Promiscuity After Rape

"She could be on the game. You've seen it happen. She believes she's dirty, worthless. She's copped a lot so...might as well make a dollar out of it."

— Rape Squad detective, Phoenix, "Fond Memories"

A promiscuous character is revealed to have Rape as Backstory. In fiction, being raped or manipulated into sex often causes a previously-sexually-innocent or moderate character to become very promiscuous. In reality, survivors of sexual abuse cope in a multitude of ways. While sexual promiscuity is not uncommon in sexual abuse survivors, it is not universal, nor does promiscuous behavior automatically mean the person was abused in the past.

The common psychological theory on why some (and, it is important to remember, some) victims of sexual assault engage in this kind of behavior is that it is based in an often subconscious urge to recreate the scenario that resulted in their trauma, but under circumstances where they can retrain control over the situation. This is believed to be an attempt to compensate for the loss of control that they experienced in the original situation.

Movies and television shows commonly rely on Rape As Back Story as a method of deepening Character Development, particularly for female characters, implying a straight line between rape and promiscuity with no room for deviation. In these works, being forcibly exposed to sex is equivalent to being injected with heroin: an addiction is the likeliest outcome. This may stem from a variety of reasons, ranging from the abused desiring to lose themselves in the pleasurable sensations of sexual intercourse, to an internalized Madonna-Whore Complex causing them to consider themselves Defiled Forever, to the idea that "If Sex Is Evil, Then Let Me Be Evil!"

Victims of this trope do not make the connection between what happened to them and their present-day behavior. They may find themselves interacting with others as though sex will automatically lead to love, comfort, or acceptance or that abuse in a relationship is acceptable or a sign of love. Sociologically, inappropriately sexual behavior in children is usually a sign that they've been sexually abused, making the Fille Fatale particularly prone to this characterization, which may also be applied to characters who were very innocent or naive but not actually children when they were raped.

May overlap with Rape and Switch, where being raped causes a character to "become" gay. May be revealed via Troubled Backstory Flashback.

Related to Defiled Forever, Madonna-Whore Complex, My Girl Is Not a Slut, and Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. Contrast Got Over Rape Instantly, Hates Being Touched, and Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality for inverted reactions to rape.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Downplayed with Ash from Banana Fish. He's been deeply hurt by being raped and forced into prostitution at a young age, and early on he learned how to use his looks to charm older men. In the present day, he does use seduction to get information from people and will occasionally resort to sex, but only when the situation requires it and it's clear that he doesn't actually enjoy having sex with older men.
• In the second season of Black Butler, this fits in with the course of Alois'/Jim's whole life. After his little brother and entire village are killed, this already slightly-off boy (who laughed cheerfully as he robbed the dead) begins living as a true street rat in the city. Understanding the inherent risks for homeless youth, and seeing his reactions to things later on, it's sadly unsurprising to discover that he engages in solicitation for food or shelter before his age even hits double digits. He's then only around 11 when he goes to Earl Trancy's manor and ends up living with a bunch of boys in the same dire straits, being bathed and treated like cattle, all while being a Sex Slave to the old man. At the age of 11. It's clear even at that young age he is not a virgin, as he dolls up and puts on a beautiful red robe, seducing the old man with obvious expertise until the guy's kissing his feet. Then he manages to kill the Earl and his behavior from then on out is disturbingly sexual.
• Tamura from Bokura no Hentai was abused as a child by an older neighbor. He repressed the memories until he lost his virginity. Tamura ends up becoming promiscuous, often trying to have sex with adult men and other male-assigned-at-birth members of the cast (including trans girl Marika). Even as an adult, he engages in strings of one-night stands and flings despite finding them unfulfilling. The abuse also spured him into being a Crossdresser, as his neighbor would dress him up like a girl.
• Cheat Magician Life That Started From Being Judged Useless has several examples, but the first introduced to the audience is Adventurer's guild capital branch master Reese, a 250-year-old dark elf who was captured after a ship-wreck, enslaved, sold to a brothel, and forced into prostitution to serve a long, long line of depraved and lustful men, denied the option of saying "no," even being healed up again with magic when the Johns went too far so she could keep going. Eventually, she figured out how to use Sex Magic to escape, becoming a leading figure in Slave Liberation, but now, centuries after the event, she's sexually predatory.
• In Gravitation, Yuki revealed he was raped when he was younger, leading to his preference for multiple partners (male and female), as well as triggering his depression.
• In Kaze to Ki no Uta, Gilbert throws himself at pretty much any man and uses sex as a tool of manipulation after a childhood full of sexual abuse. It's shown that he has sex in an attempt to make an emotional connection with his sexual partner, despite not enjoying the act itself.
• Knights: Euphemia was accidentally doused in aphrodisiacs when her mother was apprehended for witchcraft, and was raped by the guards while in prison. After being rescued by Mist, she uses her body as a weapon by dousing herself in aphrodisiacs and having sex with enemy soldiers until they pass out from exhaustion.
• Log Horizon, major villain Nureha is explained to have a background as a "compensated dater", which she was forced to do as a means of survival. When she meets the protagonist, Shiroe, in the game Elder Tale, she finds him to be an intellectual equal and one of the few men she's had pleasant interaction with. She thus develops an extreme infatuation with him, to the point that her Evil Plan's primary goal is to get him into her bed and will destroy everything and everyone else he loves until she's the only option left. She also implies that she's been very promiscuous in the meantime, largely as a means of practicing "techniques" that will bring Shiroe the most pleasure once he gives in to her.
• MW: 9-year-old Yuki was raped by 16-year-old Garai, and grew up to be a Depraved Bisexual Serial Killer who uses sex to manipulate and trap both men and women.
• Twittering Birds Never Fly: Yakuza boss Yashiro was raped by his stepfather when he was young, leading to promiscuity (as early as middle school) and the development of his sado-masochistic sexual preferences.

