A thing to do
2010 July 17
Here is one way you can fight rape culture. If you have just watched a movie with a rape scene:
- Go to the Wikipedia page
- Note the scene’s description
- Note that it likely does not use the word “rape,” but probably instead says “have sex,” “seduces,” or “love scene.”
- Revise the description of the scene and use the word “rape”
- Go back in 6 months and return it to “rape,” as a rape apologist or rapist has by now has revised it back to “love scene”
- Repeat
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Awesome!
I’ll look out for this the next time I watch a movie.
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Incidentally, your changes are more likely to avoid immediate reversion (by people who watch out for vandalism – they might not even know the movie and just think you’re changing a word for fun or something) if you create an account and do it under that name rather than anonymously. It would also help if you fix any typos that jump out at you at the same time and give the reason-for-editing as “copyedit”.
And/or, if you want to keep an eye on it so you can change it back to “rape” as soon as someone ‘fixes’ it, you can either: a) put it on your watchlist at Wikipedia – this is helpful if you’ve got a lot of pages to watch; or b) if you use an RSS reader like Google Reader you can add a Wikipedia page to that and get alerts whenever it changes.
You are the best!
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: Great tips, thanks.
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Also: Changing “pro-life” to “anti-abortion” or similar, “family values” to “anti-gay” or similar.
This comment is hotly debated.
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Now if only there were a wiki for NPR and NYT news stories about Roman Polanski.
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Rebacca: While I agree that those are more accurate terms, the right’s made them the accepted terms and so it’s just as likely that some apolitical (ie status quo) editor would change them back as a conservative would. When it comes to rape scenes though, you’d like to think a neutral editor would actually watch the film before making changes and so you’d be able to tell who’s actually a rape apologist.
Of course I don’t edit wikipedia that much, so I don’t really know.
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So, I tried this out.
I went to the wikipedia entry on Blade Runner the movie and changed the part where they claim “Rachael saves Deckard by killing Leon, and the two return to Deckard’s apartment, where he roughly initiates sex.” to “Rachael saves Deckard by killing Leon, and the two return to Deckard’s apartment, where he rapes her.”
I explained it in the History section as:
It said roughly initiates sex, but since he had the legal right to kill her any time he wanted to, she was in no position to actually consent to sex, making it rape.
I would have gone into more detail about why this is so, but there’s a character limit.
Exactly four minutes later, it was reverted to initiated sex roughly because I was speculating.
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Broggly: the right’s made plenty of stupid things “status quo” – would an apolitical editor think that it was right to describe the anti-science-education movement as “in favor of diversity” or something?
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@CS Hearns: Maybe something like this:
“The two return to Deckard’s apartment, where Deckard attempts to initiate sex with Rachael. Rachael rebuffs him and attempts to leave. Deckard physically stops her from leaving. He roughly throws her against a wall, pins her there, and angrily orders her to ask him for sex. Rachael complies with his orders and repeats the phrases he orders her to repeat. It is implied that Deckard has sex with her, though Rachael’s consent is not implied in the scene.”
Then, as an explanation for the change, “A more detailed and accurate rendering of the scene. Since Rachael attempts to escape Deckard and is physically barred from leaving, her consent is questionable. Rachael’s lack of expressed consent and Deckard’s use of force is legally consistent with rape, not sex. ‘Roughly initiates sex’ indicates that Deckard and Rachael have sex, when the scene clearly illustrates that Deckard wants sex while Rachael wants to leave his apartment. This cannot clearly be called a sexual encounter when one party is physically coerced into compliance, and ordered to request sex she has attempted to escape. Calling this act ‘sex’ illustrates a clear bias on behalf of the author, since legally, this would be considered rape.”
It’s still a bit of a soft-pedal — it doesn’t use the word “rape” in the Wikipedia entry. But I’ve got three goals with this, when I do it: 1) I want to accurately describe these things, 2) I want to give survivors a chance to accurately vet their media for trigger material, and 3) I want rape apologists to actually have to put their rape apologism into words. Very few people actually have so much asshattery as to say, “It’s not rape if she’s screaming no!”, but will instead poke around the same thing by saying things like, “Well, the context of the scene with the way she was looking and I think I read this thing about the director once.” Putting this out there forces the people who revise it to say “not rape” to specifically say, out loud, when they think it’s okay to rape somebody. I want that shit connected to usernames, IPs, and moments of crippling conscience in the future.
You are the best!
