By now it's almost a ritual: A movie or TV show—probably Game of Thrones—depicts a woman getting raped, is greeted by furious criticism on the Internet, which slowly dies down until the next rape, when the cycle begins anew. Over the last several decades, rape has evolved from a topic that was neither depicted in pop culture nor talked about publicly, to a frequent, even overused plot point in movies and TV shows. It's also become the center of a fierce debate about when portraying rape in fiction is unnecessary, manipulative, and even harmful—especially when it feeds into real-life misconceptions about sexual assault that are often used to deprive rape survivors of legitimacy or justice.

Half the time, people can't even seem to figure out how to define rape, let alone portray it in responsible ways. Indeed, one of the most baffling things about so many rape scenes in popular culture is that the people who scripted them felt qualified to do so, despite seemingly knowing nothing about rape except that it exists and it is bad. In short, anyone can write a rape scene—but should they? Chances are, the answer is no.

From reinforcing falsehoods about sexual violence to the objectification of women, here's why that rape storyline is probably a bad idea, and a pretty uncreative one too.

Rape Is Rape

One of the reasons why rape remains so terrifyingly pervasive is far too often, no one is willing to call it what it is. We've generally agreed as a culture that rape is bad, but since people want to continue to commit (and excuse) rape, they resolve that cognitive dissonance by defining rape in incredibly narrow ways that distance it from themselves and the people they know. Behold the rise of euphemisms like "gray rape" and "rape rape" (aka "real" rape).

A small but terrifying study conducted on college-age males earlier this year found that around one in three men said they would be willing to rape a woman if there were no consequences—but only if you didn't call it "rape." For these men, the resistance or disinterest of women was viewed as insincere or inconsequential, and the use of force or coercion was seen as either acceptable, or a nebulous "gray" area—but not "rape rape." That's why definitions of rape and consent are so crucially important: They literally encourage people to commit acts of rape by redefining them into social acceptability. Simply put, any form of media that reinforces any of these ideas actively enables sexual assault.

Take for example Game of Thrones, which filmed a rape scene for Season 4 without realizing it was a rape scene. After it aired, its director continued to insist that it was not rape, despite the female character saying "no" and "stop" while her assailant pushed her down, saying "I don't care." Instead, the director explained that the assault "becomes consensual by the end"—despite no clear verbal or physical indication of that—and that the coercion was actually a "turn-on" for the woman. Which leads neatly into another cardinal sin of bad rape scenes...

Rape Should Not Be Sexy

Not making rape scenes look sexy might sound like a no-brainer, yet avoiding this pitfall seems remarkably difficult. That's because most popular media looks at women primarily through the lens of sexual attractiveness. Important female characters are uniformly young and alluring, while unconventionally attractive or older women rarely make it to the screen at all. It's a troubling subtext: If women aren't sexually attractive to men, what's the point of them even existing?

It's a troubling subtext: If women aren't sexually attractive to men, what's the point of them even existing?

The impulse to sexualize women is so knee-jerk and compulsive that sexiness becomes functionally mandatory, which sets the stage for maximum creepiness any time those characters suffer, and particularly when they suffer sexual violence.

As Rachel Edidin wrote in her critique of sexualized rape scenes, "Women are exaggeratedly—and always—sexy. They're sexy on the phone. Sexy on the job. Sexy fighting. Sexy tortured. Sexy dead. Sexy raped."

If you're a woman in media, you're basically the sexy Halloween costume of human beings in a world where Halloween never ends. Again, I cannot believe I have to say this, but if a movie or TV show can't visualize a woman in non-sexual terms even for the brief duration of a rape scene, it has no business depicting rape scenes.

Vertigo

Rape Does Not Have to Be Seen to Be Believed

For reasons that almost uniformly do not speak well of us as a species, when rape is introduced as a part of a character's storyline—either in the past or the present—we seem to need those assaults to play out before our eyes in order for them to seem real.

But do we really? Although the recent Mad Max: Fury Road movie featured a number of central female characters who had experienced rape and lived in sexual slavery, one of the most remarkable things about their depiction was that their rapes were not depicted on screen; instead, the movie trusted that we could simply believe what they were saying.

But where the movie made an active effort to get things right with its female characters—even bringing in Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler to consult—when it came time to make a comic book, the story got turned over to an all-male team that immediately introduced a rape backstory to "motivate" its main female character, Furiosa, and immediately put the previously off-screen rapes in the comic.

It gets even more troubling when you consider the reasoning behind this decision, as articulated by the comic's co-creator, Mark Sexton:

The use of institutionalised rape by Immortan Joe is not only central to the story but without it, the story could be viewed merely as a bunch of young spoilt girls whining about being kept in relative luxury by an older man who's concerned with their safety. Not really much room for dramatic tension there!

