The Feminist Eye: Rape/Sexual Assault is NOT Entertaining

And the entertainment industry needs to stop using it as a plot point. There are other ways to traumatize a woman without resorting to Rape.

*Trigger Warning*

Case in point: My husband and I have been doing a Star Trek movie marathon. I hadn't seen the originals as I became a Trekkie with TNG, so we figured why not. The other day, we watched ​Star Trek: Nemesis. There is a scene where Troi and Riker are making love and the bad guy invades her mind psychically raping her. The scene was meant to divulge the psych ability of the enemy that she then later uses to locate their cloaked shipped. There was no reason the scene needed to be that violent, it didn't push her character forward and it didn't add to the plot. It was a detail that could have been discovered in a less dramatic but still traumatizing way.

​They could have had the bad guy appear when she was putting on her silk negligee, maybe he touched her shoulder trying to remove the sleeve. She screams and slaps him, and Riker runs in concerned. It's still traumatizing, a strange being in her mind, seeing her in her gown, trying to touch her without her permission, but it would have been less violent. The point would have still been made. On top of that, when she tries to remove her self from duty, Picard won't let her. "I need you," he says. Meaning, "I need you to relive what he did to you every time you see him on the view screen on the bridge because my needs come before yours." A violent act to a woman is pushed aside for the sake of a man.

This type of treatment of rape/sexual assault is all over movies and TV. In most cases, the men rarely see any accountability for what they've done, there is no repercussion or it's done off-screen where we are supposed to assume its been handled. There is a correlation to rape/sexual assault behavior on screen to that in the real world, especially for those individuals who can't seem to separate fiction from real-life. 

If the entertainment industry insist on using rape/sexual assault as a plot for women's storylines, then they NEED to include some type of recognition, healing, and punishment that is not done off-screen. People need to SEE something being done about it.

Rape/Sexual Assault is Serious and it's time it's been treated as such on the screen.