Comic Books

• Addressed in The Boys. Starlight was initially a pure and innocent superhero, but her PR team decided to spice up her backstory by saying she was raped and that the trauma made her a sex addict with a penchant for outfits that cover absolutely nothing. Deconstructed when Starlight reveals that she is in fact a rape survivor and that the experience didn't make her horny at all.
  • It should be noted that Starlight was sexually coerced in her first appearance and eventually became sexually active, but the story doesn't make any connection between the two events and her sexual side seems reserved solely for Hughie.

Fan Works

• The Jem fic Once Upon a Time was a Backbeat explains Minx's promiscuity as being related to her prostitute mother pimping her after she hit puberty.
• UNDERTOW: Downplayed. Minx was sexually abused as a child. Her flirtatiousness stems as a way of gaining control over the trauma. However, Minx isn't as promiscuous as she seems. She never sleeps with the men she flirts with, but always loses interest before it gets to that point (which also stems from her trauma).
• A horrifying Gender-Inverted example happens in The Dark Trio. Harry is already a KidAnova by the time he enters Hogwarts, able to attract girls older than him with minimal effort. Unfortunately, this is revealed to be the result of Harry being raped by his adoptive sister (who's seven years older than him) in the past.
• The Stargate SG-1 fic "None So Blind" reveals that Vala was essentially raped shortly after she became Qetesh's host, as Qetesh and Ba'al were lovers for a time and obviously Vala had no say in the matter, the matter even worse as Vala was a virgin before being taken as a host and Qetesh liked it rough. When she first shares this detail with her current lover Cameron Mitchell, he wonders if her current sexual attitude is her way of taking control after what happened to her.
• With Pearl and Ruby Glowing:
  • Gary Oak, depicted as a ten-year-old Dirty Kid who's unusually flirtatious with older women, was repeatedly molested by his parents (though he seems to believe it's actually monsters creeping on him).
  • Rudi being gang-raped by older boys due to being Mistaken for Gay leads to him having sex with several girls to make it clear that he's straight so it doesn't happen again.

