Taking the US' slavery as an example: You control a black field-worker, have power over him and beat him to make him do a better job, and humiliate him if he does a bad one.
Then to go back to the OP, if you want people to like your characters, don't show it. If you don't care if they're liked or not, then do as you like, I guess.
@LostThePlot gave the best thought-out discussion to this complex discussion in this whole thread! Thanks!
Writing a character set in the past can be difficult, because people do read the story with their present 'eyes' on. If you want to create a character that readers sympathise with, sometimes you're caught between a rock and a hard place, portraying them as they would have been. You find yourself writing your character as if he/she was 'different' from the others who lived at that time. I suppose there were people who WERE different (in the way they thought and the things they believed) but sometimes if you put too modern a slant on stuff it just comes out as "PC" and not historical at all. It's an awkward position that writers of historical novels often find themselves avoiding. .......... Incidentally, if you want to look at rape as 'spoils of war' you don't have to go back into the past. Go into some of the conflicts going on right now in various parts of the world (Nigeria jumps to mind because I just read an article about it.) Or look back on what happened in the former Yugoslavia, which was not all that long ago. Rape was definitely on the agenda there.
Or try the sex slaves and rapes today in Iraq and Syria, complements of ISIS. There are Kurdish and Yazidi army platoons and companies which are entirely female, formed up especially to avenge and prevent ISIS rapes. They look awesomely professional and cold-blooded in their demeanor, I would not want to tangle with them.
Did I say you've said that? No, I mean that it can feel like the narrative is treating a character like they're perfect despite clear moral flaws. Thomas Covenant was given as an example earlier in the thread. That's what I'm talking about. You don't need to use second person or break the fourth wall to do that.
It's worth pointing out that chattel slavery along the lines used in the South was not the only form of slavery throughout history, and that part of the reason for its conditions was the use of racism to support and justify it.
I can understand not wanting to project modern morals into the past but you're already doing that just by talking in modern terms about these things. I think that's what's causing you problems here. You're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You want an 'authentic' middle ages but writers of the the middle ages wouldn't really talk about war rape as being a big deal. It simply was not notable. Like I say, that's something pretty tragic by itself but the only way to make a point about that is to bring more modern ideas of morality to the era. Like I said, in a very real sense your characters won't consider themselves to be rapists. They might still be scarred and unhappy about what they did (because seriously, coldly assaulting another human being very much like your sister and your mother while they cry and beg you to stop is not something you can be inured to by upbringing. Being told it's right cannot make you a sadist or a psychopath and it absolutely leaves a mark on you.) but they wouldn't see they committed a crime so why would they bring up rape apropos of nothing? This is what I mean by having it both ways. If you want to show the effects of the setting on the people living there then you need to use modern morality to show how different they are to today. If you don't want to show that then why exactly is rape being mentioned?
It's naive to think they all were rapists. Men are not hard wired that way. Men are not turned on by a women in pain. Men are turned on by women who are turned on. Photos become more attractive to men who see women in orgasm or pleasure. Magazines shelves are not filled with women in pain and agony, like they would be in rape. You've read false accounts of the nature of human behavior in human history. Further more, this will be nearly impossible to enculture. Sure some men may be turned on by a woman hurting, but that is a psychopathic small minority. It's never been a majority anywhere, you can't rewire our instincts.
No one's sympathizing with Hitler here. The whole point of Downfall was to show that Hitler wasn't some alien monster, but a morally bankrupt human being. It wasn't saying, “feel sorry for this genocidal murderer!” rather it was saying, “Hitler proves that human beings are capable of stooping down to his level of cruelty.”
Your writing a story set in the Dark Ages, as such your likely audience will be familiar with that period and understand what went on in war i.e. to the victor the spoils. I'd suggest steering your MC, or MC's away from any direct involvement in rape if you want your audience to "like" those characters. I'm not sure who your MC's are but for example if one were a General, he'd be fully aware that his army would rape the populous. In reality there'd be little he could do to stop it happening. Using my own logic I know that he knows that but by virtue of not being the actual rapist I can still like the character even though I know rape is going on around him . . . If that makes sense! How granular you go into the detail is entirely your choice. It is after all your story but in my own opinion less is more.
