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I was prepping a laundry load of newly thrifted fabric and recently finished sewing projects, and decided to throw in my pincushion, as it was getting kind of grungy.

This pincushion is the one I made as my first project in 6th grade Home Ec, by sewing together two small squares of cloth and then stuffing them. I've been using it for twenty years.

After pulling all the pins out, and then all the visible needles, and then squeezing it for awhile to get all the hidden needles, I threw my hands up, took out the stuffing, and went through it that way.

There were forty-five needles hidden in it.*

...has anyone yet invented a pincushion that doesn't eat needles?

Anyway, I am still working on Kushiel. This week's FMK poll is still neck-and-neck, so your vote could turn it! You have until I get back from the St. Pat's dinner in an hour or two. I took the first three weeks' K books to the thrift store today (where I bought the fabric that is being washed. And two more books shhh) so I can't chicken out, augh. I am now finding myself wanting to buy books just because they will fill out a good set for an FMK poll. No, melannen! Bad! Bad!

In preparation for writing my thoughts on Kushiel, here is a poll for you about evolving terminology in reviews:

Poll #18094 Rape vs. rapeyness

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 71

View Respondents

If I describe a creative work as "rapey", I mean that it:

View Answers

has at least one rape in it
7 (9.9%)

has a lot of rape in it
13 (18.3%)

has unnecessary amounts of rape in it
31 (43.7%)

may or may not explicitly include rape, but has a lot of dubcon/noncon sort of situations or references
42 (59.2%)

may or may not explicitly include rape, but a general aura of rapiness hangs over it
42 (59.2%)

may or may not explicitly include rape, but uncritically includes many lovely exemplars of rape culture, such as victim-blaming or 'he couldn't help it he's an alpha male'.
56 (78.9%)

I will give you my answer in comments
5 (7.0%)

I would never use that word and don't find it a useful descriptor
2 (2.8%)

*I did not intend that as a metaphor for rape culture, and yet there it is.

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Maybe the one with the word "uncritically" in. Definitely all higher options, though I might sometimes choose more specific phrasing.

That's interesting, because it seems like a lot of voters are going the other direction (i.e., definitely the last one, maybe the higher options.) That question was why I posted the poll! I'm one of the people who probably wouldn't use "rapey" just to mean "has a rape scene", but you definitely aren't the only one using it that way.

I wouldn't use 'rapey' and I find it ambiguous; I might read it to mean any of your examples, and additionally:

--contains no sexual violence, but eg appropriates culture in a 'rapey' fashion;
--contains no sexual violence, but squicks me for reasons I can't quite pinpoint.

Sexual violence! That's the noun phrase I was looking for in the "aura" question and settled on "rapiness" instead!

That's interesting because I certainly wouldn't use it outside the sexual/sexualized violence context, at least not without a lot of extra context to clarify. (But then I tend to not want to use the word "rape" to mean anything but sexual/ized violence, because it carries so much extra along with it for a lot of people.)

I never use the word myself, but it's a useful descriptor (=warning) when used by other people.

I might use it, thinking back to the college summer I found a stack of someone's abandoned Harlequin romances and read a bunch of them. Some were SUPER rapey: not just because the heroine was raped, but because she ended up with that guy because he was so Passionate, y'know? ugh ugh ugh UGH

Even at the time (c 1977) we were horrified.

Yyyyeah, that's the kind of thing I would use it for. Not just that it contains rape, but it handles it REALLY HORRIBLY. I find it v. useful in reviews too, which is why I wanted to be clearer on how we were using it!

If I call something rapey (which I don't think I usually do, as it's not that precise, or I do and add why I called it that), I feel that I mean that it has explicit rape (or rape that explicitly happens, it doesn't have to be on page) that doesn't feel like it serves the plot, and this happens more than once. Uncritical rape culture also tips it towards that, but it tends to be books that include multiple sexual assaults, sexual harassment or threats of said, that don't seem to have any point to them past author needing to shortcut that the bad guy is bad, the hero(ine) is in peril or other situations that could be depicted sans rape save that the author is lazy/hasn't really thought about it.

If the book includes rape, even multiple instances of it, and they seem like the author has put thought into why they included that, then I'm a lot easier with it.

Maybe I should have ticked the aura of rapeiness box too.

Having done a word search. I have described two things as Rapey,

Silver Phoenix by Cindy Pon: which had three threats of rape, a tentacle monster and an actual rape in the first forty pages of a YA fantasy novel, with no reason I could see other than angst and to move the plot along.

