Thoughts on Sam and rape; and a list about John and Sam

[hmpf]

In my (glacier-slow) quest of catching up with fic in lifein1973 (another thing I do when I'm at work *g*) I got to amy_wolf's "No" today. It's an interesting fic that makes the argument that Joni actually raped Sam. I'm not sure I agree, but this is tricky terrain, so I don't think I should be too sure of my own responses. I do have some arguments for my - tentative - view that it probably wasn't rape, though:

- Sam doesn't seem traumatised enough; his later interactions with Joni show anger and disappointment, but not of the level that I would expect after such an intimate violation. Sure, he's aware that she was under a lot of pressure herself, and Sam can be sympathetic to a fault - but if he felt raped, I'd expect something a bit more irrational to break through there, even if only for a moment.

- Sam seems *surprised* to find out he was drugged. This suggests to me that up to that point, it seemed not that unimaginable to him that he may have had a certain amount of conscious involvement in having sex with Joni. This is also supported by the fact that they had sex on the bed, whereas we saw him trying to go to sleep in the armchair. *Somehow* he had to get from there to the bed, and I doubt that Joni carried, or forcibly dragged him there. Yes, he was drugged and hence more suggestible - but even under the influence of LSD, I don't think you can make a person do something they feel very strongly against. I also felt that the dinner scene preceding the sex scene was not completely devoid of sexual tension, and that Sam's 'disinterest' was mainly founded on his ideas of propriety and not so much on not being attracted to Joni. I can well imagine him acting on some latent attraction once the drug had removed his rational inhibitions. This would explain how he got from the chair to the bed.

- This is also supported by an admittedly unreliable witness, the Test Card Girl. She says, during the LSD hallucinations, "There's nothing to be ashamed of, Sam. You can't be lonely all the time." This suggests to me that, as the voice of Sam's subconscious, Test Card Girl is trying to convince Sam that it's okay to give in to his 'improper' urges.

Ultimately, I don't think we can judge if Sam was raped or not unless we see how the actual sex started - how he got into that bed. But I think there is fairly strong evidence for the 'not rape' theory.

Opinions?

(I haven't given feedback on this story yet, but I will once I've thought about this some more.)

***

Now, with John Crichton from Farscape it's very obvious that he was raped. There's chemical influence involved right from the start, and afterwards John has the expected reaction - compulsive washing, curling up... and nearly an entire season later, when he talks to Grayza again, he explicitly compares her sudden loss of political/military power and control to being raped, and there's a very definite undercurrent of "see, this is what it feels like" in his words. (Of course, he's also been mindraped by Scorpius, the Scarrans, the Ancients, Maldis - did I forget anyone? He really does speak from experience.)

***

So... here's a short list of the main parallels between John and Sam, just because, well, there *are* so many!

- Both have (sort of) travelled in time.
- Both are displaced, desperately lost, looking for a way home.
- Both make pop culture references nobody in their surroundings gets.
- Both find themselves frequently clad in leather in their new lives.
- Both have creepy, semi-regular hallucinations.
- Both have pointed guns at their fathers.
- Both have a bit too much sexual tension with their mothers. ;-)
- Both have had involuntary or near-involuntary sex under the influence of drugs.
- Both have contemplated suicide.

Substantial differences between the two of them are a bit more difficult to find. Mainly there's the fact that Sam's a police officer whereas John is, more or less, a terrorist. Oh, and Sam's a cat person whereas John's a dog person. *g*

Comments

Oh, I think there's a little misunderstanding here:

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

My bit of discussion here wasn't about the fic. The fic is great, and yes, that's what fic should do and all. I was just - perhaps not even from the fic itself, but from some of the comments - under the impression that this reading was essentially... *the* reading of the situation in the fandom. And that seemed a bit too definite to me, because I think it's a bit more ambiguous. (The fic's great, of course, for pointing out that ambiguity.)

Well, then, once again, I am at a loss...

[loz]

Um, well, no. The people who responded to the story are those who agreed with the premise and I'd guess that a proportion of those who didn't, uh, didn't.

No one had written that story before (there had been earlier stories that dealt with rape, but not within that context) and little had really been said about the whole situation, considering it is quite controversial. So I'd hazard to guess there wasn't much of a fandom-wide view on it. Just, those people who had thought about it were glad someone was writing from that angle, and responded accordingly.

I dunno, it just made so much sense for a moment there.

[hmpf.livejournal.com]

It was one of those moments where you feel like you (and perhaps only you) may have missed something essential all the time that was obvious to everybody else. For a moment there, I was all "wait a sec... maybe this really *is* what those scenes should be read as" - and if that was the case, wouldn't it be logical if most people *had* read them that way? Hence the sweeping assumptions.

I think that was essentially the mental process. *g* But I'm not at my most awake today...