Oh yeah. Spend some time in soap fandom and at some point a show will trot out a 'rape redemption' cliche and by that I do not mean redeeming the rapist. That's a whole other ball of wax. It's just that if they write a female character that a show intends to be a heroine but the audience doesn't agree, some writer will haul out a rape that pretty much has the subtext "You must root for her now! If not you are heartless and evil!"
The one that most easily pops to mind is OLTL's resident martyr who back in the day was a bad ass party girl who pretty much crossed into totally unlikable territory in a storyline where she accused a minister of sexually molesting a young boy because the minister had rebuffed her sexual advances. That and she had done some drunk driving that I'm really vague on whether or not she killed someone during that or whether she just injured someone, but it sticks in my mind that there was some awful result of her having driven while drunk. At any rate, she was an unlikable hellion, so they cooked up a gang rape plot (that was so much more graphically horrifying than anything on BtVS. Ever. Seriously, it's been fourteen years and I still remember it) and, well, of course she became insta-ingenu/heroine after that... because how could everyone not sympathize with her? And of course we did! Hell, still do. That said, she's been milking that victim status for fifteen years and it wore out its welcome at some point (that said I also still want her rapist to DIE! A horrible, horrible death alone in a pit somewhere, the skeezy dead eyed sad panda self-serving bastard. *ahem* I hate him a lot).
Another case of rape redemption that I remember was a marital rape after the woman had been having an affair behind her husband's back for months while he consistently catered to her every whim. Because the heroine was clearly supposed to be the 'do no wrong' type and what she was doing was not so right-- as long as the husband was a naive good guy-- they chose to have him find out and rape her. Hence, she's back on the high moral high ground without the show having to expend any effort or time making sense of her actions.
Actually the instance Marti and Joss were specificaly cited when they decided to do the AR wasn't all that different from the case stated above, though it wasn't nearly as blatant as the case above. It only turned into retroactive justification when her husband subsequently went evil...avenging her rape against her rapist who she'd by then fallen into supercouple with... it's complicated. I'm still unclear how her husband became the bad guy in the tale.
Another I can remember is a girl who kept trying to steal her sister's boyfriend, and sold her baby sister on the black market (I know!) that they quasi-redeemed by having her brutally raped (on the upside, she did get to castrate her rapist). But, again, the point of it was to manipulate the audience into forgiving her completely non-associated to the rape transgressions by staging an even greater transgression against her. Suddenly anything -- selling babies, murderous car wrecks, accusing a priest of child molestion -- are acts never to be mentioned again because she had become a victim of violence elsewhere.
In the soap world far, far too many writers consider it a quick fix for faulty female characterization. If any show hellion, bad girl, vixen, or good girl who strayed into unlikable territory needs to be placed on moral high ground without the show making any efforts, a rape is in the offing. And, yeah, fans note the cliche and the misogyny behind it. But soaps keep using it.
The fact that the AR came in the wake of Noxon's contentious interview with Zap2It that Buffy was the 'victim' in Dead Things and resulted in her doing a subsequent interview with Zap2It in the wake of Seeing Red that she'd "proved her point" only ups the suspicion that it wasn't just Spike's journey they were thinking about.
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The one that most easily pops to mind is OLTL's resident martyr who back in the day was a bad ass party girl who pretty much crossed into totally unlikable territory in a storyline where she accused a minister of sexually molesting a young boy because the minister had rebuffed her sexual advances. That and she had done some drunk driving that I'm really vague on whether or not she killed someone during that or whether she just injured someone, but it sticks in my mind that there was some awful result of her having driven while drunk. At any rate, she was an unlikable hellion, so they cooked up a gang rape plot (that was so much more graphically horrifying than anything on BtVS. Ever. Seriously, it's been fourteen years and I still remember it) and, well, of course she became insta-ingenu/heroine after that... because how could everyone not sympathize with her? And of course we did! Hell, still do. That said, she's been milking that victim status for fifteen years and it wore out its welcome at some point (that said I also still want her rapist to DIE! A horrible, horrible death alone in a pit somewhere, the skeezy dead eyed sad panda self-serving bastard. *ahem* I hate him a lot).
Another case of rape redemption that I remember was a marital rape after the woman had been having an affair behind her husband's back for months while he consistently catered to her every whim. Because the heroine was clearly supposed to be the 'do no wrong' type and what she was doing was not so right-- as long as the husband was a naive good guy-- they chose to have him find out and rape her. Hence, she's back on the high moral high ground without the show having to expend any effort or time making sense of her actions.
Actually the instance Marti and Joss were specificaly cited when they decided to do the AR wasn't all that different from the case stated above, though it wasn't nearly as blatant as the case above. It only turned into retroactive justification when her husband subsequently went evil...avenging her rape against her rapist who she'd by then fallen into supercouple with... it's complicated. I'm still unclear how her husband became the bad guy in the tale.
Another I can remember is a girl who kept trying to steal her sister's boyfriend, and sold her baby sister on the black market (I know!) that they quasi-redeemed by having her brutally raped (on the upside, she did get to castrate her rapist). But, again, the point of it was to manipulate the audience into forgiving her completely non-associated to the rape transgressions by staging an even greater transgression against her. Suddenly anything -- selling babies, murderous car wrecks, accusing a priest of child molestion -- are acts never to be mentioned again because she had become a victim of violence elsewhere.
In the soap world far, far too many writers consider it a quick fix for faulty female characterization. If any show hellion, bad girl, vixen, or good girl who strayed into unlikable territory needs to be placed on moral high ground without the show making any efforts, a rape is in the offing. And, yeah, fans note the cliche and the misogyny behind it. But soaps keep using it.
The fact that the AR came in the wake of Noxon's contentious interview with Zap2It that Buffy was the 'victim' in Dead Things and resulted in her doing a subsequent interview with Zap2It in the wake of Seeing Red that she'd "proved her point" only ups the suspicion that it wasn't just Spike's journey they were thinking about.