Rape isn’t entertainment, it’s a never-more pressing outrage that is not to be enjoyed with a glass of Merlot and a few cheese straws as you watch your “edgy” TV drama. There are more refuges, more sexual assaults and women are now seen as sex objects on an unprecedented scale.
Director Carrie Cracknall says: “The interconnectedness of the way women are represented in pornography, in music videos, in cinema, in advertising, in fashion which connects into the global beauty industry – insecurity about body image, younger and younger women going under the knife which connects into a dehumanised objectified perspective on women by men and other women and that must in some way lie at the heart of conversations we are having about domestic abuse, about rape, about sexual assault. Those things all sit together in one murky, complex bathtub.”
I think violent, on screen images of women fuel violence against women in society and I am now implementing zero tolerance on taking part in any storylines that involve violence against women, unless, of course it is with a radical feminist agenda. Let us rewrite the stories, let us bring back the heroines, let us ditch the vacant stereotypes and inanimate objects, let us educate women and men, empower them to find different subjects. As Rebecca Reilly-Cooper wrote in the New Statesman: “If I wanted to avoid anything that contained damaging depictions of women, I would have to live in a cave.”
The way rape and violence against women is usually shown on screen is exploitative and titillating. Sexualized and pornified, it works directly against efforts to end rape culture.
There are movies which show these things in an effort to challenge rape culture but these are few and far between.
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