Consent, Rape Culture, and Reproductive Justice in Rachel Smythe’s Lore Olympus

[Content Warning: This post contains discussion of sexual assault.]

On June 23, 2022, the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe vs. Wade, setting in motion a chain of events that have drastically decreased abortion access across the United States. While some countries have recently increased abortion access, the loss of Roe may embolden other global leaders to limit abortion access further. Still, even where governments may legally limit abortion, they often leave cases of rape, incest, and instances where the life of the mother is at risk as potential exceptions to abortion bans.[1] However, the practical obstacles survivors face when seeking healthcare after their assault are often overlooked or ignored. In her Webtoon Lore Olympus, creator Rachel Smythe brings this set of issues to the forefront.

In Smythe’s ongoing, Eisner-winning, Hugo-nominated webcomic Lore Olympus (2017-present), readers “Witness what the gods do...after dark” (ellipses in original) through Smythe’s adaptation of the Hades and Persephone myth. Meant to be read on the Webtoon app (though also available via web browser), Smythe designed Lore Olympus to be scrolled through, and thus, it lacks the traditional page turn, allowing for the use of different techniques than those in traditional print comics. Webtoon has had a significant impact on global webcomics more generally, and as one of the most popular comics on the platform, Lore Olympus forms an outsize portion of that influence. Although Rachel Smythe lives and works in New Zealand, her work—and its engagement with pressing issues like sexual assault—reaches a global audience.[2] As 19-year-old Persephone leaves home, starts college, and (of course) begins to fall in love with Hades, Smythe explores familiar young adult themes like identity, sexuality, and coming-of-age. One of Smythe’s most significant adaptations to the original myth, and the reason I examine the Webtoon in this post, is that Apollo (not Hades!) sexually assaults Persephone. Through this depiction, Smythe uses the fantastic world she creates to explore Persephone’s experience of acquaintance rape and the difficulty she faces in negotiating that event and its aftermath.

Many aspects of Smythe’s treatment of sexual assault and rape culture demand investigation, including the limitations of affirmative consent; the complications of acquaintance rape; and the connections between purity culture and rape culture. However, for the purposes of this blog post, I want to look more closely at one episode in particular: “Episode 83: Proserpina is Late.” (Warning: spoilers ahead!) At this point in the story, Apollo has already sexually assaulted Persephone, but she has not yet recognized what happened to her as rape. Though memories of that night (and Apollo himself) continue to haunt Persephone, she endeavors to ignore what happened and move on with her life, including her blossoming romance with Hades. As the episode opens, she has a nightmare that she’s pregnant and wakes up to realize that her period is late.[3] After some quick concerning period calculations, despite her fantastic powers as the immortal goddess of spring, Persephone decides to do something very ordinary: she goes to the doctor. Smythe then devotes the remainder of the episode to Persephone’s visit to a reproductive clinic for immortals, reminiscent of a Planned Parenthood.

Smythe’s depiction of Persephone’s search for reproductive services reflects the realities of sexual assault survivors. According to the World Health Organization, “Women who have been subjected to violence often seek health care, including for their injuries, even if they do not disclose the associated abuse or violence” (1). However, while survivors of sexual assault may be likely to seek care eventually, “Few adolescent and adult women seek out formal support services in the acute period (7 days or less) following a sexual assault. Instead, many women choose to disclose weeks, months, or even years later” (Lanthier, Du Mont, and Mason 251). Even when seeking care, sexual assault survivors are unlikely to disclose to their health care provider that have been assaulted, particularly when they know their assailant.[4] Though Persephone does go to a doctor, she does not disclose her sexual assault—and indeed, would not be able to do so, since she doesn’t yet classify what happened to her as rape.

Equal parts didacticism and critique, Persephone’s clinic visit functions both as intervention and cultural commentary. On the one hand, the comic may provide an intervention that nudges young readers into seeking medical care after experiencing sexual assault themselves, especially if they resonate with Persephone’s experience of date rape. If nothing else, Persephone does get tested for both pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. On the other hand, Persephone’s “unsettling and invasive experience” (Ep. 83), as she describes it, highlights how the medical system overlooks the needs of sexual assault survivors. The doctor who sees Persephone asks her a series of brusque, impersonal questions that allow no space for disclosure about the assault.[5] Worse, after confirming that Persephone isn’t pregnant, the doctor tells her, “Next time, be more careful! You need to [be] responsible for your own body” (Ep. 83). His attitude towards Persephone points to a larger patriarchal and misogynistic culture more likely to blame women for “carelessness” than their sexual partners, even in cases of consensual sex. Furthermore, the doctor’s neoliberal assertion that Persephone needs to take individual responsibility for something that Apollo did to her without her consent does even more harm.

