oh, why, why, why?

The game book I was reading last night is still great, but has disappointing and irritating examples of play that depend on the humiliation and rape of women as their main plot device. Why is this so often true in game books? I feel like going through some game books and compiling stats on it.

And some basic questions on rape statistics. I am suddenly very curious.
- a testimony with footnotes that might lead to good sources
- center for women policy studies

for instance I remember reading statistics that compared the numbers for men and women being raped but I don't remember how it broke down. Also that women were way, way more likely to be raped by someone they know than by a stranger on the street. There was a really good Canadian report on this but I don't have time to look for it this morning... maybe later...

***
The difficult thing is talking about it w/out being censoring, which I don't mean to be and don't want to be. am also not saying women are fragile victims who must be protected from any mention of rape. But the concept of "safe space" is still valuable. And it's just that it seems to be everywhere - why? like in the league of extr@ordinary gentleman comic book i think in issue #1 there were 3 rapes. I was trying to ramble to Rook this morning about "gamer culture" and "its" anxieties (not that there is an "it" to anthropormorphize) and how there is excessive focus on women as signifiers of rapability, and I'm including in this the idea of chivalry along with the constant actual rape scenes and rape innuendo in game books and game play. The rapability of women is way over-exaggerated so that the males feel less rapable -- in addition to them feeling like they get to act out (unconscious?) hostility to the women players or even potential (absent) women players or to the female NPC i.e. in-game women. You know, it's hard to talk about this stuff coherently but I'm going to keep trying so I can write some good essays.

And the effect of it IS unpleasant and irritating and if you imagine a group of gamer girls playing out some scene where some character or NPC is under the threat of rape, what then? what does it look like? I've been in so many games where basically if my character is female, I am guaranteed that there will be a threat-of-rape scene really pretty quickly in the game's course. Grrr. And don't even get me started on the fucked up... oh... fuck.. i'm going to write about this later but I've blogged it before about the one dude who told me to come in the other room with him and got behind me and held a knife to my throat. i don't care that it was a butter knife - that was so fucked up! and the other GM, a stranger, at a convention, who got me alone in a room to give my character private information, then turned off the lights and came up behind me. FUCKED UP.

***

Mostly I see stuff like this, and there are sources listed but I really need the actual sources to draw some reasonable conclusions. Fro example:

Every year approximately 132,000 women report that they have been victims of rape or attempted rape, and more than half of them knew their attackers. It's estimated that two to six times that many women are raped, but do not report it. Every year 1.2 million women are forcibly raped by their current or former male partners, some more than once.

What the heck does this mean? If the first sentence is true, what does the 3rd sentence mean? Are the 1.2 million raped by partners not included (obviously) in the 1st sentence's stat of 132,000? Why isn't it? If those numbers were combined then it makes things look very different. And the 1.2 million number isn't described as an estimate, but because it comes right after a sentence about estimates it looks like it might be an estimate.

Comments

[Prentiss Riddle]

I think it's called "can't add". And it's sad, because that kind of incompetent use of statistics only undermines the credibility of the point they're trying to make. I'd have expected better from NOW.

[J]

Hmm...in twenty-five years of playing these games, in all kinds of circumstances including playing convention games with people I've never met before and never saw again, there's only once campaign that I can think of where rape even came up (a female PC was raped, and one or two other times a female PC was threatened with rape)--and that campaign is run by a feminist GM. So I'm not sure that there is a uniform "gamer culture" in regards to rapability.

[badgerbag]

I completely disagree with you... but you knew that...