MacNair is blond-haired and blue-eyed, with an easy smile that could convince you to sign a petition. She's also a reluctant expert in staging sexual assaults on television and film. An independent pro wrestler (character name: Fire!) and trained actor, MacNair made her way to L.A. to work as a stunt double in comedies. She loves Buster Keaton–esque physical comedy, "almost Three Stooges with seltzer water" stuff, she says, but she rarely gets that kind of work. Shortly after she got to Hollywood, she was introduced to the macabre career of rape choreography by a male mentor who abruptly quit coordinating fights, because she says "he found himself exclusively choreographing rape scenes." The intensity took its toll on him.
MacNair might prefer to be working on Disney and kids projects, but a job's a job, and men still get the best stunt-doubling gigs (even for female characters). So she picks up the phone when producers call with a potential scene. She has continued to pick it up — rape scenes are everywhere. MacNair is grateful, always positive, ready to do what's asked of her. At the same time, she — and others — hope the industry might stop to consider the toll of the number of rapes it depicts on screen.
While narratives of sexual assault are nothing new — everything from early Old West films to the various Renaissance-era depictions of The Rape of the Sabine Women and Japan's 19th-century ukiyo-e prints (an art form that influenced anime today) depicts gendered violence — these storylines have become particularly common in film and TV lately. In the last few years, there's a laundry list of media involving rape: The Handmaid's Tale, Westworld, The Magicians, The Revenant, The Salesman, The Birth of a Nation, Nocturnal Animals, The Innocents, Don't Breathe, Palo Alto, Jamestown, Room and even Your Highness. The list goes on and on. Some of the rape storylines tell us something new and pertinent, such as Paul Verhoeven's film Elle, in which sexual assault is a defining moment that is the central core of the narrative. Some do not, like Game of Thrones, which — like the 1970s Italian giallo shock films — seems to use rape as a way to get naked women (and men) on screen.]
