High-Rise

Content Warning: This section includes the source material’s references to graphic depictions of sexual assault, violence, neglect, and cruelty to animals.

Throughout the novel there are allusions to a growing alliance of female residents. The details of this group remain largely off the page because of the limited narrative perspective of the increasingly self-absorbed male characters. However, J. G. Ballard suggests that this group is a powerful one that ultimately rules the high-rise.

In the first weeks of saturnalia, male and female residents alike join in the rowdy parties and occasional eruption of violence. Both the men and the women embrace these unruly festivities as opportunities to explore their perverse sides, and they cross the limits of consensual sexual encounters. Instead, assault, including sexual assault, is lauded as a welcome progression of the disintegration. At one of these drunken revelries, the film critic Eleanor Powell approaches Laing:

Flushed and excited, Eleanor Powell swayed up to Laing, pointing hilariously at him and accusing him of trying to break into her apartment. Everyone cheered this news, as if rape was a valuable and well-tried means of bringing clan members together (115).

Sexual assault becomes celebrated, rather than protected against, in the building.