Trigger Warning

Read a Wired article, “Rape Scenes Aren’t Just Awful. They’re Lazy Writing,” and all I can say is, “Good.” This is something that needs to be said. I’ve probably read a variation of this article a dozen times in the past year, and it needs to be written again and again and again until movie and television creators get it through their thick skulls.

Rape is not titillating. It is not romantic. It’s not a plot point that needs to be pursued via a step-by-step scene progression that’s slowed down to -10 speed so every agonizing emotion can be read and cataloged.

Rape is an act of aggression committed by depraved individuals that need to spend a significant amount of their life locked up in a small box having their brains reconditioned.

At the very least, rapists need to be made aware that what they’re doing is WRONG. Like seriously, dude, if you don’t know that holding someone down and ignoring them saying “No, stop, no” is rape, then you should not be having sex with ANYONE, not even yourself, until you’ve taken some kind of class.

And I will opine that a lot of the confusion people feel about what constitutes as rape is due to popular culture. Movies, television, books, music, comic books — creators think they’re being clever or blurring the lines by introducing “conflict” in the form of a “traumatic past.” It’s too hard to just say that someone was physically assaulted; there needs to be a horribly drawn out flashback scene detailing every moment of degradation and fear. Because, you know, that’s what society needs. Realism or something.

From the Wired article:

But do we really? Although the recent Mad Max: Fury Road movie featured a number of central female characters who had