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I feel that a lot of comedy movies will have a lot of rape and sexual assault jokes pointed towards men and it's suppose to be funny. Movies like Wedding Crashers, Get Hard, or even Family Guy in a lot of parts, and Horrible Bosses. But it seems to be a double standard cause you never see humor like this directed at women compared to men.
I think Horrible Bosses is the best example, I can use and I'll be spoiling the movie, if that's okay.
In the movie, a man (Dale), is being blackmailed by his female dentist boss (Julia). Julia keeps on trying to blackmail him into having sex with her. She goes as far as use the knock out gas that she keeps around since she is a dentist, to knock him out. Strip him naked and take lots of pictures of her with him making it look like he was having sex with her, while he was unconscious.
She then blackmails him with the photos, threatening to send them to his wife, unless he has sex with her, and gives him a clock until his time is up, or the photos will be sent to her.
Dale tells his guy friends about this, and they don't take the issue seriously and tease him about it.
Now if this where the other way around, and a female employee was rendered unconscious from gas, from her dentist boss and he stripped her naked and made it look like she had sex with him in photos... and then threatened to send the pics to her husband unless he slept with her... and then she goes to her friends to tell them about it and the friends tease her about it and don't take it seriously...
Audiences would not find this near as funny I don't think, and I feel that this is a huge double standard when it comes to society and humor that just makes quite a few comedies, leaving me with a bad taste in my mouth when it's over.
But it seems a lot of fans of the movie did not feel this way. I watched this movie with my gf and another female friend of mine and they were laughing at this situation hysterically, especially in the scene, when the photos are unveiled. My female friend is even a victim of sexual assault herself, so I wondered, how can she find this stuff funny?
Am I weird for thinking this, or perhaps I see a valid point here?
Yes...it is a huge double standard. And just as rapey comedy material TOWARDS women used to be seen as perfectly okay (and still is, for some people), similar humor as it relates to guys may hang on for awhile yet. Of course it is much less commonly done and because it is seen as very rare in real life (not exactly true) that makes it even funnier, for people who like it. Also, lots of people think men can't be raped or never don't want sex, regardless of the person threatening them.
I guess I'd say that this too will fade with time. The cynical person inside me says - if it took centuries to even start talking about this stuff in regard to women, why do you think the analogous stuff with men should fade 10 times faster? And Horrible Bosses 2 was done (only) 5 years ago.
BTW - the director for Horrible Bosses 2 was male and he might have even co-wrote it - talk to him! As for a woman finding this humor funny - perhaps despite how it resonates with her personal experience she sees it as comeuppance for men to be in that situation? You'd have to ask her - but it is a pretty wacky comedy not even meant to echo real life in it's other aspects.
I'm one of those men who doesn't think a man can maintain an erection while being threatened.
If he's been put into fight or flight mode, his mind and his blood is elsewhere.
Otherwise, he's not really being threatened.
The rapist may be the one with the erection and the target is male. Haven't you seen the movie "Deliverance" for a drama, or "Trading Places" for a comedy?
The rapist may be the one with the erection and the target is male. Haven't you seen the movie "Deliverance" for a drama, or "Trading Places" for a comedy?
That's not, however, what they're talking about these days in this discussion of "male rape," and it's not what the poster I responded to was talking about.
There are various types of humor, and various reasons how and why they work. Oppressing the oppressor and getting even with the mastah are social justice humors -"9 to 5" is an example. Using similar schticks out of such context against an entire class of people is a less developed social retribution humor.
Much humor only works within the immediate context of a culture and falls flat outside of it. "Culture" in that context is not the overall culture of a nation, but the cultures of teens, country, women, geeks, bikers, military, stockbrokers, or any of the groups that have some commonality and agreed upon stereotypes. This was driven home to me many years ago. My father used to roar in laughter at the likes of Jackie Gleason and his sketches. I later showed him "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" and he sat stone-faced through the entire movie. It wasn't part of the culture he understood.
Humor that depends upon physically hurting others for enjoyment is base humor, which has root in the word debasing. The more socially aware a person becomes, the less that humor is likely to appeal, except in the context of object lesson, with the hurt being less physical and more of a come-uppance.
Just about any form of schadenfreude drags a society down into base and even nasty spaces where people are objectified and there is glee in the audience at not being as stupid as the person acting dumb. "America's Funniest Videos" is a penultimate example of not bright people taking joy in watching and knowing that they are at least not quite as dumb as the people they are watching hurt themselves.
Oh okay. But even 9-5 doesn't take it as far as something like horrible bosses. In 9-5, you don't see Dabney Coleman's character render Dolly Parton unconscious and take a bunch of sex pictures of him and her, threatening to blackmail her husband, unless she cheats on him.
So I feel that Horrible Bosses took it a lot further in comparison.
Oh okay. But even 9-5 doesn't take it as far as something like horrible bosses. In 9-5, you don't see Dabney Coleman's character render Dolly Parton unconscious and take a bunch of sex pictures of him and her, threatening to blackmail her husband, unless she cheats on him.
So I feel that Horrible Bosses took it a lot further in comparison.
Quite a lot of time between those two movies, though. There is a lot of screen human debasement in recent movies than a movie nearly 40 years ago.
Times have moved on, culture has changed. That doesn't imply hypocrisy--you'd have to compare examples taken near the same times in the same culture.
To paraphrase Hank Hill: "It's called 'The Double Standard', Bobby. Don't question it. We got the long end of the stick on that one."
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Haven't you seen the movie "Deliverance" for a drama, or "Trading Places" for a comedy?
