I’m a year late, but I’m finally playing Until Dawn. I feel like I’m having an entirely different experience with the game this year than I would have last year because this year, I’m playing during the election. I imagine that had I played last year, I would have plowed through the typical horror tropes with an eye roll. But, this year, they hit my harder. In particular, I’m referring to a scene in which a couple goes off alone to a cabin to have sex. Until Dawn asks the player to make a lot of choices, which result in the butterfly effect during later scenes in the game. In my game, my choices led to the woman being pretty ticked at her boyfriend, and she was not in the mood to have sex. He’s pushing, she’s saying no, and I’m getting stressed out. Eventually, they have sex, and then die because, of course, having sex makes you a bad person.
We’ve all seen this a million times before, but boy I’m having a hard time with it this year. The election and all the stuff I’m seeing on Facebook are bringing up a lifetime of awful memories for me. Thankfully, I’ve never been sexually assaulted, but I’ve had to deal with angry, pushy men so many times in my life. The messages and expectations of women in our society are so contradictory. We are not supposed to have sex because sex equals bad. Also, we run the risk risk of pissing a man off if we don’t want sex. I’m seeing these messages play out on Facebook in ways I find very bizarre and disturbing.
This week, I got into a Facebook argument with a woman who kept posting defenses of Trump’s rape allegations by comparing them to things like Beyonce’s videos or random examples of consensual sex she found on the internet. During our discussion, she informed me that if Trump did rape a 13-year old, it was the 13-year old’s fault. I asked for clarification because I couldn’t believe she was serious. But, she was serious. She then tried to convince me by comparing getting raped to murdering someone. Her argument went something like this: a 13-year old has free will, so if she puts herself in a position to get raped, she’s just as responsible as another 13-year old who murders someone. She got a lot of support for her stance. She’s not alone in her thinking.
This conversation disturbs me so much because our bodies are not our own. It’s 2016, and people still think this way. I think that’s why the scene in Until Dawn is bothering me more this year than it would have last year. Sure, the teens who have sex die in every horror movie. It’s a trope, an old tired one, but still an expected one. But, it’s also a reflection of our society and what society values. Thankfully, not everyone thinks this way but, I’ve realized that enough people do, and it’s a much, much bigger problem than I thought. And, I’m not even just talking about Trump here. I’m concerned that what we are seeing is an in-your-face normalization of rape. I guess it’s always been there, under the surface, but now people don’t have a problem saying rape is the victims fault. Is this why rapists often don’t receive much punishment?
I don’t know how to process all this. I’m devastated and making myself physically ill over it. I fear I sound terribly naive in this post, but I honestly thought we had made much more progress than this. I don’t know what the path forward is anymore.