Uh, no. By the 1300s the "Dark Ages" had been over for centuries. To quote the Encyclopedia Britannica website, "Dark Ages, the early medieval period of western European history. Specifically, the term refers to the time (476–800) when there was no Roman (or Holy Roman) emperor in the West; or, more generally, to the period between about 500 and 1000, which was marked by frequent warfare and a virtual disappearance of urban life." As for the OP's question, I'd ask @King Arthur what literary purpose the rapine serves. From what I know of the history of human warfare, yeah, warriors "prerogative" to ravish the women of a conquered people was, with a few exceptions, beyond dispute. But if drawing attention to that fact in a novel just goes to show how disgusting and degenerate the civilization of the time was, it won't be surprising if few people will want to read one's opus. But if a specific episode of rape happens in the life of the major characters (victim or perpetrator) in way that forwards the plot and sets their course towards redemption or destruction, I think the educated readers will understand, and you should put it in. IMO, I don't think we're obligated to expose all the disgusting aspects of any civilization featured in a historical novel just because they were there. For instance, I've read stats that allege that the majority of men and a large number of women these days regularly look at online porn. But if porn addiction isn't a driving element in one's story, there's no call to be showing all the characters getting their daily porn fix, just to be "authentic." It's the same with war-related rape in the Dark Ages. Why include it? To drive the plot? Fine, go ahead. Or merely for (a perverse kind of) decoration? Meh, not so much. Answering that question will make all the difference.
Title: Everyone is a Rapist Pages of comments: 5 Welp, looks like my nights spoken for *Gets to reading*
I would like to think that people who read historical novels will be willing to understand that the mores of the time they're reading about will not be the same as the ones we hold today. In other words, a reader should be willing to cut some slack if the writer is attempting to portray attitudes as they were in an unsanitised way. However, that is often not the case. I think we can't help but apply our own standards to standards of the time, and find the old ways lacking. I'd say in the case of rape in wartime, if your main character is a soldier who commits rape as a normal spoil of war, you'll need to bend over backwards to make him not enjoy the process if you want the reader to like him. Maybe even try to avoid doing it (as I suspect many men did.) It might be an idea to not make him the only paragon of virtue in your story either, but maybe include a few others who are also reluctant. I'm sure these men existed. Either that, or get inside your soldier's head and make the reader understand why an otherwise decent man would do such a thing. What are his thought processes? In case people start jumping all over me, I'm not condoning rape. I hate the very thought of it. But as a writer who prefers writing about the past, I'm also concerned about portraying things accurately. One of the fascinating things about history is delving into the mindset of people who lived then, who did things we'd consider 'bad' today. Why did 'upright citizens' like Thomas Jefferson own slaves? Why might somebody who lived in the Middle Ages and who tried to be a good person in the eyes of God be willing to stone a 'witch' to death? Or at least to mentally support the action? Why did people of my parents' generation think it was perfectly okay to drop huge bombs on enemy cities filled with civilians?
Come now, people of our generation like doing that too! I'm uncertain if it make it better or worse that we bomb dangerous minorities instead of white people though. Better maybe?
Yes, I thought about mentioning that. The idea of 'collateral damage.' 'We' seem to find that acceptable for some reason, as long as the war is 'just.' ??? I think 21st century people are very good at ignoring bad stuff that doesn't directly touch us. Perhaps that's an unavoidable result of being 'connected' all over the world—a situation our ancestors didn't experience. Go back far enough and all our ancestors had was rumors and after-the-fact history to make sense of what happens elsewhere. So all they could relate to was what happened right under their noses and / or what they feared or hoped might be coming their way.
Umm, could you repeat this? I had a great run going on with Boom Beach, so didn't really pay attention. Oh, Iraq? Yeah well whatevs, it's so far away mate.
Also easy to accept when 'they deserve' what's happening to them as well? An important component. This might well be an 'in' for the writer of the OP to exploit. If the rapist truly believes that the women being raped 'deserve' their fate for some reason, that will colour his response to what he might otherwise see as an appalling act. He could see them as either the just spoils of war, if he and his culture believe that women are just chattels to be taken from the enemy and used during wartime. Otherwise he might believe that the particular women had something to do with the atrocities his 'side' have also experienced. I reiterate, these are not positions I support. But if the writer is looking for a way in to the character's way of thinking during those times, these might be useful threads to explore. I just had an interesting conversation with an old friend of mine from the USA who was a soldier during the Vietnam War. (A reluctant one, who joined the marines just before he was about to be drafted into the army.) He said the soldiers there committed all sorts of atrocities. He participated in some of them himself. He remembers one incident where his platoon were ordered to advance on an enemy position, but the route through was littered with landmines. The soldiers got tired of getting blown up, so they grabbed a bunch of villagers (all ages and sexes) and made them walk ahead of them through the jungle. The civilians either avoided the mines (meaning they knew where the mines were, which brought repercussions) or they walked into them and got blown up. Either way, the soldiers made it through. This man has never recovered totally from his experiences in Vietnam. He still suffers a lot of trauma and guilt from what he saw and did. And that was nearly 50 years ago.