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I love this idea. I just went on and modified the “Observe and Report” page. There was already a discussion in “talk” about whether the date rape scene in that movie should be referred to as “rape” or “sex.” Someone argued that “sex” is more neutral so that should be used. So I also went into talk and made the argument that the term “sex” is not neutral. Just wanted to raise the point that there may already be discussion pages on some of these.
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Ack! I’ve tried to do this before and within a day it was changed back saying that calling it rape was a subjective interpretation so to maintain non-bias it had to say had sex. (This is a paraphrase).
I’m excited to try it again with recommended techniques y’all have shared!
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I noticed that recently myself on IMDB – scenes of rape are always classified as “sex” and never as “violence.” After all, it’s just ‘surprise sex,’ right?
I may have to get myself an IMDB profile.
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Hmmm I meant that emoticon to express more “ughh” and less smiley. Just to clarify.
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I don’t edit Wiki so I don’t know if these would work, but here are some phrasing ideas:
“questionably consensual sex”
“violent sex-like activity”
“seemingly coercive sexual activity”
” violent sexual depiction that resembles rape or rape fantasy, given the woman’s clear protestations”
that way, you keep the “neutral” term “sex” but give the oh-so-inflammatory term “rape” a little room to breathe.
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Perhaps this is total derailment, but I’ve wanted to put this out into the feminist blogosphere since last week. I went to the new Predator movie, “Predators”, with my boyfriend and was witness to a gross, inappropriate and unfunny rape joke right in the middle of the movie. Even worse, about half the theatre actually laughed at it. If I had been wearing better clothes and had washed within that last few days I would have had the confidence to shout something ballsy into the darkness. Besides that, the movie wasn’t bad.
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I recently joined TV Tropes so I could do corrections like this, among adding entries.
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: I’m so glad I saw your comment, I was thinking of seeing that! I even asked my sister, who saw it (and who does not know I was raped) if there were any violent sex scenes/violent female deaths, and she said nope, so I mistakenly thought it’d be safe. That’s a great example right there of just how damn much it would help to have wiki/imdb edited so we can vet our movie choices.
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Mwuahahaha – I feel I finally have a way of striking back at that horrible scene between Theon and Gorgo from 300 (note: Leonidas’s wife is never actually named during the movie, but that’s a discussion for a different time)! That scene has bothered me for so long, not only because it’s triggering, but also because it is a far more accurate depiction of how I have experienced rapes occurring (not a stranger popping out of the bushes!)
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I just had another look at the Blade Runner article. Now it says “he forces Rachael to trust her feelings and make love with him.”
God, sometimes it feels like there isn’t a single battle, however small, that we can win.
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Excuse me, but I don’t get it. If a scene is *clearly* sexual assault and corresponds to the *legal definition* of sexual assault (which I am assuming is the same or damned close to it across state lines), then how is rape “biased”????? That’s like saying you can’t use the word “kill” or “murder” to refer to how people die in episodes of CSI, Law and Order, Criminal Minds, etc., etc., etc….. -????!!!???? I mean, wtf?
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I would add: document it somewhere public each time you do this. The “Wikipedia” page at Issuepedia is suitable for this kind of thing. (Write it in the talkpage if you’re not sure where to put it; I’ll find a way to organize any submissions.)
The problem people seem to be running into with this and related ideas is that the process by which truth is arrived at on Wikipedia, although less broken than in society at large, is still somewhat broken. It’s too easy for an admin — or just someone who thinks they have more credibility than you — to ignore perfectly valid arguments and get their way, especially if that was already the status quo. I’m working on that problem…
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A few remarks: If something is unambiguously rape then this change may be ok. But Wikipedia has neutrality and manual of style policies for a reason. Wikipedia’s job is not in cases like Blade Runner to make moral judgments. Unfortunately, in some examples like that one, almost any phrasing is going to have some connotative issues and so figuring out a neutral wording can be difficult . In cases like that, citations to what the director, writers, actors and actresses thought about the scene may be more useful than anything else for actually establishing what is intended.
Regarding “Changing “pro-life” to “anti-abortion” or similar, “family values” to “anti-gay” or similar.” – This is a much more clear cut situation with the simple: Please don’t. In general, organizations and individuals get their own self-descriptions regardless of where they are on the political spectrum. So for example, in an article on the American Family Association, we can talk about them being a “pro-life” organization just as we talk about say NOW being “pro-choice.” We need to maintain neutrality. There’s an argument for changing the wording in movies. There’s no good argument for changing political self-descriptors and it just gives massive headaches to those of us who are trying to write a neutral encyclopedia.
