Last year taught us that everyone in Hollywood needs years of rigorous training on how sexual consent works, and some should be getting said training behind walls of concrete and barbed wire. But beyond the behind-the-scenes scandals, we should talk about how the movies and shows they make are so often crafted to appeal to the creepiest rape fantasies. That can't be good for us, right?

And when it comes to this sort of thing, it's possible that no genre is more insidious than fantasy/sci-fi, which has its own very specific collection of "Sometimes non-consensual sex can be fun!" scenarios that come up again and again.

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Is It Still Rape If There's Magic Involved?

Let's rewind for a bit: If you're a child of the '80s, you remember when Revenge Of The Nerds was a huge hit, and you may even remember that the final triumph of the main nerd was when he put on a Darth Vader mask and pretended to be a hot girl's boyfriend so he could bang her. This, as we have previously pointed out, is rape by deception, and here in the real world, it can totally get your ass thrown in prison. That, of course, does not happen in the movie, because once the ruse is revealed, the victim is delighted to learn that nerds are great at sex, and she rewards him for showing her the light. It should probably be noted that this movie was written by dudes.

20th Television

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Now fast-forward to Season 4 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in which the titular character *spins wheel of fantasy cliches* switches bodies with another girl, Faith. Faith then impersonates Buffy and has sex with her boyfriend, Riley. It was Buffy's body the whole time, but it was also still rape on Faith's part, just like it's still assault when someone makes you punch yourself with your own hand. The Buffy spinoff Angel built on that idea in the most convoluted way possible by having an ancient power possess the body of young woman and trick Angel's son into impregnating her so she could give birth to her new human body (audiences cannot be weirded out by fantastical rape when they're not totally sure what the hell they've just seen).