Patrick's post was very intreresting, even though he has deleted it now. The question is, however, when is a rape a rape? People are going to disagree about that, because we have different standards. Maybe you know that rapes on a horrific scale are being committed in some war-ravaged parts of Africa. I heard an interview with a soldier from such a part of Africa, and he said that there are two kinds of rape: the "good" kind, where the soldier rapes the woman because he needs sexual gratification (so that he rapes her for his own pleasure); and the "bad" kind of rape, where the soldier rapes the woman in order to hurt or deman her, so that he rapes her to cause her pain. Well, I think most people in the west wouldn't consider it a "good" kind of rape if the man rapes the woman just because he needs sex right then. But what is rape, then, to most people in the west?
Frankly I think people in the west don't generally agree about what exactly rape really is, but we probably agree that if the two people sharing a sex act are consenting adults, then it is probably not rape. But things get more complicated when we consider that one of the persons having sex may not be able to make a good, well-considered choice, and if the other person knows and takes advantage of this fact, then it may be rape after all. I seem to remember a case in Sweden where a psychologist lost his right to practice psychology as a profession, because he had taken advantage of female patients. The women were vulnerable and turned to the psychologist to find help and healing, and when they became attracted to him he encouraged them to have sex with him. The court didn't consider it rape, but it did say it was malpractice, and the psychologist lost his licence to practice his profession.
What about Clark's behaviour on the island where he has taken Lois? First, I don't think we can really use the legislation of today to judge Clark, because his crime (his kidnapping of Lois) was a reaction to a futuristic sci-fi crime, Deter's complete and utter manipulation of Lois's mind and free will. You can't judge Clark without considering his acts as a reaction to Deter's crime, but the legislation of today wouldn't know how to properly deal with such a futuristic sci-fi mind control.
It is of course possible that Deter was able to take control of Lois's mind because she is a woman who loves nothing better than to be manipulated by a powerful man. If so, then Deter's determination to hypnotize and control her may in itself be enough to make her love him and prefer him over Clark. After all, Clark has always allowed her to make her own choices, but she may prefer to have her choices taken away from her by a strong man.
Of course, that is not how I want to see Lois.
The alternative, if Lois really and truly loves Clark, and Deter has managed to control her so completely that she has totally rejected her love for her fiance and transferred it to Deter against Lois's natural will, suggests to me that Deter's ability to control and subjugate other people is quite horribly effective. Please note that in spite of her total rejection of Clark and her insistence that she loves only Deter, Lois is quite well-functioning in other ways. She is determined, smart and unconcerned by her amnesia, since she completely trusts "Max" to cure it. She accepts that she has been engaged to Clark, but she is utterly uninterested in why she wanted to share her life with him. She is thinking and planning like she normally does. In fact she is very much her normal self, except that she has been completely robbed of her natural love for Clark, and she has been forced to love Deter instead.
As I said, there are only two possible explanations for Lois's behaviour. Either she is a very weak woman who doesn't love Clark for himself, but only loves his super strength and his ability to control her if he wants to. But since he doesn't want to force her to do things against her will, she loves a man who does take away her ability to make her own choices.
The other possibility is that Deter has found a way to control people that is so effective that he might be able to take over Metropolis and possibly the world. There have been stories where Clark suffered from amnesia. Suppose that Clark lost his memory and his powers at the same time, and suppose he was brought to Deter for treatment. And suppose that Deter told him that "he loves only Max". I don't mean this in an erotic sense, but what if Deter was planting the suggestion that Clark loved nothing better than carrying out Deter's will? What if Superman became Deter's slave, insisting on always obeying his master's voice?
You may object that Clark would never be enslaved like that, because unlike Lois he can't be manipulated. And that is possible. But if so, that means that Lois can be manipulated and made to do things that she would normally rebel against. But if she isn't this wishy-washy kind of person, then Deter's manipulation must be super-strong.
I think that Clark didn't rape Lois on that island not only because Lois was a consenting adult, but because her body was the part of her that was really and truly "in its right mind", and her body desperately wanted to make love to Clark. I think her body "remembered" Clark, too. Her body knew that it loved him and her body knew that it had been engaged to him because it loved him. Her body was in its right mind. We can argue that Clark should have resisted her seduction of him, because he should have suspected that her mind "was not in its right mind". Well, he wasn't able to do that. He reacted to the honesty of her body and to his own intense longing. And he chose to believe, rather naïvely, that Lois had become herself again. That was stupid of him, but he didn't rape Lois. At least not in my book, the way I define rape.
Ann
