Do women enjoy watching other women being attacked on TV?
Germaine Greer says yes and that’s why dramas feature so many rapes and sex murders. So has she exposed a dark female secret? Two TV addicts do battle
NEVER one to shy away from controversy, Germaine Greer this week claimed that it’s women, not men, fuelling an appetite for scenes of rape and murder of women on TV. ‘Female victimisation sells. What should disturb us is that it sells to women,’ said the 79-year-old author of The Female Eunuch. Her comments sparked outrage in some corners, but murmurs of agreement from others. So, does seeing violence against women on TV satisfy a primal urge? Or is this a horrific trend we should reverse?
DEAR Germaine Greer. She takes her job as outspoken national auntie very seriously — one minute calling Meghan Markle a ‘bolter’, the next slamming #MeToo victims, and now telling us that the surge of nastily, gratuitously violent and detailed sexual assaults and murders on TV is really what we ladies like.
‘The endless array of female cadavers laid out on slabs and dragged out of the undergrowth in crime drama on TV is designed to reel in a mainly female audience,’ she says.
I think not. She’s right about the growing nastiness but, I believe, wrong about women’s responses. Of course, there are some women who harbour fantasies about rape or masterful near-rape: there always have been.
Think of the end of Gone With The Wind, with Scarlett O’Hara scornfully pushing Rhett Butler away and being carried up the great stairs in her billowing red dress as he snarls: ‘This is one night you’re not turning me out!’
What do we see the next morning? She’s pleased as punch, humming and smiling. Marital rape, that was.
Or think of all those romantic novels pinned to the idea of a big, hunky man so blown away with the heroine’s charms that he can’t resist her feeble, giggling protests and takes her to bliss in his strong arms.
Or, in the case of one Jilly Cooper novel, puts the wayward lass on his knee and spanks some sense into her.
Greer is right to point out that ‘the man who groans and clenches his teeth as he struggles to resist the heroine’s fatal charms has been a staple of chick-lit ever since Jane Eyre’. She is also right to remind us that the idea that rape springs from irrepressible sexual desire is a delusion. Rape is about domination.
Yet there’s no point denying that it is one of the fantasies many women have had, and written about. We’re hard-wired to want strength: we need its protection for us and our babies.
Sexual domination can, in some women, become part of that fantasy, and a whole industry sells fluffy, fetish handcuffs to feed it.
But violence? Murder? You’d have to be a very rare and worryingly kinky woman to enjoy the idea of being hit hard, stoned to death, knocked unconscious, slashed and murdered. And then having your corpse disposed of in some disgustingly disrespectful way and poked around on a slab.
If we do seek out TV crime fiction — and we do, just as we revel in Agatha Christie and all her successors — I suspect it is more because human beings of both sexes have a need to face and imagine their worst fears.
There is something cathartic about confronting the idea of appalling violence and knowing that it didn’t happen to you.
And — this is where TV drama and novels are different to the horrors on the news — also in knowing that it didn’t happen to the actress, either. She’s washing off the fake blood in the dressing-room. It’s all made-up and we can sleep easy.
But it’s a big step from crime fiction (with nice Lewis or Morse catching the beast at the end) to the present extremes of violence.
Most women I know, unlike Greer’s imaginary salivating viewers, are growing angrier and angrier at the way that in film and TV and, indeed, on stage, there is a deliberate, cynical ramping-up of butchery.
The law of diminishing returns means that the more we see, the less we care — or even notice. So writers and directors of limited talent like to make it nastier every time.
Yet the time I have been most struck with the reality of rape was in a small play about highwayman Dick Turpin, in which a maidservant gives evidence of her assault to the court and the poor girl doesn’t even know the right words to use to describe it.
If you want to treat the subject seriously, less is more.
So I think Greer is wrong about us loving the extremes of nasty violence against our imaginary sisters on TV.
There are, of course, many other ways in which we enjoy plots where men do us down. Ones in which men cheat, lie, manipulate and ‘gaslight’ women into thinking it’s all in their heads. We did love TV’s Doctor Foster, after all, and radio listeners lapped up the long-running Archers plot where nasty Rob was psychologically dominating poor Helen.
For some reason — perhaps because we like to reflect that our own poor blokes are not so bad after all, even if they did forget the dry-cleaning — we really rather enjoy shouting ‘B*****d!’ at imaginary strangers on the telly.
But fantasise about being bound, gagged and butchered ourselves? Sorry, Germaine, but no.
I love strong men but not evil killers says Libby Purves
On Sunday evening, I settled in to continue watching new BBC series The Woman In White. A Victorian melodrama depicting fragile women cruelly treated by brutal men, the threat of violence is always present. Men had complete control over their wives, allowed to beat and rape them without redress. Even on honeymoon! It was dark, brooding and genuinely scary — and, like millions of other women, I was hooked. Reeled in, as Germaine Greer would say.
For we women are magnetically drawn towards murder mysteries that largely depict women as victims. Whether it’s a bleak, Scandi-noir drama such as The Killing or a forensically fascinating episode of Silent Witness, we love nothing more than solving a mystery and being scared out of our wits. And if it’s a woman as the victim? All the scarier.
It’s telling that the most gruesome TV dramas seem to be emerging from some of the most progressive countries in Scandinavia, where socialism has supposedly eradicated much inequality.
These dramas give women permission not only to indulge in the dark recesses of their imaginations but, in a society where gender boundaries are constantly blurred and roles equalised, they allow them to view the world in oversimplified ways.
Of course, it’s ghastly to assume that all men are rapists. But it’s a much easier view to take of the world than one where women actually don’t know where they stand with many men who claim to be on their side.
It’s one of the reasons why the #MeToo movement has gathered such momentum.
Another reason we love to see violence depicted on screen is that — thanks to constant exposure — we have become addicted to the excitement of violence.
In bygone centuries, women lived under constant threat of rape, pillage and plague. Much of the population was dead before the age of 20.
Today, however, going about our risk- averse lives, women can enjoy relative safety. Yet part of us is all too aware that life is still fragile and can be extinguished at any moment.
Watching a brutal murder of a fictional female character on television in the safety and comfort of our living rooms gives us that primal ‘ rush’ of danger that we rarely experience in our day-to-day lives any more.
Much of the violence we see nowadays on TV, while gory, is still highly stylised and we are becoming desensitised.
Women, like everyone else, are hankering for bigger and more shocking thrills, so it’s natural that producers have upped the ante.
I wonder whether we would feel differently if we saw even more realistic portrayals?
It might not be as ‘fun’ or ‘escapist’ or even ‘entertaining’, but it might cure our evergrowing appetite for brutality.
The novelist J. G. Ballard, who grew up amid the horrors of war and massacre in Shanghai, once told me: ‘I don’t think we show enough real violence on screen. What we show is quite sanitised and, if people knew the smell and the feel of it, they would think quite differently.’
I was shocked by this thought at the time. But now, I can see it’s very true. We may see blood, but we don’t have to touch it or smell it. We may see a shocking murder, but we rarely see the ripple effect it causes on the family of the victim left behind.
We also live in a world obsessed with victimhood. Books and films about surviving child abuse, domestic and sexual abuse have never been as popular.
If people ever object — as Mary Whitehouse famously did — they are pilloried. It means that women have become brainwashed into accepting ever more liberal values.
I’m afraid we won’t be seeing these violent TV thrillers disappear from our screens anytime soon.
TV murders give women a primal rush says Jeannette Kupfermann