Rape Politics on Private Practice

I know I am not the only one haunted by last week’s episode of Private Practice.  The episode, entitled “Did You Hear What Happened to Charlotte King?” addresses rape in ways I’m not used to seeing on television.  The episode depicts the aftermath of the brutal rape of Charlotte King by a misogynist stranger.  Unlike many popular shows, rape here is not used as a hasty plot device to simply entertain a voyeuristic audience, or to glorify the work of the police, or as an excuse for some revenge plot in which the spotlight is really shown on a male hero.  Rather, creator Shonda Rhimes has carefully paved the way for a deeply feminist exploration of rape as a political issue, and as an issue that cannot be divorced from sexism.  There are elements of the show’s treatment of rape that impress me, and others that worry me.

Refusal of the victim role and the privileging of female experience

To start with, I am really impressed that Rhimes decides to portray Charlotte as a survivor rather than a victim. Likewise, the episode does not paint women in general as mere victims, and no male character in the episode is portrayed as a hero.  Charlotte is Chief of Staff at a hospital, and the attack occurred in her office.  At the start of the episode, we see her dragging herself out of her office to look for medical supplies to treat her own injuries.  She’s been beaten beyond belief and can barely stand, but her mental strength propels her to try.  Pete, another regular Private Practice character, finds her and tries to help.  She tries to minimize the attack by telling him she was robbed (not raped), and by insisting on treating her injuries without anyone at the hospital seeing her in her bloodied state.  Pete breaks it to her just how bad her injuries are, as she is too much shock to realize some of her bones are broken.  She accepts his help as he takes her to a hospital bed for proper medical treatment.

However, Pete does not get to be a hero in this narrative.  His desire to help Charlotte is obvious, but he isn’t allowed to or able to give her the help she needs.  Charlotte calls Dr. Addison Montgomery, the strong lead character of Private Practice, to the hospital.  Addison, like Charlotte, is a smart, skilled, independent woman on the show, and is the only one Charlotte tells about the rape. When Addison arrives, she orders everyone in the room to leave, including the police badgering Charlotte for information, and also including Pete, to his surprise and disappointment. Addison’s experience in gyneacology enables her to perform the necessary pelvic exam.  Her experience as a woman, and as someone with strong feminist opinions about rape (which have been voiced in previous episodes), enables her to give Charlotte psychological support that a man might not be able to offer.  It is likely that Charlotte puts her trust and confidence in Addison for all of these reasons; certainly she does not call her out of fuzzy female friendship, since the two women have never had a warm relationship, as Addison points out when she acknowledges they haven’t always “seen eye to eye.” Thus, Rhimes privileges women’s experiences, both personal and professional, rather than relegating women to victims in need of male rescue.

Rape survivors are often presented as “broken.”  Fictional accounts often erase the survivor’s ability to be herself, to be anything but “victim.”  This is not the case for Charlotte.  She needs medical help, yes, but she is still empowered with knowledge that not everyone has.  Amelia, who Charlotte knows from work, is about to give her a CAT scan when she admits to Charlotte that she has been drinking a lot recently.  They are both women with histories of addiction, and Charlotte counsels Amelia to start attending NA meetings again.  She volunteers to accompany her, boasting that “she knows all the best ones.”  Her bones may be broken, but her mental ability to be a mentor is in tact.

Charlotte’s interaction with Addison privileges her knowledge of what rape is like.  When Addison tries to convince her to report the rape, she defies her efforts by questioning whether she knows what it’s like to be violated like that.  She tells her (and the audience) that being assaulted isn’t the romanticized picture you see on made-for-TV movies, and she gives us chilling detail of her reality of rape.  She sticks to her grounds in her refusal to report the rape to the police or to her peers.  In addition, she determines her own treatment – she refuses to let Addison do a rape kit (since she doesn’t want to report it); despite her intense physical pain, she refuses to go on morphine or accept any pills, due to her addiction; and she is specific about which hospital staff she will allow to help her.  She also refuses to be named a victim in the literal sense.  When her fiancé Cooper refers to her as a victim she throws her tray of food at him and shouts that if he ever calls her a victim again she’ll call their marriage off.  As viewers, we have to admire her subjectivity, to admire what she does for herself.  It’s more pleasing as a feminist to admire her so than to define her by what someone else did to her.

