Rape in the Literary Mirror

I was discussing the shock jock thing with my husband as we were pottering about, and this went immediately into a discussion of some of the novels he's been reading.

You see, my husband really loves alt history/apocalyptic future sorts of novels, reads a bunch of them. And he says that, the apocalyptic stuff, the major cue that the apocalypse has come is focused around a rape. This is the iconic symbol of the degeneration of society in all of these novels -- and as I said, he reads a bunch of them, different authors. Probably the same subculture, though.

Which got us off on what it means that there's this common trope that rape is the iconic image of non-civilisation -- aside from the fact that it demonstrates that we don't much live in civilisation. What does this bit of our literature reflect back about us.

These are the theories that I managed to come up with, which I would like to add to:

- First of all, there is the thread of "there being social order is the only thing that keeps us from perpetrating sexual violence on each other". Human decency is a thin veneer only enforced by the need to look good for the neighbors or the fear of consequences.

- Murder, theft, other violence, are all normal; rape, however, is the worst of worst things, the sign that everything is ruined. Sexual things are beyond the normal rules. Which of course ties in with the "better dead than raped" notion, and the common notion that someone who has been raped is completely beyond the pale, can only be considered as the object of sexual violence from then on. Further, someone who has been touched by the fundamentally anti-civilisation energies of rape is thereby pulled out of civilisation -- they have become Other by their encounter with the unmaker.

- The will to power is tamed by civilization; when given free rein for expression, it automatically does so in terms of framing women as property available for use.

- As a friend pointed out over in the discussion that I had in my journal on the subject, the acceptability of rape is a matter of whether or not women are people; thus, the acceptability of rape is a sign of how thin the veneer of belief that women are people is presumed to be.

- And something really disturbing and consistent with observed reality that occurred to me, partially because I read Pigeon's On the Record post over at Little Light's place -- if the absence of rape is the sign of civilisation, and people wish to believe that this is a civilisation, then it is the people who claim to have been raped who are threatening civilisation, not those who perpetrate rape. Because this is civilised, right? And we have always been at war with Eastasia.

There was some more, but I've lost 'em. I'll add 'em back in if I remember. Anyone have any others?