"She's Asking For It" - Girlhood Unscripted

A woman’s harrowing experience reveals the unsettling normalisation of sexual violence, exposing how cinema and society disguise abuse as romance, while directly calling out the audience’s complicity in perpetuating rape culture.

She’s Asking For It opens with a question borrowed from Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: “What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence?” (2018: p.4) This question mirrored the conversations I’d been having with the women in my life – stories of encounters they never named as rape or assault, because somewhere along the way we were taught to fold these experiences into the fabric of girlhood and womanhood. The too-long stare. The grabbed wrist at a party. The boyfriend who didn’t listen when you said no. This quiet acceptance, the sense of “this is just how it is”, became the main reason for my film. It was born out of that anger, but also out of asking: how did we get here? How is it that we keep looking away? And the answer kept circling back to the media – cinema, television, advertising – to a culture that takes sexual violence and disguises it as romance, desire, even entertainment. We’ve been sold the coercive kiss as passion, the persistent “no” that turns into a “yes,” the sexual assault that gets referred to as a love scene. These are the narratives we consume and internalise. They shape what we expect, what we tolerate, what we name – or more often, what we don’t name.

With this film, I wanted to hold up a mirror, not just to the culture out there, but to the audience watching inside the cinema. By blending documentary and fiction, I aimed to disturb the line between what feels real and what feels constructed, to force a kind of reckoning with the images we’ve been conditioned to accept. The title itself, She’s Asking For It, is a provocation, a phrase as toxic as it is familiar, that lives in the mouths of abusers and bystanders, in headlines and courtrooms, on social media. What I wanted was to create a space of tension, where the audience is forced to sit with their own complicity, to confront something so deeply ingrained they may not even realise they’ve played a part.

But this film is foremost for survivors, for those silenced, shamed, made to believe their pain was their fault. The culture of victim-blaming is insidious – from the way society thinks about consent to the way women who speak out are treated. We’ve been taught to carry this burden of responsibility, to question our own reactions, and to doubt whether what happened even counts as assault. We’re told, directly or indirectly, that we invited it in some way, that we weren’t “innocent” enough, and this kind of thinking is the fault of the system that normalises abuse and teaches that silence is safer than speaking out. She’s Asking For It tries to unravel this reality to help survivors see that the guilt they carry was planted there by a culture that trained them to minimise and normalise their own pain.

Making this film was as intimate and fraught as the subject matter. My lead actress and contributor, Karolina, is someone who has lived through sexual violence, but from the beginning, she was adamant that this film would never just be about her. She wanted to stand in for all the women who share her experience, to give shape to something collective, not individual. I was, after all, asking her to step back into the contours of her own trauma, to inhabit it, replay it, embody it for the camera, and yet she never approached it as self-exposure, but as an act of solidarity.

There were moments on set, especially while filming the most difficult scenes, when Karolina would suddenly burst into laughter as a way of coping with the reality of what we were doing. We often asked each other, “Is this therapeutic or traumatic?” But from the beginning, we had drawn a line of trust and she knew she could stop at any moment; the power to pull away was always hers. That trust, and the sense of doing this for the girls and women whose voices are swallowed by shame, became the scaffolding that held us both up.

By the end, she told me that the process had, in fact, been therapeutic, and she could finally leave this chapter behind her.

Looking back, I sometimes marvel that this film exists at all, that it found its final form despite, or maybe because of, the chaos that shaped it. When Karolina first travelled to the UK, we had little more than an idea. We struggled with the central question: how do you show rape culture on screen? How do you visualise something that’s everywhere and nowhere at once – spoken in jokes, folded into love stories, passed off as normal? And slowly, almost without meaning to, the process itself bled into the film. We turned the camera on our own conversations, which then became part of the texture of the film. We found ourselves going back again and again to the myth of Leda and the Swan, that perfect example of how female suffering is romanticised, turned into beauty, into art. That’s when we realised that the tension between reality and representation had to be part of this film.

The editing room was where I was able to give it the meaning we were looking for during production, especially with the use of quotes I came across during my research that stuck with me throughout the making of this film, and which quite directly and literally let me put that message on screen. Experimenting with the quotes and blending of the documentary and fiction helped me make it very clear that our aim is to confront and call out the rape culture, and everyone complicit in it. What I hope for is that the film carries this confrontation into the audience – that it unsettles, provokes, and lingers. If there’s one thing I learned from making She’s Asking For It, it’s this: change doesn’t come from comfort. It comes from disruption, from the crack that lets the light, and sometimes rage, get in.

She’s Asking For It opens with a question borrowed from Roxane Gay’s Not That Bad: “What is it like to live in a culture where it often seems like it is a question of when, not if, a woman will encounter some kind of sexual violence?” (2018: p.4) This question mirrored the conversations I’d been having with the women in my life – stories of encounters they never named as rape or assault, because somewhere along the way we were taught to fold these experiences into the fabric of girlhood and womanhood. The too-long stare. The grabbed wrist at a party. The boyfriend who didn’t listen when you said no. This quiet acceptance, the sense of “this is just how it is”, became the main reason for my film. It was born out of that anger, but also out of asking: how did we get here? How is it that we keep looking away? And the answer kept circling back to the media – cinema, television, advertising – to a culture that takes sexual violence and disguises it as romance, desire, even entertainment. We’ve been sold the coercive kiss as passion, the persistent “no” that turns into a “yes,” the sexual assault that gets referred to as a love scene. These are the narratives we consume and internalise. They shape what we expect, what we tolerate, what we name – or more often, what we don’t name.

With this film, I wanted to hold up a mirror, not just to the culture out there, but to the audience watching inside the cinema. By blending documentary and fiction, I aimed to disturb the line between what feels real and what feels constructed, to force a kind of reckoning with the images we’ve been conditioned to accept. The title itself, She’s Asking For It, is a provocation, a phrase as toxic as it is familiar, that lives in the mouths of abusers and bystanders, in headlines and courtrooms, on social media. What I wanted was to create a space of tension, where the audience is forced to sit with their own complicity, to confront something so deeply ingrained they may not even realise they’ve played a part.

But this film is foremost for survivors, for those silenced, shamed, made to believe their pain was their fault. The culture of victim-blaming is insidious – from the way society thinks about consent to the way women who speak out are treated. We’ve been taught to carry this burden of responsibility, to question our own reactions, and to doubt whether what happened even counts as assault. We’re told, directly or indirectly, that we invited it in some way, that we weren’t “innocent” enough, and this kind of thinking is the fault of the system that normalises abuse and teaches that silence is safer than speaking out. She’s Asking For It tries to unravel this reality to help survivors see that the guilt they carry was planted there by a culture that trained them to minimise and normalise their own pain.

Making this film was as intimate and fraught as the subject matter. My lead actress and contributor, Karolina, is someone who has lived through sexual violence, but from the beginning, she was adamant that this film would never just be about her. She wanted to stand in for all the women who share her experience, to give shape to something collective, not individual. I was, after all, asking her to step back into the contours of her own trauma, to inhabit it, replay it, embody it for the camera, and yet she never approached it as self-exposure, but as an act of solidarity.

There were moments on set, especially while filming the most difficult scenes, when Karolina would suddenly burst into laughter as a way of coping with the reality of what we were doing. We often asked each other, “Is this therapeutic or traumatic?” But from the beginning, we had drawn a line of trust and she knew she could stop at any moment; the power to pull away was always hers. That trust, and the sense of doing this for the girls and women whose voices are swallowed by shame, became the scaffolding that held us both up. By the end, she told me that the process had, in fact, been therapeutic, and she could finally leave this chapter behind her.