In most mainstream rape scenarios in popular culture, if a man’s partner has been violated, the story relies on the male character’s virile masculinity to save the day and punish the rapist.  Masculine rage is glorified, and male violence is encouraged.  This makes no feminist sense, since what we want is to stop male violence, not promote it.  Male violence, whether it’s against women or against other men, fosters the notion that “real men” are tough, which in turn encourages men to prove their toughness by raping.  Fortunately, Private Practice doesn’t fall into this trap.  Instead, Shonda Rhimes consciously problematizes violent masculinity.  Cooper cannot react that way to Charlotte’s rape, first of all, because she doesn’t tell him she was raped (like everyone but Addison, he thinks it was a very violent robbery, but not a rape).  Maybe she chooses this solely out of concern for being seen as a victim, but maybe she also wants to prevent Cooper from becoming some sort of enraged animal. When he finds out she’s been attacked, he does verbalize his desire to hit something or someone.  He makes himself look ridiculous and weak by punching the wall and hurting his hand.  Like we were told as kids, Rhimes is telling us, “Violence is not the answer.”

When Cooper’s attempts at violence don’t pan out, he expresses to his best friend Violet how his need to protect Charlotte. He struggles to think of ways to do so, saying he needs to hire a body guard for her so she’ll feel safe.  Rather than coming off as tough, he is revealed as vulnerable.  Violet smiles at him sympathetically like he’s a little boy, and as an audience we too are meant to feel sorry for him, since we know that he really doesn’t have the power to keep her forever-safe in a world where no woman is ever really safe.  Violet is more of a hero in this scene than Cooper.  Ideological gender hierarchies equating men with reason and women with emotion are broken; Cooper is drunk when he first hears Charlotte was beat up, so he can’t exercise any supposedly masculine intellect in his decision-making.  He is the naïve child lost in his emotion while Violet is the calm one who comforts him.  Her own experiences of being attacked empower her to see reason.  She knows it is not reasonable to assume a husband or a body guard can succeed in protecting women when violence is so pervasive.    Violet doesn’t know Charlotte was raped, but Violet’s own experience of being raped nonetheless must inform her knowledge of female vulnerability.

Cooper’s vulnerability appears in his interaction with Charlotte as well. It is she who comforts him.  He has difficulty looking at her beaten body without crying, and she holds him and tells him she’s OK as he buries his head in her lap.  When Amelia is putting her stitches in her hand, Charlotte tells Cooper to go get her a coffee when she sees that he in so much pain from hearing her screams of pain.  The raped woman, not her male partner, is the one who guards and protects.  The show thus posits a counter-narrative to the traditional male chivalry script.  The emphasis on Cooper’s humanity (and not virility) is one that needs to appear more often in pop-cultural representations if we want to stop the sexism that leads to rape in the first place.

The refusal to report the rape, Questions of responsibility

Let us return to the fact that Charlotte wants to keep the rape a secret from the authorities and everyone she knows other than Addison.  Addison tries to change Charlotte’s mind.  She expresses concern that the secret will eat Charlotte up, and also stresses that the rapist will hurt other women if he gets away with it.  These points are stressed to rape survivors in real life; women get encouraged to report the crime and get help for their own sake, and also for the sake of womankind.

Should Charlotte’s decision to hide the rape be supported?  She appears terrified of allowing others to see her as a victim.  This is evident throughout the episode, continuing until the end, when she insists on going home despite her condition, and shouts at the gawking nurses as she leaves, saying, “Don’t you have work to do?”  Rape is defined by a lack of consent, a lack of respect for what the “victim” (usually a woman) does or doesn’t want to do. Is pressuring a woman to report something she doesn’t want to report a further robbery of her right to her own choices?  Is placing responsibility on one woman for the likely violations of other women unfair?  Does it push us to place more responsibility on women to stop rape than on men?  Or is the responsibility valid?  Surely Charlotte’s rapist will rape again if he gets away with it this time. Surely the disturbingly high reluctance of most rape survivors to report their rapes to the authorities doesn’t exactly have a positive effect on how seriously our culture treats rape as an important issue.  Surely a lack of legal punishment doesn’t serve to caution men from being sexually violent.  So should we be rooting for Charlotte to speak up?  These are important questions the episode raises.  It will be interesting to see how this is dealt with in upcoming episodes.