It is tough, stories from wars in general are extremely hard to listen to. When you listen, you feel like you have commited sins because you have been living so peaceful life. To the original point of the thread, I think @King Arthur is in the right at the point where he wants rapes (spoils of war) to be part of his book. I mean, yes, historically it is accurate, and if as a writer you give realism value enough, then it should be in the book. But here's the true catch; in what form and way it will be part of the book? Now this is in the deepest of ends in our field. Glorious end, I tell. Feel the odor in the air (it's insuline btw). Is there a specific reason why you would want MC to commit it? It's a huge turnaround for the feel of the character. We are not talking about giving him negatives, flaws in a character. This is bigger than that. >> So why you are eager to do this? Does this serve a purpose in the story? Or are you doing it for the sake of realism? As lets see what happens when you make MC to celebrate his victory by taking a woman for himself; + you are giving accurate depiction of what happened in that times, in such conditions + you get a huge shock value to the chapter But what you are doing here, is changing the feel of the character so much that we might lose connection with him. That's not a joke for a writer, it's next thing after death penalty. MC is a bridge for us to hop on your story. Now what you might be doing, is ultimately setting charges on that bridge and you know, rebuilding one takes a lot of time. Will reader be around for that? I see this scene as "high risk, low reward" thing, and therefore, it isn't the best thing you can do. I'm a nice guy, even with diabetes which tends to make people evil... so I give you some choices you absolutely should check out; - MC is there close to other soldiers, so yes he witnesses spoils of war happening. Maybe MC gives the subject some thoughts. "Should I?", "That's horrible." Really depends on the character. - Like someone said, mention someone chasing a woman and "be done with it". Maybe group of soldiers say to MC that they go to, and check out 'that croft' for some action. You can have spoils of war happening, but why would you risk the connection with MC this badly? I like what TV show Band Of Brothers did with this, and character called "Dick Winters". It was really immersive, dark and hard episode in that short series, but I did not lose my connection with Winters. Quite the opposite. Go and check it out.
The idea of 'what they deserve' is all tied back to the greatest word in propaganda; evil. That's why soldiers are (or at least were until recently) taught directly to hate the enemy. Not because their enemy was really all that terrible but because the soldiers have to go and shoot and stab and napalm those guys and if you believe he's just a decent chap like yourself then you really wouldn't do it. It shouldn't be a surprise to us that when we had available indirect methods of war (see drone strikes in pakistan) it's much much easier to be tearsly dispassionate about pulling the trigger. When it's man to man the belief that the enemy is evil gets you past the point of needing to make a moral choice and allows you to kill someone who wasn't a direct threat to you. He is evil, they are all evil and that means however we kill them the important part is that they are dead. Again, this isn't an abstract concept. In the first world war where the people fighting were all kinda normal people with no direct beef there were huge problems with the men on the front lines settling into a 'live and let live' mentality. This is why the 1914 Christmas truce was never allowed to be repeated. As civilians we all like the image of the regular troopers proving their humanity by laying down arms and trading presents but if your goal is to actually win a war then this kind of thing is ruinous to your plans. It sounds cold but war isn't won by sentiment. We might argue about the necessity of war but once you're fighting you really can't afford to hand out sweaters and good scotch to the germans as they invade your trench. So; make your boys think the enemy are evil. Sometimes they oblige us by being the Nazis or Communinists but even when they don't you have to do something to make your people believe than an enemy life is worth less than theirs. And that's where we get into rape. In the past groups of people were mostly ethnically divided. You were taught not just to hate the enemy soldiers, you were taught to hate all enemy people. That's how men can feel it's ok to rape people. It's not even a sexual thing. It's about hurting the object of your hate. That often begins to breakdown once the men have actually had to confront the object of their hate as normal people but that's the objective. The thought process is something along the lines of 'she deserves to be hurt' not 'she deserves my sexy body'. It's the same exact line of thinking that lets you pull the trigger while aiming at an enemy soldier. Especially once it's an actual fight and the soldiers pick up personal investment in hating the enemy (you killed my best friend!) it all just goes around in circles. This is how genocide happens too. This is how all these terrible things happen. You are French and thus my sympathy doesn't apply. Once someone is evil they cease to be truly a person in your eyes and even worse you believe it's their fault. They chose to be evil, so there's no surrender and no remorse. The veteran you talked about is a great example of how the realities of war (which haven't changed) interact with all of this psychology. You can make a man do something terrible for god and king george (or for your baked apple good of your choice) but you can't make him be ok with it. You can get past the initial impulse by teaching him to hate and putting him in a group that reinforces that hatred. But you can't make him just be ok with killing or raping or anything. High emotion can make us go past the line, but nothing can stop us seeing their faces afterwards. It effects everyone differently but it effects everyone. Some people find a talent for murder they never knew they had; the ability to dispassionately kill without remorse. This is super rare. Most serial killers don't even have it; their killing is at least a big deal to them. For everyone else there's rationalizing and denial but it'll never sit well with them even if they had to kill to stay alive. That doesn't mean it'll disable you for the rest of your life but it's not something that'll go away either. You learn to accept what you did and there was a reason for it but you don't even learn that it was ok. Because it's not. Nothing will make it so. Violence is a complex issue. The animal part of us finds violence comes naturally; even finds it exciting. Violence establishes us as big and strong and dominant. But going beyond simply scrapping over food is a deeply ingrained taboo. Maiming (which rape counts as) and killing other's of our species is counter to our own species survival. And it's that line that leaves us shaken by murder. There's a fundamental wrongness to it that you can't get past. We are simply not built to harm creatures like ourselves. Why would we be? It's counter to evolution. Those who can kill without thought or feeling have something wrong with them. It's a useful thing that we perhaps need sometimes in the modern world but it's still wrong never the less.
