That “Girls” Rape Scene
Last night on Girls there was a scene in which Hannah’s ex-boyfriend Adam sexually abuses his new girlfriend Nat.
The scene was clearly written and directed in such a way as to create ambiguity as to whether what Adam — a generally sympathetic, if deeply creepy, character — did was actually rape. Amanda Hess has a particularly good rundown, in which she describes the scene as illustrating “what happens when a person you want to have sex with ‘has sex with you’ in a way that you do not want them to.”
But such equivocation, it seems to me, is focused on the question of whether Nat can properly say that she’s been raped. But that’s not the only way of framing the issue at hand, and it seems to me that if we ask instead whether we can say that he raped her, it gets a lot simpler.
Because we know that he didn’t have Nat’s consent. We know that she wasn’t liking what was happening, and
The scene was clearly written and directed in such a way as to create ambiguity as to whether what Adam — a generally sympathetic, if deeply creepy, character — did was actually rape. Amanda Hess has a particularly good rundown, in which she describes the scene as illustrating “what happens when a person you want to have sex with ‘has sex with you’ in a way that you do not want them to.”
But such equivocation, it seems to me, is focused on the question of whether Nat can properly say that she’s been raped. But that’s not the only way of framing the issue at hand, and it seems to me that if we ask instead whether we can say that he raped her, it gets a lot simpler.
Because we know that he didn’t have Nat’s consent. We know that she wasn’t liking what was happening, and
