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"When is a Rape Not a Rape" by Carolyn Hinsey


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Did you ever see the movie The Getaway with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger? In the movie, Kim's character had sex with James Woods' character to get her husband out of jail. It was disgusting, but that was the asking price for helping her. The character was desperate and needed help (Sami), was she raped? Nope!

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She didn't even leave him. She avoided his calls for a whole day, then he brought flowers, apologized, explained that he only got mad (leading to getting drunk and raping her) because he loves her so much, and she forgave him.

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Jax being kidnapped, strapped to a bed and made to have sex with a woman in order to keep his family safe. There was no escaping to protect his family. Jax's rapist caused his duress, Sami's "rapist" did not! That is the difference for me. You can't make deals using your snatch as currency and then cry rape. EJ was under no obligation to assist Sami or Lucas!

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Jax was not raped "by coersion", he was raped period. When someone is forced to be in a place they don't want to be (liked strapped to a terrorist's bed or held at gunpoint in a car by a bloodthirsty psychopath who's already shot their hostage's stepfather and is threatening to shoot police) and their kidnapper makes them have sex with them in order to prevent an horrific fate for themselves or someone else it's rape. Rape. Rape rape. To pretend that it's anything less is to blame and demean victims.

Sami wasn't raped "by coersion" any more than Jax was. It was flat out, stone-cold rape too. And even if it weren't, EJ did rape Sami via FakeRafe. He put that criminal in her home for the express purpose of having her, the mother of his own children, violated. That's rape too and he is just as guilty as FakeRafe. It's like a mob boss ordering a hit. He and the assassin are both murderers, morally and in the eyes of the law.

Rape is a crime with a set definition in the law. Irina and EJ are both rapists by legal definition. That's really the long and short of it. People can deny it till they're blue in the face because they like a character or find the actor who plays them attractive but it doesn't change the fact that rape is rape and what both DOOL and GH showed us were rapes and quite blatant ones at that. That this is even a discussion is extremely disturbing. It also doesn't work to say "it's just a soap". People develop their attitudes about things from multiple sources and various media forms are a prominent source. When the media pushes the notion that rape is gray, that the victim must've deserved it somehow, or the rapist "only" coerced or "made a deal" and people buy into it, that kind of attitude bleeds into real life and interactions with real people. When that happens, real life rape victims get hurt because the horror of what was done to them is debased and or they are blamed.

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I think posters have specified that if someone has threatened or put in place a situation that directly effected the person into forcing a yes, that would be coercion. The reason why I maintain that what EJ did wasn't rape is two-folded, first he didn't create the situation in which Lucas' life was in jeopardy. Had EJ hired DiMera men to put Lucas in danger that would have then become coercion as he mainpulated and designed a situation in which forced Sami to say yes to him. My second reason for not saying it's rape is that Sami again had other options other then EJ and she never had to agree to his deal --that in itself implies a choice which rape never is. Just like the David situation addressed above, do I believe Sami wanted to have sex with EJ? No. But I do believe she chose to make the deal because she felt EJ was her best option, and with that choice came a price and a point of payment she had readily agreed with. Like I said above she could have stepped outside of that car and found the police to assist her. At any point in time she could have left that car and make another choice. Those two facets stop it from being rape, and I maintain what happened that night in that car is not rape, and the way it was portrayed there after with Sami going to her "rapists" house talking with him in his bathrobe, seducing him in a cabin and having hushed conversations with him in her apartment and personal bedroom isn't rape victim/rapist behavior by any constellation.

I know the legal definition of rape and I maintain that what happened in that car wasn't rape, nor was the resulting aftermath. As to liking James Scott that has no bearing on what happened that night. I don't like David Hayward at all, and I would maintain that wasn't rape either.

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Yes Irina was definitely rape, and it does classify as coercion. She threatened to have Jax's family killed if he didn't have sex with her and when we saw him he was bruised, beaten and tied up. That's definitely rape.

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I suppose people will also claim EJ didn't sexually assault Sami either when he hired Fake Rafe to manipulate, control, and have sex with her because he didn't perform the act. Yet in murder conspiracies, the brain behind it is always equally or even more complicit of the crime as the perpetrator is.

I just can't grasp the 'made a deal' argument. I honestly think there are some who believe Sami secretly wanted it, yet there was NADA about how those scenes were played that conveyed that one bit. Or are folks going to claim she faked the terror and fear she showed both before and after it happened.

I'm with you Rose, it sort of disturbs me that people think it's really no big deal when we know there are a multitude of messages conveyed through fiction. Exposing rape as the crime that it is and the fact that its a crime of power and control NOT SEX had a lot to do with some of the portrayals on film and on television in the 1970's on forward, where it was no longer shown as some sort of sexual foreplay.

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The fake Rafe incident is entirely different from the situation in the car that December night, so I don't see how those two could be tied together. Sami was complicit in one and wasn't in the other.

As to the deal being hard to understand, I don't think it really is that difficult. Sami wanted something and she was willing to do what had to be done to get it. Sami is not unlikely to make consistently damaging choices towards herself in the name of getting what she wants. When looking at her character history that is pretty much all she has ever done. I don't think it's out of character at all for Sami to make a mutually gratifiying deal to get what she wanted from the other person. As to the question if Sami wanted the sex, she didn't (that in itself doesn't make it rape which is something that was spoken about previously in this thread), but she was willing to acquise in order to get what she wanted which is decidedly what makes what happened that night, not rape.

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