Aspects of rape culture | Dogville: We were to meet in freedom

'I've chosen, Grace. I've chosen you...Tonight we free ourselves of Dogville!'ⁱ he says, as he begins to thrust his body on top of her. Grace (Nicole Kidman) seems motherly, comforting, but quietly undeterred in her position; she speaks quietly, but her words are sonorous when she womansplains[sic]ⁱⁱ that '[…]it would be so beautiful, but, from the point of view of our love, so completely wrong'. Being consent-illiterate, and having ignored her non-verbal cues thus far (she doesn't kiss back, does not react to his touch), he is now forced to see what she is saying. It cannot be ignored:

'We were to meet in freedom', she concludes. And he, reluctantly, stops.

So, hey, freedom is somewhere and is not there. It is a place where people meet, and somewhere her in particular and Tom 'were to meet'. Lovers do not meet in unfree places: rapists and victims do. Not only does she theorise freedom as a place that is not there, and that is un-Dogville-like, but she also suggests an incompatibility of being able to give consent within unequal power dynamics—within places that anatomise 'intimidation, force, and predetermined gender roles—the tools of rape'ⁱⁱⁱ as 'established by societal norms before rape happens^iv'.
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iiAlluding to, and playfully reversing, the term 'mansplaining' coined by Anna Robinson to describe what San Francisco author Rebecca Solnit was describing in a blog post titled "Men Explain Things to Me." http://www.nationinstitute.org/blog/nationbooks/3059/the_art_of_mansplaining.

iiiFeldman, The Subject of Rape, p. 18.

ivIbid.