Do we like reading about fictional rape? An affirmative answer would make us sleazy and voyeuristic, but it’s a common enough fantasy and so present in our culture that to answer with an unequivocal no can’t be right either. Yet it’s conundrums like this that make living in rape culture so confusing. The proposition that we do indeed like it validates fears about our most debased impulses, that we (or enough of us) get off on violence at some primal level. This is hard news to hear, especially for women, who we know read for pleasure more than their male counterparts. Yet it also makes innate sense to the noir fan, who understands the irresistible pull of the ugly. Even I have my limits, and I read a lot of dark stuff. I put aside novels by Jo Nesbø, who I also admire for his psychological insights and natural way of building suspense, because I found them too violent towards women. I also put aside books by Pierre Lemaitre and M.J. Arlidge because I couldn’t stomach them.
Suggesting that we might enjoy reading about rape in no way correlates violent fantasies with real-life desires. It could easily be that reading about rape inspires a strain of magical thinking, that if we experience it vicariously we are inoculated from it happening to us. But it does happen to us, in shattering numbers: in a 2014 report, the CDC estimated that one in five American women will be raped. And rape culture enables and reflects this.
Let’s define rape culture for those who are fuzzy on its meaning. In her 2015 book Asking for It: The Alarming Rise of Rape Culture—and What We Can Do About It, Kate Harding writes:
It’s a culture that rewards men for bagging as much anonymous pussy as possible, while condemning women for expressing any sexual impulses at all. A culture in which a young woman’s supposed friends will videotape her being violated and then use it as evidence that she’s a “slut.” A culture in which most victims of sexual assault and rape never report it because they fear they won’t be believed—and know that even if they are believed they’re likely to be mortified and harassed, blamed and shamed, throughout a legal process that ultimately leads nowhere.
Harding goes on to quote an older book, Transforming a Rape Culture (1993), to make a bold blanket statement: “In rape culture, women perceive a continuum of threatened violations that ranges from sexual remarks to sexual touching to rape itself. A rape culture condones physical and emotional terrorism against women and presents it as the norm.”
Building on what Harding says, rape culture is everywhere in crime fiction. It is in every missing girl or woman. It is in every female cop protagonist who is slighted or doubted by her colleagues and her superiors. It’s in every PI novel with a woman at its center, as she negotiates a sexually hostile world to do her job. Thus it is not only in books about rape, though those are the books I will be focusing on here. If crime fiction is a mirror of society that reveals our deepest and longest held fears, as I believe it is, then rape culture is one of those fears writ large in novels about men who violate women (sexually or otherwise). But it is also subtext in many, many other novels, where women are denigrated, pushed aside, ignored, hit on, groped, and verbally assaulted.
When I set out to look at rape culture in crime fiction, I found it everywhere. To take a very popular example, it’s no accident that the original title of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in Swedish translates to The Man Who Hated Women. One of the hallmarks of that series is heroine Lisbeth Salander’s repeated victimization at the hands of men, including her father and her court-appointed guardian, who raped her repeatedly when she was institutionalized as a child.
As awareness of rape culture grows and female crime fiction writers continue to take up the pen, we have a perfect recipe for the production of more books involving rape and rape culture. To take the second most popular crime fiction book of the past decade (after the worldwide hit Dragon Tattoo), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl plays with the underpinnings of rape culture. Her conniving and clever heroine, Amy, knows how to use rape culture to her advantage. To take one of the most discussed passages from the book, her description of the Cool Girl:
That night at the Brooklyn party, I was playing the girl who was in style, the girl a man like Nick wants: the Cool Girl. Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl.
The cool girl burps and loves threesomes. She never gets insulted like your typical humorless feminist when someone makes a rape joke. No, she laughs, or agrees, and as in Harding’s definition, is all too willing to call other women out on their sexual behavior.
In Jessica Knoll’s 2015 novel The Luckiest Girl Alive, our heroine, Ani (pronounced AH-NEE, shortened from the less classy TifAni), is a prototypical cool girl. When she is raped by three of the most popular boys at her new prestigious private school, she does not report it. She is traumatized but too socially savvy to let her gang rape get in the way of her desire for a place at the cool kids table. When Knoll confessed the year after her novel was published that she too was the victim of a gang rape in high school, she describes how powerless it made her feel:
I’m scared people won’t call what happened to me rape because for a long time, no one did. But as I gear up for my paperback tour, and as I brace myself for the women who ask me, in nervous, brave tones, what I meant by my dedication, What do I know?, I’ve come to a simple, powerful revelation: everyone is calling it rape now. There’s no reason to cover my head. There’s no reason I shouldn’t say what I know.
The dedication Knoll mentions above is the one in the book, which reads: “To all the TifAni FaNellis of the world, I know.” Confessing to her real-life inspiration, Knoll is forced to grapple with her victimization. Her own high school experience where three boys took turns having sex with her. In the novel, Ani has a fiancé, Luke, who cannot bear for her to mention what happened to her (the implication is that makes her a slut in his eyes). But in real life, Knoll coming clean is a major step forward. Like the #metoo hashtag, it’s a validation that yes, it happened, and it’s happened to other people, and it will keep happening until we change rape culture at its core.
