Although I did subsequently watch that one episode to see what all the fuss was about, I’m not actually interested in the show. Like I said, with the exception of some (ha) very exceptional writers (Eliot, for example), I normally loathe ‘historical’ fiction and ‘period’ drama and the only time I find it to have even the remotest chance of persuading me to give it a chance is when the period in question was the author’s ‘now’ rather than some fantasy version of it.
I’m just interested in people’s responses: fascinated by the contortions people will put themselves through to argue an indefensible position … especially when the people doing so are those who, of all people, should understand the reasons why it doesn’t matter what the reasons are, to continue after someone had said ‘no’ is a violation (and it needn’t be specifically a sexual act, it just was in this instance).
No, neither of them come out smelling of roses … but that’s neither here nor there, as far as I’m concerned. The fact remains that … whilst we can debate whose behaviour was good/bad/indifferent, why and what judgement we should make of them as a person (or even people, if we decide neither is blameless) … irrespective of their sex, gender, sexuality, position, reasons, reasoning, the works, the stage at which someone says “I’m not comfortable with this and want to stop now” is the point at which ‘no’ means ‘no’.
So, I’ll give the author/producers of the show (I don’t know how faithful it was to the author’s vision, obviously) credit for raising the question in a way that focuses on that element by not making it easy to dismiss as the typical ‘man rapes woman’ story but gets people debating what constitutes rape and why; with any luck, by making them contemplate the possibility that they might themselves be the victim, some men might actually start to empathise with women more — I’m not holding my breath, but I can still dream of a fairer, more equal world in which I never need hear about sexism, racism or any of the other bigotry that so plagues us as a species (I wonder if, given the whole ‘trans’ issue that is animating people these days, it might not be time for someone to make le Guin’s The Left and of Darkness at long last).