This is a big topic for my soldier friend. He is appalled by what he did and allowed to be done, and he never believed that the war itself was just or justified. He certainly didn't rape anybody, but he said in battle it just boiled down to survival. You survive or they survive. He thinks killing 'the enemy' or anyone seen to be associated with 'the enemy' is a very basic instinct in soldiers. He's probably right. It's the people who sit behind safe desks and plan wholesale destruction for gain who deserve to be vilified. If there is true evil, they are it. Soldiers are placed in situations where they either sacrifice their values or themselves. And these are the people who, 50 years later, find it very hard to just get on with their lives as if nothing happened.
Ken Follett's cathedral books (Pillars of the Earth and World Without End) are good examples of historically accurate novels that don't portray rape as okay. Everyone in the novels who rapes is a baddie. Maybe he got around this by having all the soldiers in his novels be baddies: his good guys are never in a war where they have the "opportunity" to rape. Well, except for a monk who gets caught up in a battle. I think Follett is a sensible man. We can't expect people in the 21st century to read with 14th century morals. And they shouldn't have to.
The Dark Ages is a terrible term that has been used to describe all sorts of time periods. Wikipedia lists this Dark Ages (historiography), the period in Europe following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire European Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries AD), particularly: European Early Middle Ages Migration Period of c. 400 to 800 AD Saeculum obscurum or "dark age" in the history of the papacy, running from 904 to 964 AD Note: For a discussion on the usage of the phrase "The Dark Ages" for the above periods, see Dark Ages (historiography). This era is covered in the post-classical eraarticle for areas outside of Europe. Irish Dark Age, a period of apparent economic and cultural stagnation in late pre-historic Ireland, lasting from c. 100 BC to c. 300 AD. Bronze Age collapse (c. 1200 BC) Greek Dark Ages (c. 1100 BC – 750 BC), a period in the history of Ancient Greece and Anatolia after the Bronze Age collapse Dark ages of Cambodia (c. 1450–1863 AD) Digital dark age, a future time when it might not be possible to read historical digital documents
Well said. Pretty much regardless of when you lived your values have never been 'murder the shit out of everyone'. Even as cavemen there is an instinctual understanding of the value of life. Not the sanctity particularly; simply more hands means more food gathered, more predators beaten off. Living as groups is an amazing survival strategy, even if Cave Steve is an asshole (or a psychopath), you'd rather have him in the accommodation urinating out. So that is exactly the choice you have in warfare, or indeed any extreme or violent situation; sacrifice your values or sacrifice yourself. And it's not surprising where the majority of people are going to fall on that debate. Anyone remember that plane crash in the Andes where they ate each other to survive? Same deal. When literally in the position of choosing between eating people and being eaten by people there's not a lot of choice to make. The choice is either to be the man with the rock (or gun) or the man with a hole in his head. Terry Pratchett called it 'The Dreadful Algebra Of Necessity'. Choice become very simple. Horrible, but simple. You don't think about it at the time, because what is there to think about? But after, when you return to the land of moral absolutes and free choice it all comes back out. That's natural. In extremis you do what you have to do. But ex extremis it's normal to start asking yourself if things were really all that extreme, if maybe there wasn't some way we could all have survived. That's why I'm absolutely certain that plenty of war-rapists were traumatized by the experience. Because it was never required. It made no difference in the end.