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: I agree with you about “pro-life” vs. “anti-choice.” While I use anti-choice in my personal lexicon, it’s not a commonly known phrase — people know what pro-life means, and run the gamut of opinions about what pro-lifers stand for and whether that’s respectable, without having to change the language. I also tend to believe that language changes follow cultural changes, and not the other way around, and I don’t think it’s an altogether worthwhile use of energy to try and force language changes before the culture in any way believes the underlying meaning of the new language.
I completely disagree with your position on rape. Calling something that meets the legal definition of rape “sex” is not a neutral statement, anymore than calling a burglary a “debate about money with many forceful and evocative points made by one party with a keen interest in resolution” is a neutral statement. That’s an obfuscation of reality with a clear preference and bias toward the perpetrator of a situation. Calling rape “sex” reflects the bias of rapists. Scrubbing out clear descriptions of a scene — a character forces another character to remain in the room using violence and force, then commands her to beg him for sex while pinning her to a wall — and replacing those descriptions with assumptions of intent — the character reveals her true feelings! — is a clear bias. Why is the case not the other way around? Why must we prove that the director and actors intended for the scene to be rape, rather than the people who continue to edit this scene to call it a lovely romantic bout of sex prove that the director and actors intended this? How is that not already a bias? How is a description of the actual events of a scene biased, and a description of personal feelings and unspoken thoughts not illustrated in the scene unbiased?
Okay, new call to arms, everybody! Find movies with descriptions of crimes, and edit them so they are not crimes but “discussions,” “negotiations,” “re-appropriation of goods,” “conflicts with unsatisfactory conclusions,” or “a revelation of true feelings.” You know, since this is apparently the definition of neutrality we’re going with. If this is the standard for rape — if that is a clear definition of what it means to be neutral — then it’s the standard for all crimes, for the sake of a neutral encyclopedia for the masses. If defining rape as “sex” is a neutral statement devoid of any bias, defining burglary as “surprise ATM withdrawal” should be an equally neutral description of events.
You are the best!
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Harriet, I’m in complete agreement that people writing nonsense about characters revealing their true feelings is utter nonsense. If I saw that in an article I’d nix that also. Clearly non-neutral and poor writing (a combination that is surprisingly common.)
Regarding the legality and comparison to burglary: People often don’t appreciate how much difference there is from culture to culture and from jurisdiction to jurisdiction about what is a crime. For example, in some cultures it isn’t theft to take something back from someone who stole it from you, in other cultures that’s theft. To use a possibly starker example, consider murder. In some locations it isn’t considered murder to shoot someone on your land if you’ve warned them even if you don’t feel at all endangered. In other locations, that’s considered murder. In some circumstances it gets even murkier, for example, is killing a robber justifiable homicide if one didn’t feel one’s life was in danger but one felt one was likely to be injured?
I think the strategy of putting in clear descriptions of what happens in scenes is reasonable. This avoids most of the issues that could potentially come up (the standard example in Wikipedia contexts when discussing this is that the article on Adolf Hilter doesn’t need to say “Hitler was evil” because any sane person reading a neutral article will reach that conclusion.) This is a good strategy and if done carefully should not be reverted (the only possible justification for reversion is that some Wikipedians take very seriously certain guidelines about how long and detailed plot summaries should be). In general, the thing that really matters the most is what reliable sources say. So for example, in the case of Blade Runner, I’d have trouble imagining their not being multiple PhD theses on the subject and lots of other sources. If one can find a direct source that describes a scene as rape and can cite the source then as far as Wikipedia is concerned (in theory) that should settle the issue. Reliable sourcing trumps pretty much everything.
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: This is a clear explanation that I mostly agree with, and a good guideline for getting changes accepted.
I will say, however, that I think the culture argument isn’t a very valid defense. Or, to be clearer, it’s only a valid defense if it’s applied across the board. I don’t see words like “theft” or “murder” or “burglary” routinely being edited out of Wikipedia articles, or re-cast as consensual acts, because in some cultures or localities, that wouldn’t be a theft or murder or burglary. While your argument may make logical sense, it doesn’t have relevance if that’s not the way Wikipedia is run. If summarizing events using an accurate name for a crime is acceptable shorthand for other events, then it should be acceptable shorthand for rape. If it’s not an acceptable shorthand for rape, then it’s not an acceptable shorthand for any crime.
So until I start seeing any reference to crimes (that aren’t specifically noted as crimes directly within the media in question) removed from articles, I’m still going to change them to call rape rape, because there is no other accurate, unbiased word that describes forced, nonconsensual sex. And the editors will just have to deal with being on the side of rape apologists who change it back to “sex.”
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