Book discussion: Outlander

Sent by Anonymous :

What are you thoughts on the famous "spanking scene" in Outlander? Or, did you get to that part of the book yet?

They’re… not very positive, to be honest.

As in: in itself, punishing Claire for leaving the forest is legitimate. She’s technically a prisonner who tried to escape and whose rashness ended up putting her and her travelling companions in danger.

The problem is that Jaimie doesn’t punish her for that. He beats her up “withing an inch of [her] life” because she disobeyed his orders as her husband, and that’s a very different thing. Being someone’s wife is not the same as being their prisonner, it shouldn’t mean the same thing–especially not for a character who a) claims to respect is wife and b) is supposedly the desirable option in this book.

Another thing that bothers me a lot is that Jaimie takes (sexual) pleasure out of beating Claire up without her consent. Had they be involved in a consensual BDSM relationship with clearly defined rule, eh, whatever floats people’s boats.
This is absolutely not what happened there. Jaimie basically physically assaulted Claire, and took sexual pleasure from it. This is not normal–this is not right.
And the fact that everyone, including Claire ends up saying he was right to do it, and that Claire deserved the trashing smacks of victim-blaming to me–victim blaming validated by the narrative, since pretty much nothing comes to challenge it.

And of course, there’s part where he later goes ‘you’re lucky I didn’t rape you aftward even though I wanted to’, because that’s always so lovely–having to thank your husband for treating you like… Well, I was going to say like a person, but I don’t think people who beat their partners bloody for disobeying consider said partners like persons.

 

Interestingly, Claire points out the bullshit in that last argument, and tells Jaimie that, if he’d raped her, he wouldn’t have been any better than Captain Randall–who tried to rape her pages earlier, and was explicitely stated as taking sexual pleasure from his victims’ struggle–but that thought is never followed to its logical conclusion: aka, that Jaimie is no better than Captain Randall.

Like, seriously, he does the exact same thing as Randall did: hurt Claire and take sexual pleasure from it.
And yes, he stops before he actually gets to the raping part, but considering he already half-forced her into doing anal by this point + the attempted rape a couple of pages later + another instance of him continuing to perform sexual acts on Claire even after she’s explicitely asked him to stop, I’m not inclined to take that as a mark of good character.

 

Basically, I don’t get why I’m supposed to approve of Jaimie Fraser when the book has been trying its damnedest to demonize Randall for doing the exact same thing–the main difference, really, is that one is married to Claire while the other isn’t, and the end message I get from that is that it’s okay to rape and hirt a woman if she’s your property wife.

Which, again, is a level of bullshit I can’t even begin to unpack.

 

(That being said, considering this happens roughly halfway through the book and Claire has already been physically assaulted at least five times prior to this point–four of which were sexual–and there are two more cases of Jaimie assaulting her only pages after the spanking, I’m mostly surprised I haven’t seen more about Outlander being a rape book before I actually discovered the term on Goodreads.)

Posted on : Tue 2 Jun
with : 1 note

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