Double Standard Rape (Female on Female)

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Double Standard Rape (Female on Female) is in large part based on the idea that lesbian sex is not "real" sex. Men, penises, and penile penetration are central to sexual relations; without a penis involved, there can be no sex, and without sex, there can be no rape. Therefore, anything a woman does to another woman is "not a big deal".

It should be noted that, at least in the United States, this viewpoint was legally supported until the 1970s. The definition of "rape", historically, was defined as the act of forcing sexual intercourse on a woman by a man. Currently, all states define rape without referencing the sex of the victim or the perpetrator, acknowledging that women and men can both rape and be raped, but many people still believe that the presence or absence of the penis determines whether any given sex act is actually sex or not. In other locations, the presence of the penis is still required for an act to be legally considered "rape" rather than "unwanted sexual touching" or other such descriptions.

This trope is invoked where women raping other women is seen as harmless or even sexy, and therefore not worth fretting over. After all, Girl-On-Girl Is Hot, no matter what the victim may think of it. In some cases, authors who would demote male rapists to Complete Monster status within a story forgive female rapists, and/or consider their relationships to be loving. The emotional impact of the rape is largely dismissed or ignored completely, usually because it would be less appealing to the audience for the victim to be legitimately traumatized, and ideas of consent and personal violation aren't often brought up at all.

The trope (and audiences' reaction) is used similarly in Boys Love works for male-on-male rape, but where BL often uses it for drama, female-on-female rape in most media would like the rape not to last any longer than the scene it happens in. Don't expect victims to think about it too hard after the fact.

Obviously this trope describes a Double Standard, and an extremely insulting one, in that it supports not one, not two, but four Unfortunate Implications: Women are so weak and ineffectual they just can't harm anyone, not even other women, even less by sex; lesbian sex is cute and harmless but most of all unreal, especially if it's non-penetrative; dismissing such a trope as Squick would immediately bear the mark of Selective Squick; and only men are rapists.

As the Double Standard Rape (Female on Male) page says, please Don't Try This At Home.

A relative of Double Standard Rape (Female on Male) and Double Standard Rape (Male on Male). See also Skinship Grope.

No real life examples, please; this is a rape trope, and All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers.

Examples of Double Standard Rape (Female on Female) include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Ichiban Ushiro no Dai Maou, Fujiko's rape (by female characters) is Played for Laughs in a Black Comedy Rape situation.
  • A Kiss, Love, and a Prince involves a girl tying another girl to a chair for a forced kiss scene.
  • In Love Hina, male characters generally get pummeled for touching female characters whether they mean to or not, yet intentional female on female assault gets brushed aside or completely overlooked (like what Kanako does to Motoko). See similar examples in other harem comedies.
  • In Ikki Tousen during Ryofu's first TV episode she immobilizes and rapes one of the show's most popular characters, Ryoumou, after defeating her. This is never brought up again (not even by Ryoumou) and she even becomes an Ensemble Darkhorse herself.
    • In Dragon Destiny it was revealed that Shrinking Violet Ten'i was gang raped at her former school by a sadistic Alpha Bitch and her Girl Posse, and they pretty much used this trope to justify their actions. This is only an in-universe case: the show itself makes it clear that the girls are Complete Monsters.
  • Though not quite rape, Haruhi Suzumiya's sexual harassment of Mikuru is Played for Laughs.
  • Strawberry Panic pulls this off with Kaname (and to a lesser extent Momomi) on Hikari. The solution to many troubles Kaname had throughout the series was, "Rape Hikari!" She never succeeds, and while it's clear other people disapprove, she faces no consequences for her obviously creepy intentions.
  • In the one-shot manga 08.04 AM Daydream, most of the patrons of the girls-only train seem to believe this.
  • Seikon no Qwaser plays this trope straight for the most part. In fact, all kinds of ripping a girls clothes off and fondling her from men and women is viewed as a normal thing. One scene in the first season even has Mutsumi saying "Don't worry, this can't be considered as rape" when raping female lead Mafuyu.
  • A bit of a Zig-Zagging Trope in Kannazuki no Miko. Chikane does rape Himeko, yes, and makes a rather dramatic Face Heel Turn in the process, but the circumstances were more than a little contrived, making for ample debate on whether or not she should still be held accountable. However, there is a notable lack of repercussions, or even disapproval of her acts in-universe. Less of a Double Standard than most examples since a male villain tries to rape Himeko at one point but is treated no less sympathetically in the end when everything gets set straight again and everyone is given their happy ending.
  • Miko from La Blue Girl won't hesitate to do the raping when her enemy is another cute girl, and without her status as the heroine being compromised.
  • Mylene Jenius from Macross 7 in the second Dynamite OVA almost became a victim of this trope. Possibly taken further in the companion Manga Mylene Beat.
  • Violent, Psycho Lesbian Ume from Ben-To seems to be present to cater to an number of feitishes, including; forced yuri to kidnap
  • In Girls Bravo Kosame once attempts to rape Kirie.
  • In Boys Empire, Umeko rapes Hitomi's mother as part of her "negotiations".
  • Subverted in Daily Lives of High School Boys; in the skit High School Girls are Funky -- the Past, Yanagin threatened Ikushima about "being ****ed with a stick" when the latter complained about the former's not fitting the personality archetype usually associated with glasses-wearing girls. Eventually, Yanagin just beat Ikushima up with a wrench instead.


