If you watched last night’s Outlander, you saw a person being sexually, physically, and emotionally tortured by a madman. It was sad, it was scary, it was shocking. But only because the person being harmed was a man.
I wanted to title this blog something like “Violence against women on TV.” But then we all would have secretly yawned and headed over to a food blog or something–because let’s face it, TV viewers made that devil’s bargain long ago. Somewhere along the line, we traded the dignity of our female characters for an hour of riveting entertainment. In the 70s, when Edith Bunker was raped on All in the Family, it sparked a national discussion. Now, women are raped and tortured on TV every week–in basements, cages, parks. We are complacent about–maybe even comfortable with–women being portrayed in this way. Otherwise, all those Law and Orders, CSIs, Criminal Minds, etc. wouldn’t thrive and multiply.
Certainly, there is an upping of the ante syndrome at work. Producers have to top what the last show did to make an impact. Your serial killer raped and murdered a woman in a dungeon? Well, our serial killer uses venomous spiders to render her paralyzed BEFORE he rapes and kills her (this is not a hypothetical example). But what do we, as viewers, get out of it?
Do these shows make us more fearful in our daily lives? Or is it the reverse? Is it cathartic to watch perverts arrested and put away by trusty detectives? I guess that is so much more palatable than the real world, in which women are raped by friends, acquaintances, and husbands, and often find no justice.
No matter the reason, we are okay with rape being a go-to TV plot line. Unless it’s our hero Jamie in Outlander. Then it makes news. Last night’s episode featured no actual rape (but plenty of violence and psycho-sexual torment), and still some reviewers described it as “some of the rawest scenes ever filmed for television.”
And Ira Steven Behr, who wrote the episode said this about filming it: “Most crews on TV shows and film are very matter-of-fact, tough hombres…This time though, everyone was feeling it. The guys would walk past me and go, ‘When is this going to end?’ I would check with them on occasion after a particularly harrowing scene and, I kid you not, there were tears. I’d never seen that before.”
So, in other words, it became real for the men.
Not only have we become desensitized to female violence on TV, but there is a total lack of any quality shows for women to watch. When you have things like Submissive Wives or 19 Kids or even if the woman is the lead detective, she is still after the same serial killer, what message is this giving women. Why can’t we have more strong female oriented options. One or two shows is just not enough.
Yep. In film school, it became obvious to me that if you don’t have women at the helm, you’re just not going to get enough of the kind of content women are interested in. Not much has changed since then: women need to have decision-making roles in entertainment (and everywhere else). There are more female-centered channels on TV then there used to be, but frankly, some of that content is dubious (victim of the week stories, etc.).