Comments on “Aestheticizing Rape”
Elizabeth Scarbrough
I’d like to thank Anne Eaton for an excellent paper. It is a difficult subject, but I knew it was in deft hands. In these comments, I will first provide a summary of Anne’s argument. Then, I will highlight some areas where I’d like to hear her say more. I will note some places where her argument could be extended. Finally, I will conclude on a positive note, detailing instances where mainstream culture is pushing back against these representations of aestheticized rape.
I/
Anne claims that the literature on rape often focuses on spoken and written language, rather than pictures. In this paper Anne aims to correct this lacuna. Her focus is on canonical pictures of rape from the European tradition.
In the first section, Anne defines and discusses rape culture, going through some familiar literature (or at least familiar to feminists). In sum, rape is tolerated by (i) being under penalized, (ii) seen as inevitable (iii) promoted through disseminations and popularization of sexists and misogynistic values.
Aestheticized rape is pervasive in our culture; she defines the “aesthetics of rape” as follows:
“The aesthetics of rape is a broad category that includes aesthetic attitudes, tastes, aesthetic values, and aestheticizing representations that take rape as their object.” (pg 2)
Anne asserts that canonical pictures of rape normalize rape through aesthetic means.
In section two, Anne discusses trends in canonical depictions of rape:
- The subject matter typically involved men raping women (at least until the 1970s).
- Narratives often drew from Greco-Roman mythology, historical legend, or Judeo-Christian scripture.
While rape is sometimes depicted negatively, these depictions often suggest beneficial outcomes for the victim or society. - Different moments of rape are represented.
- The straightforwardness of these depictions varies, categorized as:
- Sanitizing: Rape is shown as welcoming (e.g., Leda).
- Ambivalent: Rape is shown as both consensual and non-consensual (e.g., rape of Europa).
- Unequivocal: Rape is depicted clearly as rape.
In the third section Anne discusses how pictures aestheticize representational content. And in the last section, Anne examines Titian’s Tarquin and Lucretia.
Key points to note:
- The target audience was 16th-century heterosexual men, for whom these pictures were cues to sexual excitement. This is achieved through various elements:
- Tarquin’s red attire
- Lucretia’s sexualized, titillating pose
- The eroticization of Lucretia’s flesh
- Lucretia’s resemblance to Venus
- Crucially, the painting does not seem to condemn rape, as it adopts Tarquin’s perspective.
II/
Anne argues that while controlling images contribute to rape culture, they are not a sufficient cause. In a longer version of this paper, it would be beneficial to detail the extent of their contribution. I have colleagues researching the harms of advertising aimed at young girls, and I have explored how TikTok algorithms target young people. How significant is the contribution of these factors to rape culture, and how do they influence women’s perception that rape is tolerated? The scientific community often prioritizes other societal issues over studying rape culture, making such data difficult to obtain. Nevertheless, it is an interesting question.
No single paper can cover everything, and Anne does an excellent job of collecting examples of canonical pictures of rape. If we had more time, we could extend the discussion to other art forms, including opera. Opera has a significant issue with sexual violence, often depicting adultery through rape. This is partly because both Western opera and these canonical pictures draw on Eurocentric myths. But even when opera doesn’t use Greco-Roman myths or biblical text, rape is still prevalent.
Two brief examples:
- In the comedy (COMEDY!!!!) The Marriage of Figaro, there is a thwarted rape of a servant woman on the Count’s wedding night (referencing the practice that a lord of the manner got to “have sex” with every young bride on his wedding night, not just his own.)[1]
- The entire opera Tosca revolves around rape by coercion. (Spoiler alert: Tosca kills her rapist, but her lover views her rape as adultery.)
And in terms of the aestheticization of rape, we have additional aesthetic elements here than we have in pictures! The music during the rape scenes is over the top big and beautiful. As you see a woman get violated, you hear glorious music. Here we have aural clues on how we respond to the rape.
Michelle Rofrano, founder of the social justice nonprofit PROTESTRA, dedicated to understanding classical music through the lens of advocacy, puts it this way: “I think a big problem with violence against women in opera is the empathy with the male perpetrators.”[2] This corresponds to another of Kate Manne’s concepts, “himpathy.” Manne defines himpathy as “the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly, or less privileged, female targets in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behaviour.”[3] Opera is filled with himpathy, and audiences are starting to wise up to it.
Opera is not the canonical artwork of our time—it’s challenging to get people my age to attend. If I were to extend Anne’s argument to contemporary canonical artworks that depict rape, I would point to movies.
One example is Zack Snyder’s Watchmen, a 2.5-hour comic book movie. In this film, the attempted rape of Sally (aka Silk Spectre) by the Comedian is brutal in the comic but is sexualized and aestheticized in the movie.
Sally undresses in an unoccupied pool room when the Comedian enters and says, ‘Come on baby, I know what you need. I mean, you must have some reason for dressing in that outfit.’