There are quite a few things wrong with this response, but the idea that sexually enslaved women are in danger of seeming "spoiled" unless they are raped before our very eyes is surely the most contemptible.

Rape Is Not Shorthand for Maturity, Edginess, or Depth

Because rape is widely acknowledged as a Very Serious Topic, there's also a tendency to treat rape scenes as a means to be edgy or shocking. You know, as a way of creating really serious, mature content. Most of the time, however, this approach radiates nothing so much as ignorance and immaturity.

Adding yet another manipulative rape scene is not just one of the most offensive things a writer can do, it is also one of the most boring.

One of the reasons that creators of media like to include rape in their work is specifically because it elicits strong feelings, even when divorced from all context and consequences. Think of it as a recipe for cheap drama: Take a story, add one rape, stir vigorously, and presto—instant emotional reaction! This is both incredibly lazy and incredibly callous, but it works, so people keep doing it. Rape has been so overused and misused in popular media that adding yet another manipulative sexual assault to the world just to heighten the stakes of a story or have a Very Special Episode is not just one of the most offensive things a writer can do, it is also one of the most boring.

This also holds true when writing backstories for female characters, and trying to create challenges and struggles that motivate and shape them as individuals. There's a tendency in media to reduce women to their genitals and what men want to do to their genitals; too often, the combination of "woman" and "bad thing that happened in the past" defaults to "something bad happened to her genitals, probably."

In reality, millions of other bad things happen to women every day—car crashes, tornados, gentrification, crappy health insurance—so unless there is a highly specific and deeply considered reason to use rape, it's better to use literally any of those instead. And if rape is the only tool someone has in their bag for creating "complex" female characters, it's time to get another bag.

DC Comics

Female Rape Victims Do Not Exist to Motivate Men

There's a long and depressing tradition of subjecting female characters to harm solely to generate reactions from male characters; it's so common that comic book writer Gail Simone came up with a term for it, inspired by a scene where Green Lantern's girlfriend was murdered and stuffed in a fridge: Women in Refrigerators. If you've ever heard about a female character getting "fridged," that's what it means.

The same is true of rape scenes, which so often end up being stories about how men feel about women getting raped, rather than how those women feel about their own assaults. As one woman noted after creating a statistical breakdown of rape in Game of Thrones, although the rapes of 117 women have been described thus far in the novels, "only two rape victims in books tell their own story rather than having a man tell it for them—and they're both villains." Too often, women and their abuse are treated as a tool for inspiring feelings, reactions, and character development in men; the story of their rape is not about them, or how it affects them: It's about a man, and how it affects him. (See: Theon's tears as Ramsay raped Sansa on Game of Thrones this season.)

Rape Is Not Just For Women

While I've talked a lot about rape scenes in regards to female victims, that's largely because rape victims in media are almost exclusively portrayed as women. But that's not the complete picture of sexual assault, which is experienced by plenty of men and non-binary people. But those aren't stories we often see depicted; indeed, the sexual assault of men is disproportionately ignored by the stories we tell about rape.

So why is rape such a comparatively easy weapon to wield against female characters, but not male ones? The most likely and upsetting answer is that we as a culture are are more comfortable seeing women raped, which is not only messed up for women, but wholly erases the experiences of male survivors—not to mention encouraging the equally crappy stereotype that the rape of men isn't a "real" thing. This should go without saying, but of course it is.

HBO

Rapists Are Not All Mustache-Twirling Villains

If many crime dramas are to be believed, rapists are visibly creepy villains who lurk in alleys waiting to pounce on random women. But studies show that the opposite is true: More than 80 percent of rapes are committed by someone the victim knows; close to 50 percent of rapes are committed by a friend or acquaintance, and 25 percent are committed by an intimate partner.

The idea that rape is committed by people you know against other people you know is a difficult truth to swallow, and that's why it's often avoided in fiction. It's more comforting to believe that rape is usually committed by drooling perverts lurking in alleys, and the narrative in movies, TV, and other media that rape is just stranger danger remains popular in part because it bears so little resemblance to the reality of rape, and renders it safely distant.

Seriously, Why Use Rape?

Yes, there are stories about rape that are worth telling. But without extensive research into the problems, stereotypes, and struggles that rape survivors face—including what makes sexual assault different from other forms of violence—it's too easy for fictional depictions to contribute to those issues rather than combat them. With so many other narrative tools out there, using sexual assault is almost always unnecessary. There are better ways to tell nearly any story, so why use the one that tends to be both the laziest and the most harmful?

TL;DR: Do not write a rape scene. While there are exceptions to this, everybody tends to think they are one of those exceptions, when more likely they are the reason the advice exists.