“You can’t throw the word rape around”
Quentin Tarentino explained what rape is and what it isn’t.
That Tarantino’s apologia is disingenuous in the era of #MeToo could come as a surprise if you’re unfamiliar with the director’s love of depicting women having the shit kicked out of them on camera or if you’re unfamiliar with interviews he’s done in the past. Like, for example, this 2003 Howard Stern interview submitted to us by a reader in which he adamantly defends Roman Polanski’s sexual assault of a 13-year-old in 1977.
Asked by Stern why Hollywood embraces “this mad man, this director who raped a 13-year-old,” Tarantino replied:
“He didn’t rape a 13-year-old. It was statutory rape…he had sex with a minor. That’s not rape. To me, when you use the word rape, you’re talking about violent, throwing them down—it’s like one of the most violent crimes in the world. You can’t throw the word rape around. It’s like throwing the word ‘racist’ around. It doesn’t apply to everything people use it for.”
Fair point, very fair point. Polanski didn’t rape the 13-year-old, he simply took advantage of the fact that she was very young and her parents weren’t in the room with them.
Reminded by Robin Quivers that Polanski’s victim—who had been plied with quaaludes and alcohol before her assault—did not want to have sex with Polanski, Tarantino became riled up.
Tarantino: No, that was not the case AT ALL. She wanted to have it and dated the guy and—
Quivers: She was 13!
Tarantino: And by the way, we’re talking about America’s morals, not talking about the morals in Europe and everything.
Stern: Wait a minute. If you have sex with a 13-year-old girl and you’re a grown man, you know that that’s wrong.
Quivers: …giving her booze and pills…
Tarantino: Look, she was down with this.
Yeah. She was a 13-year-old hoor and Polanski did nothing wrong!
Perhaps Tarantino needs to look up the legal definition of rape. He doesn’t get to define rape; that has been done. It is a legal term referring to a crime, and having consensual sex with someone too young to consent, too drunk to consent, or incapacitated, is rape. Even if they claim they want to have sex.
I am so f***ing sick of these “legitimate rape” guys. Very convenient for them, but horribly inconvenient for women (or girls) who don’t want to have sex with someone but get taken advantage of while drunk, incapacitated, asleep, or young.
Even without the pills, even without the booze, what Polanski did would be considered rape by any legal definition of the word. Rape. There. I “threw it around”.
Tarentino has it backwards. I can call a lot things rape that he does not. I’d also agree that most anyone who think they have been raped have probably been raped. Period. Conversely, somebody could do things to me and I would not call them rape, and yet others would. So if those same things were done to another person and they called it rape than its rape regardless of what I think. It really does matter on perspective and a lot of other factors.
Same thing goes with racism. If someone thinks a statement is racist, then that statement is racist, at least to them. People can throw the word racism around because it could have meaning to those people and possibly everyone else.
Tarentino needs to spend some time around some fundamentalist Christians who know that God is real. If he thinks their a little whacko just maybe he might figure out he’s the same way with ‘rape’. He knows what it means to be raped in the same way these people know God.
Some more bits could end on the cutting room floor and who would miss them?
From a HuffPo article regarding the same Howard Stern interview:
Ah, yes. Because Tarantino wouldn’t raise no hoor, so his rage would be justified. But fucking some other dude’s 13-year-old daughter just gets you a high-five from Quentin.
But totally not indicative of a widespread acceptance of rape culture or denial that non-violent sex can also be rape.
/s
Again, hardly surprising when you look at his movies. Even when introducing a truly awesome female character like Jackie Brown he has to “cancel it out” with the deeply problematic way that Bridget Fonda’s character is portrayed in the very same movie. I officially gave up on Tarantino after The Hateful Eight, where the sole female character spends the first half of the movie getting punched in the face while tied up and unable to defend herself. I was hoping the movie was going to end with her taking revenge on her tormentors, but insted it ends with two men sitting on a bed laughing while watching her hang from the ceiling.
I hope I have some notice if I’m ever invited to the same function as Tarantino. I’d need to take some pickpocketing lessons, since apparently he wouldn’t find anything to object about if I take his wallet, watch, and car keys, as long as I don’t do it by force.
Nah, it’s cool if you drug him first. He’ll mutely assent.
Party with him, and take his stuff when he’s too high to resist. Then it will totally not be theft.
By the way, a lot of people have repeated this bullshit about it not being forcible rape (remember Whoopie Goldberg’s “it wasn’t rape rape”?) but the victim says she did say no:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Polanski_sexual_abuse_case
Any sexual act committed on someone without their consent, or under the influence, or under any form of duress, or under age, is rape rape. Whatever the hell it means to be rape that isn’t rape rape. (I know what they think that means, but it is simply an incomprehensible statement, both legally and morally).
If they choose to pretend that they know the law better than lawyers and judges, then I just have to say – Dunning-Kruger
Thank you, Lady Mondegreen. As I recall, the young woman in question resisted Polanski, but the prosecution chose to charge him with statutory rape because they felt they had a better chance of getting a conviction. So it was absolutely “rape rape,” i.e. forcible.
In Tarantino’s defense, perhaps he was just being a complete ignorant moron, spouting off on a topic about which he had no knowledge. “She…dated the guy”? Nobody claims that. Maybe he’s thinking of a different story.
Yeah good point. Maybe he had a TSA while he was talking and lapsed into gibberish. Maybe he was distracted because there was a hole in his pants. Maybe he had a hangover. Maybe he had an undiagnosed brain tumor. Maybe he had amnesia but tried to explain about Polanski anyway. Maybe he’d never even heard of him – after all why would a famous Hollywood auteur know anything about another famous Hollywood auteur? It’s not as if there would have ever been any discussion of him among people Tarentino knew.
Or, more likely, maybe he knew perfectly well what it was about, and identified with Polanski rather than with the 13-year-old girl, and minimized the rape for the same reasons many Hollywood people and movie people in France and Europe more generally did.
Tarantino seems to have his own account of Polanski’s crime, one at odds with the victim’s, the police’s and just about everyone else. Where did it come from? Did Polanski hand it to him in person, or did he simply concoct it in his own mind?
At least, in this case, no one is falling all over themselves to exonerate alcohol.