Self-rape

Tubby transvestite star Divine still manages to provide some fine, ghastly moments, including a Christmas tantrum (she fails to get shoes with cha-cha heels), a hilariously gross trampoline act, and, through the magic of cross-cutting, a self-rape, which must be a movie first.

Read literally, that "as" means that Stephan renders the oft-depicted scene from Ovid as follows: Leda, the raped, has become the metamorphosed Zeus, the rapist, and is therefore caught up in a hopeless knot of self-rape.

It thus follows that if Ryuji and Noboru are two halves of one person, Ryuji's murder is a "self-rape" or self-killing, a "suicide." (It is perhaps in this sense that every murder is a "suicide."

Well, not docile per sai^([sic]), but without a constant urge, or at least an appropriate way for 1million male clones to relieve their tension without resorting to self-rape, er clone-rape... nevermind.

For a start, it feminizes Tarquin by drawing on the conventional gendering of the human soul as female (Donne's 'Batter my heart . . .' offers an obvious but interesting comparison), and implies that his physical assault on Lucrece has both offended against his own body and contaminated, almost violated, his spiritual and 'female' self. Rape has almost been self-rape.

The poem's shocking conclusion (envisioning self-rape) benefits from an analysis of the unconscious that Marta Lamas and Nelly Richard highlight.

If I forced myself to let myself be made love to against my inclination I'd hang myself for a rapist. There is self-rape, isn't there?

This ever-ready willingness not only to be raped but to like it too, is of course the wet-dream ideal of womanhood — that is to say, of all other women but one's own — remarked upon bitterly in Ruth Hersch- berger's Adam's Rib (1948) chap. 3, "Is Rape A Myth?" It represents a fantasy escape by men from the rigorous female chastity demanded by patriarchy. These jokes of female self-rape, by 'mistake,' may be lumped with the endless novelistic tales of adultery written by men in which the woman is always at fault.