Reflections on “On A Very Dry Afternoon in Early Summer”

Doing this PhD has taught me to be a lot more reflective about how I write, what my goals are in writing any given story, what theory might inform it, and how I might situate the story in relation to other creative writing in the genre, both in form, and in content.

Genre

Erotica is a genre that serves many agendas. From a genteel label for written porn, the sole purpose of which is to facilitate fantasy during masturbation or spice up a couple’s sex life, to a story – of any genre; mystery, romance, fantasy, sci-fi – that contains a number of explicit descriptions of sex written in such a way as to invite the reader’s sexual arousal in those portions of the text, to a literary effort to examine the human condition as a whole through the lens of erotic desire.

I have situated this particular story, and most of the stories I write, in the third camp. There isn’t  a lot of explicit sex in the story, and that sex might or might not be arousing to any given reader, but the characters are both trapped in their quests to understand how sex has altered their lives and formed their characters. The sex in the story is important, but it is not an end in itself. It is a way of knowing, of understanding things that were not known before.

I wrote this piece with an eye to the strange ambivalence exhibited by the ‘legitimate’ erotica publishing world when it comes to writing about rape, and rape fantasy, in the genre. There is excellent and recent research indicating that at least 40% of women have ‘rape fantasies’, and yet with few exceptions, almost no ‘respected’ erotica editor or publisher will accept material that addresses this. It is left to self-publishers and small e-presses of questionable repute to do so. Some try to handle the subject with intelligence and care; others flagrantly exploit the tabooness of the subject. I intentionally set out to reveal that hypocrisy; to write a piece that could not be said to be exploitative of the reality of rape, and yet still acknowledged that its fantasy counterpart held great erotic power.

Form

Although a short story, clocking about 6,600 words, I decided to take a rather more novelistic approach to this piece. Usually, I stick to a single POV in a short story, and although I’ve encountered shorts that pulled off multiple POVs well, usually I find them disorienting. I chose, in this story to take advantage of that very sense of disorientation for the reader. I wanted to interrupt what I perceive, under the veneer of political correctness, as rigidly gendered divisions on the subject of rape.  Consequently, the story is cut into mini-chapters and these are narrated by both the male and female characters.  Moreover, the narrative is non-linear. Finally, I shift tense to purposefully distinguish between reflection or projection vs embodied experience. Although my non-writer-readers might not consciously identify the tense or POV changes, I’m hoping that it will imbue the story with a sense of staggering, of unsettledness, of dislocation. This isn’t a safe subject. I wanted them to feel that, viscerally.

Theory

I won’t go into this in any depth here, because I don’t want to pull you into my murky miasma of Lacanian psychoanalysis. However, this story focuses on the impossibility of the desires of two people. The jouissance of the female character has two aspects: one overt and one implicit. Her desire to know that she’s a fighter as a way of constituting her sense of self-value is an impossible one. There is no reconstituting the past. She doesn’t get exactly what she wants, she gets the understanding that she is what she determines herself to be. The implicit jouissance is a desire to be asked forgiveness and to give it.You have to believe you have value as a person in order to believe you can grant forgiveness. She can never get this off the person who raped her. So her desire is only met symbolically through her lover and by the sequence of events she lives through in the story. The jouissance of the male character is also twofold. The first is the impossibility of knowing that one possesses eternal, unconditional love (it’s not that he can’t have it, it’s that his knowledge that he has it will always be unstable. This gets into the Lacanian concept of the castration complex and the induction into the Symbolic order. Blah, blah, blah… I’ll spare you.) and the problematic and reflexive spectre of forgiveness. It is not enough to have forgiveness given to you, you must believe you deserve it in order to accept it and have it mean anything.

Subject

In the interest of honesty and integrity, I need to make my association with this subject clear; like one in four women (one in three, according to the George Mason study), I have been raped. What I’d like to make clear is that a) it was not a violent rape and b) I have not suffered any debilitating long-term effects from it. I don’t know where this puts me on the continuum of women who’ve been raped. What I do know is that I’ve made some people, specifically certain anti-rape activists, very angry for saying so. I have perceived, rightly or wrongly, that there is an agenda in certain circles to not only condemn rape and insist on a zero tolerance of it (something I absolutely agree with) but also to paint it as the most heinous of all crimes (something I don’t agree with). Moreover, I feel that, as important as it is to acknowledge the undeniable suffering and damage that can be caused by the experience, the desire to have rape universally condemned as an atrocity can also lead to those who have experienced it feeling that they are victims for life. That this is something no woman should ever be able to overcome and thrive beyond it. You may have noticed that I do not use the word ‘victim’ and I avoid it purposefully.

