Yes, as ace pointed out, my examples have more to do with media's propagation of and contribution towards "rape culture", although some examples make more a explicit glamorization of rape itself. Broadly speaking, rape culture is a term defining society's legitimization of rape through a myriad different ways. This can include things as broad as victim blaming (the "she was asking for it/look what she was wearing" excuses - speaking of which did you know The Peace Corps does this?). It also is contributed to by the trivialization of rape in society - prison rape is the butt of many a joke, as, in some cases, is the drugging of dates. Most accute and prevalent both in American society and in the examples I listed, however, is the objectification of women - that is, the reducing of women to an object of male sexual desires, often to such an extent that the woman becomes nothing more than her sexual organs. This is a problem and contributes to rape culture because it fetishizes and dehumanizes women while normalizing male sexual desires or transforming women into little more than sexual objects, thereby justifying rape.
Of the examples I gave, a few of them give genuine examples dealing specifically with rape. The first and most controversial was Seth MacFarlane's song and dance routine at this year's Oscars, "We Saw Your Boobs". Besides the obvious sexist implications of this number - the reducing of a woman's acting performance to one or two brief scenes of nudity and nothing more, when MacFarlane goes around the room pointing out which movie each respective actress was nude in, the examples he often cited were scenes in which the actress was being sexually abused or played a victim of rape or sexual abuse. Examples include Jodie Foster in "The Accused", whose breasts are exposed during a gangrape scene, Hilary Swank in "Boys Don't Cry", with the scene in question occurring during a medical exam following a rape, and Charlize Theron for "Monster", a movie about the brutal murder of a prostitute. Again this song is horrendously offensive because it reduces rape to the sexual act. This isn't a horrible, brutal attack played out on screen this is a chance for us men's men to see these actresses' naughty bits. Do you see why this could be a problem?
Double Dragon's opening scene shows a women being punched in the stomach and then carried away by the villains of the game. In some versions you can see her panty line exposed. This contributes to rape culture in a number of ways. First it casually shows a woman being punched. I don't think I should have to explain to you why this is a problem. It also exposes her underwear, again sexualizing a victim of assault as well as opening the possibility of "she was asking for it"-type of arguments. Thirdly it objectifies the woman by making her not a character of the game, or an agent of her own actions, but a prize for men to fight over. Why isn't the man punched and kidnapped? Why is the woman incapable of escaping of her own free will? It contributes to the idea that women are objects of competition, prizes to be fought over and collected. A direct contribution to rape culture.
Cho Bits is a Japanese Anime about a society in which all computers have been replaced with fembots. Not robots. Fembots. The main character finds one particular fembot tied up and thrown in a dumpster (...yeah). He heroically rescues her from the dumpster, and "turns her on" by flipping a switch between her legs (...yeah). The fembot has no memory, no name, and no understanding of social norms. Her existence, as is the existence of all the other of these fembots is the servicing and pleasuring of their masters (...yeah). Again this show reduces women to machines designed for the benefit of men. They are divested of any and all humanity, free to be used, abused, and discarded as men please.
The film Taken offers a particularly interesting example of subtle contributions to rape culture. While, as you correctly pointed out, this film does in fact turn the rapists and kidnappers into villains it also does a few other things. Notice how Liam Neeson in the trailer says "I don't think a seventeen year old should be travelling alone". Notice how it focuses on the woman's femininity. First it paints being female as a liability. It's because she's a woman that she is exposed to kidnapping, legitimizing the act even as it "denounces" it. Further Neeson's warning creates an opening for the victim blaming which is one of the most prominent aspects of rape culture. We the audience get to say "I told you so" when the woman is inevitably kidnapped. It's her own damn fault. She should have listened to her father. Worse still, again she is objectified and dehumanized. She's not a character, not really anyway. She's just the MacGuffin to get Neeson in France with a gun. Even though the film is ostensibly about her we spend nearly no time with her. To top it all off we see the results of this kidnapping in the worst ways imaginable. Amanda who we only see as the ditzy, annoying, teasing best friend to the protagonist's daughter is later found in a ramshackle Parisian brothel. This is her punishment for being a teasing, annoying woman: subjected to addiction to drugs, rape, and forced prostitution. Kim, meanwhile is further objectified. In a later scene of the film she is displayed, high on drugs, strutting around in lingerie literally beneath the gaze and ostensibly for the benefit of male viewers who are bidding on her sexuality. Again it is her own teasing, feminine ways which lead her into trouble, and it is only through the aid of a man that she is spared sexual shaming.