Lock & Key the audio play, which had a gratuitous rape and murder of the MC's mom, and then pretty constant rape threats for as far as I listened. They... didn't really add anything?

It had never really hit my radar as a word in my lexicon until the comments to the FMK #3 poll and then I realized actually we were all using it quite a lot! I don't know if I've ever used it in a top-level review but I know I've used it in comments and responses (and definitely made judgements based on other people using it.)

Sounds like you're coming down pretty hard on what I meant by the "unnecessary" option in your documented uses, which is reasonable. (I don't know if I would use it for that or not - i.e. if something had a lot of rape afaict just for angst and atmosphere, but it *was* well handled for what it was.... it would probably depend on how much I like the book otherwise. Kushiel is probably running pretty close to the "unnecessary amounts" line at this point, actually. But it doesn't really take much to convince me it's unnecessary, these days.)

My search illuminated that I tend to use it more in regards to a character "Rapey Dude" or a thing "Rapey backstory" than a general description.

I think "unnecessary" is bigger for me than "lots." It's just easier to roll over one time (though a book by Nora Roberts I read had a single deeply unnecessary rape scene of an unnamed character and no other rape, and pushed the author onto my do not read list forever).

(I also find that "unnecessary" and "uncritical rape culture" often to come as a bundle.)

There are certainly works with a fair bit of rape in them that I've liked, and liked a lot. Fifth Season is a recent example, but there it seemed to be an important part of what the author was trying to say about the world.

It's often difficult to pin down the balance between aura of rapiness and well handled.

The only Nora Roberts book I read was one of her murder mysteries had only one rape in it, but it was extended and gratuitously awful (like, imagine something that would make it worse, it was in there), and also we managed to get it, in gratuitous detail, from a) the perp's POV, b) the profiler MC's attempts to see the victim's POV, c) the profiler MC's attempts to see the perp's POV, d) a videotape of it, e) the victim's dad being shown the videotape of it, f) the MC having a dream/flashback of the video, and... possibly at least one more? I had mostly tuned out by that point.

Yeah, that one probably deserved the "rapey" description. We got it the first time, Nora! We didn't need a rerun every three chapters!

The murder mystery I read after that was a Scandinavian one and it had a serial rapist as the bad guy and a lot more rapes happening, but somehow we didn't have to see ANY of them in gratuitous detail, and that was honestly a lot more effective at building suspense and reader investment.

It did not inspire me to look up Nora Roberts' other books. Which is a shame, because I keep hearing good things about her. But.

I'm glad I didn't read any more! The one I had just did the villain PoV.

I've decided that just because I like someone's online persona does not mean I'm going to like their books, in fact is often seems to mean I WON'T like their books, which puzzles me.

It is weird but it does happen a lot! Especially since sometimes I want to go "I really want to be your fan, just never expect me to read your fiction" which is... awkward at best. (It happens less often with fanwriters, luckily. With fanwriters more often I get "I love your fic and have to pretend your social media doesn't exist," which is awkward in a different way.)

In relation to some of the conversation below, these are my metric for pro works. I would never use rapey to describe fic.

I think I may have used it in the past for things like "A lot of a/b/o in that fandom comes off as really rapey" in hallway conversation at a con or sth but I don't think I would ever use it for a particular fic or fanwriter.

I prefer the term "an example of rape culture", followed by the example, a definition of rape culture, and an explanation of why this is not a good thing. However, if I had to use the term "rapey", I would say "may or may not explicitly include rape in the first, second or third degrees** or non-consensual sexual contact, but uncritically includes things like dubious consent, victim-blaming for things like molestation, sexual harassment and sexual abuse, absolving rapists/sexual abusers/sexual harassers/molesters of responsibility for their actions, objectifying people, and normalization of all of the above."

** Rape in the first degree: rape involving physical force, including the use of weaponry or the threat to use such weaponry; kidnapping; the infliction of physical injury on the victim, including rendering the victim unconscious; or illegally entering the building where the victim is.

Rape in the second degree: rape that involves force or forcible compulsion (duress) but no weapons or threats to use weapons; rape that happens when the victim is incapable of consent because they are physically helpless (comatose or paralyzed, for instance) or mentally incapacitated (drunk, high, asleep, catatonic, etc.); rape that happens when the victim has a developmental disability and the rapist has supervisory authority over them (teacher, social worker, etc.), was providing transportation, within the course of his or her employment, to the victim at the time of the rape, or is a health care provider, the victim is a client or patient, and the sexual intercourse occurs during a treatment session, consultation, interview, or examination.

