The Cutprice Guignol

I honestly cannot believe that this still needs to be said.

Last week, Dirty Business, the six episode of the fourth season of The Boys, aired. It featured an extended sequence where Hughie, the show’s main character, played by Jack Quaid, was subjected to non-consensual sex acts by episode antagonist Tek Knight. After the episode aired, there was some unease in the fandom about how it had been handled – with some feeling like the sexual assault had been played for laughs, and others arguing that the show’s long history of deliberately extreme content (sexual and otherwise) would give this story space to play out in a more serious way.

Showrunner Eric Kripke, however, put a swift end to that speculation a few days after the episode came out in an interview with Variety. When asked about the choice to include a sexual assault against Hughie, Kripke responded “Well, that’s a dark way to look at it! We view it as hilarious”, and went on to describe the scene as a “beautiful comedy setup”. Any attempts to take this scene seriously, it seemed, were purely coincidental, as Kripke made clear: Hughie’s assault was intended as a joke, a piece of comedy, “hilarious” to the people who brought it to the screen.

And, to be quite honest, I wish I was more shocked by what Eric Kripke had to say about it. A few years ago, I wrote about the depiction of male sexual assault in pop culture – coincidentally enough, with regards to another comic book adaptation, Preacher, and a case of fake-out safeword confusion – and just why it matters so much that men’s sexual violation is treated as such high comedy by so many creators. But that was six years ago, and a lot has happened in that six years regarding the treatment of sexual assault and rape in the media and pop culture more broadly – so much so that House of the Dragon, the prequel to the notoriously rape-heavy Game of Thrones, vowed not to include explicit sexual assault scenes. So how is it that we’re still out here seeing the same fucking jokes at the expense of male victims of sexual assault?

I ask that question only somewhat rhetorically. Because Eric Kripke has branded The Boys has an unapologetically political show (if not one with particular nuance or maturity in how it handles those topics), so I can’t see his decision to depict Hughie’s assault in such a humorous fashion as something divorced from those politics – especially when he’s previously acknowledged the importance of handling scenes of sexual assault with a careful touch. It’s hard not to compare it to Kripke’s commentary on an earlier sexual assault against a female character in the first season, which he described as coming with “pressure and responsibility” to avoid creating a “harmful” moment – and, yeah, he’s right about that. So what was it about Hughie’s assault that allowed him to approach it with such flippancy?

While I can’t speak to Kripke’s actual intent with this scene, it really felt like a twisted flip-side to the way that the sexual assault of women has been used as part of prestige television for so long, especially in the context of The Boys’ deliberately and sometimes simplistically subversive take on various pop culture tropes. If treating the assault of women in a flippant fashion is bad because of the long history of how sexual violence has been use to oppress and harm the female population, then the direct opposite of that must be good, right? And the direct opposite of women being treated that way is for men to be treated that way instead. Job done. Everyone break for lunch.

Whatever the reason behind his statements about this scene, one thing is clear: this is not how you go about telling stories of rape and sexual assault that feature men as victims if you want to claim any kind of progressive or forward-thinking politics for your show. One in six men will face sexual assault of some kind over the course of their lives, meaning a not-insignificant part of the show’s fanbase is probably going to see Kripke’s answer to a question about the sexual assault of a man as a hilarious chance for comedy gold. Four in five men who are assaulted will not report it; 74% of that number quoted embarrassment or fear of humiliation as an influencing factor in that choice. I’m obviously not laying the blame for these statistics at the door of Kripke or The Boys in general, but the depiction of the act in the show and his comments after the fact feed in to a culture that tells men that their assaults as funny, silly, fundamentally something to be laughed at rather than taken seriously. Men are not pulling this fear of humiliation and embarrassment about being victims of sexual assault from the clear blue sky; it’s a cultural message that’s passed on and reinforced over and over again, with The Boys and Kripke’s comments just another example of that.

Ironically, for The Boys, one of the most subversive things they could have done would be to take Hughie’s sexual assault seriously, on and off screen. But, of course, as so many shows, movies, books, and games have done before, The Boys and Eric Kripke went the most harmful, trite, and stupid route possible. I can’t believe it still has to be said – but when are we going to start taking male victims of assault seriously?

If you’re a man who’s been a victim of sexual violence, you’re not alone, and there is help out there for you – here’s a list of helplines for survivors of sexual violence, including male-specific lines. If there are any resources you’d like to share, please feel free to drop them in the comments below.

(header image via IMDB)