Framing The Rape Victim

There are plenty of things brought up in Mardorossian's book that I find meaningful to myself. As a women, the issue of rape is something that I HAVE to take take seriously; not only because of its violation to the human body, but because that human body is usually that of a woman's. It would however, be a injustice to say that it is only a woman's issue when it is a issue of violation to anybody. The part of the book that I found most provocative, was the discussion of prison rape.  It wasn't until a class presentation however, that I thought about it in relations to what we seen in TV and films.

There was a film I once saw years ago, when Pay-per-view was a thing, that took place in a women's prison; it was a older, cult type of film that really showed what a women's prison could be like; not any of this Orange is the New Black type of stuff where some how everyone seems to be friends or at least semi friendly to each other. I remember one particular part of this film; a rape scene between one female prisoner and several others along with the use of a broom handle. When I came to write my blog, I wanted to be able to say which movie it was and use other scenes from the movie that I can only very vaguely remember. However it was a task that was impossible. When I typed things such as "cult film from the late 1970's based off of women in prison" the only movie that came up was "Chicago" or countless porn/snuff films. So I took it a step further and included the rape scene into my search; at this point nothing showed up at all film related wise. I decided to try and see what would come up when I changed it to a male in prison rape scene and to no surprise, the film American History X popped up all over my search. I found this experience to relate to a line Mardorossian states in her book,

 "The public discourse of institutionalized male rape has overshadowed sexual violence against women, in part because men are seen as victims of homosexual rape and hence as "undeserving" victims of sexual violence."

This discourse can even be seen with my search results when trying to find the name of the movie I saw long ago; instead of being given any clues to what the movie might have been called, I got results for "Chicago", a rather upbeat perspective of women's prisons compared to the harsh realities that the film American History X gives us about men's prisons.