Fanfic recs, and literary device examined for ethics

[selenak]

Alas the icon has nothing to do with the content, but kathyh made some great new Doctor Who ones (and BTVS, and Merlin), and I took several, including this one. Because, you know, Aaaaace.

Fanfic recs:

Lost:

Singing you to sleep: a sensitive and beautifully written portrait of Ana Lucia and Sun in later s2 of Lost.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer:

Vigil in Accustomed Places: a fantastic Joyce Summers portrait, all the way through mid-season 5. I'm going to do a big matrithon rec post once it's over, but this story swept me away so much I had to rec it immediately. There isn't much Joyce fic out there anyway, let alone a portrait of such quality.

And now my ethical question of the day, unrelated to either of these fandoms. I hear there's currently much debate about whether or not an incident in a recent Spider-man comic counts as rape. This post draws a fascinating parallel to an actual historical incident, the story of Martin Guerre. Now, basically my own position is that yes, if A has sex with B solely because B believes A to be C, and A not only is aware of this fact but actively using it to have sex with B, then the sex is non-consensual on B's part and thus rape.

...and then I remembered that very popular stallward from Elizabethan theatre, the so-called "bed-trick". Two Shakespeare plays which use it are "All's well that ends well" and "Measure for Measure". Here, you also have a situation where B sleeps with A believing A to be C, and A is aware and counting on that fact; however, in this case B is male, and A and C are female. In the case of "Measure for Measure", B (as in Angelo) is also trying to blackmail C for sex, whereas A is a woman who is in love with him and whom he ditched; in "All's well that ends well", B isn't powerful but a complete jerk whom for some reason the heroine wants to end up with. In both cases, C and A are allies. However, the fact remains that B has sex with A against his will. Is this also rape in your opinions, oh flist, or does gender make a difference, or is it that both Angelo and Bertram are in positions of social power that makes a difference, or is there no difference?

Comments

[wychwood]

I think it's still rape, because it's still sex without fully informed consent. I agree that it "feels" different to the reader, but I think that's more an artefact of the way we think about sex and gender than otherwise - there are persistent problems with the acknowledgement of male rape, because there's a widespread idea that obviously men always want sex and therefore can't be raped, or that they can't be raped by women because how would that work, or whatever. So, no, I'd call it rape.

[selenak]

violaswamp over at the lj raised the point that in the case of Angelo, the "bed trick" could invoke a variation of the "violence is justified as a means of self defense or defense of another", as it was done in defense of two people, in one case of their life and in the other from rape. (The problem in this particular case with this argument is that the Duke could actually have stopped Angelo at any point by simply revealing himself, i.e. sans anyone having non-consensual sex with anyone else, but Mariana and Isabella did not know that.) Which leads us to another question - is sex different from physical violence like, say, punching, otherwise hurting or even killing someone who is attacking a third party? Again, it feels different, which might go back to that gender perspective. I honestly don't know.

[wychwood]

Hmm. Interesting.

I think... sex, even with the deception involved, does feel different from physical violence, but would you say it felt different from other sorts of con work? Like, to take an example you mention, the fake Martin Guerre deceiving everyone about his identity? Sex is more, hm, intimate? than most other things, which I think is part of the difference. But I do tend to think of rape very much on the same spectrum as punching and kicking and other forms of physical violence. This sort of "soft" rape not quite as much, but that's still more-or-less where it gets classed in my brain.

I would argue that Mariana and Isabella, in this instance, are not as culpable as Angelo, since they are doing wrong for important reasons, but it's still wrong; killing a prison guard as you escape from an unjust execution is still murder, but it can be morally justifiable.