(Forewarning that I'll be discussing violence against women - if rape mentions make you uncomfortable, don't read.)
Upon rereading A Streetcar Named Desire, I glazed over the scene in which Stanley rapes Blanche. This isn't to say that I felt no pity for Blanche - as morally inept as she is for sexually pursuing a student of hers, no character deserves that demise. But my lack of a reaction to the Blanche's abuse deals moreso with the treatment of women in American literature and media. There is a repeated trope of women encountering horrible violence - be it mental (the mental torture faced by the protagonist of The Yellow Wallpaper), physical (Tom breaking Myrtle's nose in The Great Gatsby) or sexual (The rape of Blanche in Streetcar.) The constant depictions of abuse against women affects me in what I can only describe as semantic satiation: "a psychological phenomenon in which repetition causes a word or phrase to temporarily lose meaning for the listener, who then perceives the speech as repeated meaningless sounds." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_satiation)
Simply put, this is the phenomenon that makes you stop hearing the word "tree" when you hear or read the word over and over again. At some point, the word does not appear real anymore. In the same sense, the repeated depictions of abuse against women has left me completely and utterly desensitized.
There is an endless amount of contemporary media which utilizes rape of women as a plot device. American Horror Story, Bates Motel, Orange is the New Black, Mad Men, and House of Cards are only a few examples of this - specifically, a few examples which include rape. In fact, I find it more difficult to think of a television series or movie that does not contain any form of abuse towards women.
To quote the website TVTropes, rape is "an appalling crime that brutalizes the victim and can destroy lives, or worse. While some other works play rape for sexual fantasies or laughs, [media which utilizes rape as drama] treat it soberly, for a dramatic purpose. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's treated tactfully." (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RapeAsDrama)
Why is rape considered by writers to be the ideal strategy to showcase the shattering of a woman's character? How can rape be used in media in a tactful manner? Is that even possible? Was Stanley's raping of Blanche tactful?
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