Rape in the third degree: rape where the victim does not explicitly consent and their lack of consent is clear through their words, actions and behavior, or where the rapist threatens substantial harm to property to compel the victim.

These are all Washington state laws. I spent a LOT of time analyzing the Fifty Shades series. Christian Grey is guilty of all three at one point or another.

Those aren't the same definitions I learned for my state, but yeah, sounds about right. (Which one of those would apply to "illegally sold as a slave to a man who expects you to warm his bed but never actually makes the threats implicit in the slavery status explicit as long as you go with it"? I guess the "sold as a slave" makes it fall under "kidnapping" automatically? Asking for a friend in a book.)

I certainly wouldn't use it in a professional sort of review or for a mixed audience, but for an audience like my DW readers or in a comment thread where people can be expected to know that rape culture is a thing, I do find it a useful term of art.

Edited 2017-03-17 23:41 (UTC)

Which one of those would apply to "illegally sold as a slave to a man who expects you to warm his bed but never actually makes the threats implicit in the slavery status explicit as long as you go with it"?

Well, "illegally sold as a slave" does encompass kidnapping. And unless you're talking about a BDSM slave who has a contract and limits and who can walk out of the situation with zero repercussions, which we're obviously not, given the whole "illegally sold" thing...well, a REAL slave, by definition, can't consent to sex with their owner. Even if a real slave rebels, the owner can always do something worse to them or to someone they care about as punishment, and the slave knows it. That sounds a lot like forcible compulsion--or duress--to me.

So I'd say that the situation of your friend in a book is rape in both the first and the second degrees. (PLEASE tell me that this isn't the protagonist you're talking about.)

*pokes nose in*

It, erm. Protagonist is the one being sold-as (and it is full-blown Actual Slave, not BDSM-flavor). The situation is presented, to my reading anyway, as "this is really fucking not okay, but what choice do i have". Which is better than the alternatives, perhaps, but still a thing.

Ah, yeah, what

batrachian said. (Actually she's been a sex slave the entire book so far, but just before where I left off she went from being the kinder, gentler sort of sex slave where they have to listen to your safeword or they don't get to contract you anymore to being sold outright to the Northern Barbarian Chieftain. So. yeah. By Washington State rules I don't think she's ever had consensual sex in her life, but then they don't have legal indentured servitude there.)

I would, I think, want more in the sense of context and such, and would not feel comfortable condensing down to a single word.

Relatedly, am muchly looking forward to your review of Kushiel. It's been embedded in my...what is words, fictional Important Places landscaping? so long I may have forgotten why the canon looks like to a newcomer. ^_^;;

I am still only just over halfway through! I hope I am not raising expectations of my review too much. It will not be super deep, I still keep getting hung up on expecting Cassiel the Angel of Bromance to turn up in a trenchcoat to rescue them. :P

*snort*

Explicit divine intervention, not so much. (it continues to be my wife and I's headcanon that Joscelin has *something* above-and-beyond from Cassiel, though. Take that as you will.)

Wait, do you mean "something" as in "some kind of divine grace" or as in "the kind of 'divine grace' that Castiel has for Dean Winchester, nudge nudge wink wink"?

Ah. The former. It's never made explicit in the text, unlike some other folks who have been Blessed(tm), but he's not very much like the other Cassilines.

Ah, okay. A) that makes sense, B) that's less fun. :P

Sorry to disappoint.

I voted for "unnecessary amounts of rape" but would also have voted for "has at least one rape or rape threat or discussion of rape, and uncritically includes many lovely exemplars of rape culture, such as victim-blaming or 'he couldn't help it he's an alpha male'." I probably wouldn't use "rapey" to describe the latter if it had absolutely no actual rape or rape threats, but would instead say it's sexist or misogynist.

(Unnecessary amounts of rape without partaking in rape culture: Esther Friesner's Psalms of Herod is an anti-rape, anti-rape culture, feminist novel. And it has so goddamn much rape that I don't know how else to describe it. I could name a whole bunch of others like that. "Show that sexism is bad by having a rape every few pages" was especially big in 80s fantasy by women. ("Have a rape every few pages just because" was big in 80s fantasy by men.))

I also would have voted yes on "a general air of rapeyness" if it included at least one rape or rape threat or discussion of rape. Without that, it's back to sexist or misogynistic.

For lots of dubcon or noncon, assuming those terms are used in the fannish kink sense, I'd just call it dubcon or noncon.

I think you can partake in rape culture while being explicitly anti-rape-culture, and that kind of thing is probably a good example. :/

It would probably be pretty hard for a story to hit the level of overhanging sexual violence for me to call it rape-y without probably at least some explicit discussion of rape, but you could probably hit it without reaching the level of actual content that would make me think a fanfic noncon warning was necessary?

