Abstract
Commercial cinema in Spain, as in the rest of the world, has gone to great lengths to describe visually, without any intention of protest, each and every one of the forms of violence against women: physical, psychological, financial, social and, lastly, sexual. Beyond insinuating and intimidating compliments and gazes, sexual violence is something that is excepted in scripts, even in those of famous directors who create powerful female characters. The aim of this paper is to know how the Spanish directors, of both sexes, represent the topic of sexual violence, paying attention to the masculinity of the characters. To this end, a content analysis was performed on twelve films from a narrative perspective. In a second stage, employing methodological triangulation and a questionnaire as a quantitative tool, university students were asked about how they perceived the scenes of sexual violence in these films. The results show, on one side, that rape is the act of sexual violence more represented and, on the other hand, a lack of awareness about the treatment of rape in Spanish cinema, as well as its rejection by young audiences.
Highlights
Commercial cinema in Spain, as in the rest of the world, has gone to great lengths to describe visually, without any intention of protest, each and every one of the forms of violence against women: physical, psychological, financial, social and, lastly, sexual
One of the aims of this study was to analyze the representation of sexual violence in Spanish cinema in order to determine the types of crimes against sexual freedom and indemnity portrayed in the corpus of films, it was deemed essential to take into consideration the definition of sexual assault, abuse and harassment established in the Spanish Criminal Code(4), according to its last review, to determine whether or not any of these situations were represented(5)
It is remarkable that rape is the most widely represented type of sexual violence and, in addition, that this kind of representation is independent of film genre since 83.2% of these acts appeared in films classified as dramas or comedies, and 16.8% in those belonging to the thriller genre
Summary
Commercial cinema in Spain, as in the rest of the world, has gone to great lengths to describe visually, without any intention of protest, each and every one of the forms of violence against women: physical, psychological, financial, social and, lastly, sexual. The aim of this paper is to know how the Spanish directors, of both sexes, represent the topic of sexual violence, paying attention to the masculinity of the characters To this end, a content analysis was performed on twelve films from a narrative perspective. Sexual relationship models that youngsters have at their disposal are primarily those of the porn industry which, besides being phallocentric and heteronormative, are even degrading and humiliating for the female partner in a relationship (Sun et al.,2016.) In this respect, there is a porn current, i.e. feminist porn, calling for the need for equitable roles as referred by Lust, the porn film director and the authoress of books such as Porn for Women (2010) and Let’s
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