Film — Live Action

• In Black Snake Moan, the protagonist is an attractive young woman (portrayed by Christina Ricci), who was sexually abused by her stepfather and became a hypersexual, feeling an overwhelming urge to just have something put inside her body, no matter where or how. The focus of the plot is her kind-napping by Samuel L. Jackson's character and how he tries to cure her by making her go cold turkey.
• In the movie For Colored Girls, the majority of Tangie's scenes have her bringing someone home or escorting them out the door. When her mother shows up to blast her for sending her younger sister to an illegal abortionist, in the ensuing confrontation, it's revealed that she was molested by her grandfather, who had also molested her mother.
• The Book of Revelation: Daniel starts picking up a lot of women after he was raped. In his case however this isn't a psychological effect solely but an attempt to locate his female rapists, as two had a birthmark and a tattoo Daniel saw, though he doesn't always have sex with them so long as he's able to check their bodies somehow.
• Jenny Curran from Forrest Gump, who is heavily implied to have been sexually abused by her father, grows up to become very promiscuous and has sex with a long series of men.
• The General's Daughter, Captain Elizabeth Campbell became a sexual deviant after enduring a horrific gang rape, years before, during her training at West Point. However, this is revealed to be a subversion: she wanted to get revenge on her father the General, who helped cover up the rape, by seducing most of his staff to embarrass him. The main character concludes that this was the real cause of her Sanity Slippage, not the rape itself.
• It Follows: The film's monster is a metaphor for sexually-transmitted disease, and the manner in which Jay is cursed and targeted by it — having sex with a man who didn't tell her about it until after he'd transmitted the curse to her — is likewise metaphorical of various forms of Questionable Consent. While it's never explicitly shown, it's strongly implied that Jay is regularly having sex with random men in order to dump the curse on them and buy herself some more time before it comes back down the chain to her.
• While it's not made initially clear, besides that she has a lot of issues, we find out later that this is the case with Candace (otherwise called "Candy"), a prostitute, in Madea Goes to Jail, as, besides being molested as a child, she was raped by Josh's friends at a party.
• In the film Mysterious Skin, Neil is the eight-year-old son of a single mother and is just beginning to explore his homosexual orientation. His mother wants him to have a positive male role model, so she signs him up for Little League. There he and another boy are sexually molested by the coach, forced to perform sex acts on the coach and each other. With no platonic male role models to compare the behavior to, Neil views the abuse as love and develops a preference for bearish, middle-aged men. Around age 15, Neil begins prostituting, willing to sleep with anyone. This lasts for three years until he is solicited by a man dying of AIDS who simply wants the touch of another person (which he has been lacking due to the hysteria around AIDS).
• In Scream 3, it is revealed that Maureen Prescott was gang-raped at a party, thus explaining why she frequently cheated on her husband and essentially leading to the events of the series.
• In the film Shame, it is heavily implied that both Brandon and his sister Sissy experienced some type of childhood sexual abuse that triggered their current behavior. Brandon has a profound sexual addiction that leads him to masturbate compulsively, view massive amounts of pornography, frequent prostitutes, and sleep with any woman who is willing (or men if women are unavailable). Sissy has unchecked codependency issues and sleeps with any man who shows her affection. It is lightly hinted that she and Brandon may have acted on their urges with each other at some point.
• Two Women: After Rosetta is gang-raped by a troop of Moroccan soldiers, she starts giving out sexual favors to older men in exchange for stuff like nylons.

Literature

• Mistuko Souma from Battle Royale, according to her backstory, was sold to a child molester by her mother, and, besides being the malicious person that she is, she acts this trope as well, even killing one of her allies because she thought he was rejecting her.
• In the Landish-Winters book Bought, Dahlia seeks out consensual BDSM scenarios as a way of overwriting the traumatic memories of her first, very nonconsensual, experience with sex. This gives her the confidence to eventually try more direct coping methods, like reconnecting with her loved ones and getting into a serious relationship.
  "When I became his Sub, I finally felt like I was in control, knowing I could stop my fantasy any time I wanted. I could safe word him and it would all stop. I had that power."
• In Hawaii by James Michener the leper colony on Molokai is a Wretched Hive of utter depravity because there is no law. As the fullest expression of this depravity, women exiled there whose leprosy has not disfigured them yet are gang-raped for months by the terrifyingly disfigured long-term inhabitants of the leper colony until the women are driven insane and become promiscuous, either out of nihilism or the need to deny that the advance of their leprosy has rendered them undesirable, foreshadowing their deaths.
• Jackie from Jackie Boy is a male rape survivor who becomes increasingly promiscuous with the permission of his lover Kent Willis. His promiscuity is only met with concern when Kent Willis researches "hypersexuality," and starts to speculate if Jackie has been sexually abused. Jackie confirms his suspicions just moments later.
• Pombinha ^note a nickname that translates to "little dove" from O Cortiço is an innocent young woman who had yet to have her first period. She is raped by a courtesan named Léonie during a visit to the latter's house. Years later, Pombinha cheats on her husband and becomes a prostitute after he leaves her. By the end of the book, Léonie and Pombinha are "inseparable friends" working together to drain their clientele's money.
• Sam of The Perks of Being a Wallflower was molested by a family friend when she was young. Later, she exhibits promiscuous behavior as a high school freshman.
• Sharra in Shadow of the Conqueror, due to her belief that she has no prospects in life after being Defiled Forever, tries to secure her future by seducing rich and powerful men. She tries and fails to seduce Daylen, and after that, has more success with the newly affluent Sain.