And you can definitely write a "sexist piece of crap" without putting aura of sexual violence in, although admittedly it makes it easier.

Hmmm. I was using noncon/dubcon not necessarily in the fannish kink sense? It didn't occur to me that people are thinking of those as specifically meaning fannish tropes: it's definitely possible (okay, make that extremely common) for published fiction to include stuff I would want to call noncon or dubious consent without getting to where I'd want to call it rape. Like the scene in Grimspace where there are implicit threats and artifical sex pheromones and involuntary telepathic bonds in play but it's unclear to what extent they actually altered the ability to consent for the people involved. It's not written in a way that it would work for me as fannish dubcon kink but it also doesn't quite reach the point where I would call it "a rape scene" rather than just "rape-y." (Maybe some people are using "rape-y" partly to mean "ambiguous or dubious consent but not the way fanfic dubcon tropes use it.")

I would not tend to use the word and also what I assume it means is based entirely on how I perceive the person using it parses stuff and all other things being equal will also immediately put me on the SUPER-defensive because it immediately ties in with an entire branch of discourse that has literally had me witness a rape survivor being terrified of the social consequences from other so-called feminist women if she wrote a story that had rape in it.

Soooooo. >.>

Yyyeah, all of this stuff can get really toxic once people start weaponizing it and using it as part of bullying and purity testing. That's part of why I stepped back and posted this poll when I started thinking about how the word was being used in my DW and goodreads circles. And how some of us are probably using it in a much more restricted way than others.

And while I might have used it for broader discussions of fanfic trends, I don't think I would ever use it for an individual fanfic, or even for, like, kindle erotica, if only because the existence of warning & tagging culture means the same normalizing effect isn't there: if the story has a noncon or choose-not-to-warn warning on it, I know going in that the author isn't confusing this with consensual sex or how healthy relationships should work.

That said, as a person who doesn't personally need warnings for a rape scene here or there and is generally down with the hydra trash party, I get really sick and tired (and sometimes just sick) of unexpectedly reading published books that are invested in the normalization of sexual violence and coercion in relationships, and it's useful to have a shorter way to let each other know that's what's up with a book.

Oh definitely - just for me, at this point, "rapey" has absolutely hit the point where it's a sign of the Ugly Weaponized Discourse, not of "I just want to let you know that this is basically Dragonflight except it was written last year so . . . "

(I don't really hold the original Dragonriders' trilogy's shit against it, but if you're writing the same shit NOW and presenting it totally unproblematized, WELP.)

And since the Ugly Weaponized Discourse is 1000% one of the things that I know feeds my anxiety to the point of making me incapable of writing, and I know does it to a bunch of other people I'm very fond of*, and I've got a big chunk of scars from it, at this point the word preeeetty much serves as a Warning Sign? Because . . . I'm poking at words to explain it, here, but like my experience is that once it's become the frame even people who wouldn't normally get into the UWD-version start framing things that way.

Tl;dr, I guess: mostly what the word indicates for me is "we have now switched to viewing anything in this work that might if we squint look like it applies to sexualized violence through a lens of Is This A Socially Responsible Work and exactly where that line gets drawn is based entirely who's framing this discussion, and I need to figure out who that is. Or actually just need to leave the discussion before I start hissing like a teakettle as we talk about 'but is this book entirely about war, violence and power full of TOO MUCH rape and ERGO BAD because it PARTICIPATES in rape culture while also critiquing it and really is writing rape ever Justified?™'"

Which: the words "for me" are germane, but. (And, ironically, I'm a person who DOES need a warning for sexual/ized violence in fic, avoids the Trash Party like the plague**, and definitely curates her reading based on "can I deal with sexual/ized violence right now", which is why The Secret History of the Mongol Queens has gone on pause right now because I cannot deal with the shit the great Khan's piece-of-shit sons started doing after he died and they all got threatened by their sisters and aunts being better than them.)

Summarize the summary of the summary: this also is totally not meant to be "STOP USING THE WORD!" Or whatever, just, "this is what it means to me, and why, and I bother saying anything at all because I know I'm not alone I'm just way more willing to be obnoxious and throw greenish ungulates at people about it."

(*just, in the way of anxiety crap, usually people whose anxiety ALSO prevents them from going "HEY GUYS A THING". Brains, man.)