Within our culture, the status of the victim is one of unempowerment. That’s not fair, and hopefully it will change, but at the moment, the perception of being a victim is to be someone who has had their agency taken away. And to remain a ‘victim’ is to renounce agency forever. I acknowledge that the aim of the anti-rape movement is to empower survivors of rape to demand justice, to seek legal retribution, to have their experiences acknowledged and condemned, but if that requires people who have been raped to remain in a perpetual state of victim-hood for the purpose of an agenda, I have a problem with that.

So, I wanted to examine the issue of rape from a number of angles.

First, this wasn’t an attempt to write the story of every person who has experienced rape, just one. I wanted to explore what is left behind in memory, what the lingering effects might be. In specific, I wanted to deal with the issue of not fighting and how the cliche of a woman who ‘gives in’ affects their sense of self. I purposely chose a lasting psychological effect that did not pertain to me (my lasting effect is a hair-trigger suspicion of men who are ‘too handsome’ by my estimation). Women who do not fight their rapists are often left with a sense of guilt, a sense of impotence, a worry that they did not love themselves enough to fight. This is made worse by not only legal standards (which tend to use strong resistance as proof of non-consent) but also by public perception and recent research. A large meta-study done by Kleck & Tark found that resisting rape is surprisingly effective in deterring its completion. I wanted also to challenge the perception that the long-term effects of rape are predominantly sexual. They can have sexual components, but they are often more life-encompassing.

I was also very interested in tackling the Dworkian proposition that all men are rapists. She actually never said that, but she implied it often. She did say “Seduction is often difficult to distinguish from rape. In seduction, the rapist often bothers to buy a bottle of wine.” I find this insulting both to the seducer and the seduced. The fact that most men have penises and could, if they desired, rape cannot be extrapolated into a statement that they are rapists, or even potential rapists. I’m pretty sure that many men do not have the volitional capacity to rape. Some do, and consciously decide to never rape. Some men, like some women, fantasize about it. It is very hard to get numbers on this for men. I’ve only found one relatively old study on this which puts the number at 36%. The subject has become so politicized today, I have my suspicions about anyone’s ability to get honest responses.

Underlying the story is an interest in the tension between the real, visceral act of rape and the metaphors we’ve made of it in almost every culture on earth. It is a signifier with many signifieds: of theft, of ownership, of territorial sovereignty, of ravishment, of lust, of powerlessness and of blamelessness to name just a few. Those metaphors, I believe, play an enormous part in why rape plays the role it does in our (self-generated) sexual fantasies. It may manifest itself in fantasy as the act of rape, but it has a multitude of meanings. Many of them very distant from its ugly, brutal reality.

I was interested in exploring the gap between fantasy and the act of rape, if it could ever be possible to do it with consent. From a strictly logical perspective, if there is consent, then it isn’t rape. But I wanted to examine two things that take humans past the boundaries of logical argumentation: the suspension of disbelief in roleplay and the reality of the lived experience in the moment. I had an interest in the progressive pattern of thinking that might allow a moral, ethical man to do this. I was interested in the abstraction and dehumanization process and how it would affect a man’s sense of himself to go there. I owe a debt of gratitude to a specific man who gave me insight into this, and it is an unfortunate reality that to name him and thank him publicly might have negative fallout for him. He knows who he is. I thank you.

I’d also like to thank others who have told me their stories: women who sought to reenact their own rape in an attempt to find some resolution or some answers to questions that have haunted them; couples who have indulged in this type of roleplay for erotic/cathartic reasons; and others.

Conclusion

The freedom of fiction is its capacity to be a site where anything can be explored. Where we get to play with ideas on the safety of the page. This was probably the most difficult story I’ve ever written, because I was aware of a personal need to explore the scenario while being, in my own estimation, a responsible writer.

I know there will be people who are offended by this piece. I know some people will feel the end  somehow justifies rape.

My response is that I feel I have satisfied my own ethical standards. The story comes with a clear ‘trigger warning’ at the top, I do not believe I’ve been irresponsible or exploitative of the subject, and I adamantly dispute that any piece of fiction could or would ‘justify’ anything, ever. My stories are fictions, they are not a guide for life, a how-to manual or a recommendation for how to cope with the after-effects of rape.

If you have been raped, you should seek competent psychological care. There are no answers for you in fiction. I’m sorry.