4 RAPE TO SELL, INDIAN STYLE

BOX 10.4 RAPE TO SELL, INDIAN STYLE

The nation producing the largest number of movies annually is India. Many of these use rape scenes as major audience draws. The great Indian epics Mahabharat and Ramayana have demure heroines who are nearly raped but are indeed rescued from their attackers by their own virtue. This pattern also appears in Indian movies featuring the same type of heroine. But the women characters who are portrayed as more independent, corrupt, immoral, or even morally ambiguous must suffer their fate, which is more typically blamed on their lifestyle rather than on the attacker A 1989 film, Crime Time, advertised: “See first-time underwater rapes on Indian screen.” One popular Indian actor, Ranjeet, has enacted over 350 rape scenes in 19 years of film acting (Pratap, 1990).

There is some call for change from women’s groups and others. Bharatendu Singhal, chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification, announced his intent in 1990 to force producers to remove much of the titillation from the rape scenes, although filmmakers lobbied for his removal from the post. Curiously, verbal suggestiveness is more frowned upon than overt violence. A 1993 movie Khalnayak (Evil One) stirred up controversy when prominent film actress Madhuri Dixit clutched her breast while singing “What’s beneath my blouse?” (Maier, 1994).

Does this state of affairs reflect society or help mold it? Over 8,000 rapes, half against poor and lower-caste women, are reported yearly in India, although that is probably a small fraction of the rapes that occur. Occasionally a rape case even comes to trial. A policeman in Bihar accused of raping 18 women was acquitted by a judge, who felt that the women were so poor that they could have been bribed to file a false complaint (Pratap, 1990).

The major concern with such films is the juxtaposition of erotic sex and violence. For example, one scene from Toolbox Murders opens with a

315 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

music Pretty Baby playing in the background. For several minutes she is shown fondling herself and masturbating in a very erotic manner. Suddenly the camera cuts to the scene of an intruder breaking into her apartment, with loud, fast-paced suspenseful music in the background. The camera and sound track cut back and forth several times between these two characters until he finally encounters the woman. He attacks her with electric tools, chasing her around the apartment, finally shooting her several times in the head with a nail gun. The scene closes after she bleeds profusely, finally lying on the bed to die with the sound track again playing the erotic Pretty Baby.

Effects of Viewing Slasher Films. Linz, Donnerstein, and Penrod (1984; see also Linz, 1985; Linz, Donnerstein, & Adams, 1989) examined the effects of viewing such films. Male college-student participants were initially screened to exclude those who had prior hostile tendencies or psychological problems. The remaining men in the experimental group were shown one standard Hollywood R-rated film per day over one week. All of the films were very violent and showed multiple instances of women being killed in slow, lingering, painful deaths in situations associated with much erotic content (e.g., the Toolbox Murders scene described earlier). Each day the participants filled out some questionnaires evaluating that film and also completed some personality measures.

These ratings showed that the men became less depressed, less annoyed, and less anxious in response to the films during the week. The films themselves were gradually rated over time as more enjoyable, more humorous, more socially meaningful, less violent and offensive, and less degrading to women. Over the week’s time, the violent episodes in general and rape episodes in particular were rated as less frequent. A similar study by Krafka, Linz, Donnerstein, and Penrod (1997) tested women and did not find the same effects on perception. Although these data provide clear evidence of desensitization in men, there is still the question of generalization from the films to other situations.

To answer this question, the same people participated in what they thought was an unrelated later study (Linz, et al, 1984; Krafka, et al., 1997; Weisz & Earls, 1995). For these experiments, they observed a mock rape trial at the law school and evaluated it. Compared to control groups seeing nonsexual violent or sexually explicit nonviolent films, both men and women who had seen the sexually violent films (regardless of whether a man or a women was the rape victim) rated the female rape victim in the trial as less physically and emotionally injured. These results are consistent with those of Zillmann and Bryant (1984), who found that massive exposure to sexually explicit media by jurors resulted in shorter recommended prison sentences for a rapist. Such findings show that the world we construct in response to seeing such movies not only can be at variance with reality but

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also can have dire consequences when actions are taken believing that such a world is reality.

Conclusions. Not surprisingly, this study and others by the authors along the same line (see Donnerstein et al., 1987, for a review) have caused considerable concern in the public. They have also caused considerable scientific concern. Some of the major effects have not been replicated in later work (Linz & Donnerstein, 1988), and there have been some methodological (Weaver, 1991) and content (Sapolsky & Molitor, 1996) criticisms.

The sharp distinction that Donnerstein and Linz made between the effects of violent and nonviolent pornography has been called into question (Weaver, 1991; Zillmann & Bryant, 1988c). Research findings have been somewhat inconsistent in each area; Zillmann and Bryant argued that Linz and Donnerstein were too quick to cite failures to reject the null hypothesis as support for the harmlessness of nonviolent pornography. Check and Guloien (1989) found that men exposed to a steady diet of rape-myth sexual violence reported a higher likelihood of committing rape themselves, compared to a no-exposure control group, but the same result was found for

a group exposed to nonviolent pornography. There is considerable controversy, both scientific and political (see Box 10.5), about the use and interpretation of data from particular studies. See Pollard (1995) for a review of pornography and sexual aggression.

BOX 10.5