Where's the line: forced sex as a plot device

MrRandyWatson said:

If this needs to go to Authors' Hangout, that's fine; I wasn't sure where to post this anyway.

My thought on the scene was to do it like this:

Mom spikes her son's drink - I'm thinking roofies and Viagra should do the trick. She then has sex with his unconscious body - but to solve the whole "he has to like it" problem, he dreams he's having sex with his girlfriend while his mom is having sex with him. So at the very least, he has a pleasant experience even if it's his mind playing tricks on him. So when he comes to, he wakes up satisfied - unaware until after the deed is completed that it was his mother all along.

I see her as the bad guy, so naturally the girlfriend would win and the son would defeat his mother through some clever trickery.

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LOAnnie2 said:

One could argue it's only taboo because it's illegal, and because it's illegal it's automatically non-consensual. Take for example statutory rape. If someone has sex with a person considered too young, even if that person wants it, that person can't consent. The question is can a person consent to something illegal?

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Ordinary_Paradox said:

Try wine. I can recommend a nice dry red if you can't come up with anything.

This is in re: 'Our father is getting old, and there are no men in the whole world to marry us so that we can have children. 32 Come on, let's get our father drunk, so that we can sleep with him and have children by him' (Genesis 19:31 - 32)

The daughters proceed to get their father Lot drunk with wine then have sex with him. They do such a good job at getting their father inebriated that he does not know what they are doing to him (verses 33, 35). The two women become pregnant and eventually give birth to boys named Moab (father of the Moabites tribe) and Benammi (father of the Ammonites).

Sooooo,

"His mother plied him with wine, as Lot's daughters plied Lot, and had him impregnate her." This might circumvent "complete lack of consent" as an issue. As far as I am concerned, there are huge issues about complete lack of consent here.

Way off topic: all my life, preachers have put up the story of Sodom and Gomorrah as proof of the Bible's condemnation of homosexual sex and anal intercourse. They always insisted that they were the only ones capable of properly reading between the lines.

I always manage to misread between the lines, and see the story as an open biblical endorsement of sexually molesting your daughters, and using "I was drunk on wine" as a complete excuse, and having nothing at all to do with anal intercourse or homosexual behaviour. If any busybody asks where your wife is, point to a natural formation and claim that God changed her corporeal form as punishment for some vague transgression.

As a practising Christian, it still causes me serious intellectual problems.

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HandsInTheDark said:

Um... this is definitely not the forum for biblical exegesis, so I won't even try to get into a long essay here. But the bit with Lot and his daughters is nothing like endorsement of incest. Also, the text claims the idea was the daughters', not Lot's. In our culture this makes little sense, other than a possible example of girls with daddy issues (which this site demonstrates isn't actually all that uncommon.) But in the culture of the day, being a barren woman was a very big and bad deal and the sisters apparently thought that sleeping with day was the better alternative. It's not until you read further that you work out that they gave birth to the Moabites and Ammonites, both villains in the piece. In short it's "you know those Ammonites? They're no better than they should be - they're the results of incest a bunch of years back." Moral of the tale: don't sleep with daddy or you'll make monsters. (Obligatory note: the Moabites weren't actually all bad; Ruth was one and she's the most celebrated female in the Old Testament.)

If you want to see some creepy artwork that makes the daughter's scene crystal clear, look up William Blake's Lot and His Daughters, around 1800 or so. You can pretend it's art and not porn if you want, but it's a wet dream for certain kinds of people. It does make the intent of the story very, very plain though.

Sodom's destruction is a favorite text for people on a campaign against homosexuality; and there is no denying that the fact that the local were up for rape and turned down a shot at raping virgin females to have visiting men instead, was noted as a demonstration of just how messed up they were. But that's nearly a footnote to the tale, which was about a city so screwed up they organized rapes of people new to town -- which in addition to the evil of rape, was a vast violation of the custom of hospitality to strangers -- a critically important teaching in the old testament and new. In other words, an account (tale if you prefer) about God's rejection of sexual violence and utter waywardness has been melted down to a diatribe against homosexuality, which strikes me as a serious misappropriation of the text.

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