Let's try that again...
Re armor: Three words: chest plate boobs.
Imagine falling off your horse and landing face down on that shit. Bye bye sternum.
So, did @The Borgified Corpse give up, not going to reply to my post? Boo.
Momentarily the conversation turned to sexual assault as comedy in the media, and I think that's an important topic to cover. It's one that I see affecting both men and women pretty equally, with male rape actually played more often for comedy, and other forms of sexual assault, like verbal assault that is directed at women played for laughs. @Joel_Kirk, it's horrible you were harassed, and it's even worse that in our society sexual harassment of men is nothing more than a joke.
It's so normalized that I didn't even recognize it until I was an adult. I think the first scene in a movie I really remember seeing and going, "Wait, that's not actually cool," was in Bruce Almighty (of all things), where Jim Carey uses his God powers to blow wind up a woman's skirt on the street, revealing her thong. lol. But, if I was walking down the street and a random guy lifted up my skirt to reveal my thong...
I remember having an internal battle: Am I becoming one of those "'humorless 'feminists'"? I'm not, it was just that by the time that movie came out I'd had enough men actually try to grab my skirt in public that it stopped being a laugh. Those kinds of little jokes are littered throughout comedies, and other genres, and we usually don't even give them a second thought. It's not to say that jokes about bodies and sex can't be funny, either. To contrast, I can't remember the movie, I was so young when I saw it, but there was a heist movie (from the 60s or 70s I think) in which the characters had to lie on their backs to slide under a laser motion detector. The woman on the crack heist team got stuck in an awkward moment when she realized halfway through the process that her boobs were too big to go under the laser, especially in her pointy 60s bra -- picturing that scene still makes me giggle.
It's hard to think of many examples where male sexual assault is more than an outright joke, though there are a few out there. I can think of two from sci-fi/fantasy off the bat:
There was a scene in Buffy between Faith and Xander that truly surprised me when I first saw it. I thought "They actually went there?": up until the point where Faith decides to try to kill Xander rather than assault him, it was written and played as a classic rape scene, but with the gender roles reversed. I think the combination of being so immersed in the universe and accepting Faith's super-strength, and just the oddity of seeng a woman sexually assaulting a man on screen (which had been done before, but rarely) made it take a moment to sink in -- but that was an intense scene, and refreshingly, it was taken seriously. I'm sure some Buffy Studies major has done a dissertation on that scene!
The other I can think of is Supernatural, which never depicted rape or stated outright that the characters had been raped (though that one vampire was pretty sexually aggressive towards Dean), but implied subtly that Dean had been raped in the events between seasons three and four, and implied that Sam had between five and six, finally making it pretty damn clear in season eleven that it was true at least in Sam's case. Again, refreshingly taken seriously.
Pages back someone (@RJDiogenes maybe?) said something along the lines of media not being that important in the grand scheme anyway. But I think it's hugely important. From the Rat Pack demonstrating the absurdity of racism with their humor onstage and their anti-racist behavior offstage (like refusing to stay in hotels where Sammy Davis Jr wasn't also able to stay), to Uhura as a trailblazer for both women and POC, to the integration of gay characters in mass media in the 90s, to the integration of trans characters today -- TV and movies have always been at the forefront of social change. And why shouldn't they be? They're our stories, and we are going to model at least a portion of our real-life narratives after them. The more we see something depicted as normal, the more we accept it as normal. This is a bad thing when women are being objectified, when sexual violence against women is normalized, when sexual violence against men is made out to be something we laugh at. But it's a great thing when we see more representation, when we examples of complex female characters (sexual or not) with their own agency, when we see male characters allowed to freely express emotion, when we see examples like those I gave of male characters dealing with sexual assault that are not jokes.
Re armor: Three words: chest plate boobs.
Imagine falling off your horse and landing face down on that shit. Bye bye sternum.
So, did @The Borgified Corpse give up, not going to reply to my post? Boo.
Momentarily the conversation turned to sexual assault as comedy in the media, and I think that's an important topic to cover. It's one that I see affecting both men and women pretty equally, with male rape actually played more often for comedy, and other forms of sexual assault, like verbal assault that is directed at women played for laughs. @Joel_Kirk, it's horrible you were harassed, and it's even worse that in our society sexual harassment of men is nothing more than a joke.
It's so normalized that I didn't even recognize it until I was an adult. I think the first scene in a movie I really remember seeing and going, "Wait, that's not actually cool," was in Bruce Almighty (of all things), where Jim Carey uses his God powers to blow wind up a woman's skirt on the street, revealing her thong. lol. But, if I was walking down the street and a random guy lifted up my skirt to reveal my thong...
I remember having an internal battle: Am I becoming one of those "'humorless 'feminists'"? I'm not, it was just that by the time that movie came out I'd had enough men actually try to grab my skirt in public that it stopped being a laugh. Those kinds of little jokes are littered throughout comedies, and other genres, and we usually don't even give them a second thought. It's not to say that jokes about bodies and sex can't be funny, either. To contrast, I can't remember the movie, I was so young when I saw it, but there was a heist movie (from the 60s or 70s I think) in which the characters had to lie on their backs to slide under a laser motion detector. The woman on the crack heist team got stuck in an awkward moment when she realized halfway through the process that her boobs were too big to go under the laser, especially in her pointy 60s bra -- picturing that scene still makes me giggle.
It's hard to think of many examples where male sexual assault is more than an outright joke, though there are a few out there. I can think of two from sci-fi/fantasy off the bat:
There was a scene in Buffy between Faith and Xander that truly surprised me when I first saw it. I thought "They actually went there?": up until the point where Faith decides to try to kill Xander rather than assault him, it was written and played as a classic rape scene, but with the gender roles reversed. I think the combination of being so immersed in the universe and accepting Faith's super-strength, and just the oddity of seeng a woman sexually assaulting a man on screen (which had been done before, but rarely) made it take a moment to sink in -- but that was an intense scene, and refreshingly, it was taken seriously. I'm sure some Buffy Studies major has done a dissertation on that scene!
The other I can think of is Supernatural, which never depicted rape or stated outright that the characters had been raped (though that one vampire was pretty sexually aggressive towards Dean), but implied subtly that Dean had been raped in the events between seasons three and four, and implied that Sam had between five and six, finally making it pretty damn clear in season eleven that it was true at least in Sam's case. Again, refreshingly taken seriously.
Pages back someone (@RJDiogenes maybe?) said something along the lines of media not being that important in the grand scheme anyway. But I think it's hugely important. From the Rat Pack demonstrating the absurdity of racism with their humor onstage and their anti-racist behavior offstage (like refusing to stay in hotels where Sammy Davis Jr wasn't also able to stay), to Uhura as a trailblazer for both women and POC, to the integration of gay characters in mass media in the 90s, to the integration of trans characters today -- TV and movies have always been at the forefront of social change. And why shouldn't they be? They're our stories, and we are going to model at least a portion of our real-life narratives after them. The more we see something depicted as normal, the more we accept it as normal. This is a bad thing when women are being objectified, when sexual violence against women is normalized, when sexual violence against men is made out to be something we laugh at. But it's a great thing when we see more representation, when we examples of complex female characters (sexual or not) with their own agency, when we see male characters allowed to freely express emotion, when we see examples like those I gave of male characters dealing with sexual assault that are not jokes.
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, please explain to me why this is a heroic MALE autobot:
