Wow, very interesting thread, with plenty of good replies.
Like many others here, I would like to praise hopewrites for the strength and courage to come out with this. I wish you only the best of luck in dealing with your traumatic experience, which can barely begin to understand.
I would also like to say that it is ludicrous to think a person cannot unwillingly be sexually aroused. The body will respond to certain stimuli of the genitals in certain ways, whether the mind was willing to go through with the sexual act or not. The body functions with plenty of involuntary responses like this (I do not know the medical terms, but I am still positive this is the case). Sure, it is possible (I am not sure) that it is slightly harder to get aroused if one is entirely unattracted by the other person, but far from impossible, as the body's response to physical stimuli is clearly largely separate from the mind.
This view seems to be more than a little akin to
the absurd notion that victims of legitimate rape do not get pregnant (which is totally insensitive to raped women, in addition to totally unscientific crap, of course), because both place waaay to much control over bodily functions under the control of the will of the mind.
Like many other phenomena in human life, I guess the concept "rape", while intuitive, is hard to define. It is rather unsatisfactory to tie it to penetration, really. Saying it is "forced sex" is essentially correct, I guess, but one must remember that there are other ways than physical ones to force someone, making the word "force" is vague of and by itself. The law is pretty bound to make fairly strict definitions of criminal acts, which to be fair it must do, but which may also lead to splitting hairs at some points.
When we look beyond the technical, I think the core aspect is the complete and total violation of another person's privacy and integrity, often done to assert the power of the perpetrator over the victim. Metaphorical uses of the word "rape" also seem to focus mostly on this aspect, in my experience. I believe the essence of this is hard to capture in a legal document, however, leading to more technical definitions, but I still think this is the core, and frankly, short of murder, that is just about the worst thing one person could do to another.
Regarding the subject of the thread, how rape is portrayed in fiction, I have to wonder if part of the problem isn't a lack of understanding of it? I mean, normal people will obviously realize that it is a downright extremely awful, horrible and traumatic experience that leaves the victim severely psychologically harmed. Normal compassion will tell that much.
Still, those are really just generalities, with no real nuances and deeper understanding of the trauma. Understanding that a certain experience is emotionally horrific is not really to understand it. Certainly not on a level where you can portray it realistically. To do that, you would need to do plenty of research on real rape cases, I think, sparing little effort in delving into the psychology of the victims.
Just to clarify my point about a traumatic experience. I lost my father a little over a decade ago (and for the record, I do not compare that to rape, just let me get to my point), and the real experience was not the way I would have imagined it before it happened. Just as bad, definitely, but still very different than my earlier imagined, abstract and hypothetical version of the sadness of losing a parent, which was very one-dimensional, compared to the real thing.
I think being a victim of rape is both significantly more severe and complex psychologically than losing a parent, so I would imagine it would be even harder to truly understand beyond the generalities, unless you have personal experience.
What I think is that if an author decides to include rape just for drama, chances are they do little or no research on the psychology of it, and go by this one-dimensional understanding of the psychological effects of rape, and that may not be very accurate or plausible enough for a novel.
That is just my theory, though. hopewrites might be able to better tell us how similar the imagined version of being raped (from someone who has not experienced it) to the real one, if they wish, I guess.