Even in the source material (the comic), after Hooded Justice thwarts the rape, he says, ‘Get up… and for God’s sake, cover yourself.’ Her clothing had remained mostly intact, again blaming the victim for her clothing choice. The target audience of this superhero movie is supposed to see Sally as a damsel, believe she is partially responsible for the rape, view Hooded Justice as a hero, but still think the Comedian (the rapist) is cool.
But so far, I have only discussed the act and the dialogue.
The rape is further aestheticized visually. During the attempted rape, we see Sally from behind, aligning our perspective with the rapist’s. Sally is picked up and thrown against the pool table as the Comedian tries to rape her from behind. The scene includes a shot of the Comedian slowly drawing his fingers down her bare back, which is sensual and reads as “sexy” in the movie.
In Anne’s terminology, the rape is portrayed as somewhere between ambivalent and unequivocal (assuming this is a scalar concept). There are pictorial cues, or what Gaut calls ‘aspectual identification’ in his ‘Identification and Emotion in Narrative Film.’ We see what the rapist sees. We feel what the rapist feels – lust. And Snyder’s slow, lingering shot tracing the contours of Sally’s back reminds me of Anne’s discussion of Lucretia’s flesh and naked body. It is aestheticized rape.
Rape depicted in contemporary movies presents additional problems. Movies involve multiple depictions of rape: the acted scene and the recorded version. Actors often have to do multiple takes, likely reenacting the rape several times, which might be more challenging for them than for a portrait sitter.
In an interview with MTV, Dean Morgan, the actor who played the Comedian, said the rape scene took three days of shooting, calling it the hardest days of filming he ever had to do.[4] (I can only imagine what it must have been like for the actress playing Sally / Silk Spectre (Carla Gugino).
Consider the infamous example of Last Tango in Paris, where actor Marlon Brando and director Bernardo Bertolucci conspired to use butter in a rape scene without informing Maria Schneider, the actress involved. This resulted in an actual sexual assault being captured on film. Similar to the examples Anne’s discusses and our Watchmen example, this rape is also aestheticized on screen. After Schneider’s death, Bertolucci admitted that the scene was ‘not consensual.’
Another reason these contemporary examples are so powerful is that they often involve people who are very similar to ourselves, unlike mythological or biblical examples such as Leda.
Rape, including marital rape, is also present in other religious texts, such as the Upanishads, just as it is in the Old and New Testaments of the Judeo-Christian tradition. One area where Anne’s account could be extended is in non-Eurocentric religious art. While this is not the focus of her paper, I encourage someone to explore that project.
III/
Finally, I’d like to end on two positive notes.
First, the reaction to the aestheticized rape in Snyder’s Watchmen was pretty poor. Although the target audience of the movie (and I dare say all of Snyder’s movies) was young heterosexual men, it was not viewed overwhelmingly favorably. From a Reddit board:
“Man…I really don’t like how Snyder shot Spectre taking her clothes off as sexual. Comedian standing behind her over the table at the end, too. Fucking creepy.” (https://www.reddit.com/r/Watchmen/comments/e1jsrv/hooded_justice_stops_the_comedians_rape_attempt/)[5]
I do think there is more distaste for aestheticized rape.
I think the second positive sign is the re-claiming of the Greco-Roman myth and subsequent feminist artwork. There has been a rash of women who survived sexual assault getting Medusa tattoos after the #metoo movement. Medusa has been claimed as a protector of women. As a woman who got raped, her trauma transformed her into a powerful woman who could turn men to stone. Women who put Medusa on their bodies claim that this is both a symbol of protection and a reclamation of their power. (https://www.wellandgood.com/medusa-tattoo-meaning/)
Reclaiming myths, such as feminist retellings like Madeline Miller’s book Circe, begins to challenge himpathy, apathy toward rape culture, and the inappropriate aestheticization of rape.
In closing, I’d like to thank Anne Eaton for this paper. I’m excited to read the longer version and am happy that such a thoughtful scholar has taken up an important and sensitive topic.
[1] Some people read the sexual politics in Figaro as subversive: through the guise of beautiful music and comedy, Mozart is criticizing this practice. That *may* (or may not) be the case. Even if the criticism was implied, we still have a Wolf of Wallstreet problem. Further, the original source material was an obvious send-up of the aristocracy (Beaumarchais). Mozart and his librettist change the diatribe against the aristocracy to an aria about the evils of unfaithful women.
[2] (https://www.sfopera.com/blog/2022/07/from-don-giovanni-to-carmen-confronting-sexual-violence-in-opera/)
[3] Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020)
[4] https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/31694464.html
[5] (Even before the movie came out, fans were worried about how Snyder was going to handle the rape scene – “The last thing i want is a Zack Snyder slow motion rape scene.” (https://forums.superherohype.com/threads/watchmens-rape-scene.318188/)
Elizabeth Scarbrough 