How have other recent crime fiction books treated rape? Sandra Brown’s 1991 Breath of Scandal is a mainstream thriller with rape at the center of the plot. Jade Sperry is raped by three boys from prominent families while a senior in high school. Her mother and her best friend both don’t believe her, and she never reports it to the police because the sheriff is one of the boy’s father. The rest of the book is an elaborate revenge plot against her rapists, especially Neal Patchett, who is from the richest and most powerful family in their small South Carolina town. Breath has some soap opera elements, including Jade falling in love with a man who sincerely wants to help her heal from the rape (leading to sex scenes out of the Antioch College rules of sexual engagement, e.g. “Is it okay if I touch your breast?”).
Grittier than Brown’s book is Wendy Walker’s 2016 All Is Not Forgotten, which also revolves around a high school girl, Jenny Kramer, who is raped in her affluent Connecticut town. This is a stranger rape, however: she is attacked in the woods during a party, and her rapist does the extra sadistic charming trick of carving a piece out of her back. Her parents agree to give her an experimental treatment which will erase her memory of that night, but instead of helping her heal the blocked memories haunt her and she attempts suicide. So she starts seeing a therapist, who is oddly the narrator of the book. He also sees her parents, Charlotte (who has her own history of sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather) and Tom, so he is in the position to report on Jenny’s progress and on the family’s attempts to heal. The odd choice of narrator makes this book feel voyeuristic and a little sleazy: a shrink should not be revealing so much of what happens in his office, and he frequently makes comments that are less than professional, especially when his son becomes a possible suspect in the crime. What does emerge here is how rape culture is even infused in the mechanisms used to help victims: in order to heal herself, Jenny has to remember, has to tell her story over and over again until it makes some kind of internal sense.
There is a problem of tone in Forgotten, located mainly in the odd choice of the narrator, who comes off at times as shrill and misogynist. Other writers do a better job of writing from the point of view of violent men steeped in rape culture. Prime examples are You and Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes, whose books are narrated from a male steeped in rape culture. Val McDermid pulls off a similar feat in Splinter the Silence, whose villain is a man who trolls outspoken women online and then kills them and makes the crime scene look like suicides of famous women writers (a head in the oven for Sylvia Plath, e.g.). Sarah Hilary’s Someone Else’s Skin, about women in a shelter who have escaped brutal domestic violence, also does an excellent job of narrating from within rape culture. (Honestly, the scariest and most graphic book I read in my research for this essay was the first third of The Game by Neil Strauss, a guide to picking up chicks, or, at the least, getting them to an isolated location and either “kiss closing” or “number closing” them. The narrative in The Game is essentially predatory: women are trophies to be collected and used once the neophyte has mastered the game. But this is perhaps a subject for a whole other essay.)
The most realistic-feeling book on rape I read was Winnie M. Li’s Dark Chapter, published earlier this year (and based on an actual incident). The book revolves around the rape of the heroine, Vivian, in a park in Belfast. Li alternates the third-person point of view between Vivian and her attacker, a teenaged Traveler (think Irish Gypsy) named Johnny. The rape is slowly described, as at first Vivian is happily hiking by herself before Johnny strikes up a conversation with her and then rapes her vaginally and anally, also forcing her to perform oral sex on him. Vivian is smart and goes right to the police, gets a rape kit done, and has her injuries documented. This proves especially important when the case goes to trial, and Johnny’s defense is that old chestnut she was asking for it. Why else would an attractive woman go hiking alone and talk to him? The book takes us from the incident to the trial where Johnny is convicted, and then there is a hopeful section at the end when Vivian starts traveling solo again. She will not let the rape define her, or get in her way of enjoying life. Li’s book is the most satisfying of all of the novels I read, as it provides all of the horrifying details of Vivian’s attack, from her experience reporting, through her depression as she deals with the aftermath of the trauma, and vindication both legally and in the regaining of her old belief that the world is safe, that every man is not a potential rapist.
Even after reading these and other books about rape I’m most haunted by a moment in Jane Casey’s 2014 novel The Kill, in particular, a scene where Casey’s protagonist, Detective Maeve Kerrigan, is cornered in a housing estate:
It was a mistake: I knew that straight away. There wasn’t one figure in the stairwell; there were four. I had no sooner pushed the door ajar when one of them grabbed hold of it and slammed it back against the wall. Another moved to block the open doorway and my line of escape. The remaining two came toward me, one sliding down the banisters and jumping off the end, the other low to the ground.
Kerrigan escapes, because her partner shows up in the nick of time. But I think about this moment all the time, and it recurs in the book (and the follow up in the series) too. It’s the near misses that we discount at the time but then dwell upon, the what-ifs? These are endemic to rape culture too: as long as men use their power to intimidate (as well as brutalize) women, we are all caught in its grasp. It’s a terrible, potent realization about books and about life.