Live-Action TV

• Following her rape, As the World Turns' Emily seduced the husband of a woman who had befriended her when they met at a rape support group. In a more tragic and sympathetic example of this trope, it's played as her being desperate for love and security after her ordeal, rather than being a tramp.
• Criminal Minds: The unsubs in "The Thirteenth Step" were both allegedly molested by their respective fathers as children. Ray's molestation is more ambiguous (his parents both deny it at gunpoint while admitting to their other abuse of him) and despite being an alcoholic serial killer, he's the more well-adjusted of the two. Syd's very definitively happened (her father implicitly apologizes when confronted), and she's highly promiscuous, to the point that her confrontation involves begging her father to rape her again.
• ER. The womanizing Dr. Simon Brenner confides in a colleague that he was molested by one of his mother's boyfriends.
• A watered-down version on General Hospital, when Karen Wexler recalled being molested by one of her mother's boyfriend. She promptly began going to late night raves wearing trampy dresses, working as a stripper, and eventually sleeping with the club's sleazy owner, someone she would never have even spoken to before.
• Protagonist Don Draper of Mad Men. Back when he was still Dick Whitman, aged 13, he moved with his half-brother and stepmother into a brothel owned by his uncle. It's established that he was sexually naive and the environment was very confusing for him. When Dick falls ill with a high fever, his stepmother, forced him to sleep in the basement, but Aimee, one of the prostitutes, takes pity on him and allows him to sleep in her room as she nurses him back to health by sitting by his bedside and feeding him soup, showing a compassionate maternal side Dick was unused to, as his own stepmother, the only maternal figure he had known up until that point, was regularly cold, and even sometimes outright abusive towards him. When his fever breaks, however, Aimee switches from maternal to predatory. She lies down in the still weakened Dick's bed, and asks him if he "wants to know what the fuss is all about", ridiculing his lack of experience, but Dick explicitly says "no". She teases him about his visible sexual arousal and fondles his genitals despite his request to be left alone. Later on, during an argument with Dick's Uncle Mack, she brags about how she "took that boy's cherry". When Dick's stepmother hears this, she immediately assumes it all be his own fault somehow and violently beats him with a wood spoon and calls him derogatory names. This mixture of sexual stimulus, shame, fear, and violence is implied to be the source of Don's present-day promiscuity.
• Nip/Tuck It's heavily implied that a huge part of the reason for Christian Troy's promiscuity is having been sexually abused by his adoptive father.
• One of the multiple personalities One Life to Live's Viki developed after being sexually abused by her father was the promiscuous Niki, who was explicitly stated to have been created to deal with the sex because she liked it.
• Tig Trager from Sons of Anarchy is so sexually promiscuous and deviant that multiple members of the otherwise super macho motorcycle club have stopped and asked if he was molested as a child. It's asked partially in jest, but comes up whenever Tig's predilection veers into necrophilia, bestiality, and other taboo areas. In Season 6, during a joking trade of insults about families, Tig says that his old man used to rape him. Tig says it as a joke and the others laugh, but in light of how his sexuality is portrayed throughout the series, it leaves the viewer wondering if Tig is taking Refuge in Audacity.
• In True Detective season 1, this is heavily implied to be the case with Marty's daughter Audrey, who is continually hinted to be a victim of sexual abuse as a child, and then becomes a very promiscuous teenager.
• Princess Kwenthrith of Vikings often seems intent on sleeping with any man around, and casually but angrily reveals that her uncle and cousin started taking of advantage of her when she was still a young girl.
• Happens with DC Mickey Webb in The Bill following his rape. He regularly has one-night stands. It's only after he himself is falsely accused of rape that he gets less promiscuous.
• The Crowded Room: Ariana has intimacy issues as a result of being raped. Whenever she's into anyone enough to have sex with them, this makes her withdraw. She has gone from one person to the next quite frequently because of this. It's revealed she's one of Danny's alternate personalities, representing how he deals with emotions (in this case, having his twin brother sacrifice himself, being molested instead of him by their stepfather).

Music

• Murdoc from Gorillaz was sexually assaulted as a child, and as an adult, he has had a lot of sexual partners; one of his most consistent traits is that he's a very sexually driven individual.

Theatre

• Katherine Howard from Six: The Musical embodies this trope after being molested by her music teacher at 13.

