SOURCE: Finke, Laurie, and Martin Shichtman. “The Mont St. Michel Giant: Sexual Violence and Imperialism in the Chronicles of Wace and Laȝamon.” In Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, edited by Anna Roberts, pp. 56-74. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1998.

In the following essay, Finke and Shlichtman contrast the ways Wace and Layamon present rape in their narrations of the Arthurian legend.

We could find no better means to illustrate in popular culture the ways in which sexual violence—especially rape—is generically encoded in our cultural narratives than that incredibly bad “B” science fiction film of 1968, Mars Needs Women. In this film, which Leonard Maltin calls “strangely sincere but extremely silly and distended,” Tommy Kirk plays a Martian sent along with four other Martians to collect five earth women to take back to Mars to repopulate a barren and sterile planet. What is striking about the...