Fan Works

  • In the Revolutionary Girl Utena fanfic Will of the Rose, Anthy rapes Utena because she is frustrated that they haven't had sex yet (since they are engaged). Anthy's character is completely altered and Utena becomes an Extreme Doormat who stays in an abusive relationship after Wakaba loses interest in their friendship. It should be noted that in this fanfic, Utena agrees to keep fighting off the abusive system (which is mostly male dominated) that Anthy is trapped in.
  • Ambiguously played in another Degrassi fanfic Bias seems headed toward Manny/Ellie femslash. The chapter started off with some boys coercing Manny into raping Ellie (it was either rape Ellie herself or they rape Ellie). What happened to Ellie is treated like a random drunken encounter and not much else. Neither the male nor female characters involved are given much blame (so far).


Films

  • One (softcore) example from The Stewardesses 3-D: The chief stewardess aggressively puts the moves on one of the junior ones, to which she yields. Later, a male character reveals that his (also male) boss extracted sexual favors from him in return for promotion, leaving him permanently embittered. Moral: Lesbian sexual harassment is fun and sexy; gay male sexual harassment is a soul-blighting trauma.
  • In Blood Night: The Legend of Mary Hatchet, Alyssa cracks a long joke about being beaten, gangraped and branded in the girl's shower room in high school.
  • It's hard to tell if the crazed teenage Dominatrix trying to rape another girl in Blood Mask: The Possession of Nicole Lameroux is being Played for Laughs or not.


Internet

  • Mugglenet.com, a Harry Potter fansite, has a section for editorials about shipping. The submission rules indicate that essays about particularly squicky pairings would be turned away, including those containing incest, bestiality, and underage characters with adults. Fair enough. Except that one essay made a case for Luna x Trelawney. I guess that doesn't count under the very clear "no underage characters with adult characters" rule, somehow?

Literature

  • Invoked in Aimee.
  • In The Big U by Neal Stephenson, when the male college students drug Sara and try to engage in sexual activity it's rape, but when her female friend rescues her from them and then engages in sexual activity with the same drugged individual, it's for the best.
  • In the anthology Blood Sisters: Lesbian Vampire Tales a female character is raped and "turned" by a female vampire. The rape experiences gives her the newfound confidence to pursue her mortal love interest and lead a happier life. Possibly also an example of Sex as Rite-of-Passage, except substitute "rape" for "sex".
  • Averted in Wizard And Glass, in which Rhea's erotic pawing of an unwilling Susan is the first demonstration of the old witch's Complete Monster status.
  • Kushiels Dart has a complicated version: Phedre informs the reader that rape is an unforgivable act of treason in her culture. Yet when Melisande drugs her and commits sex acts that could arguably be rape before selling her into slavery this act is never considered rape despite a cultural understanding that both men and women can be sexually dominant and powerful. It becomes gray since Phedre is a professional submissive, and was under contract to Melisande. Melisande did honor the letter of the contract, including the safe word, and knew damn well Phedre was a trained spy, working for her enemy, and Phedre does obviously views what happened as a violation despite no using her safeword, but she also doesn't brush it off because of Melisande's gender.
  • In the book The Queen's Gambit, the preteen protagonist is nearly raped by her large black roommate who had been working to gain her trust for weeks. Later she calls on this person to help her get her life back in order after becoming a drug-addicted mess thanks to her horrific childhood, with zero mention made of the rape.
  • John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (which was written in the early 1960s but not published until 1980, after Toole's death) has as one of its secondary characters Lana Lee, an ill-tempered female burlesque house owner in New Orleans. A Politically-Incorrect Villain, she is (among other things) intensely homophobic and is constantly complaining about "fairies and dykes" showing up in the news. At the climax of the novel, Lee is arrested after trying to bribe an undercover cop with a pornographic picture and thrown into a holding cell with three "butch" lesbians. Although the scene cuts away just before anything truly nasty can happen, it is clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that Lee is gang-raped by the trio, thus in effect becoming a lesbian herself.


Live-Action TV

  • Averted in at least one episode of Law & Order: SVU, which featured a particularly heinous teenage girl who would routinely drug and rape her younger (not blood-related) sister. It's also extremely heavily implied that she also got off on having boyfriends rape the girl.
    • And in season 12, they have a case of a woman who assaulted a young girl and then murdered her, and the detectives note that they have never before encountered such a scenario.
  • Averted in the Homicide: Life on the Street/Law and Order Crossover episode "Baby, It's You," in which a teenage model dies of toxic shock and it's discovered that she was raped - by her mother.
  • Also averted in the 1974 (!) made for TV movie Born Innocent where the main character (Linda Blair) is naked and held down by a group of girls who penetrate her with a broomstick. The scene is disturbing and awful.
    • So much so that it was cut from later screenings following a similar real-life incident involving a nine-year-old girl. (The film was subsequently released on VHS and DVD uncut.)


Theater

  • The original version of The Vagina Monologues contained an extremely controversial piece about a young girl who was seduced by an older woman, who, regardless of the girl's mental state (some productions say she was already drunk, others change it so she wasn't) and the issue of her consent (she's positive about the experience for the entirety of the piece) is still statutory rape, even when the girl is aged up from 13 to 16 in some productions. The original included the line "if it was rape, it was a good rape", and while later versions removed that line the piece itself is still highly controversial.

Videogames

  • In Embric of Wulfhammers Castle the rape is called a rape but described in erotic, titillating terms as the Duchess recounts the event to her maid, who is openly aroused by the tale, and the rapist in question is instantly forgiven because she lost control of her emotions and couldn't help raping the Duchess.
  • Averted in Dead Rising, where the psychotic police woman, Jo Slade, captures and is heavily implied to have molested some women with her nightstick, and it's never portrayed as anything other than disturbing.


Webcomics

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