HauntedHovel t1_jdqfifo wrote
One of the big uses of fiction is to provide a safe space for people to explore their fears, and a lot of women are scared of gendered violence - these books are far more popular with women. Popular fiction with this theme usually provides a situation where that fear is provoked in the reader but somehow overcome or resolved in the story, which is comforting, even when the reader knows it’s unrealistic.
A lot of fiction is built around this. We don’t expect men to want to be beaten up just because they play combat games or action flicks, they watch them partly because they wonder if they could face that situation. People watch supernatural horror because they remember being afraid of the dark, not because they want to be killed by a monster.
Of course there is some writing aiming for sadistic titillation or to express misogyny but the target audience for that usually isn’t into reading fiction, it requires empathy.
amplifylight t1_jds2j2u wrote
Yep. And it’s worth noting that all the novels listed by OP are written by women.
If this theme seems more prominent today than previously then perhaps it’s because the novels that get attention today are more likely to be written by women than those that were written in (say) the 1950s. But this has long been a notable theme in literature. I believe it’s fair to say that all three Brontë sisters wrote about domestic violence.
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