The ridiculous fact is that even when rapists are caught, they usually aren’t penalized, not very harshly anyway.  Should Charlotte go through the stressful process of speaking about what really happened to people she doesn’t trust when the outcome might not even be beneficial to her?  Would she be responsible to herself if she did so?  Would it be worth it to know she defended herself legally, or is defending her dignity this way enough? Was her tooth-and-nail physical defence of herself enough?

Private Practice touches on the inadequacy of the state towards the end.  Scenes of Charlotte and her friends at the hospital are interspersed throughout the episode with scenes of their psychologist friend, Sheldon, who is at the police station, trying to get a man to confess to an “unknown” crime.  The criminal is a stranger to us and to Sheldon; the police tell Sheldon they found him in the street, covered in blood that is not his own, and that he violently resisted the police when they approached him.  The stranger eventually admits that he raped a woman that night.  However, the police tell Sheldon that since there is no victim to press charges he cannot be held and charged for rape.  I guess it’s largely left up to the viewer to decide whether or not this is fair – but we can sort of read the writer’s disgust with this formality by the cop’s simplistic, unprofessional remark in regards to the situation, “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?” Maybe the show is blaming the state for the male ability to rape freely.  But it is the same line Charlotte delivers when Addison first sees her after the assault. Does the identical line collapse responsibility of survivor and state?  The show seems to present these questions without giving solid answers, at least not yet.  Perhaps a clearer standpoint will emerge in the episodes that follow.  I’m not sure this is a good thing though, since I don’t think I can pick one side of that difficult debate.  I definitely believe that it is men and the male state who deserve more responsibility in stopping violence against women.  But I also cringe a little thinking of all the underreporting of rape and its possible impact on social denial and acceptance of sexual violence.

The Struggle to be Taken Seriously: More on male roles

Tension about male responsibility is hinted at to me by the dialogue between Addison and her boyfriend Sam in the episode.  Thinking of Charlotte’s attack, Sam tells Addison, “I’m glad it wasn’t you.”  She seems disgusted by the comment, and tells him he doesn’t know what Charlotte’s going through (like everyone else, he doesn’t know the attack was a rape).  When Sam asks if it would be wrong for him to leave, since he has to perform surgery the next day, Addison snaps at him.  She urges him sarcastically to go home, saying that what happened doesn’t really matter because it didn’t happen to him.

Her frustration with what she sees as his inability to take the situation seriously echoes a disagreement between the couple in the show’s prior episode, “All in the Family.”  In that episode, the practice’s comatose patient was raped by her husband, whose grief had deluded him into believing his wife was aware and able to consent to sex.  Addison wanted to report the man as a rapist, while Sam believed the man’s deluded state would make calling him a rapist unfair.  What we see with that episode and “Did You Hear What Happened to Charlotte King?” is a theme of anger by Addison at Sam’s (mis)understandings about violence against women.  To Addison, Sam first fails by refusing to place responsibility on the man who rapes his wife.  He fails again by expressing relief that what happened to Charlotte didn’t happen to Addison – his relief shows his oblivion to the fact that Charlotte’s attack represents the threat of attack all women fear on a daily basis in patriarchal society.

Again the male-hero narrative is challenged as Sam’s inability to understand is exposed; when Addison gets upset when Sam wants to go home, he asks her if she’s breaking up with him.  Her laughter at his question indicates his inability to grasp the severity of the situation.  A conversation about breaking up is trivial to Addison when issues of sexist violence are at the forefront of her mind.  In the end, she tells Sam there’s nothing he can do but be there and listen.  Her words suggest a feminist desire for men to do their part in fighting rape by showing their support when women want to address it (like when Addison wanted Sam’s support in exposing the comatose patient’s husband as a rapist and having him imprisoned).  And valuable support from men does not take the glamorous form of active chivalry, but rather necessitates an acceptance that women need to take the table on this issue, and men need to follow our lead rather than trying to take over.  Male support also needs to recognize that “the personal is political”; men such as Sam must avoid seeing an attack on one woman as an isolated incident divorced from sexist violence against women as a social group.  They need to see that an attack on one woman is an attack on all women.

“She’s an emasculating bitch”: Misogyny as Motive?

