The inimitable George Saunders just wrote a great piece for the New Yorker titled "I Was Ayn Rand's Lover," which gets a lot of mileage from the rape scene in The Fountainhead—you know, the scene where Howard Roarke rapes a she-totally-wanted-it Dominique Francon. (God, those character names are embarrassing.) It's pretty brilliant, both as a send-up of Rand's work and as a reminder that Paul Ryan considered Rand a legitimate influence as recently as 2005, which is waaay past the high school grace period during which it's somewhat normal to take Objectivism seriously.
It wasn’t easy being the lover of such an intellectual powerhouse. Sometimes I’d come in from a sock-hop or cross-country meet and she’d have that look in her eyes, that look that said she was about to give me a two-hour lecture on the power-grabbers and then throw me down on the couch and rape me until it became consensual.