In the end, Persephone does not need an abortion and gets the reproductive care she needs. Still, the tenor of her experience illuminates not individual problems but systemic issues with reproductive access in Smythe’s imagined world. That narrative move resonates with a cultural shift from emphasis on not just reproductive access, but on reproductive justice.[6] As Loretta Ross of the SisterSong Women of Color Collective argues, only when we expand our focus from abortion to include larger issues of “reproductive oppression—the control and exploitation of women, girls, and individuals through our bodies, sexuality, labor, and reproduction” (4) can we build a holistic, more inclusive movement. Rachel Smythe ties together questions of reproductive oppression with those of sexual assault, rape culture, and consent to demonstrate the importance of reproductive justice not just for sexual assault survivors, but for all people.

NOTES

[1] Of course, even these long held, widely popular exceptions are under attack in the United States, as Mary Ziegler effectively demonstrates in her article, “Why Exceptions for the Life of the Mother Have Disappeared.”

[2] Smythe’s webtoon provides an interesting example of how a text might be considered international: Smythe lives and works in New Zealand; Naver’s Webtoon, a South Korean company, publishes and hosts Lore Olympus; and over 5.9 million subscribers from around the globe avidly wait for the webtoon’s weekly’s episodes. Lore Olympus also reaches beyond English speaking audiences—thus far, the comic has been translated into Korean, Japanese, Indonesian, French, and Spanish.

[3] Before the assault, Persephone was not sexually active—and, indeed, never intended to have sex at all as an impending member of the Goddesses of Eternal Maidenhood (there’s that purity culture I mentioned).

[4] In one study, only “26% of survivors who experienced a stranger sexual assault told their physician, as opposed to only 5% of those who experienced an acquaintance sexual assault” (Lanthier, Du Mont, and Mason 259).

[5] When the doctor asks Persephone if she has a partner, although Smythe includes a panel with a very distressed Persephone, the doctor either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care. When he asks about her mental health history, instead of listening as Persephone begins, “Um, I’m not sure—” (Ep. 83), he instead interrupts her, shoving a urine sample cup in her face.

[6] The term “reproductive justice” was coined by Black Women’s Caucus of the Illinois Pro-Choice Alliance in 1994 (“Reproductive Justice”). By shifting the focus from solely abortion and individual choice to include social justice, a reproductive justice framework aims to fight equally for “(1) the right to have a child; (2) the right not to have a child; and (3) the right to parent the children we have” (Ross 4).

WORKS CITED

Lanthier, Stephanie, Janice Du Mont, and Robin Mason. “Responding to Delayed Disclosure of Sexual Assault in Health Settings: A Systematic Review.” Trauma, Violence, and Abuse, vol. 19, no. 3, 2018, pp. 251-265.

“Reproductive Justice.” In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda, blackrj.org/our-issues/reproductive-justice/. Accessed 28 July 2022.

Ross, Loretta. “What is Reproductive Justice?” Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A Primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change, pp 4-5, www.law.berkeley.edu/php-programs/centers/crrj/zotero/loadfile.php?entity_key=TSHBI8ZQ. Accessed 28 July 2022.

Smythe, Rachel. “Episode 83: Prosperpina is Late,” Lore Olympus, Webtoon, 2 November 2019, www.webtoons.com/en/romance/lore-olympus/episode-83/viewer?title_no=1320&episode_no=87. Accessed 28 July 2022.

Responding to Intimate Partner Violence and Sexual Violence Against Women: WHO Clinical and Policy Guidelines. World Health Organization, 2013, apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/85240/1/9789241548595_eng.pdf?ua¼1. Accessed 28 July 2022.

Ziegler, Mary. “Why Exceptions for the Life of the Mother Have Disappeared,” The Atlantic, 25 July 2022, www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/07/abortion-ban-life-of-the-mother-exception/670582/. Accessed 28 July 2022.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Corinne Matthews is a Ph.D. Candidate of English at the University of Florida specializing in children’s and young adult literature. In her dissertation, she explores the intersections of consent, agency, gender, sexuality, and genre. More of her work can be found in The Lion and the Unicorn, the South Central Review, and is forthcoming in the Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth. She also co-hosts the pop culture podcast, Sex. Love. Literature., which takes a semi-scholarly look at why the sex stuff in media matters. When not dissertating, she likes to do yoga and make friends with the neighborhood cats, which she may or may not post about on her secret TikTok account.

You can find Corinne on her website CorinneMatthews.com or on Twitter at @corinne_kathryn.