A major strength of Private Practice in my books is its exposure of misogyny as the essence of rape.  Charlotte’s rapist explains his crime as a result of his emasculation.  He’s felt emasculated on a regular basis by his verbally abusive girlfriend, an emasculation which climaxed that night when he found her cheating on him.  She was physically violent to him, and afterwards he went to the hospital for medical attention.  He describes how a woman at the hospital (who we know to be Charlotte) made him feel small by telling him to “wait his turn” to see a doctor.  His fury at Charlotte represents his hatred of all women; he expresses rage that a woman had the nerve to tell him to wait his turn.  He likely hates that he had to seek help from a woman, and that a woman has the authority to give him help, and to tell him to back off when he’s demanding attention.  Private Practice thus politicizes rape as a result of sexist attitudes – or does it?

The relationship problems the rapist has with his girlfriend can be read as a feminist finger-pointing at patriarchy as the root of rape – but could it also be read as a sexist blaming of women for male violence?  If this character hadn’t been violent, we would probably feel sorry for him.  He’s a socially awkward, childlike guy, who comes off as scared, naïve and confused.  As he tells us about his history with his girlfriend, he comes off as one of those nice guys who never wins.  It might be tempting for some viewers to blame his girlfriend (and any other woman who made him feel small for being a “nice guy|) for frustrating him to the point of not being so nice anymore.  This potential demonization of women is obviously problematic from a feminist standpoint.  I definitely don’t think it was Shonda Rhimes’s intent though.  And surely we aren’t expected as an audience to condone what this man did, no matter what problems he has.  So I don’t think I’ll attempt to imply that the show perpetuates the sexist myth that “women deserve to be raped.”

There are two rape myths Private Practice does perpetuate though.  The first is the myth of the “stranger attack.”  It’s commonly believed that rape is usually committed by men the victims don’t know.  This myth keeps us from admitting the extent to which women are raped by dates, boyfriends, authority figures (like teachers), friends, fathers, relatives – and husbands, as was the case in the previous episode with the comatose woman.  And of course, if we don’t admit the prevalence of rape in interpersonal relationships, we can’t come up with adequate rape-prevention measures, like addressing sexism in relationships.  If Charlotte had been raped by someone she knew, the show could have made a much bigger political statement.  Instead, the rapist is a crazed man who’s never been on the show before.  He attacks Charlotte out of nowhere, and the rape is a sensationalized event that leaves Charlotte with a deformed-looking body and her office (the “scene of the crime”) smashed to pieces.  It hardly represents the more-common invisible rapes women endure at the hands of men they know, often in their own homes.

The other rape myth this episode feeds into is the myth of “rapist as sick.”  All the time rape is dismissed in our culture as a crime that only a handful of society’s “sickest” people commit.  When we reduce rape to an illness, we take away the male responsibility not to rape, and patriarchal culture’s responsibility to condemn rape and sexism.  Charlotte’s rapist fits the “sick” rapist stereotype too well.  His speech and mannerisms suggest some sort of personality disorder.  His twitchiness, his anxiety, and his short childish sentences appear to result from more than just the anxiety of being in jail.  They appear to reflect a deeper psychological problem.  His complaints about women reveal feelings of inferiority – and a lot of people struggling with psychological problems may also struggle with feelings of inferiority in a medicalized society that praises the myth of “Normal.”  When Sheldon tells him he looked at his file, the rapist is self-conscious about some secret, and says that what’s in his file happened a long time ago, and says defensively that he’s “normal” now (obviously, we’re meant to believe from this that he’s not).  What this portrayal risks, then, is the promotion of sympathy for the rapist; preservation of our right to dismiss rape as “crazy” rather than as a sexist attack of female autonomy; and the consequential avoidance of placing responsibility on men, law courts, the media, and other social institutions to combat sexism.  Instead, the responsibility may be placed on doctors, to “treat” this handful of “sick” men.  The enormity of rape as a political act diminishes as notions of illness minimize it as a private issue.

Still, I’ll reassert my gratitude to Private Practice for naming the rape as an act of woman-hating.  It’s named so when the rapist shouts to Sheldon that his girlfriend is “an emasculating bitch.” It’s affirmed when he screams that women are “all the same.”  And Rhimes’s choice to have the rape happen to Charlotte rather than any of the other female characters on the show is very telling.  All the women on the show are strong in their own ways, but Charlotte poses arguable the biggest threat to male supremacy.  She’s the real “ball-buster” who in the past has admitted to coming off as an “emasculating bitch.”  She doesn’t meet the feminine stereotype of the friendly, accommodating, passive, eager-to-please woman.  She doesn’t like to sugar-coat things, and sometimes comes off as cold and angry.  She’s assertive and driven in all areas of her life, including her career, her relationship with Cooper, and in her sexuality.