The three music videos I put up, again are examples of objectification of woman which has unfortunately become all too common in modern popular music. Big Sean's "Dance (A$$) is a very obvious example of this, reducing all woman to one singular body part. In addition the song enforces a stereotype that 1) all women dance for money from men, and 2) that all women are just waiting for a rich man to have sex with them ("Take my belt off, I'm pooty tang. Tippy tau tippy tay you gon get a tip today. **** that, you gon get some dick today") This line completely removes women from the equation. It's a foregone conclusion that the woman is going to want to have sex with Big Sean. Why wouldn't they? It's fundamentally what all women want after all.
This is mirrored in 2Chainz's "Birthday". 2Chainz repeatedly returns to the refrain "All I want for my birthday is a big booty ho". Again this line reinforces terrible stereotypes. First it implies that all women will take money for sex. As with Big Sean 2Chainz removes the agency of women from the equation altogether. It's never questioned whether or not the woman actually wants sex, 2Chainz is going to get it regardless. 2Chainz further objectifies women by reducing them to their sexualized body parts ("She got a big booty so I call her big booty). The guest verse by Kanye West is the most atrocious part of the whole song. Kanye sings "It's my birthday I deserve to be greedy huh./She holdin' out she ain't givin' to the needy huh./Go downstairs, fall asleep with the TV on" In this line Kanye is actually making a "blame the victim" statement. She's holding out. It's not that she doesn't want to have sex with the man, because he's a pig, but because she's an uptight woman who is antagonizing the poor, downtrodden man. In this song, the woman who refuses sex with a man on his birthday is cast as a villain
This is leaving aside, of course, the imagery of these three songs, which is the worst part of all. In Big Sean's song, the rapper is placed in a throne, in a position of power. The woman, by contrast is shown dancing, sitting, and laying across his lap. She is dancing for his pleasures. The 2Chainz song is particularly offensive, and I could probably go through a shot-by-shot analysis of just how horribly offensive the video is and run well above the character limit. Generally speaking though, the video objectifies women by literally turning them into objects. A camera pans showing 4 men facing forward while in the middle is a woman in a spandex suit, arms tied above her head almost as if she's some big game or fish they caught and are showing off to their friends. One woman is literally a cake laying on a table, another is shot from the neck down, focusing on her breasts and the butt-cake she's holding in her hands.
The worst, and most offensive of the three videos, though, is Kanye West's "Monster" The video opens with a disclaimer stating that the piece is merely a work of art and should not be misconstrued as a piece of misogyny. Which is hilarious. That's rather like me going to an MLK memorial, calling everybody there an [n-word] and praising the work of George Wallace, and then claiming nothing I did was intended to be racist. The video depicts woman in only 2 ways. 1) They are depicted as dead bodies hanging from chains. 2) They are depicted as prisoners behind bars reaching desperately for Kanye's body. In the dead bodies we see the full realization of woman as an objectified form. She has been deprived on any and all humanity or personality. She is literally just a sexual object for the man's pleasure, free to be manipulated into whatever form suits Kanye West best. The other women do nothing but reinforce the stereotype of a woman asking, even begging for sexual satisfaction, legitimizing anybody's sexual advances because "Well, they want it anyway and we all know it".
As for the "The Real World: Portland", it only takes 20 seconds for this promo video to show the female characters in bikinis playing on a slip and slide. And 27 seconds for one of the characters to be revealed as a Playboy centerfold, with the pictures shown, while men can be heard in the background exclaiming "YEAH". The promo then immediately cuts to the three male characters ogling her. Again she's not a human being with feelings, emotions or drives, she's a sexual object. A picture for the men to very publicly fantasize over. And we the male audience are supposed to fantasize with them. I have unfortunately watched the first episode of the series and it really doesn't get much better. In it the men go clubbing, get drunk, and invite three girls up to their studio apartment, ostensibly for sex. Once the men sober up and realize the girls "are not as attractive as they thought they were", the men barefacedly tell the girls that they need to get out of the apartment. Again this is reducing the women to little more than sexual objects. When the sexual objects do not measure up to their expectations they are to be discarded at a whim, their feelings, expectations, and compromised positions be damned.
By far the worst and most heinous propagations of rape culture emanate from the Video Games industry. This has a lot to do with the almost wholly male demographic (particularly targeted at male teens), the significant lack of representation of women in the industry, particularly as producers, managers, and directors, and the general patriarchal culture which pervades technology in today's world. Many modern games serve as little more than power fantasies and sexual wish fulfillment for the benefit of a primarily teenaged male audience. You can see this all over the place from "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time", to Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, to something as seemingly good-natured as the Mario and Zelda franchises.
