In a recent posting, Classical Mythology Too Triggering for Columbia Students, Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown focuses of the most recent—or one of the most recent—follies de jour in America’s academia, rage among four students at Columbia who discovered that Ovid’s Metamorphoses contain a whole lotta rape. According to the complaint, one student “said her professor focused on the beauty of the language and the splendor of the imagery when lecturing on the text [dealing with the abductions of Persephone and Daphne]. As a result, the student completely disengaged from the class discussion as a means of self-preservation. She did not feel safe in the class. When she approached her professor after class, the student said she was essentially dismissed, and her concerns were ignored.”
Well, yet another account of the 21st Century’s version of the vapors is reasonable grounds for yet another chuckle at the expense of kids these days,1 and also to wonder why anyone of such a contemporary disposition would choose to study someone as seriously dead, white, and male—not to mention rampantly and rancidly sexist—as Ovid. Yet one can also remark, the Metamorphoses do contain, well, a whole lotta rape. For several millennia, it seems, reading about rape was quite the thing.
And looking at it too, of course. Anyone who has spent much time looking at “classic” art has seen a whole lotta rape—the rape of the Sabine women, Tarquin’s rape of Lucretia2, Zeus descending on Leda as a swan, on Danaë as a “golden shower”3, Zeus bearing away Europa in the guise of a bull. Zeus was a busy man, no doubt.
“Christian” art had a few rapes—though, not too surprisingly, it was often the woman who was the aggressor, as in the case of Potiphar’s wife, who tried to seduce Joseph, and Salome, who had John the Baptist beheaded (symbolic castration). Christian sex usually had a heavy dose of sadism and masochism—the martyrdom thing. You got off, sure, but you paid the price.
Well, what about rape today? I guess you could say that we have the feminization of rape in such triumphs of popular culture as Fifty Shades of Grey, in which we learn that it’s okay for a man to do “horrible” things to a woman as long as he’s a handsome young billionaire.4Fifty is effectively a spinoff of the Twilight series, which is about suspended rape, or perhaps “rape by anticipation”. Can the noble vampire hero restrain himself, or will he ravish his beloved? I guess we’re still looking for cheap thrills. We just have to redesign the package now and again.
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William Butler Yeats was familiar with the problem:
On hearing that the Students of Our New University have joined the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the Agitation against Immoral Literature
WHERE, where but here have Pride and Truth,
That long to give themselves for wage,
To shake their wicked sides at youth
Restraining reckless middle-age. ↩︎ -
Tarquinius Superbus, “Tarquin the Proud,” the legendary last king of Rome. ↩︎
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Not the modern thing. Zeus didn’t swing that way. The man was a god, for Christ’s sake. ↩︎
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The film version’s “iconic” shot of duct-taped Dakota Johnson groaning in agony/ecstasy (shown above) makes clear allusion to the crucifixion. ↩︎