Some might see the rape plot as an adherence to the cinematic norm in which femme fatales are punished for their powerful sexuality.  However, I think the decision to make Charlotte a rape survivor comes out of the recognition of rape as a politically charged attack on female freedom.  By having the toughest woman on the show raped by an insecure misogynist who resented being told to wait his turn, Shonda Rhimes shows us how rape comes from the sexist social fear of the powerful female.  The episode would not have been so haunting if any other character had been the one who was raped.  Charlotte stands as a symbol for the modern white middle-class woman with a high-powered career who threatens the patriarchal order.  She’s punished like powerful women are in other popular shows, films and books, but it’s not to shamelessly entertain a sexist audience.  She’s punished so we can be angry at her punishment, so we can rebel against patriarchy rather than perpetuate it.

Rape Scenes – To Show or not to Show?

The last source of conflict and confusion for me watching this episode lies in the flash-back at the end to the rape itself.  Some feminists criticize rape scenes for romanticizing, fetishizing, and/or sensationalizing rape.  A lack of sensitivity to viewers who may find the scene traumatic is another good point.  These critiques ring true for me in the case of Private Practice.

What was the point of showing it?  We already knew what happened to Charlotte, so it wasn’t exactly necessary for plot development. Was it deemed necessary for emotional affect on the viewer? For me, Charlotte’s detailed description to Addison of the horror of it was enough to shake me.  As a woman, I fear rape every day.  I didn’t need to see a screaming, struggling woman to have the enormity of what happened enforced.  And I didn’t need a blatant reminder of the horror that I might face some day – It’s something that at least one in four women go through, and this is upsetting enough without having to see it dramatized onscreen.

The revelation of the rapist’s face in the final moments was probably considered important during production.  No images of both him and Charlotte in the same scene were shown before, so the audience can only assume that the bloodied man Sheldon speaks to at the police station is the same person who raped Charlotte.  Still, it was already pretty obvious it was the same person, wasn’t it? And if it was really necessary to confirm this hunch, couldn’t it have been edited differently?  For instance, the episode could have ended with a flashback that doesn’t show anything that goes on in Charlotte’s office.  The camera could have filmed Charlotte’s closed office door from the hallway, and we could have heard the crashing of furniture coming from the other side of the door.  The rapist’s identity could be revealed to us by showing him exiting her office.  Instead, we’re left with the terrorizing experience of seeing him on top of her, holding her down.

Granted, we don’t see too much detail of the rape scene – it could have been a lot worse.  Mainly what we see is the rapist throwing Charlotte’s underwear off to the side, and the underwear on the ground lies in front of the camera as the rape takes place in the somewhat-darkened background.  This spares us the too-graphic visual details of the attack, but also eroticizes the assault by having us focus on the panties.  This is also an artistic choice.  Artistic choices about lighting, sound, camera angle, etc. are naturally a part of filming any scene.  As someone who’s heard of men defending snuff films as art before, I’m uncomfortable with this visual mixture of art with rape.

Dramatic effect was likely the primary reason for the rape scene.  I don’t think dramatic effect on its own warrants a rape scene. Maybe, however, the creators’ desire for an intense emotional impact was more political than that. Maybe whosever call it was to include the scene worried that the rape wouldn’t be taken seriously enough without making us watch a strong, confident woman screaming in agony.  I can only hope that an assumption of such apathy is wrong.

All in all…

Obviously, my feelings about the politics of rape as presented on Private Practice are very mixed.  I’ve never put so much time and thought into mapping out my feelings about a television episode before, but, like I said, this one haunted me for many reasons.  It will be interesting to see how things unfold when the next episode airs tomorrow night.  I’m guessing Charlotte’s secret will eventually let out, and that she’ll be convinced to press charges in the end.  I just hope the mental problems of her rapist won’t be emphasized too much.  If sexism is going to be constructed as a sickness, the show had better be able to explain the fact that that society as a whole must be pretty damn sick, and not just the one guy.  I also hope to see the interrogation of masculinity continue, and for the encouragement of male empathy to soldier on.  I’m looking forward to seeing all the strengths of the female characters on the show keep on shining.  And whether or not Charlotte speaks up about what really happened, I trust that she won’t lose her selfhood, and that her words, “He took my wallet.  He didn’t take anything else” will thus ring true.