The whole thread, and the use of rape as a plot device shouldn’t be . . . Strong women or no, survivors or not, people who don’t understand it, aren’t going to any better for having seen it, and for those of us who’ve lived it, well it’s just . . . So wrong.

What was glossed over a bit, and unfortunately I can related to from direct personal experience, is Gina WANTED the resurrection ship destroyed in the hope that she’d really truly die, never to have to remember what she’d been through ever again. She didn’t want to download into a new body because she’d still remember and still FEEL it all just the same.

The body heals fairly quickly as compared to the mind, heart and soul. I wish, I wish so many things, topping the list is I wish I didn’t understand so well what Gina was feeling and why she did what she did. For her it wasn’t about taking out the Cloud 9, or other ships or lives. For Gina it was an attempt to find peace, to leave behind the pain and memories. When the value of your own heart, mind and soul is such a negative, it is really hard to see any innocence or value in other lives. Given the same set of circumstances and resources, I’d have done exactly the same thing.

I cannot take my own life to run from the pain, to find some peace, because I know I’ll just be downloaded again, I have before, so I have to be ‘strong’ if you could call it that. Medication and therapy is helping me ‘survive’ but the flashbacks and nightmares are not quietly going away. ‘Strong’ is a relative term, and I’m not even close to the same person I was before I was raped. So what value does it have, what does survival really mean in this context?

I’m on disability because of the lasting mental and emotional trauma, PSTD, Major Depression, and Anxiety to name a few but they are only words. SO I try not to think about it, and work on learning new ways of living if you could call it that. Days become weeks, then months, and I move through the fog of not thinking, not feeling, not putting myself in harms way.

Yeah, my fault, it’s always the victim’s fault just ask anyone who doesn’t have a clue. Without a frame of reference you have to wonder, how will the rest of the world catch a clue? How does using it as a plot device make it any less likely to happen?

Cain and Gina lovers? How does this make any difference? Why should that be a focus? It doesn’t make what Gina suffered any less painful or real for her. Frankly despite my earlier misgivings about BSG being reborn, this is an amazing show, and they are saying some things that I hope are causing people to think a bit.

So called “Skin Job Toasters” are no less people, real, feeling, hoping, dreaming, live than the Colonials, and in many cases so much MORE HUMAN than the “flesh and blood humans.” It’s a hell of a show, and I don’t want to see the Cylons lose the war because it’s not black and white anymore . . .

Might give some people something to think about.

I started sending letters to CBS and every member of CSI for their pin-headed decision to take a strong, smart woman like Catharine and strongly imply that her drink was drugged and she was raped. It’s wrong to use rape to garner ratings. That recent episode was just the last straw for me.

The scary thing is, I visited several CSI webforums to see how people were reacting. People were more concerned with Nick Stokes’ reaction when he finds out than Catharine’s emotional state, or the vileness of such a “plot twist.”

I haven’t gotten the impression at all that SVU encourages women to be afraid to walk alone at night–in fact, there was one episode in which Olivia Benson (one of the main detectives) was being stalked by a perp who had already killed another woman, but she refused her partner Elliott Stabler’s offer to walk her to her door after work. She made it very clear to him that she didn’t need his protection.

Benson’s a great character, a strong woman who kicks rapist and pedophile ass. Women on the show aren’t just victims–they’re also detectives, medical examiners, assistant district attorneys, and judges.

I do have one problem with the show, though, which is that in some episodes, it turns out that the accuser falsely reported a rape. There was even one episode in which a family from the South beat up their daughter to make it look like she had been raped and beaten, and she had sex with a man they had found on a list of sex offenders, so that she could claim she had been raped in order to sue the hotel where the rape happened and make money. There was also one episode in which a pyschopathic woman drugged men and raped them using a machine that allowed them to get erections while passed out, then accused them of raping her.

The number of episodes with false rape accusations are small compared to the number with real crimes, but it still really bothers me that the show portrays false accusations as something that happen somewhat regularly, when in fact they’re incredibly rare and the vast majority of rapes are never reported. That’s my main problem with SVU–other than that, I’ve found its portrayal of sex crimes to be pretty accurate.

Then, all of a sudden, they started losing the magic a bit (it’s still better than most things on air right now, IMO) and into that there was suddenly a massive fallback on the same old rape threat. The three of four main female characters who were threatened with rape were all subjected to this within the space of one season. It was just vile. The fact is that BSG is a dark show so the rapes themselves don’t fairly represent the show’s general attitude towards women. Like I say, it’s nowhere near perfect, but even with 3 attempted rapes it’s still far more woman-friendly than something like Desperate Housewives or Grey’s Anatomy. I find those far harder to watch on a weekly basis than BSG – it’s spurts of massive feminist anger about the rapes rather than the continuous burn of the other shows.

Anyway, I thought I’d weigh in here as BSG is in my top couple of favourite shows and I love feminist analysis of the show. It’s really goddamn low what the writers/creators did to the great female characters last season and is made even worse because of the fact that they continuously toot their own horns about how ahead of the curve they are in their treatment of women.