Designated Sidekick

I've been avoiding making comment about How To Make Money Like A Porn Star! since the book was sent to Karen, and she dealt with it in her blog

It's taken until last night's rant to really dig up what's disturbed me about that comic, about the fact that Marionette over at Dance of the Puppets has the ongoing post series Rape of the Month, that Heroes has a rape/assualt/presumed assault on a character.

In the case of Money like a porn star book, somebody out there thought that I, by virtue of my gender, would want to read about rape as a wacky ha-ha hijinx story.

Somebody thought that they could commercially exploit the assumption that men are protorapists waiting for the optimum opportunity to act

That's a bullet with my gender on it.

I strongly doubt (and am willing to be corrected) that these stories of female rape are written for women. I know there will be case by case differences. There always are case by case differences. Some of them will be done for reasons that are valid for a given parameter of valid.

But the fact that somebody, somewhere, thinks there is a commercially profitable market for treating men as protorapists who fantasise about committing violent power crimes against women.

That hurts. That hurts a lot.

I don't want this. I don't want to be told that rape is funny because it's really not. I don't want to be told by Harper Collins, Australian Publisher of the Year (2005) that hey, violent abusive criminal behaviour is profitable wackiness.

Because I know marketing, market segmentation, and the fact that books are printed on the basis of expectations of profit, Harper Collins sees a commercially viable market for transforming acts of violent power crime into profit. I know I'm not the direct target market. That they didn't send the review copy to me, and say "hey Steve, we think you'll like this one". But goddamn you to hell Harper Collins, you still produced, sanctioned and authorised this work because you think men want to read rape stories as comedy.

I don't want to be thought of like this. I'd like to be thought of as human, as decent, and as something other than what I feel like right now. Because frankly, if this shit is written for me, my gender, my peers and the younger than me guys out there? We're viewed as such contemptable creatures, it's depressing as hell.