Hunting Girls, by Kelly Oliver (excerpt 1)

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NT I NG U H GIRLS

K E L LY O L I V E R

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A PRINCESS IS BEING BEATEN AND RAPED

way as other violent images in blockbuster films, they become part of the entertainment.2 Certainly, within these retold fairytales, for girls (and boys) coming-of-age is brutally violent. The transition from girlhood to womanhood is a violent initiation, which in some ways may mirror the real-world experience of girls, who, statistically, face a strong chance of becoming the victims of sexual abuse, violence, and rape.3 Although my analysis is not directed at hookup culture, or even rape culture, per se, it interacts with those notions.4 Specifically, I consider issues of power, control, and danger, as they play into contemporary manifestations of sexuality. In this chapter, I argue that these filmic fantasies perpetuate, justify, aestheticize, and normalize violence toward girls. In addition, some of these contemporary fantasies take us back to medieval notions of consent as the purview of men only, and thereby serve as warnings to girls and young women coming-of-age in a world of affirmative consent apps for cellphones, and party rape creepshots photographed, or recorded, on those same cellphones. Here, tracing the fantasy of consent on the part of sexual predators, along with the drugging and raping of unconscious girls, from the fourteenthcentury tale of Sleeping Beauty to its contemporary retellings in Disney’s Maleficent (2014) and Divergent, to the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey wherein lack of consent is hot, it becomes clear that in terms of sexual politics, in many ways, we are still in the Middle Ages.

THE RAPE OF SLEEPING BEAUTY

Once upon a time, there was a tale of a beautiful princess who was drugged unconscious and raped. What could be an entry in too many a college girl’s diary is the medieval tale of Sleeping Beauty, familiar to pop culture through Disney without the drugs or rape—that is, until 2014’s dark retelling in Maleficent (played

A PRINCESS IS BEING BEATEN AND RAPED

by Angelina Jolie). The myth of Sleeping Beauty, awakened from sleep by the kiss of her prince, is the quintessential rape fantasy.

Revisiting this fairytale and its history is apt considering the widespread use of rape drugs on college campuses, drugs that render girls unconscious or put them to sleep.5 What are we to make of this desire to kiss or have sex with—that is to say, rape—an unconscious “dead” girl? For starters, it is a desire that takes us back to the fourteenth century at least, and may be the ultimate power trip for sexual predators.

The fantasy of sex with an unconscious girl is centuries old, mythical even, with its first recorded roots in an anonymous fourteenth-century Catalan story entitled Frayre de Joy e Sor de Plaser (Léglu 2010:102). In this version of the fairytale, after the beautiful virgin daughter of the emperor of Gint-Senay dies suddenly, her parents place her in a tower accessible by a bridge of glass. Among the young men attracted to the tower, Prince Frayre de Joy, son of King Florianda, convinces a magician to give him the means to reach the tower. When he sees the sleeping beauty’s smiling face, he “has sex repeatedly with the corpse” and gets her pregnant. Nine months later, she gives birth to a son who suckles at her dead breast. The prince wants to marry Sor de Plaser and makes a bargain with the magician, who brings the girl back to life in exchange for his kingdom. At first, the girl refuses to consent to the marriage because the prince raped her. But once she learns that the father of her child is the noble Frayre de Joy, she agrees and the prince becomes the successor to her father as emperor of Gint-Senay (Léglu 2010:102).

In her interpretation of the poem, Catherine Léglu describes how the young prince attributes consent to Sor de Plaser by kissing her a hundred times until her lips move in response, and then exchanging his ring for hers as a promise of betrothal to justify the rape (2010:106–107). She maintains that, throughout the poem, the prince sees signs of the dead girl’s active consent. This line from the poem indicates the level of the prince’s hallucinations of consent: “And it seemed to him that she was smiling gently at

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him, and that she was satisfied” (2010:106). “The text,” says Léglu, “endorses his forceful reinterpretation of her dead body as a consenting partner with a proverbial expression” containing the girl’s name, Plaser or pleasure: “Pleasure loves, pleasure desires; thinking brings worry, pleasure guides” (2010:106–107). At the time that this fairytale was written, it was widely held that women could not conceive without an orgasm. Thus, Sleeping Beauty’s pregnancy would be proof of her consent.6 This absurd view has recently reappeared in the political arena after the Republican representative from Missouri, Todd Akin, said in an interview, “ ‘legitimate rape’ does not lead to pregnancy. . . . If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down” (Franke-Ruta 2012).

Léglu discusses another Sleeping Beauty tale, cantare of Belris, from fourteenth-century Italy, wherein the girl is sleeping under an enchantment rather than dead. In this tale, Prince Belris is tasked with retrieving a falcon. While out slaying dragons, he has sex with another woman along the way. Eventually, he finds a sleeping queen, whom he rapes, leaving her a note with instructions for the name of the son she just conceived. The birth of the son awakens the sleeping queen and she commands her army to find Belris and makes him marry her. His other mistress kills herself and leaves her own son orphaned. In another version of this medieval tale, believing his daughter Clarisse is cursed, a father locks her in a garden with her governess to protect her. The girl falls ill and the nurse gives her wine to make her well. The girl goes into a drunken stupor and the governess goes off to Mass. A passing prince comes upon her, sees her alone in the garden, and taken by her beauty, he kisses her. Like Frayre de Joy, he interprets the girl’s lack of response as consent. Since the girl doesn’t resist, he rapes the drunken girl (Léglu 2010:121).

These tales morph into the medieval courtly romantic poem Perceforest wherein a princess, Zellandine, falls in love with a prince, Troylus, who must perform courageous feats to win her hand.

While he is off on his adventures, she falls into a deep sleep from an enchantment. Upon his return, he rapes her while she is sleeping

A PRINCESS IS BEING BEATEN AND RAPED

and impregnates her. He removes the flax from her finger that caused the enchantment and they marry. The question, of course, is why he didn’t wake her before having sex with her. In these tales, the fantasy of the sleeping or dead girl not only ensures the lack of resistance to sex but also engenders illusions of consent, and even sexual satisfaction and love, on the part of the unconscious girl. Sex, consent, and satisfaction are all the property of men and their fantasy projections onto incapacitated girls and women. This medieval fantasy of consent is echoed in a remark made by one of the boys involved in the gang rape of an unconscious high school girl in Steubenville (Ohio), who said, “It isn’t really rape because you don’t know if she wanted to or not” (Ley 2013). The illusion that unconscious girls may want sex, even enjoy it, is still with us.

From fairytales to pornography, popular culture is filled with girls and women, unconscious or sleeping, “enjoying” nonconsensual sex. And until we change our fantasies, it is going to be difficult to change our realities.

A PRINCESS IS BEING DRUGGED

Starting with Charles Perrault’s (1608–1703) La Belle au Bois Dormant, “Sleeping Beauty in the Wood,” modern versions of the tale displace the prince’s rape of the unconscious girl with the prick from a spindle, followed by a kiss from the prince. In Perrualt’s version, and in the Brothers Grimm’s Dornröschen or “Little Briar Rose,” a beautiful princess falls under a sleeping enchantment and is awakened by a kiss from a handsome prince. The issue of consent falls away as an explicit part of the narrative, and the girl wakes up to the man of her dreams, who breaks the spell, and then marries her. With Walt Disney’s animated version of the classic fairytale (1959), Sleeping Beauty is named Aurora and the rape from earlier versions is transformed into “true love’s kiss.” In this familiar version, Aurora is cursed at her christening by an evil fairy

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