones, a show which 

1. Is not a historical drama
   
2. Is not set on our Earth
3. Is fantasy

So no, there was no “back then” because we can’t go “back” to a “then” that never existed.  And as far as I can find, Westeros is ~12,000 years old.  You wanna make a historically accurate drama set on earth in 10,000 BC, be my guest, but it ain’t gonna look like Game of Thrones.

So when all of the writers for the TV show keep putting rape scenes in the script, they aren’t thinking “yeah, this would’ve been realistic,” they’re thinking “haha let’s see how much I can torture women on this show.”  If the logic you’re using doesn’t even hold up to the thing you’re discussing, you’ve really gotta examine why you’re so enthusiastic about defending rape as a plot device.

Maybe if high fantasy writers and creators weren’t all fucking hacks who’ve been riding JRRT’s dick for the last fifty years and insist on making every single god damn fantasy world they create a boring retread of Middle Earth based on the same three hundred year span of time in four countries of Western Europe they wouldn’t all have to rely on the same garbage logic to justify their garbage misogyny. 

You know, they could deny that they find rape sexy, and they might even believe their own denials.  But the point is that they clearly don’t think of rape as something distasteful enough and disgusting enough to omit.

And you know what, I’m not even gonna insist on the dysentery.  Just this: if you’re going to include rape on the basis of historical accuracy, none of your female characters are allowed to have shaved legs or armpits.  And all of your characters have to have terrible teeth – yellowed and worn and crooked, because nobody’s getting braces or regular visits to the dentist – with at least a few teeth blackened or missing for every character over the age of thirty.

Of course, if your reaction to blackened teeth and hairy armpits is “ugh, no, sure it might be historically accurate but it’s gross, nobody’s going to want to watch that" and you don’t have the exact same reaction to rape, you might want to think about why that is.

An open letter to tumblr @staff / @support about the 10/29/2015 update:

Dear @staff / @support,

I know you must have spent time and money to implement this recent update that changes tracked tags to search, and I appreciate your attempts to improve this website. However, these recent changes are not user-friendly. They reduce the functionality of your website, and here’s why:

1) This new update is upsetting, and it’s more than just “Oh look, tumblr moved all the furniture 2 inches to the left again.” You said you’ll “periodically slip the best new [tracked tags] posts right into your dash.” I noticed. In case anyone besides my followers actually reads this, I’m a fan of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire (ASOIAF) book series, and ASOIAF is the main focus of all of my blogs. I used to be a fan of the popular tv show adaptation, Game of Thrones. My love for ASOIAF remains strong, but I cut ties with the tv show after HBO raped Sansa Stark, one of my favorite characters in the books. 

But now, @staff, you’re slipping the best new posts about Sansa Stark being raped right onto my dash! You’re slipping the best new posts about the latest Game of Thrones/Sansa Stark rage-blogging right onto my dash! Not too many! Just enough to completely upset me, and make me shut down the computer for several hours! I just want to be able to go into the Sansa Stark tag when I choose to do so, and to scroll swiftly past the rape posts to find the pretty fanart. I do not want any posts on my dash from people I don’t follow. 

Tracked tags allowed me to mentally prepare myself before looking at sensitive topics / tags / content that I am interested in. I used to be able to choose how and when I wanted to look at that content; you’ve taken that choice away from me. 

2) This new update is inefficient. I used to have 19 tracked tags. Now I have 19 bookmarks saved in a folder in my browser. Now, I don’t know when any of those tags have a new post in them. This morning I clicked on 19 different links trying to find the latest content for my blogs; out of those 19 tags, 3 of them had new content in them, meaning I wasted my time with 16 of them. I track a bunch of obscure tags for minor characters, so is this what I’m going to have to deal with from now on? I already waste enough time on this website. The least you could do is allow me to waste that time efficiently. 

Tumblr users are busy people. Despite the infantilizing language often used to make announcements on tumblr, apparently 85% of tumblr users are adults 18 or older, and presumably a lot of these people have commitments like work, school, and family. We don’t always have time to scroll our dashboards and sift through 5 million reblogs of the same cat post to find the latest news and the latest content we want to see. 

Even when I didn’t have time to scroll my dash, I could spend 2 minutes to glance at my tracked tags and immediately see which ones had new content in them. Even working 5 days a week, I could always keep my blogs updated because tracked tags told me right away when there was brand new content I wanted to see. I wasn’t searching for that content. I wasn’t sifting through my dashboard like a miner panning for gold. The content I wanted was right there waiting for me. 

I think I understand what you were trying to do. This streamlines the tumblr experience, with “tracked tags” now slipped onto the dashboard. By slipping posts onto the dashboard, I’m guessing you were trying to have us spend more time on the dash (where your advertisements are, incidentally) and less in tracked tags. I’m also guessing you were trying to deliver content to us faster. 

But it doesn’t work. This is not how users actually use your website. Tumblr is supposed to be fun, and all you’re doing is making it frustrating and upsetting.

Please, I don’t know if anyone, let alone anyone in a position of authority, will actually read this, but I’m begging you: put the tracked tags back. In all my years on tumblr, I’ve only ever seen you restore one feature that you had previously taken away: rebloggable asks. Please, make tracked tags the second thing you restore. 

Please, bring back tracked tags. 

I fucking love the character that’s like. not really the villain. but definitely not a good guy I mean he’s on our side. but he’s definitely not morally upstanding.