This was the reason for my very intentional placement of the Far Cry 3 article. You very obviously did not read it because it has everything to do with this subject, and in particular the game's ending. The majority of the game serves largely as a power fantasy and sexual wish fulfillment for the audience. The main character, Jason Brody is a middle-aged early 20-something from California. He didn't really know what he wanted to do with his life before the game started. He's smart and athletic but unmotivated. As soon as he enters the island he suddenly finds direction as he guns down 20 (literal redshirts) bad guys at a time. Jason doesn't have much of a personality and the strict adherence to the first-person perspective solidifies Jason as little more than a player-avatar - somebody for the player to insert himself into. His interaction with females comes largely in two forms. First there's the love interest Liza and the rest of your friends. These interactions are fairly limited, the women are modestly dressed, and mostly consist of the women nagging you to do x or y menial task so they can get off the island (i.e. end your fantasy). The other interaction is with Citra, the exotic, beautiful, and half-naked Chieftess of the native Rakyat tribe. Citra, in contrast to Liza is fairly integral to the plot, sends you on all kinds of cool missions like killing smoke monsters, stabbing people with knives, blowing up military bases, and killing the villains, and rewards you for completion of these missions with awesome drug trips and explicit sex scenes. Moreover she encourages your increasingly violent and deranged actions, praising you as a true warrior of the Rakyat.
SpoilerGame ending spoilers integral to my argument :
At the end of the game you kill all of your enemies and repair the boat and you're all set to leave the island. The only problem is that Citra has now kidnapped all of your friends and you now have to make a choice. You can choose to release your friends, at which point you all get into a boat and sail into the sunset, leaving your fantasy behind, or you can violently and graphically kill your girlfriend and choose to stay on the island. This choice is rewarded with another graphic sex scene with Citra, ending in ejaculation. After sex Citra rolls you over and stabs you through the chest with a knife, declaring that your unborn child will rule the island as the most powerful warrior in history. The game ends as your consciousness fades to black.
Fans and critics alike hated this ending. They didn't like that Citra killed them because they wanted a happy ending. They wanted their fantasy to end with them having 6 bajillion babies with Citra while hunting tigers and bears every other day with their awesome tricked out weapons. The problem, of course, is that that's just the point. The game is a total critique and deconstruction of the pervasive wish-fulfillment, power fantasy culture of video games. In order to keep your fantasy going you the character commit horrible atrocities, ending with the ultimate (and most horrifying of all): standing over your girlfriend, the woman who has nagged you, belittled you, and impeded you at every corner with a knife to her throat, watching her beg you for her life, and you finally get to kill her yourself. You are an asshat. And you are rewarded with a suitably abrupt and unfulfilling death. The article's inclusion in the rapidfire of links was a reference to the backlash the game's ending had generated. It's a perfect demonstration of the rape culture which exists in Video gaming today.
Nowhere is this rape culture better demonstrated in the reactions to Anita Sarkeesian's recent set of feminist videos released on youtube last month. The woman launched a kickstarter to fund her series, asking initially for $6000 but ending up with over $160000. The backlash to her proposal was enormous, garnering a metric s***ton of misogynistic attacks, including, not least of them, threats of rape and sexual assault. Internet Film Critic Lindsay Ellis aka The Nostalgia Chick ran into similar problems when a "fan" started leaving very disturbing rape threats on her video comment feeds and facebook page. The same happened to another internet critic Obscurus Lupa, who was forced to take time off from reviewing out of fear of the torrent of rape and assault threats she was receiving (in the case of the Nostalgia Chick these threats came from a perceived moving out of the "female nostalgia shows" which she was originally hired to cover and into manly things like Lord of the Rings, and for Lupa it was for breaking up with another internet critic "The Spoony One" (...yeah).)
This is the sort of thing rape culture creates. The portrayal of women as sexual objects actively dehumanizes them to the point where you no longer see them as human beings. They are no longer people. They're asses, or tits, or p******. They're b****** or h****. They are objects whose sole purpose in life is the sexual pleasure of men. When they don't provide this they are seen as "frigid" or "snooty" and "need to be taught a lesson". At the same time women who are too loose or sexual (traits which are encouraged, again through the sexual exploitation and objectification of nearly every female role model) are seen as deserving any abuse, sexual or otherwise which they run into. In other words the sexual objectification of women creates a lose-lose situation. Either the woman rejects their sexuality and is therefore labeled a frigid b**** or worse, a ********. Or the woman embraces it and is seen as a floozy who needs to be raped so she can "be taught a lesson". This is why objectification is wrong. This is why feminism is still a real issue which needs to be taken seriously. This is rape culture.
On that note I'll leave you with this. A wonderful rap song which I think outlines the problem pretty well:
The thread this is from is one of about 5 or 6 that I'm actively ignoring right now. Sooo glad curiosity got the best of me so I could read this. The rest of the thread is mostly garbage btw.
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