Abstract
Under the title and Scarlett: Rough Sex or Rape? Feminists Give a Damn, Tom Kuntz revisits a debate between Christina Hoff Sommers and Marilyn Friedman over the filmic representation of rape in Gone With the Wind.' Sommers controversially stated in the Chronicle of Higher Education, referring to Gone With the Wind, that many women continue to enjoy the sight of Rhett Butler carrying Scarlett O'Hara up the stairs in a fate undreamt of in feminist philosophy.2 Friedman countered Sommers by pointing out the tension between the reality of rape as experienced by female victims and romanticized representations that make watching a rape acceptable as entertainment.3 What is at stake for Friedman and Sommers in Gone With the Wind is how the representation of rape encodes a cultural discourse on rape, and how the relationship between represented rape and real rape is negotiated by the female spectator. Though opposed in how they construe women and representation, these arguments hinge on an acceptance of heterosexual rape as a poetic theme as common to literature and art as war.4 This paper addresses
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