Video Games

• In A Dance with Rogues, this can happen to the Princess, the Player Character, after she is raped in the prologue. While it's up to the player whether she develops a Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality, becomes hyper-promiscuous, or anything in between, the game plot is rife with situations where Sex for Services is the most effective option to get through—and other characters will call the Princess out on it if she takes it.
• Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls:
  • Played straight with Kotoko Utsugi. She was regularly whored out to producers by her parents while she was a child, and acts the most sexually provocative of the Warriors of Hope, even going so far as to strap protagonist Komaru Naegi to a machine and molest her.
  • Implied with Monaca Towa. She acts rather sexually inappropriate for her age, eventually planting a Forceful Kiss on Nagisa Shingetsu without his consent. Her big brother Haiji would regularly beat her to the extent that he genuinely thought she was disabled, and more damningly, openly admits to, in his words, "liking them younger. As young as possible." Keep in mind that she was a little girl in the same house as an abusively violent pedophile...
• In Dark Elf Historia, if Fraylia loses any one of the major boss battles, she is raped, and thereafter becomes vulnerable to "H-Attacks" from enemies. Losing her virginity also unlocks new quests that entail prostitution or stripping.
• In Dragon Age II, Isabela was sold to an abusive husband as a teenager, who is implied to have lent her out to his friends for sex. It's only after he died and she ran away to become a pirate that she became a Lovable Sex Maniac.
• In Fallout: New Vegas, after being raped by a male raider, Corporal Betsy developed a habit of aggressively flirting with other women. The player is tasked in a sidequest to get her to quit it and see a psychiatrist due to the behavior being a major distraction in the military base they're stationed in.
• In Looters of Dystopia, if Hatsuki loses the first major boss battle, she is raped, and thereafter she is assigned a number of Honey Trap missions, which leads to her becoming increasingly promiscuous.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, this explains Jeanette's promiscuity. Being an alternate personality of Therese, a victim of rape at the hands of her father, this personality embodies the consequences of the rape to cope up with the trauma that goes worse due to her innate Malkavian madness. On the flipside, Therese develops an aversion towards sex due to the same reasons as well.

Visual Novels

• Fate/stay night: Played disturbingly straight with Matou Sakura. She’s spent the entirety of her life both effectively and literally being raped constantly by the only two other people in her household, and her mind has been deliberately manipulated into a heavily distorted state as a result. While she largely makes an effort to hide it from Shirou (not wanting to disgust him), the moment she runs away from Zouken for Shirou and needs a "Mana Transfer" we see the full extent of just how broken she is. There’s a reason people say Heaven’s Feel is the one time the sex scenes add to the plot.
• Spirit Hunter: Death Mark: Hanahiko was regularly raped by his school principal. In death, most of his female victims are found in states of undress and in sexually provocative positions. Do the math.

Western Animation

• Bojack Horseman:
  • Several lines none-too-subtly imply that Sarah Lynn's promiscuity was at least partially the result of being molested by her bear-man stepfather. She mentions to one of her Horsin' Around co-stars that he homeschools her and that he's a photographer. Later, she remarks that she knows what bear fur tastes like because of her stepfather. This, plus Bojack telling her that she should always be vying for the audience's love and the general negative demands of show business, particularly those it has of women, result in her growing up to be a sex starlet and, eventually, a junkie. She also seems to have an Electra Complex with Bojack himself, her significantly older colleague who played the role of her father on TV and one of her many sex partners. The one time we see her step-father, he's a caricature of fashion photographer and accused rapist Terry Richardson.
  • This is discussed in "That's Too Much, Man!" when Sarah Lynn thinks of how Penny could be coping after BoJack almost slept with her (a situation that, while not legally rape, is treated as Questionable Consent at best due to Penny being only 17 at the time while BoJack was a family friend in his fifties). One of her theories is that Penny is in a chat room with middle-aged men because that's the only way she can feel love. Due to Sarah Lynn's own backstory, the subtext is that Sarah Lynn is likely projecting.
• An episode of Drawn Together has resident slut Foxxy Love uncover a repressed memory of being gang-raped by a Captain Ersatz version of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. After failing to get them behind bars, she instead goes on a Kill Bill-esque rampage to get her revenge on her rapists (and Colonel Sanders). In the end, it turns out to be a subversion. Just before she can kill the Fat Albert analogue, it's revealed that the gang-rape never happened; Wooldoor simply implanted a false memory to help her justify her sluttiness.
• Cheryl from Archer aside from being promiscuous, also has a series of strange fetishes including hardcore BDSM and asphixiophilia, the show's wiki theorizes that it might be related to her having been molested by her grandfather.
• Discussed in Tuca & Bertie. When Bertie was a teenager, she was sexually assaulted by a life guard she trusted. As an adult, she has shown and expressed a high sex desire which includes understandable requests like wanting to be more adventurous with her boyfriend Speckle to the disturbed like masturbating after being sexually harrassed by Pastry Pete. During a therapy session, she expressed fear that her sexual assault shaped her sexual preference. Though, her therapist does try to comfort her that her sex preference could have developed naturally regardless if she was raped or not.
• Hazbin Hotel: Angel Dust suffers abuse under the hands of his boss sexually, physically, emotionally and financially and with his job at times as a sex worker, and he’s introduced as a flirtatious hedonistic spider demon that likes to get high. It’s revealed he likely developed these behaviors as a coping mechanism for the abuse.

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