(**not because there's anything Wrong there but just because the whole frame Upsets Me because of how I relate to fiction and so on. They are 100000% free to do their thing and I will fight for their right to do it as long as I don't have to look at it. ;P)

A couple that you didn't include, which would get that description from me:

- It has normalized or fetishized rape in it. By "normalized" I mean stories where the rapist's viewpoint (including all his internal justifications) is privileged, or the Stockholm Syndrome ones where the woman falls in love with her rapist afterwards (sometimes because of the rape). By "fetishized" I mean specifically that the rape is presented as HAWT!!! A lot of bodice-rippers fall foul of this; so does Dragonquest with F'nor/Brekke.

Note that I will give fanfic a partial pass on this if and only if it is warned for. Even if I'm specifically looking for porn, this is something that needs to be noted.

- It uses rape as a lazy-writer's substitute for motivation and characterization. Need a bad-ass woman who kicks ass and takes names? She was raped, and It Changed Her Life. Need a man similarly? His wife/daughter/sister was raped, and It Changed His Life. No further work required on the part of the writer.

ETA: That said, I have to confess that I wrote one of those Stockholm Syndrome fics. In my defense, (1) that was 20 years ago, and (2) the structure was implicit in canon -- it was back-story for Gul Dukat and Tora Neprem on DS9, and based on what we were shown in the episode ("Indiscretions") there just wasn't any other way to write it.

Edited 2017-03-18 04:44 (UTC)

I think once you get into certain historical or secondary world type settings, the "my rapist and I learned to love each other and we are now happily married" thing can work without being overly rape-y? Because those stories did & do happen in real life, especially in cases where the cultural coercion is so strong that the rapist believably did not realize there were other valid ways to get a wife. And I don't think it's useful to exclude large swaths of human experience from stories because they are ideologically inconvenient.

But it has to be really well done, and most of the time it does come off as the author excusing rape. (Also it often falls into the "unnecessary amounts of rape" category if there was no particularly compelling reason to worldbuild that way except that the author thinks it's how things should work.)

(Pern, for example, did not do it well. I actually thought the F'nor/Brekke in Dragonquest was framed as sad rather than sexy, but then I never felt the need to re-read that scene. It was defintiely rapey in other ways though. And the F'lar/Lessa in Dragonflight definitely was framed as hottt. Of course I never quite bought F'lar/Lessa as happily married.)

I also don't think I would ever use "rape-y" as a description of a fanfic? Probably not even for, like, indie kindle erotica. I feel like for me there's a certain context of... the writer having a particular power relationship with... cultural norms?... that works differently with fic writer. (I might use it to describe an entire subfandom or genre, though.) I expect non-con warnings on fic, though, which is probably another reason why I feel like the power relationship is different - the fic writer isn't trying to slip the non-con by the reader as normal good sex.

I don't think I'd use it for the lazy characterization version either, not unless it was, like, half the characters. I would be annoyed and call it lazy, but you can do that without having the things that make me think it's a generally rapey story. Interesting differences in usage!

On a totally different topic, the way to avoid having your pincushion eat needles is to put a large wooden bead in the middle of the stuffing, so the needle can only go in as far as the bead.

Given the many, many angles at which the needles had managed to embed themselves, I'm not super-confident. (The pincushion I have is only about an inch and a half thick, theoretically most of my needles should poke through rather than getting eaten. but no. forty-five.)

I know there are some, like the tomato ones, that are stuffed with something much denser than polyfill, and I think that makes it less likely that needles change angles and slide in sideways, but it also means that once they are in, you can never ever get them back out.

On the pin cushions - my grandmother has a small plastic jar with a small cushiony type top on it. The cushion isn't big enough to eat a needle - and if they go through they end up in the jar underneath it.

Oh, that's clever! I think I'd seen jar-type ones before but hadn't realized they were designed so needled would fall through.

I think I would also include in this, as a major factor, works where a situation that I would think of as rape is uncritically presented as sexy. So something like where the woman says no but then after the man has [done whatever] she finds herself enjoying it and so obviously he was right to insist or force her, because she didn't know that she wanted it.

I would probably include that under the "lovely exemplars of rape culture" category. (Although I also think, for me at least, the important part there is "obviously he was right" not "she enjoyed it" - Kushiel is actually doing that well right now, she gets off on the rape but she is 100% certain that does not in any way make it okay that he is doing it.)

I think I would use 'rapey' when there isn't explicitly a rape but rape culture is there without a denunciation.

IM3 isn't rapey because Pepper gets to take a flaming clue by four to Aldrich, so the catharsis is right there.

I don't use the word, but it could interpret it as being/have seen it used as any of the first five answers.

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